Crown, Church and Constitution: Popular Conservatism in England, 1815-1867 9781785331411

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Crown, Church and Constitution

Studies in British and Imperial History Published for the German Historical Institute London Editor: Andreas Gestrich, Director of the German Historical Institute, London Volume 1

The Rise of Market Society in England, 1066–1800 Christiane Eisenberg Translated by Deborah Cohen Volume 2

Sacral Kingship between Disenchantment and Re-enchantment The French and English Monarchies, 1587–1688 Ronald Asch Volume 3

The Forgotten Majority German Merchants in London, Naturalization and Global Trade, 1660–1815 Margit Schulte-Beerbühl Translated by Cynthia Klohr Volume 4

Crown, Church and Constitution Popular Conservatism in England, 1815–1867 Jörg Neuheiser Translated by Jennifer Walcoff Neuheiser

Crown, Church and Constitution

Popular Conservatism in England, 1815–1867

?

Jörg Neuheiser Translated by Jennifer Walcoff Neuheiser

berghahn NEW YORK • OXFORD www.berghahnbooks.com

Published in 2016 by Berghahn Books www.berghahnbooks.com German edition © 2010 Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG English edition © 2016 Jörg Neuheiser Originally published in German in 2010 as Krone, Kirche und Verfassung – Konservatismus in den englischen Unterschichten 1815–1867 by Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht GmbH & Co. KG, Göttingen All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purposes of criticism and review, no part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system now known or to be invented, without written permission of the publisher. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A C.I.P. cataloging record is available from the Library of Congress. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 978-1-78533-140-4 hardback ISBN 978-1-78533-141-1 ebook

Contents Prefacevii Introduction1 Chapter 1.  Celebrating the Monarchy: Loyalism, Radicalism and the Crowd, 1820–1832 Analysing Crowds and the Popularity of the Monarchy  39 The Monarchy in the Provinces  42 The Capital Celebrates the Crown  51 Chapter 2.  ‘True Friends of Her Majesty’: Plebeian Conservatives and Crown, Constitution and Patriotism Operative Conservative Associations and Popular Constitutionalism 69 The Crown and the Constitution in Election Campaigns and Celebrations 78 National Elements and Local Differences  90 Chapter 3.  ‘Above All, Be Faithful to Your God’: Confessional Conflicts and Plebeian Conservatives The Conflicts over the Emancipation of the Catholics  118 Contesting the Cities: Confessional Conflicts in Local Power Struggles  132 Conservative Constitutionalism after Catholic Emancipation 141 Chapter 4.  Conservative Antics, Protest or Racism? Anti-Catholic Aspects of English Street Culture Guy Fawkes Day Celebrations before 1850  157 The ‘Papal Aggression’ and Its Consequences  163 The English Orange Order and Preachers of ‘No Popery’  174 Protest, Spectacles and Anti-Catholicism: St George’s-in-the-East, 1859–1860  181

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Chapter 5.  In the Name of Inequality? Tory Radicalism, Social Protest and Plebeian Ideas of Justice Social Structures and the Political Language of Protest in the 1830s  199 Local Alliances between Tories and Radicals  215 Oastler’s Friends? The Operative Conservative Associations after 1842  225 Chapter 6.  ‘Beer and Britannia’ or ‘Moral Reform’? Paternalistic Populism, Self-Improvement and Gender Early Paternalism and Calls for Moral Reform  241 The Family, Domesticity and the Political Mobilization of Women  250

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Conclusion259 Bibliography267 Index303

Preface

This book is a translation of Krone, Kirche und Verfassung: Konservatismus in den englischen Unterschichten 1815–1867, which was published in 2010 by Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht. The English edition has been slightly shortened and revised, but on the whole, the content is the same as it was when originally published. This translation has been made possible by the prize Geisteswissenschaften International, generously awarded by the Börsenverein des Deutschen Buchhandels. Many thanks are due to all the institutions sponsoring the prize, which include the Fritz Thyssen Foundation, the VG WORT and the German Federal Foreign Office. I am also grateful to my German publisher, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, especially Margarita Wolff, and the editors at Berghahn Books for all their help. Special thanks go to Andreas Gestrich, Director of the German Historical Institute in London, for his constant support in making this translation possible. Moreover, I had the great pleasure to work with Jennifer Walcoff Neuheiser, a translator whose language skills and meticulous care for a good English text were amazing. In case anyone is wondering, she also happens to be my wife. The German preface acknowledged the help of many friends and scholars whose support, advice and critique made the work on this book such a great experience. It is wonderful to have a chance to thank them again. They include my PhD supervisors in Cologne, Hans-Peter Ullmann and Andreas Fahrmeir (now in Frankfurt); my friends and colleagues Willibald Steinmetz, Detlev Mares, Michael Schaich, Aribert Reimann and Andreas Pečar; and a number of other colleagues who might or might not remember my name but who were important for me at some point during my research: Jon Lawrence, Antony Taylor, Philip Salmon, Steven Farrell, Matthew Roberts, Hans-Christoph Schröder, Rudolf Muhs, Andreas Rödder, Domenik Geppert, Mark Willock, Mike Rapport and Vera Nünning. I also wish to thank Frank O’Gorman whose work I very much admire – his devastating critique of my initial exposé nearly ended the whole project. However, it survived and in some way or other probably profited from his comments. Most of the research for this book was done in the Newspaper Reading Room of the British Library in Colindale which has since been closed. The lengthy months spent in darkened rooms at microfilm readers were brightened up by

viii | Preface

my landlady, Mandy O’Keeffe, who made my research trips to London such a pleasure. My thanks also go out to all the staff in the many libraries and archives that I visited. Most of their names can be found in the bibliography at the end of this book; only a few must be named here, in particular the university libraries in Cologne, Mainz and Tübingen as well as the Staatsbibliothek in Berlin. It is a great pleasure to finally celebrate the publication of the English edition of this book. The original German version was well-received by German specialists on British history; however, I am grateful that this study is now available to a much wider English-speaking audience. Jörg Neuheiser Tübingen, April 2015

Introduction

Why was there no revolution in England in the nineteenth century? What can account for the remarkable stability of English society compared to others in Europe and its ability to go through profound processes of change without erupting in volatile conflicts or succumbing to the violent overthrow of state institutions? In the century following the French Revolution, England was no less confronted by the challenges of modernity than other European societies. Phenomena such as industrialization, urbanization, population growth and democratization, to name just a few, were experienced in England and throughout Europe at roughly the same time. At the end of the nineteenth century, England had a population of about thirty million; around 1800, its population had been less than nine million. In 1901, more than two-thirds of the population lived in cities, most of which had doubled, tripled or even quadrupled in size in a very short amount of time. In centuries prior, only about 27 per cent of the population lived in cities. Fewer and fewer people worked on the land as jobs in trade, transport and industry became more prevalent. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars, England had officially become the greatest economic power in the world. Less than 3 per cent of the population was enfranchised at the beginning of the century, but by 1900 almost every adult man could vote and be elected to Parliament.1 Regardless of the scholarly debate over whether the United Kingdom must be considered an ancien régime until the early nineteenth century, the fact of the matter is that by the turn of the twentieth century, England had basically become a democratically governed industrial society.2 No other nation in Europe had experienced a similar social, economic and political transformation without a complete restructuring of its state. It is important to bear these questions and facts in mind when embarking on an analysis of political culture among the English lower classes in the nineteenth century. Looking at the conservative aspects of this culture helps clarify why the massive social conflicts that were rife in England in the nineteenth century did not escalate as they did in other countries. This is not to say that England followed a Sonderweg (‘special path’) to modernity. A long tradition of popular conservatism by itself cannot explain the absence of an English revolution in Notes from this chapter begin on page 22.

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the nineteenth century. Yet the aspects of popular conservatism analysed in this book point to the complexity of political conflicts in Britain and the variety of ways in which England could face its social challenges. Plebeians, like all other social groups, interpreted their world and the changes that they experienced and endured very differently. Many sought stability by holding tightly to positions that opposed rapid change or promised a safe path into the future without the disappearance of traditional structures. Consequently, it was rather difficult, if not completely impossible, to turn these plebeians into the bearers of revolutionary ideals. But this is not to say that English society was fundamentally conservative, which ultimately made it unsusceptible to revolution. Nor is the intention to discredit the efforts of all those who fought for radical social change based on experiences of despair or social destitution. On the contrary, a large portion of the English lower classes took part in these struggles, full of hope for a better future and fuelled by democratic ideals coupled with a commitment to equality and social justice. Yet, as the following chapters will exemplify, ideas of ‘Church and Crown’ fell on fertile ground between 1815 and 1867 in those very places in which calls for reforms, the fight for the People’s Charter or opposition in the form of strikes, social protests or the breaking of machinery were usually considered a natural political expression of class experience. Specifically conservative notions of the monarchy and Protestantism, of the constitution and the nation as well as of social justice, gender relations and the English way of life greatly influenced the political actions of social groups within the English lower classes in the nineteenth century. These ideas were paramount in celebrations of the monarchy, local conflicts during parliamentary elections and the control of local administrative bodies. They were also reflected in confessional conflicts between Anglicans and Nonconformists as well as between Catholics and Protestants, which in turn fostered disputes between Irish and English workers. They could also feed into social protest movements or encourage workers to support the Tories. But, above all, they were anchored in the culture of English plebeians – in their associations, in their traditions and celebrations, and in their everyday lives. It is these ideas that this book is all about. Working from premise that the cultural interpretation of shared social experiences differs from one individual to the next, this book suggests that there was a plurality of possible political identities circulating within the English lower classes. These political and social identities were heterogeneous and complex. They were also constantly in a state of flux and sometimes contradictory and mercurial. In a nutshell, political contests between popular traditions of radicalism and conservatism did not take place between ‘above’ and ‘below’, but rather within all levels of English society and particularly among the lower classes. In the past, historians who have studied the English lower classes have been preoccupied with finding explanations for the remarkable stability of English

Introduction | 3

society in the age of revolution. As a result, much of the scholarship on the history, identity and political activities of ‘ordinary Englishmen’ has approached the English lower classes in a singular sense, ignoring the plurality of perspectives within this broadly defined social group. Consequently, the ‘English working class’ appeared to be a product of the major social processes of the nineteenth century as well as the big loser in the grand scheme of politics and economics. Yet the experiences of this class raised doubts as to the harmonious development of English society. In contrast to the older Whig interpretation of English history with its master narrative of the triumph of liberalism marked by organic reform as well as the slow, but steady blossoming of a deeply English notion of liberty, social historians focused on the conflicts between social classes well into the 1980s.3 In particular, E.P. Thompson was influential in the development of this field of research. Thompson’s unorthodox Marxism did not define categories such as ‘social classes’ or ‘class consciousness’ in a strictly economic sense; he sought to come to a better understanding of English history by looking at class struggles. For followers of Thompson’s approach, these kinds of struggles reached a climax with the appearance of Chartism, which was seen as the first comprehensive articulation of a new self-conscious working class that was democratic in its goals, but sometimes revolutionary in its means. Building on this premise, it became all the more imperative to tackle the question of why there was no revolution in England.4 This question, in turn, sparked some of the great debates in labour history over the social disciplining of the lower classes through the dominance of the middle class, the downfall of Chartism, the reformist tendencies of a well-educated class of Labour aristocrats among the workers and the late establishment of a political party representing the English labour movement.5 Given the generally widely accepted significance of social class for English history as well as the early strength of the English labour movement, the stability of English society seemed highly improbable, and thus particularly in need of explanation. As an answer, social historians suggested dividing the nineteenth century into three characteristic periods. The early phase, marked by the initial formation of the English working class, was replaced by the era of the Victorian consensus, which emerged out of the economic upswing that took place around 1850. The rise of the Labour Party in the late nineteenth century then reflected the once again increasing importance of class differences. The focus of these sociohistorical interpretations of the ‘long nineteenth century’ from 1815 to 1914 was not a revolution, but rather a fundamental caesura in English history around 1850.6 Today, this perspective seems both timely and curiously outdated at the same time. The move away from the concept of ‘class’ and towards the construction of social identities through language or symbolic forms of communication sparked by the ‘linguistic’ or ‘cultural turn’ generated a fundamental scepticism

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for these older socioeconomic interpretations of history. The many studies that grew out of this turn over the last few decades have coagulated into a kind of ‘revisionism’ that shares a common thread despite many individual differences. 7 With respect to the absence of an English revolution, the most important commonality within this scholarly trend is the strong emphasis on long lines of continuity within English history and the political behaviour of social groups from the lower classes. Whereas earlier studies of the social protests of the 1830s and 1840s identified the formation of independent workers’ organizations as a clear break with older forms of social conflict, the revisionists situate Chartism and other protest movements within the tradition of English radicalism that emerged in the eighteenth century. From a revisionist perspective, the language of reform was not marked by a new understanding of society whose roots lay in the economic differences generated in an industrial society, but rather defined by democratic ideals carried over from the French Revolution. Well into the nineteenth century, according to this line of thought, demands for political reforms, such as universal suffrage or civil liberties, stood at the forefront of fights for reforms, and not social issues or conflicts between classes with opposing economic and political interests. Moreover, when workers and other groups from among the lower classes became more and more involved in politics in their own right, revisionists argue, they did not represent a new social formation, but rather they were part of an older, cross-class reform movement. Working from this kind of approach, the break in English history around 1850 becomes less significant because the defeat of Chartism no longer appears to be a deep schism in an inevitable series of class struggles; rather, the failure of the Chartists marked a shift within a long-lasting conflict over the reform of the English constitution. A strong emphasis on heterogeneous identities at all social levels can be easily reconciled with this revisionist view of English history. These theses of continuity and the new image of the heterogeneity of English society are in fact mutually contingent.8 At the same time, another commonality among revisionist approaches points in the opposite direction. As revisionist scholarship still tends to focus on social protests and demands for reforms when examining the political activities of the English lower classes, conservative viewpoints are largely depicted as products of the late nineteenth century, if they are dealt with at all.9 Indirectly, this limited perspective reaffirms the old periodization suggested by English social history. The clearest formulation of this argument can be found in Neville Kirk’s Change, Continuity and Class, which was published in 1998. Especially with regard to the late emergence of a popular conservative tradition after 1850, he defends the idea that there was a fundamental break within English history around 1850. Likewise, Kirk portrays the working class as a unified entity prior to the mid century. Given the general dominance of the Chartists among the lower classes, he also maintains that it would be impossible, if not

Introduction | 5

downright absurd, to suggest that popular conservatism existed earlier in the century.10 From a completely different perspective, Philip Harling has recently argued that the old division of the nineteenth century into three phases holds true for England, regardless of all the debates over lines of continuity within the major political controversies of the time. Harling also asserts that the shift in political culture around 1850 was one of the most important phenomena over the course of the entire century; the revisionists, he claims, provided a more differentiated perspective with their new methods, but they had not shaken the foundation of this older thesis.11 This book’s analysis of conservative traditions among the English lower classes and their importance in the political conflicts waged in England in the nineteenth century takes up with this thread of scholarship. It draws on different scholarly discussions that have by and large existed independent of one another and weaves them together to suggest a more nuanced approach to the political culture of the English lower classes. In detail, these discussions revolved around the interpretation of expressions of loyalism and patriotism in the era after the French Revolution; Conservative electoral success among lower-class voters in the late nineteenth century; the role of the constitution as a reference point in the broad social debates on reforms and confessional conflicts; and the importance of religion in the lives of the English lower classes.

Patriotism and Loyalism Since the mid 1980s, scholars of the Early Modern period have led the discussion over loyalist reactions to the French Revolution in England.12 On the one hand, they have emphasized the demonstrative loyalism of broad swathes of the English population. To do so, they have cited the huge number of anti-revolutionary flyers and pamphlets that were printed; the role of the churches (of all confessions) as a platform for the dissemination of conservative ideas through loyalist sermons; and the extensive network of Reeves Associations, which actively opposed radical followers of the revolution in numerous cities and parishes after 1792.13 Based on this research, there is no doubt that the ideological positions of conservative thinkers spread among the middle and lower classes in the late eighteenth century in a popularized way. Alongside a positive view of the monarchy and the Church as well as the English constitution and the liberties anchored therein, these thinkers emphasized an acceptance of the existing social and political order as well as patriotic notions as to the superiority of English as well as particularly British characteristics. First and foremost Harry Dickinson has pointed out how well conservative political elites were able to mobilize a substantial portion of the English population after 1789 by calling for the preservation of the existing order.14 Similarly, Eckhard Hellmuth has noted the existence of a genuine

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plebeian antipathy to the ‘radical cause’ and suggested that conservative notions were at least as popular as radical ones around 1800.15 On the other hand, historians such as John Dinwiddy, David Eastwood and Mark Philp have focused on the limits of the conservative consensus within English society around 1800 and the ambiguity inherent within demonstrations of loyalism.16 They argue that the waves of loyalism in the 1790s were merely temporary occurrences. At the same time, they suggest that loyalist mobilization among the lower levels of society changed the general perception of political processes, often unleashing demands for political participation or social reforms. Alan Booth, for example, describes a transformation in the prevailing popular attitudes towards economic crises in the second half of the decade in his examination of the massive outbreak of Church and King mobs from 1792–93.17 Philp’s analysis of the propaganda of the Reeves Associations leads him to the conclusion that radical thoughts had at least partially infiltrated loyalist arguments, lending them a somewhat subversive tone.18 Studies of volunteer associations have noted a widespread willingness to fight for king and country, but also cited examples in which some volunteer units refused to ensure public order during strikes, for example, and also expressed demands for democratic command structures coupled with radical suggestions for ways to improve the situation of the population at large.19 Moreover, these studies emphasize the close connection between radical demands and patriotic arguments. From this perspective, as early as 1800 and by the end of the Napoleonic Wars at the latest, reformers could equate patriotism and radicalism without contradiction.20 In sum, this scholarship suggests that England was a society in conflict, shaped by radical protests movements and riots in which even waves of loyalism and patriotism undermined the existing order and a long-lasting, unstoppable dynamic of reform was unleashed. The parallelism between the classic division of the nineteenth century in England into three phases and the rise of a selfconscious radical working class was as unmistakeable from this point of view as the mid-century caesura. Those scholars who follow this interpretation first detect a fundamental change in the tone of English society after 1850; they argue that parallel to the emergence of a high-Victorian consensus, patriotism developed into a right-wing political concept.21 But this line of thought leaves a number of essential questions unanswered. How, for example, were radicals able to almost completely suppress clearly popular loyalist notions of Crown and Church even during the Napoleonic Wars? Were ambivalent political tendencies enough to turn Church and King mobs into crowds of radicals ready to protest? Did conservative counterstrategies really disappear or were they just innocuous for decades? Questions such as these become all the more pressing if entirely different aspects of the elections at the end of the nineteenth century are taken into account.

Introduction | 7

Electoral Victories The electoral victories of the Conservative Party following the suffrage reforms in the last third of the century as well as the ability of the Tories to mobilize large portions of the unorganized working classes attracted considerable scholarly attention quite early on. Around 1900, at least a third of the newly enfranchised voters from the lower classes cast their ballots for Conservative candidates; even in the twentieth century, around fifty per cent of the votes for Conservatives almost always came from plebeian circles.22 Contemporaries at the time were also astounded by these Conservative electoral victories, especially given the fact that the Conservatives themselves had expected that the democratization of English society would permanently weaken their party – regardless of the fact that a Conservative Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, was seen as responsible for the suffrage reform of 1867 and portions of the party propagated the notion of the ‘Tory Democracy’ just a few years later.23 Among Leftists, Conservative voters from among the working classes caused shock and dismay. Marx and Engels, for example, reacted to the Conservative electoral victories in 1868 with hefty accusations directed at workers who had been led astray.24 For a long time, historians concentrated on the organizational basis for this electoral success, such as the activities of the Conservative Primrose League from 1883 or the expansion of party organizations, as well as the weakness of the Liberals in the respective elections. Moreover, they looked at the views of the party leadership on social questions in England.25 Until the 1990s, labour historians referred to the voting behaviour of workers who voted Conservative as ‘deferential voting’: this voting behaviour, they claimed, demonstrated a traditional respect for social elites as well as the rather uncritical acceptance of their leadership.26 This explanation rested on the equation of the social and economic interests of the working class with the goals of the early labour movement. From this perspective, workers who voted Conservative deviated from the norm. Their voting behaviour was then sometimes explained as the temporary expression of pragmatic interests or the result of a direct dependent relationship with the Conservative candidate; usually, however, the reason cited for such ‘deviance’ was an ideologically imbued false consciousness.27 It was not until the beginning of the 1990s that Jon Lawrence published his path-breaking cultural history studies on the late nineteenth century in which he demonstrated that the voting behaviour of social groups cannot be explained by merely looking at their social and economic positions in the strict sense of the word. Lawrence focused on the construction of identities, the conscious creation of political coalitions through symbolic activities and binding elements such as the culture of the pub and sport as well as they ways in which masculinity and gender roles influenced this construction process.28 His seminal work prompted a series of publications that have emphasized the

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way in which patriotic, imperialistic and religious elements in Conservative ideology created a bond with voters from the lower classes and working-class neighbourhoods.29 The question remains as to whether there was a link between the great loyalist mobilization that took place in England around 1800 and the success of the Conservative Party in the last third of the nineteenth century. The loyalist patriotism and conservative notions of nation, empire and society propagated by the Tories around 1900 bear a great resemblance to this earlier phase of loyalism. Is it really plausible that these ideas just disappeared for over fifty years and had no influence over political conflicts involving the lower classes? What were the political consequences of conservative ideas anchored in everyday life and the perceptions of gender roles and social responsibility in the world of work between 1815 and 1860? Furthermore, not much scholarship has dealt with the organizations that preceded the Tory working men’s clubs and the Primrose League in the late nineteenth century. The establishment of so-called Operative Conservative Associations in the 1830s, for example, has received scant scholarly attention.30 For the most part, these clubs have been brushed aside as a consequence of Tory Radicalism.31 Apart from the temporary alliances that were formed between Tories and Radicals in England’s industrial north in the 1830s, little is known about the continued influence of loyalist traditions from around 1800 and the supposedly sudden appearance of a popular form of conservatism after 1867.32

The Constitution The great significance of popular notions of the constitution for the scholarly debates between older proponents of labour history and the revisionists has already been touched upon. Even E.P. Thompson argued that radical notions of reform in the early nineteenth century stemmed from a widespread appreciation of the English constitution, which basically reaffirmed the inviolability of certain institutions and conventions such as the monarchy, the aristocracy and the Church as well as the traditional privileges of large landowners. Constitutional rhetoric shaped the political thought of most political groups. Likewise, the almost ritualistic accentuation of the advantages of the English constitution was a quite common topos.33 Whereas Thompson cited the replacement of this rhetoric with that of a democratic Republicanism drawing on Thomas Paine as the crucial moment marking the emergence of an independent working class, these notions of the constitution once again took centre stage in scholarly debate following Stedman Jones’ reinterpretation of Chartism. For the revisionists, the similarity between the constitutional language of early radicals, Chartists and later Liberal leaders and the constitutional rhetoric of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was striking. Consequently, they see a long tradition of reform-oriented

Introduction | 9

constitutionalism associated with the radicalism of the nineteenth century rather than a break with older forms of constitutional veneration.34 Two aspects of more recent scholarship on this subject merit further attention. First of all, John Belchem and James Epstein have made an attempt to reconcile the contradiction between the noticeably positive view of the existing constitution among English radicals and the revolutionary tendencies within radicalism itself. Belchem in particular coined the term ‘popular constitutionalism’ to describe this political ideology of the radicals in the early nineteenth century.35 He argues that the specifically radical understanding of the constitution did not aim at social consensus, but rather allowed for all social institutions and values to be called into question if they deviated from the established ideal English constitution of the past. For the radicals, he notes, comprehensive reforms were necessary because absolutism and corruption had destroyed the truly democratic constitution that had once existed. Concrete demands for rights or authority were therefore justified because they corresponded to the original English (AngloSaxon) constitution that had been instituted prior to the Norman Conquest. In particular, according to Belchem, radicals understood the struggle against oppression and absolutism as the basic premise of the English constitution. Belchem also maintains that this constant recourse to the constitution allowed radicals to counter accusations that they sought revolutionary upheaval without forcing them to abstain from making demands for far-reaching social changes.36 Epstein has pointed out, however, that these constitutional arguments were only one strain of thought, albeit a dominant one, within radical discourse. Republican arguments, he adds, had been just as prevalent in radical discussions since the 1790s and they were often mixed into the language of popular constitutionalism, which meant that they also characterized the general outlook of the English lower classes.37 In contrast, Patrick Joyce situates the radical recourse to the constitution within the idea of ‘populism’ in order to describe the construction of political identities outside the boundaries of class interests through universal categories such as the ‘nation’ and ‘the people’.38 In his studies of the language of politics and popular mass culture, he outlines a broad ideology of ‘the people’ that revolves around the opposition between ‘ordinary people’ or ‘decent folk’ and a corrupt ruling class. Unlike Epstein, he emphasizes that ‘the people’ and the ‘working class(es)’ cannot be used interchangeably. With reference to his studies of popular conservatism, he interprets the typical elements of popular constitutionalism simply as part of this ideology. Alongside the dominant radical populism, he maintains, there was also a conservative form, especially after 1860. James Vernon has broadly identified the constitutional aspects of the conservative variant in which the obligation to defend tried-and-true structures and to resist demands for reform stemmed from a general veneration of the constitution. The Tories, unlike the radicals, believed that the existing

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constitutional order was an expression of the original English ideal of liberty, which was closely linked to the notion of a Protestant nation and the sanctity of property and prosperity. ‘Liberty’ in this sense was not based on individual social participation, but rather on the good of the nation as a whole. As such, it was not defined by natural law because it was an English privilege that had to be defended against domestic and foreign enemies, including reformers and radicals, Catholics and Jews, and rival nations like France in particular.39 Although Joyce’s contradictory use of the term ‘populism’ does not hold up in this context, the inclusion of a popular Tory tradition in broader debates on the constitution proves to be quite helpful.40 Vernon, moreover, has expanded the concept of ‘popular constitutionalism’. He turns what Belchem and Epstein use as a category to define radical arguments into a master narrative of English politics in the nineteenth century.41 This, in turn, begs the question as to what extent a conservative interpretation of the constitution met with support among lower-class social groups in the early nineteenth century as well. Vernon himself only vaguely discusses the social background of those who adhered to these conservative notions of the constitution in his portrayal of the popular Tory constitutional discourse. Moreover, he does not go beyond general statements as to the surprising popularity of these ideas. Furthermore, he does not look at the role of the monarchy in terms of his discussion of popular constitutionalism. How could it be, however, that the Tory variant of popular constitutionalism in the second half of the century was not in some way linked to the popular loyalism that had emerged around 1800 whose antirevolutionary societal ideal was propagated by means of a positive perspective on the existing constitution as well as an affinity to the Crown, the Church and the constitution? To what extent do the beginnings of a Conservative organizational structure in the 1830s and 1840s indicate that conservative constitutionalism became a crystallizing point for Tories from among the lower classes just as radical groups and protest movements made demands for far-reaching social reforms based on an alternative understanding of the constitution? What brought Tories from the social elite together with supporters from the lower classes outside the context of Tory Radicalism?

Religion and Politics Studies of religious culture in nineteenth-century England sketch out a complex and sometimes contradictory image of the dissemination of religious convictions and their role in defining political identities among the lower classes. For over a hundred years, historians have been discussing the influence of evangelical movements and especially Methodism, which is sometimes seen as a conservative phenomenon and sometimes as a politically ambivalent one because its

Introduction | 11

organizational structures as well as the central role of workers in its parishes contributed to the development of a self-conscious working class.42 At the same time, the impression that the lower classes lacked religion or an affinity to the Church, especially within the context of the debates on secularization, still persists. 43 However, a number of local studies have been published in recent years that attest to closer bonds between the lower classes and their churches or confessions in both rural and urban contexts.44 Callum G. Brown, for example, has impressively shown that between 1800 and 1960, the majority of those who attended church services, regardless of confession, stemmed from the lower classes. Moreover, he notes, the involvement of better-educated workers in particular in parish life did not differ from that of parishioners from other classes. For the entire nineteenth century, he does not detect any period in which the lower classes on the whole became alienated from their churches due to factors such as accelerating urbanization or political radicalization.45 The results of Brown’s study raise important questions: did religious positions and confessional conflicts directly influence political attitudes among the lower classes? To what extent were plebeian Englishmen, as non-voters, integrated in the classic political-confessional milieus of the parties? Can the front line between an Anglican Tory milieu and the reform-oriented milieu of the traditional Nonconformist denominations (Presbyterians, Congregationalists, Baptists and Quakers) be extended to the very bottom of the social ladder?46 Could candidates and local party organizations capitalize on these kinds of developments within the constituencies to gain support beyond the normal links between the parties and confessions by emphasizing individual positions and stressing dominant issues? What role did regional differences play in the respective strength of the individual confessions? Last but not least, anti-Catholic positions often complicated conflicts among Protestant denominations. The Nonconformists’ personal experiences with legal disadvantages, for example, could generate a feeling of solidarity with Catholic demands for emancipation, especially when they were coupled with the fundamental rejection of any kind of ties between the State and the Church espoused by many liberals. Accordingly, Catholics, whose numbers grew steadily with the influx of Irish immigrants, tended to support liberal politicians, which in turn brought a detectable Catholic-Irish element into English radicalism.47 On the other hand, the conservative opposition to Catholic emancipation and other legal concessions to the Catholic Church brought together Protestants of different denominations. Misgivings about Catholics and racist attitudes toward Catholic immigrants from Ireland provided a substantial foundation for the political success of the Tories in the late nineteenth century and generated sympathy for the party among the lower classes in particular; this kind of anti-Catholic Protestantism had already played a key role in defining the British national consciousness in the eighteenth century.48

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All told, when these four strands of scholarship are woven together, they indicate that a complex interplay of different factors influenced the formation of political identities as well as the political behaviours of lower-class social groups. Debates over loyalism and patriotism as well as the constitution and social justice not only reflected long-lasting ideological convictions, but also different social experiences within the age of industrialization. In this respect, religious bonds and ethnic differences were just as significant as habitually communicated notions of English traditions, the relationship between the sexes or the expectations that ordinary people harboured for social elites. Within this context, three overarching questions guide this book’s analysis of the nuanced ways in which these political identities developed: Do political conflicts in which plebeian agents were directly involved as well as the popular culture associated with their celebrations, daily life and work indicate that conservative attitudes spread among the English lower classes between 1815 and 1867? How and why was the Conservative Party, together with its closely associated organizations, able to win political support among the lower classes prior to 1867? What was the relationship between conservative politics and the political alternatives offered by radicalism and liberalism as well as the emerging labour movement? As these questions illustrate, this book sets out to trace different facets of the development of popular conservatism. On the one hand, it looks at how conservative views, ideas and identities were anchored in different ways in the lives of English plebeians, and outlines how these factors influenced political conflicts in general and not just the inclusion of plebeians in the party’s political milieu or its organizations. On the other hand, it examines the ways in which the Conservative Party could use these attitudes to bring conservative-minded members of the lower classes into their associations, electoral campaigns and other political activities. By looking at both these aspects, this book will widen the scholarly perspective on popular politics in England between the end of the Napoleonic Wars and the Second Reform Act to include a conservative dimension. In doing so, it will help better understand that curious being known as the ‘conservative working man’. However, what exactly does ‘conservative’ mean in the English context?49 Existing scholarship on conservatism in Great Britain usually focuses strongly on the English Conservative Party and tends to neglect the ideas that defined English conservatism as a political ideology. Given the long organizational continuity of the party, its ideological shifts and the difficulties it has faced in formulating a stable ideological core stand out, especially in a European comparison.50 Consequently, most of the English attempts to outline basic conservative values stem in some way from the party itself or can be found in the programmatic writings of conservative theorists and corresponding anthologies.51 Most political history accounts of the party emphasis the focus on power in Conservative politics and analyse content almost exclusively in terms of the party’s parliamentary leaders.52

Introduction | 13

The Conservative Party is therefore often depicted as representing traditional landed interests and landed property; at the same time, over the course of the nineteenth century, it opened up to the upper echelons of the middle class in industry and finance as well as increasing numbers of middle-class families with social ambitions.53 Three main goals are usually cited for the nineteenth century in relation to the parliamentary elite of the party: the defence of the traditional position of the Crown and other constitutional institutions, especially the House of Lords; the defence of the Anglican Church as the church of state and Protestantism as the dominant religion across the country; and the defence of traditional elites as leaders in society (i.e., the aristocratic ruling class as well as the landed interests) and the protection of their economic interests within the context of a paternalistic understanding of society.54 Over the course of the nineteenth century, the spectrum of Conservative politics expanded, especially under Benjamin Disraeli, who brought a more patriotic tone to the party as the ‘national party’ and added imperial goals. His tenure as the leader of the party is commonly associated with a period of mobilization in which the party loosened its ties to rural structures, thereby building a bridge to the middle classes without sacrificing aristocratic claims to leadership. The economic-based insistence on protective roles, which led to a split in the party in 1846, faded to the sidelines as the fight against radicals and democracy increasingly necessitated the reconciliation of urban and rural interests and extended the notion of property beyond land to include money and education. The party of the landed interests, as it were, integrated manufacturing interests. As such, it was able to push through defensive reforms such as the Second Reform Act in 1867 under the guise of ‘anti-radical radical conservatism’.55 Such a description of the Conservative political platform along the lines of the development of the Conservative Party in a parliamentary sense, however, is inadequate when it comes to questions related to political identity among the lower classes. On the one hand, a narrow perspective focusing on the leading circles of the party neglects differences of opinion within the party, such as those between the administrative ‘liberal conservatism’ of Robert Peel in the 1820s and the older traditions of country politics akin to that of the so-called ‘Ultra Tories’.56 On the other hand, it makes it impossible to take into account developments taking place outside the confines of Parliament, especially given the fact that no real unified party in the modern sense existed for much of the nineteenth century and local political constellations often differed from those in Parliament. Moreover, it fails to explain the prevalence of conservative values and ideological aspects in social circles beyond those of the aristocratic bearers of the landed interests and the aspiring middle class with its manufacturing interests. An expanded definition that goes beyond an abstract assessment of fundamental conservative values and the political attitude of the Conservative Party at

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a national level is needed in order to analyse conservatism at the level of popular politics. A sociopolitical matrix needs to be taken into account as conservative groups only partly derived their political identity from the canon of conservative thought begun by Edmund Burke or the central political goals of the Conservatives in Parliament. Pronounced patriotism and loyalism; the defence of a traditional English way of life and the liberties and rights associated with it; a decisive anti-Catholicism and committed Protestantism were the substantial markers of ‘popular conservatism’. As a political identity, it was also constructed through local celebrations and rituals, the culture of the pub and of sport as well as the adherence to paternalistic social structures in public life, within the family and in the realm of work. ‘Conservative’ therefore describes a specific mix of political convictions, a paternalistic understanding of society and an appreciation for traditional ways of life; being a conservative was not just about casting a ballot for a Conservative candidate or supporting the policies of the Conservatives in Parliament. Rather, an amalgam of ideas, traditions, rituals and practices shaped the contours of this political identity. Moreover, the rejection of liberal and radical notions of society had a unifying force among conservatives and served to delineate them more clearly as a group separate from the ‘Whigs’ or ‘reformers’ in general. Like the term ‘conservative’, however, ‘liberal’ and ‘radical’ did not refer to clearly defined political parties nor static political programmes, but rather conglomerations of positions and views linked to varied efforts to reform English society, which were spread through different kinds of social, symbolic and ritual practices.57 The meaning associated with these terms within the English context also differed from the continental uses of the terms. In England, for example, ‘liberal’ was used by conservatives after 1815 as a polemic description of views traditionally associated with the parliamentary Whigs, which revolved around a libertarian interpretation of the English constitutional tradition. This entailed, above all, demands for parliamentary reform through the expansion of the vote or budgetary constraints on the state as well as the critique of what was perceived to be the corrupt governing practices of the Tories. Over the course of the 1820s, and especially within the reform debates surrounding the expansion of the franchise in 1832, the term came to be used as a positive self-description by parliamentary proponents of reform who were increasingly identified as the Liberal Party.58 The term ‘radicalism’, in contrast, had been used since the late eighteenth century in conjunction with plebeian protest movements and extra-parliamentary demands for a reform of the political system, which derived the right to universal suffrage from the libertarian tradition of English constitutionalism.59 After 1820, as outlined above, liberals and radicals shared a constitutional language that called for the expansion and redefinition of existing constitutional liberties without raising the spectre of revolution, while also emphasizing the sovereignty of the people and the authority of Parliament over the Crown as well as

Introduction | 15

traditional elites.60 In the semantic separation of the two, ‘liberal’ was connected to the Whigs in Parliament as opposed to the more plebeian character of ‘radical’; differences also appeared between the two in terms of the extent of the reforms that they believed to be necessary. For example, specifically ‘radical’ demands included democratic calls for universal suffrage, secret ballots, annual elections and the equitable distribution of constituencies. But not all political groups and agents who called themselves radicals adhered to this programme. Between rather more moderate liberal notions of reform and radical demands, there was a broad spectrum of suggested reforms that conservatives easily whittled down to the label ‘Whig liberalism’ or ‘Whig radicalism’.61 The politicians, associations and movements that are referred to as ‘liberal’ or ‘radical’ in this book stem from this spectrum of reformers. Furthermore, given the broad debates over the ‘language of class’ and the problems inherent within unifying social terminology, it is important to stress the heterogeneous character of social formations.62 People whose social status was considered below that of the ‘middle classes’ and who were commonly referred to as the ‘lower orders’ (or alternatively lower ranks or classes), ‘operatives’, or the ‘working classes’ (or alternatively the ‘labouring’, ‘humbler’ or ‘poorer’ classes) in the language of the nineteenth century will be described in this study as the ‘plebeian lower classes’. This label applies to a variety of different groups, ranging from skilled workers in factories to beggars on city streets to farm labourers or domestic servants.63 These groups can be separated easily from middle-class groups such as businessmen and manufacturers or solicitors and vicars. But it is not as straightforward to differentiate between these groups and small shop owners such as bakers or butchers as well as self-employed craftsmen and those in the cottage industry who often had a respectable income, but who were also culturally as well as socially integrated in lower-class circles and whose standard of living was not better than an average worker. For both radicals and conservatives, these lower-middle-class groups played an important role in associations and other political activities. That said, however, it is rather difficult to treat them as a distinct social formation, especially in the early nineteenth century.64 As the emphasis in this analysis is on the heterogeneity of these groups, socioeconomic parameters such as income or vocation, level of education or place of residence will not be used to develop a definition of the ‘lower classes’ nor corresponding definitions of the middle classes or the aristocracy. Instead of socioeconomic terms of class or status, descriptive terms such as ‘social groups’, ‘milieus’ and ‘political camps’ more accurately capture political agents within the lower classes as well as among local elites. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s definition, ‘social groups’ describe real ensembles of agents who build connections within social space on the basis of similar positions, conditions or conditioning and display similar behavioural dispositions; correspondingly, they can be easily mobilized en masse and come together through shared experiences.65

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This description applies to active groups that also defined themselves vis-a-vis socio-economic criteria, although not exclusively, as the cohesion of the group was based on cultural conditioning, religious identities or a shared ‘habitus’. Accordingly, members of a single vocational group such as plebeian craftsmen or middle-class businessmen often appeared as political agents in different social groups.66 Alongside these ‘social groups’, broadly defined ‘milieus’ and ‘political camps’ are used to describe social formations that bridge across groups. ‘Milieus’ refer in particular to political and religious associations or organizations and their members or circles directly associated with them (for example the Anglican Tory milieu in individual constituencies). However, as suggested by Karl Rohe in particular, there were also ‘political camps’ identified as conservative or reformoriented that crossed class boundaries and were shaped by opposing political identities defined by the spectrum of opinion attached to these political terms.67 With its focus on the heterogeneity of political identities and the language of popular politics, this study moves in a direction similar to that of revisionism, but it is neither a revisionist analysis nor is it intended as a programmatic ‘postrevisionist’ attempt to combine sociohistorical accounts with revisionist analyses of political languages.68 Nonetheless, the questions and goals of this book have been influenced by the revisionist emphasis on the relative independence of politics as well as the language used by individual agents in social conflicts. Furthermore, it must be said that the revisionist approach, with its focus on political discourses and the historical analysis of social practices, does have its merits. As Stedman Jones has pointed out with respect to Chartism in 1983, it is necessary to look at what political agents ‘actually said or wrote, the terms in which they addressed each other or their opponents’ in order to adequately understand the way in which they thought and acted.69 However, his emphasis on the importance of words and texts needs to be expanded to include forms of symbolic communication and the ways in which meaning and identities were constructed. At the same time, the weakness of radical revisionist studies in particular cannot be forgotten. The lack of sociohistorical background in the revisionist works of Patrick Joyce and James Vernon, for example, often resulted in conclusions lacking in nuance and complexity, such as Vernon’s highly oversimplified contrast between the elite and ‘the people’ or Joyce’s problematic use of the concept of populism.70 In order to circumvent this danger, this study uses more accurate social analyses of the groups involved in order to provide a firm basis for its examination of social praxis. It draws on Clifford Geertz’s theory of ‘thick description’ as well as the theory of social praxis developed by Pierre Bourdieu.71 As such, it proposes a praxeological approach to the history of popular politics. Especially with regard to conservative groups within the lower classes, most of whom did not leave behind any explicit documents attesting to their political thought, this approach promises to shed new light on the variety of political views that

Introduction | 17

abounded. Looking at the symbolic actions of groups within the context of their social praxis lays bare the often unconscious and habitual structures governing the actions of historical agents who were themselves often unaware of these structures. More importantly, it allows for an analysis of the identities and mentalities as well as political ideals and goals of those groups who left little record of their activities, apart from the information that appeared in reports and descriptions of their social behaviour. Such an analysis is guided by a cultural history perspective that approaches politics along the lines of Thomas Mergel as ‘social actions, as a network of meanings, symbols and discourses in which realities – often contradictory ones – are constructed’; the perspective of the historian is like that of the ethnologist in that he approaches the political conflicts of the past from the perspective of an outsider.72 A discussion of popular politics involves an analysis of local political contexts that does not stop at the edge of town, but rather crosses from one locality to the next. This study mainly outlines conservative phenomena in which the lower classes participated in three English cities, but neighbouring towns as well as counties and the region as a whole are also taken into consideration as the situation merits. The focus lies on the greater London area; the West Riding in Yorkshire with its major city, Leeds; and the Bolton area in Lancashire. Ancillary material from other locations is sometimes included in order to offer a point of comparison or reference. Likewise, numerous other local studies are called upon to offer a corollary perspective, from Exeter in the south-west to York in the north-east and from Liverpool in the north-west to the Isle of Sheppey in the south-east. Further examples also stem from the counties of Devon, Kent, Sussex, Northamptonshire and Worcester. This is a book about popular conservatism in England, not Great Britain or the United Kingdom: Ireland, Scotland and Wales are beyond its scope. The focus on Bolton, Leeds and London may seem to reflect the classic perspective of labour history, which has been rightly criticized, but these localities were actually chosen on the basis of several different criteria. First of all, they represent three different types of cities: London as the great metropolis, Leeds as a provincial centre and Bolton as a small industrial city with strong economic links to Manchester. Bolton and Leeds were also ‘new cities’ that first voted as constituencies following the Reform Act in 1832. Moreover, the source material from these cities also offers a look at the political structures of the counties in which they are located. Likewise, the greater London area, which went from being divided into three constituencies to encompassing seven constituencies in 1832, includes both new and old urban constituencies as well those in nearby counties.73 Secondly, the three cities with their surrounding areas represented different industrial structures, which were often traditionally associated with varying mentalities and influences that affected political attitudes among the lower classes. For

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example, London as well as Birmingham were cities whose economic structures were shaped by trade, administration and the strong presence of independent craftsmen and self-conscious master artisans. In addition to its function as the seat of government and a cultural centre, London’s economic structure is often cited as the reason for the low level of militancy associated with the labour movement in the capital. For many historians, this factor also explains the dominance of a strand of radicalism dominated by craftsmen who were willing to form alliances with middle-class circles and who were strongly reform-oriented in their outlooks.74 In contrast, Leeds and Bolton embody relatively young industrial cities shaped by different structures associated with the northern English textile industry. As a mill town about fifteen miles north-west of Manchester, Bolton was a typical town representative of the sprawling cotton industry in Lancashire. Thanks to its large spinning mills and dye works, it was more deeply defined by factory work and industrialization than London.75 Leeds, as a provincial centre for the surrounding towns of Bradford, Huddersfield and Halifax, was also significant as a trade centre and a transportation hub. But, like Bolton, it was also dominated by the textile industry, although the regional economic structure in the West Riding with its varying emphases on wool, linen, worsted yarn and cotton was more diversified than in Lancashire. The manufacture of machinery as well as the mining industry both left their mark on Leeds.76 Both Leeds and Bolton were also situated in industrial regions often associated with the militant northern English variant of the labour movement, the breaking of machinery and the physical force of Chartism.77 Lastly, these three cities followed different patterns in terms of the Conservative electoral success among voters from the lower classes in the late nineteenth century. After 1868, Bolton developed into a Conservative stronghold that regularly sent Tory candidates to Parliament and whose local politics were dominated by Conservatives. In the decades prior, Conservatives were also repeatedly able to exercise their political influence in the city and win at least one of the city’s two parliamentary seats. In the 1840s, they also controlled the city council for a number of years.78 In Leeds, the Tories were able to reduce the long-standing Liberal dominance over parliamentary elections as well as in local politics after 1868, but they were not able to muster the same strength as the Conservatives in Bolton. Before the Second Reform Act of 1868, the exclusively middle-class electorate in Leeds was split into relatively even Liberal and Conservative blocks. Yet the primarily Nonconformist Liberal milieu was almost always able to control the city’s political structures when it closed its ranks. In 1874, 1885 and 1900, however, the Tories in Leeds were able to win the majority of the three or sometimes five seats in the different constituencies within the city; twice they won more than 50 per cent of the ballots.79 Unlike Leeds, London developed into a bastion of conservatism in the late nineteenth century along with other urban centres such as Sheffield and Birmingham. The political constellation in the capital before

Introduction | 19

1868 clearly differed from that of Bolton and not just because of its more complex administrative structures. In the early nineteenth century, London was a stronghold of the liberals and radicals, and Conservatives could hardly muster support on a large scale. Not counting parliamentary circles, it was often said that London was bereft of Conservatism.80 Given their many differences, these three cities thus provide a broad panorama of the many facets of lower-class participation in Conservative politics between 1815 and 1867. In terms of its temporal scope, this study stretches from the debates over popular loyalism during the Napoleonic Wars to the Conservative electoral victories following on the heels of the Second Reform Act in 1867. The faces of all three cities changed considerably over this time span. In particular, they experienced population explosions largely generated by the influx of residents from surrounding regions. At both the beginning and end of this time frame, London was the largest city in the world; however, its population grew from around a million to well over three million during this period. With a population of 62,000 in 1811 and almost 260,000 in 1871, Leeds grew even faster. Bolton, on the other hand, grew about at the same rate as London from 24,000 to 92,000.81 Urban planning issues as well as transportation and sanitary problems associated with this massive population growth greatly impacted the daily lives of the residents of all three cities; they also generated local political conflicts, particularly in the last third of the century. Around the middle of the century, the rate of urban growth began to slow down and the general economic recovery after 1850 provided the financial means to deal with this population explosion under the rubric of ‘improvement’. In the decades prior to this shift, the long-lasting crisis that ensued at the end of the war in 1815 was felt in all the cities. Local economies were affected differently by this economic situation, but they all suffered similar lows from 1817 to 1820, from 1829 to 1831 and from 1837 to 1842.82 Whereas the country’s high war debts weighed heavily on the public treasury, industrial innovations and the strong growth of the population brought social upheaval to the cities. This general framework sets the stage for the analysis of popular conservatism outlined in this book. The main sources that form the backbone of this study are local English papers as they best speak to the level of popular politics. English newspapers from the nineteenth century have been rightly described as minute books of the social, culture and political life of their respective cities. The papers offer a better account of what was happening in local administrative bodies as well as parishes and city councils than official records and minutes, many of which have not survived. For the most part, these newspapers are the only sources that cover local events, including public celebrations and the activities of parties and associations as well as different protest movements. At the same time, sources like these are shaped by a mostly urban outlook because newspapers circulated largely in cities or reported on the events in local towns or market centres in rural regions. Similar sources are

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lacking at the village level, although the English provincial press made an effort to offer its readers regional coverage that also included events taking place in the countryside. As the development of the English press in the nineteenth century in all its variety has already been well documented in historical scholarship, only a brief overview of the press landscape in the three cities in question will be provided here.83 In most cities, there were at least two newspapers that belonged to different political camps and therefore presented two different perspectives on local happenings. The structure of the press in Leeds was quite typical in this respect. For the entire period under question, Leeds was home to the liberal Leeds Mercury and the conservative Leeds Intelligencer. These two weekly newspapers competed with each other economically as well as politically. The Leeds Mercury, however, had much higher circulation figures. In addition, there were also other weekly newspapers that appeared for a limited time in Leeds such as the most important publication of the Chartists, the Northern Star. In Bolton, however, this diverse press structure developed a bit later. The Bolton Chronicle first appeared in the mid 1820s as a radical-leaning weekly newspaper, but it later adopted a conservative voice. About a decade later, it was joined by the liberal Bolton Free Press that collapsed in 1847. A series of other liberal papers appeared in its wake. The press in London, however, was dominated by the national newspapers, in particular The Times and a series of other important dailies and weeklies. The dominance of the national press made it difficult for local ‘London’ papers covering events and conflicts below the parliamentary level to gain a foothold in the city. Special papers for the different boroughs appeared one after the other in quick succession after 1850. The lack of local coverage makes it more difficult to reconstruct popular politics in London, but the national perspective offers a broader look at other counties, cities and regions in England. As the primary focus of this analysis is the reconstruction of local events through these newspapers, the question of the respective readership of these newspapers is somewhat secondary. The reports and countless minute-booklike descriptions of events, speeches and celebrations generate a quite nuanced picture of what was taking place on the streets. As the goal of this analysis is not to recreate the role of local papers in shaping the opinions of the mostly middle-class readerships, commentaries and feature articles play only a minor role. Despite the ‘middle-class’ profile of the local and national press, however, the influence of newspaper coverage on the lower classes should not be underestimated. Even though the rather high price of these newspapers, especially in the early nineteenth century, made them largely unaffordable for a plebeian public, they nonetheless circulated among a broader readership through a variety of different channels. In this respect, pubs and inns played a key role, not only because the newspapers were often passed from table to table and widely discussed among the patrons, but also because they were sold at a discount a

Introduction | 21

few days later. Additionally, small reading circles and libraries were established in the early nineteenth century that also subscribed to the newspapers and later sold them. Plebeian neighbourhoods as well as lower-class clubs and associations also joined together to purchase newspapers.84 In fact, it is generally estimated that up to about twenty people read a single copy of a newspaper. Thus, apart from the significant number of radical newspapers, some of which were circulated illegally without a tax stamp, the middle-class newspapers also had a plebeian readership. Indeed, it was not without reason that continental observers referred to England as the land of newspaper readers. Other types of sources were also consulted in order to supplement newspaper coverage. These include the records of the Home Secretary on riots, reports on local moods by the military and local civil servants, planning materials for public events such as coronation celebrations, and local administrative records and minutes from meetings of municipal bodies. A few reports from the comprehensive records on the proceedings of special inquiries in Parliament provided further material as did the papers of prominent politicians and local archival collections of campaign posters and flyers, election materials, poll books and local directories. Contemporary reports, flyers and pamphlets offered key insights, especially Richard Oastler’s extensive collection on the factory movement and the protest against the New Poor Law of 1834, which is housed in the Goldsmiths’ Library in London. Alongside the detailed reports in the press, sources such as these offer a broad perspective on local political culture in the cities in question. This material also allows for a two-pronged analysis. On the one hand, discourses among the lower class can be inferred from the speeches made during election campaigns or before assemblies of workers as well as the messages conveyed during demonstrations or within religious organizations. Whether as plebeian activists themselves or as politicians, clergymen or others, these speakers sought to directly address a plebeian public. On the other hand, the reconstruction of social practices in terms of celebrations, the world of work or daily life within the framework of conflicts over elections or between plebeian groups provides insight into the behaviour of plebeian agents, which in turn points toward influential mindsets and attitudes that were prominent within the lower classes. That said, however, it must be noted that discourse and social praxis cannot always be reconciled with one another as there was often a tension between the two. For example, the participation of much of the population in official public celebrations cannot be read as indicative of political support for the views of those who organized them. Yet, in many cases, a detailed analysis of the actual events that takes into account the general context can trace connections between the level of discourse and that of praxis. These links in turn expose the nature of popular conservativism and attest to the extent of its influence among the lower classes.

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The book as a whole is divided into three thematic parts, each of which stretches over the entire period in question. Although discourse and social praxis are constantly woven together, the individual chapters alternate between a focus on praxis and on discourse respectively. The first section deals with phenomena associated with ‘loyalism and patriotism’. Whereas the first chapter covers the celebrations of the monarchy up to 1832 with an in-depth look at the behaviour of the crowds in attendance, the second chapter traces the further development of these celebrations within the context of local politics as well as the establishment of Operative Conservative Associations from the 1830s onward. The conflicts over the proper understanding of the Crown and the constitution as well as the question as to the extent to which conservative views on these issues resonated among social groups from the lower classes form the focus of this first section. Under the banner of Protestantism, the second part examines the role of anti-Catholic sentiments and conflicts between Protestant groups in the manifestation of conservative tendencies among the lower classes. The third chapter discusses the active resistance against the emancipation of the Catholics and the religious dimension of notions of the constitution that were prevalent among lower-class conservatives. Social practices that played out on the streets locally as well as in mass demonstrations make up the bulk of the fourth chapter; it looks at the celebrations of Guy Fawkes Day on the fifth of November, anti-Catholic and anti-Irish riots and the reactions to the so-called ‘Papal Aggression’ as well as its consequences in the 1850s and 1860s. The third section discusses aspects of popular conservatism associated with ‘social justice and conservative morality’. Chapter 5 examines cooperative efforts between radicals and Tories in the protests against child labour and the New Poor Law in 1834. It questions whether presumably conservative sentiments among the lower class resulted merely from pragmatic decisions on the part of plebeian agents who sided with the Conservative opposition rather than the governing Liberals when it came to the struggle for social reforms. The last chapter clarifies the nature of the link between popular conservatism and efforts to improve the lives of ordinary English men and women through education and ‘moral reform’ by looking for evidence of a populist ‘beer and Britannia’ strategy among Conservatives and by tracing the significance of traditional ideas of gender in the mobilization of support for the Conservative cause.

Notes 1. On these figures, see C.M. Law, ‘The Growth of the Urban Population in England and Wales, 1801–1911’, Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers 11 (1967), 125–43; B. Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England 1783–1846, New Oxford History of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006). The figures apply to England, not the United Kingdom as a whole, but they can be easily extended accordingly.

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2. The depiction of English society before 1832 as an ancien régime comes from J.D.C. Clark, English Society, 1688–1832 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). For a fundamental critique of Clark’s interpretation, see J.A. Phillips, ‘The Social Calculus: Deference and Defiance in Later Georgian England’, Albion 21 (1989), 426–49. 3. Cf. H. Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: Bell, 1950). 4. For explicit debates regarding the absence of a revolution in England, see, for example, G. Rudé, ‘Warum gab es in den Jahren 1830 und 1848 in England keine Revolution?’, in H. Stuke and W. Forstmann (eds), Die europäischen Revolutionen von 1848 (Königstein im Taunus: Verlagsgruppe Athenaeum, 1979), 30–45; H.C. Schröder, ‘Die Revolution, die nicht stattfand. Großbritannien im Jahr 1848’, in O. Haberl and T. Korenke (eds), Politische Deutungskulturen (Baden-Baden: Nomos, 1999), 463­–77; E. Royle, Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, 1789­–1848 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); R. Bavaj, ‘Reform statt Revolution: England im Zeichen der Wahlrechtsreform des 19. Jahrhunderts’, Historische Zeitschrift 278 (2004), 683–709. 5. Marxist and liberal interpretations differ in this respect. Marxist inspired studies include: E. Hobsbawm, Labouring Men: Studies in the History of Labour (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1964); idem, Worlds of Labour: Further Studies in the History of Labour (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1984); G. Rudé, The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and England 1730–1848 (New York: Wiley, 1963); R. Harrison, Before the Socialists: Studies in Labour and Politics, 1861–1881 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965); P. Hollis (ed.), Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England (London: Edward Arnold, 1974); R.Q. Gray, The Labour Aristocracy in Victorian Edinburgh (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); idem, The Aristocracy of Labour in Nineteenth-Century Britain, c. 1850–1900 (London: Macmillan, 1981); G. Crossick, ‘The Labour Aristocracy and Its Values: A Study of Mid-Victorian Kentish London’, Victorian Studies 19 (1976), 301–28; idem, An Artisan Elite in Victorian Society: Kentish London, 1840–1880 (London: Croom Helm, 1978); I. Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-Century London (Folkestone: Dawson and Son, 1979); D. Thompson, The Chartists (London: Temple Smith, 1984); J. Belchem, Orator Hunt: Henry Hunt and English Working Class Radicalism (Oxford: Breviary Stuff Publications, 1985); and N. Kirk, The Growth of Working Class Reformism in Mid-Victorian England (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985). The most important contributions on the liberal side include: J. Vincent, The Formation of the British Liberal Party, 1857–1868 (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1976); P.F. Clarke, Lancashire and the New Liberalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1971): idem, ‘Electoral Sociology of Modern Britain’, History 57 (1972), 31–55; and T.J. Nossiter, Influence, Opinion and Political Idioms in Reformed England: Case Studies from the North-East (Hassocks: Harvester Press, 1975). For the best overview of the debate, see J. Lawrence, Speaking for the People: Party, Language and Popular Politics in England, 1867–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 11–25. 6. Cf. Lawrence, Speaking, 13–15; R.A. McWilliam, Popular Politics in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1998), 16–18. 7. For a good overview, see D. Mares, ‘Abschied vom Klassenbegriff? Viktorianische Arbeiterbewegung, politische Sozialgeschichte und linguistic turn in England’, Neue Politische Literatur 42 (1997), 378–94; idem, ‘Zum Verhältnis von Politikgeschichte und Sozialgeschichte in Großbritannien’, Neue Politische Literatur 44 (1999), 81–86; Lawrence, Speaking, part 1; McWilliam, Popular Politics; and S. Pedersen, ‘What is Political History Now?’, in D. Cannadine (ed.), What is History Now? (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 36–56. D. Cannadine describes the comprehensive meaning of ‘class’ in English society and historiography in D. Cannadine, The Rise and Fall of Class in Britain (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999). For a discussion of the methodological debates and cultural history in English, see P. Burke, What is Cultural History? (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).

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8. Cf. Lawrence, Speaking, 13–15; McWilliam, Popular Politics, 16–18. Critics who questioned the revisionist interpretations have sometimes provocatively demanded a ‘Remaking of the British Working Class’. See M. Savage and A. Miles, The Remaking of the British Working Class, 1850–1940 (London: Routledge, 1994); R.Q. Gray, Aristocracy of Labour; idem, ‘Class, Politics and Historical “Revisionism”’, Social History 19 (1994), 209–20; N. Kirk, ‘In Defence of Class: A Critique of Recent Revisionist Writing upon the Nineteenth-Century English Working Class’, International Review of Social History 32 (1987), 2–47; idem (ed.), Social Class and Marxism: Defences and Challenges (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996); idem, Change, Continuity and Class: Labour in British Society 1850–1920 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998); idem, ‘Decline and Fall, Resilience and Regeneration: A Review Essay on Social Class’, International Labor and Working-Class History 57 (2000), 88–102; J.A. Epstein, ‘Rethinking the Categories of Working-Class History’, Labour/Le Travail 18 (1986), 195–208; idem, ‘The Populist Turn’, Journal of British Studies 32 (1993), 177–89; idem, In Practice: Studies in the Language and Culture of Popular Politics in Modern Britain (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003); P. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (New York: Macmillan, 1995); M.W. Steinberg, ‘“The Great End of All Government”: Working People’s Construction of Citizenship Claims in Early Nineteenth-Century England and the Matter of Class’, International Review of Social History, Supplements 3.40 (1995), 19–50; idem, Fighting Words: Working-Class Formation, Collective Action and Discourse in Early Nineteenth-Century England (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999); idem, ‘The Talk and Back Talk of Collective Action: A Dialogic Analysis of Repertoires of Discourse among Nineteenth-Century English Cotton Spinners’, American Journal of Sociology 105 (1999), 736–80. 9. P. Joyce, ‘Popular Toryism in Lancashire, 1860–1890’, PhD dissertation, University of Oxford, 1975; idem, ‘The Factory Politics of Lancashire in the Later Nineteenth Century’, Historical Journal 18 (1975), 525–54; idem, Visions of the People: Industrial England and the Question of Class, 1840–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991); and J. Vernon, Politics and the People: A Study in English Political Culture, c. 1815–1867 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 10. Kirk, Change, 97–98; see also idem, ‘Ethnicity, Class and Popular Toryism, 1850–1870’, in K. Lunn (ed.), Hosts, Immigrants and Minorities: Historical Responses to Newcomers in British Society, 1870–1914 (Folkestone: Dawson, 1980), 64–106; and idem, Growth, 310–48. 11. P. Harling, ‘Equipoise Regained: Recent Trends in British Political History, 1790–1867’, Journal of Modern History 75 (2003), 890–918. 12. On the debate in general, see M. Philp, ‘Introduction’, in M. Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–18. More recent summaries of existing scholarship can be found in J. Mori, Britain in the Age of the French Revolution 1785–1820 (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000); C. Emsley, Britain and the French Revolution, Seminar Studies in History (Harlow: Pearson Education, 2000); J.E. Archer, Social Unrest and Popular Protest in England, 1780–1840, New Studies in Economic and Social History 41 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2000); and E.V. Macleod, ‘British Attitudes to the French Revolution’, Historical Review 50 (2007), 696–98. The developments in Scotland are described in A.L. Wold, ‘Loyalism in Scotland in the 1790s’, in U. Broich et al. (eds), Reactions to Revolutions: The 1790s and their Aftermath, Kulturgeschichtliche Perspektiven 2 (Berlin: Lit Verlag, 2007), 109–35. 13. See A. Mitchell, ‘The Association Movement of 1792–1793’, Historisches Jahrbuch 116 (1961), 56–77; D.E. Ginter, ‘The Loyalist Association Movement of 1792/3’, Historical Journal 9 (1966), 179–81; D.R. Knickerbocker, ‘The Popular Religious Tract in England, 1790–1830’, PhD dissertation, University of Oxford, 1981; R. Hole, ‘British Counter-Revolutionary Popular Propaganda in the 1790s’, in C. Jones (ed.), Britain and Revolutionary France: Conflict, Subversion and Propaganda (Exeter: Exeter University Press, 1983), 53–69; R. Dozier, For

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King, Constitution and Country: The English Loyalists and the French Revolution (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1983); O. Smith, The Politics of Language, 1791–1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); S. Pedersen, ‘Hannah More Meets Simple Simon: Tracts, Chapbooks and Popular Culture in Late Eighteenth-Century England’, Journal of British Studies 25 (1986), 84–113; T. McGovern, ‘Conservative Ideology in Britain in the 1790s’, History 73 (1988), 238–47; M. Weinzierl, Freiheit, Eigentum und keine Gleichheit: Die Transformation der englischen politischen Kultur und die Anfänge des modernen Konservatismus 1791–1812, Ancien Regime, Aufklärung und Revolution 26 (Vienna: Walter de Gruyter, 1993); M. Duffy, ‘William Pitt and the Origins of the Loyalist Association Movement of 1792’, Historical Journal 39 (1996), 943–62; M.O. Grenby, ‘The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Fiction, British Conservatism and the Revolution in France’, History 83 (1998), 445–71; idem, The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001); and K. Gilmartin, ‘In the Theater of Counter-Revolution: Loyalist Associations and Conservative Opinion in the 1790s’, Journal of British Studies 41 (2002), 291–328. 14. H.T. Dickinson, ‘Popular Conservatism and Militant Loyalism 1789–1815’, in H.T. Dickinson (ed.), Britain and the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Basingstoke: Macmillan Education, 1989), 103–25; idem, ‘Popular Loyalism in Britain in the 1790s’, in E. Hellmuth (ed.), The Transformation of Political Culture: England and Germany in the Late Eighteenth Century (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 503–33; idem, Politics of the People in EighteenthCentury Britain (Basingstoke: St Martin’s Press, 1995). 15. E. Hellmuth, ‘Kommunikation, Radikalismus, Loyalismus und ideologischer Pluralismus: “Popular Politics” in England in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts’, Aufklärung 4 (1989), 84. See also I.R. Christie, Stress and Stability in Late Eighteenth-Century Britain: Reflections on the British Avoidance of Revolution (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984); idem, ‘Conservatism and Stability in British Society’, in M. Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 165–87. 16. J. Dinwiddy, ‘Interpretations of Anti-Jacobinism’, in M. Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 38–49; D. Eastwood, ‘Patriotism and the English State in the 1790s’, in M. Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 146­–68; M. Philp, ‘Vulgar Conservatism, 1792/3’, English Historical Review 110 (1995), 42–69. R. Wells argues even more strongly along the lines of E.P. Thompson that there was nothing like a cross-class consensus during the Napoleonic Wars – ‘It would be idiotic to assume the loyalty of the British masses’ – in R. Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience, 1795–1803 (Gloucester: Alan Sutton, 1983), 264; see also idem, ‘English Society and Revolutionary Politics in the 1790s: The Case for Insurrection’, in M. Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 188–226. 17. Above all in his dissertation, Booth interprets the emergence of loyalist mobs along waves related to economic ups and downs; see especially A. Booth, ‘Reform, Repression and Revolution: Radicalism and Loyalism in the North-West of England, 1793–1803’, PhD dissertation, University of Lancashire, 1979, 124. In the relatively prosperous early 1790s, he argues, the willingness to resist protest movements was quite widespread; after the economic situation declined considerably around 1795 due to the developments of the war, the willingness to protest increased and loyalist incidents disappeared. He comes to a similar, yet more ambiguous conclusion in idem, ‘Popular Loyalism and Public Violence in the North West of England 1790–1800’, Social History 8 (1983), 295–313. 18. Philp, ‘Vulgar Conservatism’. See also K. Watson, ‘Bonfires, Bells and Bayonets: British Popular Memory and the Napoleonic Wars’, in B. Taithe and T. Thornton (eds), War: Identities in Conflict 1300–2000 (Stroud: Sutton, 1998), 95–109. For further thoughts on the complex relationship between radicalism and loyalism in the 1790s, see M. Philp ‘Disconcerting Ideas:

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Explaining Popular Radicalism and Popular Loyalism in the 1790s’, in G. Burgess and M. Festenstein (eds), English Radicalism, 1550–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 157–89. 19. L. Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992); and J.E. Cookson, ‘The English Volunteer Movement of the French Wars, 1793–1815: Some Contexts’, Historical Journal 32 (1989), 867–91. Both Colley and Cookson describe the great willingness of volunteers to defend the nation, but they warn against oversimplified interpretations and emphasize the often ambivalent attitudes that prevailed among the associations. For perspectives that also address regular army units, see A. Gee, The British Volunteer Movement, 1794–1814 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003); the contributions in M. Philp (ed.), Resisting Napoleon: The British Response to the Threat of Invasion, 1797–1815 (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006); K.B. Linch, ‘A Citizen and Not a Soldier: The British Volunteer Movement and the War Against Napoleon’, in A. Forrest, et al. (eds), Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 205–21; J.E. Cookson, ‘Regimental Worlds: Interpreting the Experience of British Soldiers During the Napoleonic Wars’, in A. Forrest et al. (eds), Soldiers, Citizens and Civilians: Experiences and Perceptions of the Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, 1790–1820, War, Culture and Society, 1750–1850 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009), 23–39. 20. On this view of English patriotism, see in particular H. Cunningham, ‘The Language of Patriotism? 1750–1914’, History Workshop Journal 12 (1981), 8–33; L.Colley, ‘Britishness and Otherness: An Argument’, Journal of British Studies 31 (1992), 309–29. Similarly, some scholars have warned against overestimating loyalist patriotism in the years prior to 1815: P. Harling, ‘Leigh Hunt’s Examiner and the Language of Patriotism’, English Historical Review 111 (1996), 1159–81; idem, ‘The Duke of York Affair (1809) and the Complexities of War-Time Patriotism’, Historical Review 39 (1996), 963–84; idem, ‘Robert Southey and the Language of Social Discipline’, Albion 30 (1998), 630–55. See also G. Newman, ‘Anti-French Propaganda and British Liberal Nationalism in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Studies 18 (1975), 385–418; idem, The Rise of English Nationalism: A Cultural History, 1740–1830 (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1987); J. Belchem, ‘Republicanism, Popular Constitutionalism and the Radical Platform in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, Social History 6 (1981), 1–32; M.G. Dietz, ‘Patriotism’, in T. Bull et al. (eds), Political Innovation and Conceptual Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 177–93; D. Eastwood, ‘Robert Southey and the Intellectual Origins of Romantic Conservatism’, English Historical Review 104 (1989), 313–31; idem, ‘Robert Southey and the Meanings of Patriotism’, Journal of British Studies 31 (1992), 265–87; idem, ‘Patriotism and the English State’; M. Finn, ‘“A Vent which has Conveyed Our Principles”: English Radical Patriotism in the Aftermath of 1848’, Journal of Modern History 64 (1992), 637–59; and the articles in R. Samuel, (ed.), Patriotism: The Making and Unmaking of British National Identity (London: Routledge, 1989). 21. The decisive turnabout is usually dated to the 1870s. See H. Cunningham, ‘Jingoism and the Working Classes, 1877–1878’, Bulletin of the Society for the Study of Labour History 19 (1969), 6–9; idem, ‘The Conservative Party and Patriotism’, in R. Colls and P. Dodds (eds), Englishness, Politics and Culture, 1880–1920 (London: Croom Helm, 1986), 283–307; E.J. Evans, ‘Englishness and Britishness’, in A. Grant and K.J. Stringer (eds), Uniting the Kingdom: The Making of British History (London: Routledge, 1995), 223–43 ; N. Kirk, ‘“Traditional” Working Class Culture and the “Rise of Labour”: Some Preliminary Questions and Observations’, Social History 16 (1991), 203–16; idem, Labour and Society in Britain and the USA, vol 2: Challenge and Accommodation (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1994), passim; idem, Change. 22. M. Pugh, The Making of Modern British Politics, 1867–1939 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982), 81–83; idem, ‘Popular Conservatism in Britain: Continuity and Change, 1880–1987’, Journal

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of British Studies 27 (1988), 254–82. See also J. Belchem, Class, Party and the Political System in Britain, 1867–1914, Historical Association Studies (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 18–35; idem, Industrialization and the Working Class: The English Experience 1715–1900 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1990). 23. M. Pugh, State and Society: A Social and Political History of Britain 1870–1997 (London: Arnold/Hodder, 1999), 30–32. 24. Letters from Engels to Marx, dated 18 November 1868 and 20 November 1868, printed in K. Marx and F. Engels, Marx / Engels Gesamtausgabe, section 3, vol. 4: Der Briefwechsel zwischen Marx und Engels 1868–1883 (Berlin, 1931), 126–27. 25. See J. Robb, The Primrose League, 1883–1902 (New York: AMS Press, 1942); M. Pugh, The Tories and the People, 1880–1935 (Oxford: Blackwell, 1985). See also the standard studies on the history of the Conservative Party from R. Shannon, The Age of Disraeli, 1868–1881: The Rise of Tory Democracy, Longman History of the Conservative Party Series (London: Longman, 1992); idem, The Age of Salisbury, 1881–1902: Unionism and Empire, Longman History of the Conservative Party Series (London: Longman, 1996); R. Blake, The Conservative Party from Peel to Thatcher (London: Methuen, 1985); B. Coleman, Conservatism and the Conservative Party in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Edward Arnold, 1989); and J. Ramsden, An Appetite for Power: A History of the Conservative Party Since 1830 (London: Harper Collins, 1999). A summary of the existing scholarship can be found in D. Watts, Tories, Unionists and Conservatives, 1815–1914 (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 2002). The ‘negative’ interpretation of Conservative electoral victories as the consequence of low voter turnout and the weakness of the Liberals is put forth in particular by J.P. Cornford, ‘The Transformation of Conservatism in the Late Nineteenth Century’, Victorian Studies 7 (1963), 35–77; idem, ‘The Adoption of Mass Organization by the British Conservative Party’, in E. Allardt and Y. Littunen (eds), Cleavages, Ideologies and Party Systems: Contributions to Comparative Political Sociology, Transactions of the Westermarck Society 10 (Helsinki: Academy Bookstore, 1964), 415–30; E.H.H. Green, ‘Radical Conservatism: The Electoral Genesis of Tariff Reform’, Historical Journal 28 (1985), 667–92; idem, The Crisis of Conservatism: The Politics, Economics and Ideology of the British Conservative Party, 1880–1914 (London: Routledge, 1995), ch. 3; Shannon, Salisbury, 313; and M. Brodie, The Politics of the Poor: The East End of London 1885–1914 (New York: Clarendon Press, 2004), 99, 113 and 200–1. 26. See R. McKenzie and A. Silver, Angels in Marble: Working-Class Conservatism in Urban England (London: Heinemann Educational, 1968); E.A. Nordlinger, The Working Class Tories: Authority, Deference and Stable Democracy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1967); Pugh, Making; idem, ‘Popular Conservatism’; Belchem, Class; and J. Boughton, ‘Working Class Conservatism and the Rise of Labour: A Case Study of Birmingham in the 1920s’, The Historian 59 (1991), 16–20. Early criticism of such explanations can be found in F. Parkin, ‘Working-Class Conservatives: A Theory of Political Deviance’, British Journal of Sociology 18 (1967), 278–90; and H. Pelling, ‘Working Class Conservatives’, Historical Journal 13 (1970), 339–43. On the concept of ‘deference’, which has been cited as one of the defining characteristics of the English political system and voting behaviour in general, see R. Davis, ‘The Whigs and the Idea of Electoral Deference: Some Further Thoughts on the Great Reform Act’, Durham University Journal 67 (1974), 79–91; idem, ‘Deference and Aristocracy in the Time of the Great Reform Act’, American Historical Review 81 (1976), 532–39; H. Newby, ‘The Deferential Dialectic’, Comparative Studies in Society and History 17 (1975), 139–64; idem, The Deferential Worker: A Study of Farm Workers in East Anglia (Cambridge: Allen Lane, 1977); D.C. Moore, The Politics of Deference: A Study of the Mid-Nineteenth-Century English Political System (Hassocks: Harvester, 1976); J.G.A. Pocock, ‘The Classical Theory of Deference’, American Historical Review 81 (1976), 516–23; D. Spring, ‘Walter Bagehot and Deference’, American Historical Review 81 (1976), 524–31; R. McKibbin, ‘Why Was There No Marxism in Great Britain’, English

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Historical Review 9 (1984), 310–24; J.D.C. Clark, English Society, 94, 274–75, 293. Above all, P. Joyce, Work, Society and Politics: The Culture of the Factory in Later Victorian England (London: Methuen, 1980), 90–133; J.A. Phillips, Electoral Behaviour in Unreformed England: Plumpers, Splitters and Straights (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1982), 46–64; idem, ‘Social Calculus’; F. O’Gorman, ‘Electoral Deference in “Unreformed” England: 1760–1832’, Journal of Modern History 56 (1984), 391–429; and idem, Voters, Patrons, Parties: The Unreformed Electorate of Hanoverian England, 1734–1832 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), 225– 44, have refuted an oversimplified understanding of deference as direct dependence or naive obedience, suggesting that the hierarchical relationships between nobles and their tenants, for example, were always shaped by moments of negotiation; in this sense, deference and the acceptance of authority rested on a carefully negotiated balance of interests. 27. Pugh, ‘Popular Conservatism’; and Belchem, Class, 26–28. Alongside deferential voting, Pugh and Belchem refer to the pragmatic voting of the ‘upper’ working class, which identified with middle-class ideals or profited directly from existing social inequalities. 28. J. Lawrence, ‘Class and Gender in the Making of Urban Toryism, 1880–1914’, English Historical Review 108 (1993), 629–53; and idem, Speaking. The groundwork for interpretations like these stems from Joyce, Work, although Joyce overemphasizes the economic aspects of these hierarchical relationships in order to explain the affinity of large portions of the working class for the Conservatives. 29. P.A. Readman, ‘The 1895 General Election and Political Change in Late Victorian Britain’, Historical Journal 42 (1999), 467–93; idem, ‘The Conservative Party, Patriotism and British Politics: The Case of the General Election of 1900’, Journal of British Studies 40 (2001), 107– 45; A.L. Windscheffel, ‘Villa Toryism: The Making of London Conservatism 1868–1896’, PhD dissertation, Royal Holloway, University of London, 2000; M. Roberts, ‘“Villa Toryism” and Popular Conservatism in Leeds, 1885–1902’, Historical Journal 49 (2006), 217–46; and idem, ‘Constructing a Tory World-View: Popular Politics and the Conservative Press in LateVictorian Leeds’, Historical Review 79 (2006), 115–43; see also the earlier studies from F. Coetzee, For Party or Country: Nationalism and the Dilemmas of Popular Conservatism in Edwardian England (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990); and P. Cain, ‘The Conservative Party and “Radical Conservatism”, 1880–1914: Incubus or Necessity?’, Twentieth Century British History 7 (1996), 371–81. 30. D. Walsh, ‘Working Class Political Integration and the Conservative Party: A Study of Class Relations and Party Political Development in the North-West, 1800–1870’, PhD dissertation, University of Salford, 1991; idem, ‘Conservative Party Organisation and Working Class Political Integration in the North-West, 1832–1867’, in A. O’Day (ed.), Government and Institutions in the Post-1832 United Kingdom (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1995), 31–49. M. Cragoe briefly mentions the Operative Conservative Associations in relation to the establishment of Conservative clubs after 1832, but he does not look specifically at Tory attempts to organize groups from the lower classes; see M. Cragoe, ‘The Great Reform Act and the Modernization of British Politics: The Impact of Conservative Associations, 1835–1841’, Journal of British Studies 47 (2008), 581–603. 31. On Tory Radicalism, see R.L. Hill, Toryism and the People, 1832–1846 (London: Constable, 1929); C. Driver, Tory Radical: The Life of Richard Oastler (New York: Oxford University Press, 1946); J.T. Ward, ‘Revolutionary Tory – The Life of Joseph Rayner Stephens of Ashton under Lyne’, Transactions of the Lancashire and Cheshire Antiquarian Society 68 (1958), 97–116; idem, The Factory Movement (London: Macmillan, 1962); N.C. Edsall, The Anti-Poor Law Movement, 1834–1844 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1971). 32. M. Roberts, ‘Popular Conservatism in Britain, 1832–1914’, Parliamentary History 26 (2007), 408; Roberts notes the lack of studies on early popular conservatism prior to the 1860s as a significant desideratum in scholarship. He refers primarily to the work of J. Walsh and the

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other studies cited above in his account; see M. Roberts, Political Movements in Urban England, 1832–1914, British History in Perspective (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2009), ch. 5 and 6. 33. E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1963), ch. 4, esp. 96. 34. Even before 1983, some scholars criticized Thompson’s thesis; the idea that English radicalism in general was distinguished by a reform-minded and consensus-oriented constitutionalism was put forth, for example, by M.I. Thomis and P. Holt, Threats of Revolution in Britain 1790– 1848 (London: Macmillan Press, 1977). For older critiques of Thompson, see F.K. Donnelly, ‘Ideology and Early English Working-Class History: Edward Thompson and his Critics’, Social History 2 (1976), 219–38; and Belchem, ‘Republicanism’. 35. Belchem, ‘Republicanism’. 36. Ibid., 6–7. With its look at the language of the radicals, Belchem’s article has become one of the main pillars of the critique of the image of the radical protest movement in the early nineteenth century originally put forth by E.P. Thompson; Belchem, however, situated himself within Thompson’s tradition and rejected the notion that he was a revisionist. See Belchem, Orator Hunt, Introduction; and idem, Popular Radicalism in Nineteenth-Century Britain, Social History in Perspective (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996), 1–8. 37. J.A. Epstein, ‘Understanding the Cap of Liberty: Symbolic Practice and Social Conflict in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, Past and Present 122 (1989), 75–118; idem, ‘The Constitutionalist Idiom’, in J.A. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1994), 1–28; and J.A. Epstein and D. Karr, ‘Playing at Revolution: British “Jacobin” Performance’, Journal of Modern History 79 (2007), 495–530. Epstein’s studies, however, must be situated within the context of revisionist debate; he outlines his moderate position (in comparison to scholars such as Patrick Joyce and James Vernon) with respect to the break with traditional English social history and the consequences of cultural history and postmodern theories for the history of England in the nineteenth century in Epstein, In Practice, esp. Introduction. 38. P. Joyce, Visions; and idem, Democratic Subjects: The Self and the Social in Nineteenth-Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). Earlier uses of the term ‘populism’ in relation to radical groups and politicians can be found in W.D. Rubinstein, ‘British Radicalism and the “Dark Side” of Populism, 1780–1860’, in W.D. Rubinstein, Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British History (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), 339–73; C. Calhoun, The Question of Class Struggle: Social Foundations of Popular Radicalism During the Industrial Revolution (Oxford: Blackwell, 1982); and G. Himmelfarb, The Ideal of Poverty: England in the Early Industrial Age (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1984), 228–29. 39. Vernon, Politics, ch. 8. 40. Joyce’s definition of ‘populism’ remains rather vague; sometimes, he seems to describe a field of political conflict, but in other places, he suggests a general ideology of ‘the people’ that crystalized in a conflicting ‘family of populisms’. He refers to certain values and views, but also political styles and political methods, as ‘populistic’. Joyce uses ‘populism’ to move away from the use of ‘class’ in order to suggest the idea of cross-class identities alongside the clear ideological divisions between workers, the middle class and the aristocracy. At the same time, he identifies radical populism as the dominant narrative for the construction of identities among much of the population. Rather than contradictory and overlapping identities, Joyce sees a relatively cohesive social and ideological formation that, in a sense, echoes Thompson’s working class. Joyce’s difficulty in outlining a clear definition of ‘populism’ as a political concept, however, is quite typical. For critiques of the term ‘populism’, see G. Ionescu and E. Gellner (eds), Populism: Its Meaning and Characteristics (London: Macmillan, 1969); J.B. Allcock, ‘Populism: A Brief Biography’, Sociology 5 (1971), 371–87; and J. Retallack, ‘Demagogentum, Populismus,

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Volkstümlichkeit: Überlegungen zur “Popularitätshascherei” auf dem politischen Massenmarkt des Kaiserreichs’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft 48 (2000), 309–25. 41. Vernon, Politics, 328. Vernon’s understanding of popular constitutionalism inspired a series of new studies on discourses of the constitution within radicalism; see Steinberg, ‘Great End’; J.A. Epstein, ‘“Our Real Constitution”: Trial Defence and Radical Memory in the Age of Revolution’, in J. Vernon (ed.), Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 22–51; J. Fulcher, ‘The English People and their Constitution after Waterloo: Parliamentary Reform, 1815–1867’, in J. Vernon (ed.), Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 52–81; D. Wahrman, ‘Public Opinion, Violence and the Limits of Constitutional Politics’, in J. Vernon (ed.), Re-reading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 83–122; P. Joyce, ‘The Constitution and the Narrative Structure of Victorian Politics’, in J. Vernon (ed.), Rereading the Constitution: New Narratives in the Political History of England’s Long Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 179–203; and B. Weinstein, ‘Popular Constitutionalism and the London Corresponding Society’, Albion 34 (2002), 37–57. Alongside radical forms of constitutional discourse, the focus of scholarly discussion has been its narrative structures, especially melodramatic elements. Before Vernon, Schwoerer looked at the controversial traditions of constitutional interpretations in the nineteenth century: see L.G. Schwoerer, ‘Celebrating the Glorious Revolution 1689–1989’, Albion 22 (1990), 1–20. For a more recent perspective, see R. Saunders, ‘Parliament and the People: The British Constitution in the Long Nineteenth Century’, Journal of Modern European History 6 (2008), 72–87. 42. The first arguments appeared in E. Halévy, ‘La naisance du méthodisme au Angleterre’, Revue de Paris 4 (1906), 519–39 and 841–67; idem, Histoire du peuple anglais au XIXe siècle, 4 vols (Paris: Hachette, 1912–1946); E.P. Thompson, Making. On scholarly debate, see D. Hempton, Methodism and Politics in British Society, 1750–1850 (London: Routledge, 1986), 11–13; and McWilliam, Popular Politics, 64–65. 43. K.S. Inglis, Churches and the Working Classes in Victorian England (1963; reprinted London: Routledge, 2006); idem, ‘Churches and Working Classes in Nineteenth-Century England’, Historical Studies: Australia and New Zealand 8 (1957), 44–53; H. McLeod, Religion and the Working Class in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1984); and S. Gunn, ‘The Ministry, the Middle Class and the “Civilizing Mission” in Manchester, 1850–1880’, Social History 21 (1996), 22–36. 44. See, for example, T.W. Laqueur, Religion and Respectability: Sunday Schools and Working Class Culture (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1976); J. Obelkevich, Religion and Rural Society: South Lindsay 1825–1875 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976); J. Cox, The English Churches in a Secular Society: Lambeth 1870–1930 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982); A.B. Bartlett, ‘The Churches in Bermondsey 1880–1939’, PhD dissertation, University of Birmingham, 1987; M. Smith, Religion in Industrial Society: Oldham and Saddleworth, 1740–1865 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994); S.J.D. Green, Religion in the Age of Decline: Organisation and Experience in Industrial Yorkshire 1870–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); and H. MacLeod, Religion and Society in England 1850–1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1996). 45. C.G. Brown, The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation 1800–2000 (London: Routledge, 2001), esp. ch. 7; similar conclusions regarding Nonconformists can be found in M.R. Watts, The Dissenters: The Expansion of Evangelical Nonconformity (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 319–21; and D. Hempton, ‘Religion and Political Culture in Urban Britain’, in D. Hempton, Religion and Political Culture in Britain and Ireland: From the Glorious Revolution to the Decline of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 117–42.

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46. For a typical description of the Tory milieu, see J.J. Sack, From Jacobite to Conservative: Reaction and Orthodoxy in Britain, c. 1760–1832 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1993), ch. 8–10; see also P. Wende, Großbritannien 1500–2003, Oldenbourg Grundriss der Geschichte 32 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001), 78. On the politics of Nonconformists, see A.D. Gilbert, Religion and Society in Industrial England: Church, Chapel and Social Change 1740–1914 (London: Longman, 1976), ch. 3–5; T. Larsen, Friends of Religious Equality: Nonconformist Politics in Mid-Victorian England (Woodbridge: Boydell and Brewer, 1999); and R. Floyd, Church, Chapel and Party: Religious Dissent and Political Mobilization in Nineteenth-Century England, Studies in Modern History (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008). 47. See J. Belchem, ‘English Working Class Radicalism and the Irish, 1815–1850’, North West Labour History Society Bulletin 8 (1982/3), 5–18. 48. See Colley, Britons; eadem, ‘Britishness’; and J.D.C. Clark, ‘Protestantism, Nationalism and National Identity, 1660–1832’, Historical Journal 43 (2000), 249–76. 49. The term ‘Conservative’ was used in England to describe a parliamentary group as of 1817 or 1820. It replaced older terminology such as ‘Jacobite’, and it was used interchangeably with ‘Tory’, which is still commonly used today. The use of these two terms in the English context, especially with respect to the Conservatives in the nineteenth century, is problematic; the meaning associated with ‘Tory’, for example, shifted completely between the early eighteenth century and the early nineteenth century. See J.J. Sack, ‘The Quarterly Review and the Baptism of the “Conservative Party” – A Conundrum Resolved’, Victorian Periodicals Review 24 (1991), 170–72; idem, Jacobite to Conservative; T.P. Schofield, ‘Conservative Political Thought in Britain in Response to the French Revolution’, Historical Journal 29 (1986), 601–22; B. Coleman, Conservatism; J. Leonhard, Liberalismus: Zur Historischen Semantik eines europäischen Deutungsmusters, Veröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London 50 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2001), 486–94; and esp. A. Rödder, Die Radikale Herausforderung: Die politische Kultur der englischen Konservativen zwischen ländlicher Tradition and industrieller Moderne (1846–1868) (Munich: Oldenbourg, 2002), 41–42, 62–64. N. Gash dates the emergence of the term ‘Conservative’ to a later point with reference to the first reform crisis around 1830; see N. Gash, Politics in the Age of Peel, 2nd edn (Hassocks: Longman, 1977), 56–57. In political debates, the terms ‘Tory’ and ‘Conservative’ were used for a time after 1820 to delineate two different positions within English Conservatism, but they were also used somewhat interchangeably to describe candidates and the politics of the Conservative Party. This book does not differentiate between these two terms in detail. But ‘Tory’ is only used clearly in reference to the party, its MPs/candidates/associations and the people and positions associated with them. Similarly, ‘Conservative’ is capitalized in reference to the actual Conservative Party; in other contexts, ‘conservative’ with a lower case ‘c’ will be used. ‘Liberal’ and ‘liberal’, ‘Radical’ and ‘radical’ will be used in the same way. 50. Explicit doubts as to a cohesive ideological identity attached to the politics of English Conservatives have been raised, for example, by W.H. Greenleaf, ‘The Character of Modern British Conservatism’, in R. Benewick et al. (eds), Knowledge and Belief in Politics: The Problem of Ideology (London: Allen and Unwin, 1973), 177–212; later, however, Greenleaf presents their positions in a more differentiated light. See also idem, The British Political Tradition (London: Methuen, 1983), vol. 2, 189–346. 51. For a partisan perspective on the Conservative Party, see, for example, S. Moore, The Conservative Party: The First 150 Years (Richmond upon Thames: Country Life Books, 1980); P. Norton and A. Aughey, Conservatives and Conservatism (London: Temple Smith, 1981); J.W. Osborne, ‘Toryism’, Modern Age 28 (1984), 330–38; P. Norton (ed.), The Conservative Party (London: Prentice Hall/Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1996). For examples from Conservative theorists and Conservative self-descriptions, see R.J. White (ed.), The Conservative Tradition (London: Black, 1963); N. O’Sullivan, Conservatism (London: Dent, 1976); idem, ‘Conservatism’ in R. Eatwell

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and A. Wright (eds), Contemporary Political Ideologies (London: Pinter, 1993), 51–79; R. Scruton, The Meaning of Conservatism (Harmondsworth: Macmillan, 1980); idem, ‘Introduction: What is Conservatism?’, in R. Scruton (ed.), Conservative Texts: An Anthology (Basingstoke: St Martin’s Press, 1991), 1–28; A. Quinton, The Politics of Imperfection: The Religious and Secular Traditions of Conservative Thought in England from Hooker to Oakeshott (London: Faber and Faber, 1978); W.R. Harbour, The Foundations of Conservative Thought: An Anglo-American Tradition in Perspective (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1982); F. O’Gorman (ed.), British Conservatism: Conservative Thought from Burke to Thatcher (London: AddisonWesley Longman, 1986); and J. Muller (ed.), Conservatism: An Anthology of Social and Political Thought from David Hume to the Present (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). 52. See the works on the history of the Conservative Party cited in footnote 25. In a certain sense, Rödder, Radikale Herausforderung, is an exception in this respect because it focuses strongly on the content of the Conservative Party programme; but, like most other studies, it still focuses on the parliamentary level and the political positions of leading Conservative politicians. 53. This portrayal is echoed in numerous handbooks on the development of the Conservative Party; see, for example, K.T. Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886, New Oxford History of England (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998); G. Niedhart, Geschichte Englands im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Munich: C.H. Beck, 1996). For earlier examples, see also H. Dietz, ‘Konservatismus in Großbritannien’, in G.K. Kaltenbrunner (ed.), Konservatismus international (Stuttgart: Sewald, 1973),14–32; and P. Lane, The Conservative Party (London: Macmillan, 1974). 54. R. Stewart, The Foundation of the Conservative Party, 1830–1867, Longman History of the Conservative Party (London: Longman, 1978), xii; B. Coleman, Conservatism, 3–5; Sack, Jacobite to Conservative. 55. Rödder, Radikale Herausforderung, 502 and passim. 56. On liberal conservatism, see N. Gash, Mr Secretary Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel to 1830 (London: Longman, 1961); idem, Sir Robert Peel: The Life of Sir Robert Peel after 1830 (London: Longman, 1972); P. Mandler, Aristocratic Government in the Age of Reform: Whigs and Liberals 1830–1852 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990), 5–6; Sack, Jacobite to Conservative, ch. 6; Ramsden, Appetite, ch. 1; Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous, 314–28; and S. Lee, George Canning and Liberal Toryism, 1801–1827 (Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society/Boydell Press, 2008). On the ‘Ultra Tories’ and the tradition of Conservative ‘country positions’, see D.G.S. Simes, ‘Ultra Tories in British Politics, 1824–1834’, PhD dissertation, University of Oxford, 1974; Stewart, Foundation, 2–36; and L. Colley, In Defiance of Oligarchy: The Tory Party 1715–1760 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). 57. See J.A. Epstein, ‘Radical Dining, Toasting and Symbolic Expression in Early Nineteenth Century Lancashire: Rituals of Solidarity’, Albion 20 (1988), 271–91; idem, ‘Cap of Liberty’; and idem, Radical Expression. 58. By far the best examination of the semantics of ‘Liberalism’ in a European and English context can be found in Leonhard, Liberalismus, esp. 225–39 and 400–12. 59. See G. Lottes, Politische Aufklärung und plebejisches Publikum: Zur Theorie und Praxis des englischen Radikalismus im späten 18. Jahrhundert, Ancien Regime, Aufklärung und Revolution 1 (Munich: Oldenbourg, 1979); idem, ‘Bürgerliche Grundrechte und traditionelle plebejische Kultur am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts in England und Frankreich’, in G. Birtsch (ed.), Grund- und Freiheitsrechte im Wandel von Gesellschaft und Geschichte, Veröffentlichungen zur Geschichte der Grund- und Freiheitsrechte (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1981), 96–118; D.G. Wright, Popular Radicalism: The Working Class Experience 1780–1880 (London: Longman, 1988); Belchem, Popular Radicalism; and Leonhard, Liberalismus, 239–51. 60. Epstein, ‘Constitutionalist Idiom’; Belchem, Popular Radicalism, 1–8.

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61. In E. Biagini and A.J. Reid, ‘Introduction’, in E. Biagini and A.J. Reid (eds), Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organized Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1–20, the authors thus describe radical positions as ‘working class liberalism’ (p. 4) or speak of ‘radical liberalism’ (p. 5). See also E. Biagini, Liberty, Retrenchment and Reform: Popular Liberalism in the Age of Gladstone, 1860–1880 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 1–8; D. Mares, Auf der Suche nach dem ‘wahren’ Liberalismus: Demokratische Bewegung und liberale Politik im viktorianischen England. Arbeitskreis Deutsche England Forschung-Schriftenreihe 45 (Berlin: Philo, 2002). 62. In general, see W. Reddy, ‘The Concept of Class’, in M.L. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes in Europe since 1500: Studies in Social Stratification (Harlow: Taylor and Francis, 1992), 13–25; A. Reid, Social Classes and Social Relations in Britain, 1850–1914 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1992); and Cannadine, Rise and Fall. On the bourgeois middle classes in particular, see J. Seed, ‘From “Middling Sort” to “Middle Class” in Late Eighteenth-Century and Early Nineteenth-Century England’, in M. Bush (ed.), Social Orders and Social Classes (London: Routledge, 1992), 114–35; D. Wahrman, Imagining the Middle Class: The Political Representation of Class in Britain, c. 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995); S. Gunn, ‘The Public Sphere, Modernity and Consumption: New Perspectives on the History of the English Middle Class’, in A. Kidd and D. Nicholls (eds), Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: Middle-Class Identity in Britain, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 12–30; idem, The Public Culture of the Victorian Middle Class: Ritual and Authority in the English Industrial City, 1840–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000), 3–4 and 14–24; and A. Kidd and D. Nicholls, ‘Introduction: History, Culture and the Middle Classes’, in A. Kidd and D. Nicholls (eds), Gender, Civic Culture and Consumerism: MiddleClass Identity in Britain, 1800–1940 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1999), 1–11. 63. See, for example, Hoppen, Mid-Victorian Generation, ch. 1–3; and R. Price, British Society, 1680–1880: Dynamism, Containment and Change (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), ch. 1. On the whole, the ‘lower classes’ represented between 60 and 80 per cent of the population. 64. The difficulty in drawing a clear social boundary between the lower classes and the lower middle classes runs like a red flag through the debates over the ‘menu peuple’ or the ‘petite bourgeoisie’. Although the role of this group in the French Revolution or as English radical leaders has been repeatedly noted, any definitions of this ‘class’ emphasize the fluidity of its borders with the lower classes as well as higher levels of the middle class. These small shop owners and master craftsmen became a more clearly defined group towards the end of the nineteenth century and in the early twentieth century. See G. Crossick and H.G. Haupt, ‘Introduction: Shopkeepers, Master Artisans and the Historian. The Petite Bourgeosie in Comparative Focus’, in G. Crossick and H.G. Haupt (eds), Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Methuen, 1984), 3–31; eidem, The Petite Bourgeoisie in Europe 1780–1914: Enterprise, Family and Independence (London: Routledge, 1995), esp. 1–16. See also G. Crossick (ed.), The Lower Middle Class in Britain, 1870–1914 (London: Croom Helm, 1977); idem, ‘Urban Society and the Petty Bourgeoisie in NineteenthCentury Britain’, in D. Fraser and A. Sutcliffe (eds), The Pursuit of Urban History (New York: E. Arnold, 1983); idem, ‘The Petite Bourgeoisie in Nineteenth-Century Britain: The Urban and Liberal Case’, in G. Crossick and H.G. Haupt (eds), Shopkeepers and Master Artisans in Nineteenth-Century Europe (London: Methuen, 1984), 71–81; M. Winstanley, The Shopkeeper’s World, 1830–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983); and P. Bailey, ‘White Collars, Gray Lives? The Lower Middle Class Revisited’, Journal of British Studies 38 (1999), 273–90. For a detailed local study on the complexity of social classes in English industrial regions in the nineteenth century, and especially the lines between the lower classes and the lower middle classes, see R. Pearson, ‘Knowing One’s Place: Perceptions

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of Community in the Industrial Suburbs of Leeds, 1790–1890’, Journal of Social History 26 (1993), 221–44. 65. P. Bourdieu, ‘Social Space and the Genesis of Classes’, in P. Bourdieu, Language and Symbolic Power, ed. J.B. Thompson, trans. G. Raymond and M. Adamson (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992), 231. 66. The notion of ‘habitus’ is taken from Pierre Bourdieu; see P. Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. R. Nice (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990), book 1, ch. 3. 67. On the notion of ‘milieu’, see the definition of sociomoral milieu in R. Lepsius, ‘Parteiensystem und Sozialstruktur: Zum Problem der Demokratisierung der deutschen Gesellschaft’, in W. Abel et al. (eds), Wirtschaft, Geschichte, Wirtschaftsgeschichte: Festschrift zum 65. Geburtstag für Friedrich Lüge (Stuttgart: G. Fischer, 1966), 383. Karl Rohe offers a more precise definition of milieu with respect to the historical analysis of elections; see K. Rohe, ‘Wahlanalyse’, Historische Zeitschrift 234 (1982), 346–53; idem, ‘Politische Kultur’, Historische Zeitschrift 250 (1990), 321–46; idem, ‘Politische Kultur – politische Milieus: Zur Anwendung neuerer theoretischer Konzepte in einer modernen Landesgeschichte’, in S. Lässig and K.H. Pohl (eds), Sachsen im Kaiserreich: Politik, Wirtschaft and Gesellschaft im Umbruch (Weimar: Böhlau, 1997), 186–88. Welskopp has recently defined ‘milieus’ as concrete networks of people, referring to them as social communities defined by their internal social affinity and the social boundaries that demarcate them externally; see T. Welskopp, Das Banner der Brüderlichkeit: Die deutsche Sozialdemokratie vom Vormärz bis zum Sozialistengesetz, Politik and Gesellschaftsgeschichte 54 (Bonn: Dietz, 2000), 49. See also D. Rink, ‘Politisches Lager und ständische Vergesellschaftung: Überlegungen zum Milieukonzept von M.R. Lepsius’, Comparativ 9 (1999), 16–29. On political camps, see also Rohe, ‘Politische Kultur – politische Milieus’, 188–90. However, Rohe’s emphasis on the construction of ‘political camps’ from above is somewhat questionable. 68. McWilliam, Popular Politics, 98–101. 69. G. Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, in G. Stedman Jones, Languages of Class: Studies in English Working Class History1832–1982 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 94. 70. Vernon, Politics, passim; and P. Joyce, Visions. A similar set of problems links these studies with those of Stedman Jones. On the critique of P. Joyce, J. Vernon and G. Stedman Jones, see above all Lawrence, Speaking, 48–61. 71. See especially C. Geertz, Dichte Beschreibung: Beiträge zum Verstehen kulturelle Systeme (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1987); and Bourdieu, Logic. On the compatibility of these seemingly contradictory theories, see A. Reckwitz, Die Transformation der Kulturtheorien: Zur Entwicklung eines Theorieprogramms (Weilerswist: Velbrück Wissenschaft, 2000). 72. T. Mergel, ‘Überlegungen zu einer Kulturgeschichte der Politik’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft 28 (2002), 605. In general, the methodology of this book draws more heavily on German historical discourse rather than English debates on revisionism. On methodology, see also N. Schindler, ‘Spuren in die Geschichte anderer Zivilisationen: Probleme und Perspektiven einer historischen Volkskulturforschung’, in N. Schindler and R. van Dülmen (eds), Volkskultur: Zur Wiederentdeckung des vergessenen Alltags (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer Verlag, 1984), 13–77; and R. Habermas and N. Minkmar, ‘Einleitung’, in R. Habermas and N. Minkmar (eds), Das Schwein des Häuptlings: Beiträge zur Historischen Anthropologie (Berlin: Wagenbach, 1992), 7–20. 73. Prior to1832, London encompassed the constituencies of Westminster and Southwark with two seats each, as well as the City of London with four seats; after 1832, the following constituencies with two seats each were added: Finsbury, Greenwich, Lambeth, Marylebone and Tower Hamlets. The great majority of London was located in the county of Middlesex (two MPs). Bolton and Leeds each elected two MPs after 1832. The county of Lancashire had two seats prior to 1832, but it was then divided into North and South Lancashire by the Reform Act, both of which elected two seats; Bolton was in the north of the county. Prior to 1832,

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Yorkshire had two seats; after 1832, the county was divided into three constituencies, each of which sent two candidates to Westminster. Leeds belonged to the West Riding of Yorkshire. 74. See, for example, G. Stedman Jones, Outcast London: A Study in the Relationship Between Classes in Victorian Society (Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1976); Crossick, Artisan Elite; Prothero, Artisans; and D. Goodway, London Chartism,1838–1848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982). More recent studies have suggested a more nuanced perspective on the economic structures of London and the labour movement in the early nineteenth century; see D. Green, From Artisans to Paupers: Economic Change and Poverty in London, 1790–1870 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1995); idem, ‘The Nineteenth-Century Metropolitan Economy: A Revisionist Interpretation’, The London Journal 21 (1996), 9–26; idem, ‘Lines of Conflict: Labour Disputes in London 1790–1870’, Review of Social History 43 (1998), 203–33; and P. Johnson, ‘Economic Development and Industrial Dynamism in Victorian London’, The London Journal 21 (1996), 27–37. See also L. Schwarz, London in the Age of Industrialisation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992); idem, ‘London 1700–1840’, in P. Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 1540–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 641–71; S. Inwood, History of London (London: Macmillan, 1998); and A. Fahrmeir, Ehrbare Spekulanten: Stadtverfassung, Wirtschaft und Politik in der City of London, 1688–1900, Veröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London 55 (Munich: Oldenbourg Wissenschaftsverlag, 2003). 75. Unlike the other cotton towns in Lancashire, Bolton also had a significant number of machinery manufacturers. See Walsh, ‘Working Class Political Integration’, ch. 10; B.D.A. Lewis, ‘Bourgeois Ideology and Order: Middle Class Culture and Politics in Lancashire 1789–1851’, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1994, Introduction; and P. Taylor, Popular Politics in Early Industrial Britain: Bolton 1825–1850 (Keele: Ryburn, 1995), 154–56 and passim. 76. See R.W. Unwin, ‘Leeds Becomes a Transport Centre’, in D. Fraser (ed.), A History of Modern Leeds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 113–41; and E.J. Connell and M. Ward, ‘Industrial Development, 1780–1914’, in D. Fraser (ed.), A History of Modern Leeds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 142–76. 77. On the regional structures and town networks in northern England, see J.K. Walton, ‘North’, in P. Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 1540–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 111–31. 78. See P. Joyce, Work, passim; R. Poole, Popular Leisure and the Music Hall in Nineteenth-Century Bolton, Centre for North-West Regional Studies, University of Lancaster, Occasional Paper 12 (Lancaster: Centre for North-West Regional Studies, 1982); J. Garrard, Leadership and Power in Victorian Industrial Towns, 1830–1880 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983), ch. 9–10; and P. Taylor, Popular Politics. 79. See D. Fraser, ‘Politics in Leeds, 1830–1852’, PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 1969; idem, ‘Politics and Society in the Nineteenth Century’, in D. Fraser (ed.), A History of Modern Leeds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980); and M. Roberts, ‘“Villa Toryism”’, 221. After 1867, three MPs were elected in the constituency of Leeds; after 1885, the city was divided into five districts, each of which elected one MP. 80. See P. Claus, ‘Real Liberals and Conservatives in the City of London, 1846–1886’, PhD dissertation, Open University, 1997; A.L. Windscheffel, ‘Villa Toryism’; Fahrmeir, Ehrbare Spekulanten, 307–9, 397–99; and M. Baer, ‘From “First Constituency of the Empire” to “Citadel of Reaction”: Westminster, 1800–1890’, in M. Cragoe and A. Taylor, London Politics, 1760–1914 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), 144–65. 81. For London, see Inwood, London; for Leeds, see C.J. Morgan, ‘Demographic Change, 1771– 1911’, in D. Fraser (ed.), A History of Modern Leeds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 46–71; and for Bolton, J. Clegg, Annals of Bolton: History, Chronology, Politics,

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Parliamentary and Municipal Polls (Bolton: Chronicle Office, 1888). The figures are based on the respective official census reports. 82. On the economic developments in Great Britain, see, for example, M.J. Daunton, Progress and Poverty: An Economic and Social History of Britain 1700–1850 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), passim. 83. See, for example, A. Aspinall, Politics and the Press, c. 1780–1850 (London: Horne and Van Thal, 1949); I. Asquith, ‘1789–1855’, in G. Boyce et al. (eds), Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (London: Constable, 1978), 98–116; A. Lee, ‘1855–1914’, in G. Boyce et al. (eds), Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (London: Constable, 1978), 117–29; and A. Jones, Powers of the Press: Newspapers, Power and the Public in Nineteenth-Century England (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996). On northern England in particular, see D. Read, ‘North of England Newspapers (c. 1700–c. 1900) and their Value to Historians’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 8 (1957), 200–15; idem, ‘Reform Newspapers and Northern Opinion (c. 1800–c. 1848)’, Proceedings of the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society 8 (1959), 301–14; and D. Joyce, ‘The Leeds Intelligencer and Reform, c. 1815–1835’, PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 2003. 84. See Aspinall, Politics; S. Coltham, ‘English Working-Class Newspapers’, Victorian Studies 13 (1969), 159–80; P. Hollis, The Pauper Press: A Study in Working Class Radicalism of the 1830s (London: Oxford University Press, 1970); P.R. Mountjoy, ‘The Working-Class Press and Working-Class Conservatism’, in G. Boyce et al. (eds), Newspaper History from the Seventeenth Century to the Present Day (London: Constable, 1978), 265–80; I. McCalman, ‘UltraRadicalism and Convivial Debating Clubs in London, 1795–1838’, English Historical Review 102 (1987), 303–33; idem, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988); K. Gilmartin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early Nineteenth Century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996); J. Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002); and A. Wirsching, Parlament und Volkes Stimme: Unterhaus und Öffentlichkeit im England des frühen 19. Jahrhunderts. Veröffentlichungen des Deutschen Historischen Instituts London 26 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1990).

Chapter 1

Celebrating the Monarchy Loyalism, Radicalism and the Crowd, 1820–1832

?

At the end of January in 1820, the news of George III’s death reached the English public amidst a deep political conflict raging between conservative loyalists and radical reformers. Just a few months earlier, in August 1819, a large demonstration in favour of democratic reforms with a crowd of up to 100,000 had erupted on St Peter’s Field near Manchester and ended in a veritable bloodbath. After the local magistrates had issued the order to disband the demonstration, the yeomanry charged wildly into the crowd, leaving eleven dead and hundreds of wounded in their wake. Liberals as well as radicals reacted with outrage and staged protests against the ‘massacre of Peterloo’ across the country. Meanwhile, the government, under Lord Liverpool, sought to prevent further protests by enacting repressive laws in short succession. These so-called Six Acts were designed to put a damper on the rights of assembly and the freedom of the press. The Peterloo incident thus marked the apex of a crisis that had developed after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. After years of fiery debate, the gap between the interests of the conservative establishment and the demands of radical reformers seemed to have become irreconcilable. Both sides claimed to speak for the majority of ‘the people’.1 And so it came that a new king was to be crowned during this period of constrained peace that reigned in early 1820. Only a few days after the death of his father, celebrations proclaiming George IV as the new king took place in all the cities and villages of the kingdom. Whereas this situation presented an opportunity for demonstrations of loyalism and affinity for the monarchy, it was also overshadowed by the question of whether these festivities might open a forum for voicing further demands for reform that might lead to renewed protests against the government. Notes from this chapter begin on page 59.

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Even after the celebrations were over, the situation was still ambiguous. Although the proclamations themselves were not marred by any incidents and large crowds participated in the festivities across the land, there was not a great outpouring of enthusiasm for the new king and the monarchy.2 Accordingly, both conservatives and radicals could call individual celebrations a success. For example, the conservative newspaper Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle reported on the festivities in Manchester with a measure of relief, noting that ‘the most zealous loyalty pervaded the conduct of the people, and the air rang with acclamations and applause’.3 A crowd of a few thousand assembled as the municipal authorities, accompanied by the army regiments and militia stationed in Manchester, officially celebrated the proclamation of George IV as king at St Anne’s Square with a gun salute and the singing of the national anthem. Afterwards, they paraded through the city to the neighbouring town of Salford. Along the way the proclamation was read, to the cheers of the crowd, several times over. Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle reported that there was just one attempt to disrupt the procession, which was quickly put down by the assembled crowd and only served to increase the jubilation. It claimed the day as a ‘complete triumph of loyalty’.4 The liberal Cowdroy’s Manchester Gazette, on the other hand, maintained that hardly anyone had celebrated the parade as only ‘a very small portion of the people assembled joined the authorities of the town and the soldiers in giving nine cheers’.5 Given such contradictory accounts of the celebrations of the monarchy, historians have repeatedly cautioned against judging the general political inclination of these crowds merely on the basis of their large numbers and rushing to the conclusion that the cheering masses reported as having attended these kinds of celebrations attest to a fundamental conservative spirit among the people. In particular, Mark Harrison emphasizes the complex character of these celebrations of proclamations and coronations in the early nineteenth century, using Bristol as his primary example. He argues that, on the surface, the public expression of loyalist feeling could blanket over local conflicts, but when looked at more closely, these moments actually underscored these very issues.6 Harrison rightly describes the general emptiness of such loyalist rituals and calls for more detailed analyses of their specific local contexts because of the difficulties in assessing the meaning of such events. Yet his own examination of the festivities surrounding the proclamation and coronation of George IV in Bristol, Liverpool, Norwich and Manchester still provides a rather simplified view. For example, he sees the lack of planning to symbolically involve the people in the official celebrations in 1820 and 1821 as a conscious act of exclusion on the part of the municipal authorities. Similarly, on the basis of liberal and radical press reports on the lack of cheering among the crowds, he concludes that there was an ideological antagonism between city leaders and the local population.7 Correspondingly, Harrison interprets the reverse signs that appeared in 1831, with the coronation of William

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IV, along class lines, and re-emphasizes the opposition between the conservative leaders who were reluctantly involved in the planning of the celebrations and the crowds who cheered the king while harbouring demands for reform.8 Yet an examination of lower-class participation in the celebrations of the monarchy in other years, in which a political crisis did not loom so largely overhead, effectively questions the rather oversimplified assumption that there was a fundamental conflict between the political interests of the crowd and the goals of the ruling political classes. A look at Leeds, Bolton and London, for example, reveals that even as early as the 1820s, there was no clear-cut conflict between the municipal authorities and the cheering crowds. Moreover, by extending the perspective beyond the 1820s, a more complex picture of the political positions of those who participated in the celebrations of the monarchy emerges. Rather than a one-sided opposition between ‘upper class’ and ‘lower class’, there were a variety of opinions and changing identities apparent among the crowds. Correspondingly, elements of popular conservatism can be detected in the celebrations of the monarchy that attest to the circulation of conservative political attitudes within the English lower classes. At the same time, the popularity of conservative political thought among plebeians undermines assumptions that English society was divided along insurmountable lines of conflict as well as the notion that a fundamental social consensus reigned in England at this time.

Analysing Crowds and the Popularity of the Monarchy Mark Harrison’s analysis of crowds in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century aims to free the historical interpretation of mass phenomena in England from the all too rigid definitions of the masses proposed by Eric Hobsbawn, E.P. Thompson and George Rudé. In their studies, these three Marxist historians sought to replace the strongly negative image of the threatening and unpredictable ‘masses’ associated with a fear of revolution, which had come to characterize many sociological and socioanthropological analyses of crowds by the time Gustav Le Bon’s La psychologie des foules appeared in 1895, with a perspective shaped by well-founded sociohistorical analyses. Correspondingly, they wanted to overcome the blanket equation of ‘the masses’ with ‘the people’ or the ‘lower classes’.9 Rather than focusing on the psychological disappearance of the individual in the crowd and the dissolution of individual sociomoralistic standards in the behaviour of a group, they analysed the immediate social context within which crowds appeared, as well as their entirely rational, coordinated and clearly goal-oriented behaviour. Within this framework, it was Thompson in particular who developed the concept of the ‘moral economy’ of the crowd that has been so often cited.10 At the same time, these three scholars limited the scope of their interpretations to phenomena that were directly

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connected to social protests, civil disturbances and riots. Rudé, for example, explicitly excluded crowds that assembled to celebrate ceremonial, religious or carnivalesque events as well as those attending public performances.11 Despite the rather pragmatic focus on protest culture, the perspective developed by these historians greatly influenced further scholarship on crowds and disturbances in England for quite some time.12 In contrast, drawing on continental scholarship on the culture of celebrations, Harrison has developed a broader concept of the ‘crowd’, which he defines as a large group of people assembled in an open space. He also adds a further criterion, namely that of proximity, as he maintains that crowds must be concentrated in such a way that the people involved influence one another in terms of their behaviour and actions; they must be close enough to each other so that they could appear to contemporary observers as an assembly. At the same time, Harrison proposes an exemplary analytical framework for examining the behaviour of crowds that takes into consideration systematically collected data on a given event such as the date, the time of day (general working hours or rather leisure time), the location of the assembly and/or the route taken by the group or the parade as well as the weather at the time. He then evaluates this information using a ‘thick description’ method drawn from Clifford Geertz.13 In his study, he also consciously includes crowds that took part in ceremonial events that may have at first seemed to be merely a group of spectators. Moreover, he questions the depth of the ideological convictions of agents within crowds. Despite these methodological innovations, however, Harrison hardly strays from the rather one-sided, protest-oriented tradition within scholarship on English social history. This can be seen in his – quite legitimate – rejection of the idea inspired by Emile Durkheim that patriotic rituals are events in which societies debate shared values and beliefs or celebrate a moralistic consensus in a quasireligious way.14 It is also reinforced in his argument that almost exclusively binds an analysis of celebrations and ceremonial events to a reconstruction of subversive attitudes, which effectively traces a fundamental opposition between the English lower classes and the social elite along the lines of the old labour history. Especially in his examination of the celebrations of the monarchy in the early nineteenth century, Harrison neglects to discuss the changing moods as well as contradictory positions and attitudes that could emerge within a crowd. Harrison’s study is not merely interesting because of its interpretative methods, but also because its assessment of the popularity of the English Crown supports the idea that the popular loyalist Church and King attitude disappeared around 1800. Even today, scholarship on the subject of the popular opinion of the monarchy is still heavily influenced by the works of Linda Colley and David Cannadine that outlined the idea that the monarchy under George III developed into a popular national institution up to 1815, but then became unpopular and controversial under his successors before transforming into a symbol of British

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dominance and national identity under the flag of imperialism toward the end of the nineteenth century.15 Colley, for example, describes the transformation of George III from a young king who seemed to endanger England’s constitutional compromise of the seventeenth century by stressing his own political role into a figure of national identification who stood at the centre of a new ‘anti-democratic brand of patriotism’. This change, she argues, was connected to an increasing amount of royalist self-staging and public celebrations that touted the king as the personification of the political order. The king’s birthday and the anniversary of his coronation became firmly entrenched in the calendar of public celebrations. Events such as the Golden Jubilee in 1809 or the king’s recovery from his first phase of madness in 1789, for example, sparked a wave of rejoicing and elaborate festivities across England.16 Although George III’s popularity during the war against France helped to unify the nation and turn the monarchy into a symbol of national greatness, Cannadine describes the story of the monarchy after 1820 as the decline of a national institution. Even before the death of George III, Cannadine maintains, the popularity of the royal house had begun to wane as the Prince Regent, George IV, de facto replaced his ageing father; the image of the king as the devoted father of the nation was effectively shattered as the crown passed from father to son, especially because the prince was rather known for being sexually promiscuous and having sparked a series of scandals involving the royal family. Cannadine also links the sinking reputation of the royal family following the Queen Caroline Affair17 in 1820 to the dwindling of public celebrations of the monarchy and efforts to mould the public image of the Crown. The largely unpopular image of the English monarchs, he suggests, remained firmly in place even under William IV and Queen Victoria. It was not until the last decades of Victoria’s reign that the royal family consciously took advantage of celebratory events involving the Crown to re-establish the monarchy as a national symbol by the ‘inventing of tradition’.18 Although the narrative of the monarchy and its public reception outlined by Colley and Cannadine has been thoroughly criticized and revised, their interpretation that the royal family played almost no role in the formation of patriotic and loyalist identities among much of the English population between 1815 and 1870 still holds sway.19 Indeed, although more recent studies on public debates related to the monarchy in the nineteenth century emphasize the parallel existence of a conservative-loyalist tradition of honouring the royal house and a widespread radical tradition of rejecting the monarchy and sharply criticizing the reigning monarch, they continue to reinforce the periodization put forth by Colley and Cannadine.20 Since then, however, several historians have detected a rather noticeable change in the attitude toward the Crown among much of the middle class even in the early phase of Queen Victoria’s reign; some also suggest

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that the Chartists had a conspicuously positive view of the Crown.21 But with respect to the English lower classes and their participation in celebrations of the monarchy before 1870 in particular, most scholars still stress the anti-monarchist character of crowds and depict the cheering masses as rather thoughtless agents.22 Moreover, few historians have considered the idea that conservative attitudes may have been prevalent among the crowds on the streets. A look at these celebrations of the Crown in different cities around the kingdom, as well as a comparison of the events in the provinces with those in London, however, provides a relatively distinct impression of the variety of attitudes toward the monarchy and loyalist views that existed among the general population. Yet it is important to bear in mind that a limited perspective in which only a few extraordinary events are taken into consideration ignores the celebrations of the Crown for what they truly were: they were part of a calendar of festivities that took place year after year. That said, however, the meaning and significance attached to these events varied from year to year and they can thus also be read as reflections of contemporary debates and political conflicts. The following section will look at the crowds that participated in the celebrations of coronation day and the king’s birthday in the 1820s and the early 1830s. Above all, it questions whether these celebrations on the whole generate a reliable impression of the moods and positions that reigned among the violent crowds of people who attended them.

The Monarchy in the Provinces A look at the festivities surrounding George IV’s birthday in Bolton in the 1820s quickly reveals some of the problems associated with Mark Harrison’s argument that these celebrations reflected a clearly decipherable conflict between the masses of spectators and municipal elites. The descriptions of the events in Bolton mostly stem from the radical Bolton Chronicle that clearly sided with the city’s reformers. Nonetheless, over the course of the 1820s, significant differences can be detected in the depictions of the festivities and the crowds in attendance. In 1820/21 and 1831, it appeared that the celebrations in Bolton were rife with tensions like those in the towns mentioned by Harrison.23 However, there is little evidence suggesting that conflicts like those associated with the Queen Caroline Affair and the electoral reforms at the beginning of the 1830s emerged in the years in between. In the 1820s, the celebrations in Bolton followed the same pattern year after year. During the weeks leading up to George III’s birthday on 23 April, the leading administrators in both districts of the city, the boroughreeves and constables of both Great and Little Bolton, planned a large parade through the city, where all the important buildings were decked with flags. As announced in the

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Bolton Chronicle, the immediate preparations for the parade took place in the morning as the participating groups assembled in the centre of Great Bolton at the New Market. Lead by a guard of cavalry from the local yeomanry, representatives of local associations and clubs, the local militia with its officers and bands, and the city’s officials as well as the clergy from the Anglican Church paraded through the town’s main streets. In Bolton in particular, the vicar of the city, Reverend James Slade, and the commander of the local yeomanry, Colonel Ralph Fletcher, were among the prominent participants in the parade. These two men counted among the most well-known Tories in the city. Slade, who came from a leading clerical family within the Anglican-Conservative milieu, was considered to be one of the most important opponents of the liberals and radicals in Bolton. As a magistrate and commander of the yeomanry’s cavalry, Fletcher was partly responsible for the use of troops to disband the Peterloo demonstration and had become one of the main enemies of the radical opposition.24 The parade was first supposed to stop on Bradford Square, where marchers from the respective regiments stationed in the city were to be greeted by the public.25 The soldiers fired a round of celebratory salutes before a large crowd of spectators while the military bands played a mix of patriotic songs including ‘Rule Britannia’ and other popular melodies. Afterwards, the parade, with the regiments in tow, wound its way through the surrounding streets to Little Bolton before heading back to New Market where a large crowd waited. Everyone cheered the king three times before the official part of the celebration came to an end with the singing of the national anthem. Although the Bolton Chronicle was the organ of the radicals who challenged the Tory city government, which was backed by the local gentry, it nonetheless had to acknowledge that the support for these celebrations held under the auspices of the opposing political camp grew among the population over the years.26 The success or failure of the celebrations seemed to have become much more dependent on the weather than on the city leaders’ efforts to control a threatening crowd. Year after year, larger crowds assembled for the celebrations that were staged as a festive event open to all. In 1828, for example, the Bolton Chronicle commented, ‘On no previous occasion have we ever witnessed such general enthusiasm as animated all classes of the inhabitants on that day’.27 It was not until a year later that the newspaper reported that considerably fewer people attended the parade than usual – the crowd on the edges of the street numbered just around twelve thousand. The Bolton Chronicle asserted that it was primarily the absence of the ‘orangemen and other bigoted ultras’ that accounted for the meagre turnout. As the parade took place a few days after the Catholic Emancipation Act was passed on 13 April 1829, it seemed that these groups had refused to participate in the festivities because they were disappointed over the fact that they had lost the fight against legal equality for Catholics.28

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Even though the brief account of the Bolton Chronicle only permits limited conclusions regarding the social composition of the crowds involved in the festivities as well as their attitudes and reactions, there was no open opposition to speak of between the city’s elite and a protest-minded public. As in 1820/21 in Bristol and Liverpool, there were no craftsmen’s associations or groups clearly representative of the lower classes that took part in the official part of the celebrations. Not even the radical press, however, seems to have taken this fact as evidence of a conscious effort to exclude plebeians from the celebrations.29 Rather, groups recruited from among the lower strata of society such as the local lodges of the Orange Order apparently took part in the festivities on a regular basis without sparking dissent or conflicts. Indeed, it is quite telling that the particular success of the celebrations in April 1828 came shortly after the repeal of the Test and Corporation Act in March, which had excluded Nonconformist Protestants from public offices and parliamentary mandates, and amidst fiery debates regarding the future legal status of Catholics. The major confrontation between ultra-conservative circles, who saw equality for Catholics as a grievous threat to the English constitutional order and the Protestant identity of the English nation, and their liberal and Catholic opponents was not reflected in the celebrations, despite the fact that the conflict led to fierce confrontations in the coming months in Bolton as well.30 In Bolton, the king’s well-known opposition to the emancipatory measures for Catholics demanded by radicals and liberals, the Ultra-Tory control of the festivities and the participation of the Orange Order had the potential to put a damper on the celebrations. However, unlike during the Queen Caroline Affair in 1821, there was no radical mobilization of the crowd. On the contrary, the prevalence of anti-Catholic views among the population and the link between loyalism and anti-Catholicism seems to have made the celebrations all the more successful in 1828. By no means can the celebrations of the king’s birthday in Bolton be read as indicative of a confrontation between the elites and the ‘people’.31 Rather, the general political situation at the local level and the mindset of the majority of those attending the festivities determined whether the celebrations expressed a feeling of conflict or consensus. The mood of the crowd could easily sway within just a few years, switching from decidedly radical to conservative loyalist as circumstances allowed. Similarly, in the cities of the West Riding in Yorkshire, radicals and liberals only enjoyed a moderate amount of support among the crowds attending the celebrations of the monarchy during the 1820s in the first two years following the Peterloo demonstration. Even at the beginning of the decade, however, little evidence suggests that the majority of the crowds in attendance had radical leanings. Admittedly, a few weeks before the coronation of George IV in 1821, the conservative Leeds Intelligencer complained that neither the king’s ascension to the throne in 1820 nor his birthday had been properly celebrated in Leeds. In

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an article tinged with a measure of concern, the paper also wrote that it hoped that a general feeling of ‘national joy’ would help put party politics aside for the upcoming coronation festivities.32 Yet after the coronation celebrations the liberal and conservative press only made isolated references to protests among the crowds in Leeds, Huddersfield and surrounding towns. Incidents like those described by Mark Harrison, in which attempts were made by members of the crowd to turn the official celebrations into demonstrations against the king and his Conservative government, neither emerged in 1820 with the proclamation of George IV nor on his birthday on April 23; they were likewise absent as the country mourned the death of the old king. It was not until June 1820, with the trial of Queen Caroline, that radicals mobilized a large crowd of supporters in the West Riding, effectively changing the character of the celebrations in Leeds and Huddersfield, if only temporarily. In 1820, the proclamation ceremonies in Leeds and Halifax echoed those in Manchester. With their parades of local army and militia units, associations, clubs and the city’s magistrates, these celebrations also resembled those in honour of the king’s birthday in Bolton. The Leeds Intelligencer as well as its liberal competitor, the Leeds Mercury, briefly described how the parade made its way through all the city’s districts, proclaiming George IV as king at several points along the way. Both papers emphasized that the prevalent mood among the crowd was one of mourning for the new king’s father.33 Disruptions and protests against the proclamation only arose in Huddersfield on the fringe of the procession in which the local Orange Order had also taken part. The Leeds Mercury explicitly described the crowd as divided, but noted that some of the over ten thousand spectators on the streets joined in the cheers for the new king without hesitation.34 A mere two weeks later, celebrations and parades took place in many towns in the area in honour of the funeral of George III, but the ringing of the church bells all day, the closed shops and the numerous church services mourning the king did not lead to any public confrontations or protests.35 Moreover, the birthday of the new king two months later passed without incident, accompanied by ‘suitable demonstrations of joy’.36 However, the apparent harmony surrounding the celebrations of the monarchy in early 1820 does not erase the fact that they took place within an extremely tense atmosphere in these regions as well as in other parts of England. Numerous participants in the Peterloo demonstration had travelled to Manchester from Leeds, Huddersfield and other towns in Yorkshire in order to fight for democratic reforms and other radical goals. Protests and riots had rocked the region in 1819, instilling fear into the hearts of the local conservatives. The celebrations in early 1820 were accompanied by the revival of Luddism and took place parallel to labour struggles in and around Leeds which had been spurred on by the Clothiers’ Union, one of the first unions for weavers and drapers.37 Correspondingly, there were many complaints coming from among conservative circles regarding

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the radical temperament of the lower classes and how they had been mobilized by radicals and enemies of the state to such a degree that they were no longer willing to advocate for the Crown and the Church.38 Given the fact that the demonstration in Manchester just a few months prior was still fresh in mind and given the strong presence of the military, militias and public authorities at the celebrations in honour of the royal proclamation, the king’s funeral and the new king’s birthday in Yorkshire, the lack of any crowd protests on these occasions is not surprising. However, this cannot be read as proof of the hegemony of loyalist and conservative attitudes among those attending. At the same time, the striking lack of references to protests in the towns of the West Riding even in liberal newspapers differs noticeably from the case in Manchester and Liverpool. Liberal papers in these two cities either emphasized the negative mood that reigned among the people or cited the politically neutral character of the festivities as an explanation for the absence of protest. They also explicitly stated that the situation was not indicative of widespread conservatism among the public.39 Furthermore, intimidation and the threat of military force did not deter radicals and striking workers in Yorkshire from symbolically expressing their anti-monarchist position outside the boundaries of the official celebrations. An anonymous letter to the editor in the Leeds Intelligencer, for example, deplored the fact that members of the Clothiers’ Union in Batley, Littletown and a few other towns demonstratively marched through the towns on the day of George III’s funeral with drums and lively music as part of a conscious effort to displace the mood of mourning that had prevailed.40 It is exactly the coexistence of public protests with celebrations of the monarchy attended by large crowds and marked by few, if any, disturbances that casts doubts on the idea that people had only taken part in the celebrations as a matter of silent protest. Even at the height of radical mobilization, only a part of the crowd seems to have questioned the loyalist tenor of the official celebrations. Correspondingly, protests against the politics of the king and his government mostly appeared outside the framework of official celebrations. The conflict-rife celebrations following on the heels of the Queen Caroline Affair only serve to further confirm this impression. As in many other regions in England, the trial surrounding the divorce of George IV from his wife Caroline brought the political conflict between conservatives, liberals and radicals in the West Riding to a head.41 At a demonstration in Leeds in September 1820, a few thousand people signed a petition that demanded the resignation of the government and promised Queen Caroline the support of the city of Leeds. Alongside prominent liberals like Edward Baines, the radical spokesmen Mason, Mann and Brayshaw took to the podium at the demonstration. The Leeds Intelligencer maintained angrily that only the ‘very lowest classes’ of the city let themselves be led astray by these kinds of speakers.42 After the failure of the trial against Caroline at the beginning of November, the organization of a demonstrative illumination of

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houses and shop windows in the towns of Yorkshire by liberals and radicals resonated strongly in working-class districts in particular. Whereas the conservative press claimed with a measure of relief that the brightly lit districts on the edge of the city were only proof that established, wealthier citizens would not be swayed by the protests in the streets, the liberal papers reported that ‘the people’ mistrusted the government as well as the king and demanded fundamental reforms.43 From the available sources, however, it is difficult to determine just how widespread such radical protests actually were among the urban lower classes. For example, at the end of the year, the Leeds Intelligencer claimed that only a small portion of the lower classes took part in the radical demonstrations; the silent majority, it maintained, stood loyal to the altar and the throne and had merely gone unnoticed thanks to its rather quiet and inconspicuous behaviour.44 But, the huge crowds that cheered Queen Caroline in autumn 1820 and repeatedly expressed their displeasure with the king as well as his Conservative government cast more than just a small measure of doubt on these conservative assessments. Nonetheless, the appointment of the new Tory mayor in Leeds, William Hay, was celebrated by a parade of the city’s leaders and a special church service in 1820. The first appearance of the newly founded Leeds Volunteers at these festivities attracted a large crowd, but the new militia, which had been established to bolster ‘Civil Power’, marched through the streets without sparking any protests or unrest. At least in Leeds, the Tory municipal elite was able to express itself and reaffirm its local dominance before a large audience without being questioned by protests coming from the crowds, even during peak phases of radical mobilization.45 It was not until the celebrations in honour of the coronation of George IV in July 1821 that scenes occurred in Leeds and other nearby towns that were reminiscent of the conflicts described by Harrison. Both the Leeds Intelligencer and the Leeds Mercury portrayed the day of the coronation as a holiday, with celebrations in schools, factories and on the streets. The festivities were marked by free beer and food for workers as well as gun salutes, decorated public buildings, ringing church bells and parades through the city. Meanwhile, evening banquets for the conservative city leaders and the regiments of the city brought an end to the official celebrations. But the real highlight of the day came as the Volunteers marched out of town together with the regular troops stationed in the city. Under the eyes of about twenty thousand people, the troops celebrated the occasion on the field near Woodhouse Moor with the presentation of flags and standards that had been donated by ‘ladies’ from the city. Whereas the Leeds Intelligencer observed the ‘utmost good humour’ and ‘heart-cheering loyalty’ in the crowd, the Leeds Mercury wrote of the dampened elation of the spectators. It described incidents that took place on the edge of the procession, including the waving of a poster with ‘God save the King and Queen’ as well as numerous cheers to the Queen during the festivities in factories and on the fringe of the ceremony at

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Woodhouse Moor.46 These kinds of protests intensified as the day went on and culminated in attacks on the Volunteers who were celebrating in different pubs around the city. A rowdy crowd of about five hundred men made its way across the entire Brickgate neighbourhood and threw stones at the pubs, cursing the Volunteers and even violently attacking some of them.47 Thus, similar to Harrison’s study, a look at the celebrations of the monarchy in the West Riding in 1820 and 1821 reveals nothing like a cross-class consensus in terms of loyalist-conservative politics. However, only a small minority of the crowd was in any way involved in direct disturbances affecting the celebrations themselves, as the great majority of the celebrants took part in the festivities in an inconspicuous way. Moreover, decidedly radical groups such as the Clothiers’ Union tended to refrain from sponsoring demonstrations during the official celebrations. Within the very tense atmosphere surrounding George IV’s coronation, for example, only a small portion of the crowd sought an open conflict with the municipal leaders and fought for a reinterpretation of the loyalist symbolism of the celebrations. Therefore, even if there were in fact more attendees who tended to disagree with the conservative tenor of the celebrations than not, the notion that there was a clear opposition between conservative elites and the radicalleaning crowds still seems oversimplified. After 1821, moreover, these kinds of confrontations ceased to accompany the celebrations in the West Riding altogether. Until 1827, both the Leeds Mercury and the Leeds Intelligencer often described the usual celebrations on the king’s birthday in the same way, without mentioning any untoward incidents.48 The highlights of the well-attended festivities during these years were a travelling theatre troupe from the capital, which performed scenes from George IV’s coronation ceremony in London on the stage in Leeds in 1822 and at the elaborate ceremony held in honour of the laying of the foundation for a new Anglican church in Woodhouse the year after.49 Many people ringed the streets as the city leaders, followed by the lodges of the Orange Order and some other associations, made their way to the construction site in a conscious effort to link the king’s birthday to a religious message. Even in 1826, when the local celebrations in Leeds and surrounding cities were accompanied by strikes and unrest resulting from the widespread unemployment in the region, there appear to have been no protests or battles over the interpretation of the celebrations.50 Conflicts only seem to have occurred in 1828 and 1829 on these holidays, but they raged between the different political camps in the city and not along class lines. Whereas the Leeds Mercury ignored the celebrations in early 1828, the Leeds Intelligencer reported on the extensive parade while also noting the success of a campaign to gather signatures for a petition against the emancipation of the Catholics.51 A year later, on the king’s birthday, the now embittered conservative newspaper complained about the advent of the Emancipation Act and encouraged the Protestants of the city to continue to fight for the constitution. The

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Leeds Mercury, on the other hand, spoke of rather subdued ‘demonstrations of loyalty’.52 Apparently the scale of the festivities shrank after the emancipation of the Catholics because many plebeian loyalists from the anti-Catholic Orange Order withdrew from the celebrations because they were disappointed with the Crown and government. The celebrations of the monarchy in the West Riding thus clearly resembled those in Bolton in the 1820s. As in Bolton, no protests against the loyalist tenor of the celebrations emerged within the crowds nor were great numbers deterred from attending the events of the day despite the heavy conservative involvement in the festivities. For many people in the towns of the West Riding, these celebrations appear to have been so popular because of their loyalist character. At the same time, however, the conflicts surrounding the celebrations in 1828 and 1829 already began to reflect a change in the general political framework, which ultimately altered the character of the celebrations significantly after the new king ascended to the throne in the summer of 1830. George IV’s successor, William IV, was considered to be a supporter of reforms and as such he was revered by liberals as well as radicals as a ‘Patriot King’, much unlike his predecessor. The celebrations at the beginning of his reign were therefore accompanied by a rather extensive mobilization of the reform movement. The festivities drew especially large crowds, who cheered William as a reformer and a people’s king. In Leeds, more people attended his proclamation in July 1830 than any before, which the Leeds Mercury saw as a reflection of the more liberal atmosphere and the hopes associated with the new monarch. Quite apparently, for many who now took part in the festivities, the loyalist character of the parades and celebrations in honour of George IV’s birthday had deterred them from attending. That said, however, it appears that only the number of spectators changed, as there is no indication that there was a particular increase in enthusiasm on the part of the lower classes. Likewise, William’s proclamation does not seem to have sparked a symbolic reinterpretation of the traditional elements of the celebrations, as suggested by Harrison’s study. Correspondingly, the conservative Leeds Intelligencer could paint the unusually well-attended celebrations in a positive light, citing the popularity of the festivities as a clear indication of the people’s attachment to the throne.53 A year later, however, the celebrations in honour of William’s coronation had a clearly liberal tone, which reflected the fact that the political situation had fully changed its course. Only a few days after William IV ascended to the throne at the beginning of July 1830, the July revolution broke out in Paris, which sparked a new wave of radical protests and strengthened liberal demands for parliamentary reform. Almost simultaneously, the social tensions resulting from the protracted unrest among farm labourers in southern England, which had stemmed from the long-lasting economic crisis following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, seemed to unravel. In the midst of this widespread crisis atmosphere, liberal

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and radical reformers managed to unite different protest movements behind the demand for an expansion of the suffrage. In November 1830, the Duke of Wellington resigned as Prime Minister and Lord Grey was able to form a government that began to tackle extensive reform projects in the early months of 1831.54 Given these developments, the coronation celebrations in many cities in September 1831 became a symbolic expression of the advent of a new era that was supposed to come with the new king. As in the examples described by Harrison, the conservative elites in the towns of the West Riding either stepped back from the planning of the events altogether or bickered with the local liberals over the financing of the festivities.55 As a result, the official celebrations in Leeds, for example, were rather modest, while in Halifax they were cancelled completely. Nonetheless, large crowds assembled on the streets in most towns and cities to cheer their king. Whereas the radical-led craftsmen’s associations in Halifax, in light of the disagreements within the city government, organized their own parade honouring William as a reformer, the crowds at the official celebrations in neighbouring towns repeatedly made clear that the popularity of the new king rested on his reputed support for the reforms planned by the new government. Even the Leeds Intelligencer had to concede the success of the liberal and radical reformers in its report; it described a ‘general and spontaneous display of loyalty and attachment’ to the king, despite the heavy rain that put a damper on many of the planned events of the day.56 The coronation celebrations in 1831 in the West Riding, however, do not indicate that there was any kind of permanent conflict between conservative municipal elites and the lower classes who leaned toward radical protests, akin to those traced by Harrison in Bristol and Liverpool.57 The widespread spirit of reform, however, could also be detected in the celebrations of the Crown in years to come. In May 1832, for example, a tellingly small number of people attended the festivities in honour of William’s birthday after it became clear during the suffrage reform debates that the king was anything but a proponent of the Reform Bill. As a result, the birthday celebrations in Leeds, as in many other cities around England, stood quite in the shadow of the parades, concerts and public banquets that the reformers organized to celebrate the expansion of the suffrage just a few days later.58 Despite this symbolic reprobation of William IV for supporting the conservative opponents of the suffrage reform, the parades and festivities in honour of his birthday in 1833 once again passed without incident and without any indication that the crowd tried to reverse the symbolic meaning of the day’s events.59 In conjunction with the clearly loyalist celebrations in the years prior to the advent of reforms, the sudden and temporary change in the political tone of the celebrations in 1831 and 1832 reveals the fundamental mutability of the celebrations of the monarchy much more than any kind of shift in power within a longlasting struggle between social elites and the masses. Indeed, there was no clearly

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observable, permanently entrenched loyalist, liberal, or radical tendency among the attending crowds. Likewise, the ability of an elitist municipal government to control the festivities or use them to propagate a conservative social ideal under the aegis of the Crown remained quite limited. Rather, the celebrations were continually interwoven with current political conflicts and could be used by competing parties as a stage for symbolic confrontations, whether it be in the context of the emancipation of the Catholics or the question of parliamentary reforms. The crowds along the streets did not express themselves as a unified lower class and certainly not as a self-conscious working class. On the contrary, these crowds reflected the changing attitudes and different political identities associated with the heterogeneous plebeian social groups from which they were made.

The Capital Celebrates the Crown The perspective on celebrations of the monarchy up to 1832 emerging from Bolton and the cities of the West Riding correlates with an analysis of the same festivities in London. Through the physical presence of the court and the king, the celebrations in the capital took on a different character than those in provincial cities. Court ceremonial, official state acts and demonstrations of local identity by the participating boroughs of London blended together in a public meeting of the monarchy and the crowd. In Leeds and Bolton, the relationship between the conservative municipal leaders and their liberal and radical opponents as well as the population at large took centre stage in the eyes of the crowd. In London, however, the participation of the king and the great number of opportunities for the public to deal directly with the monarchy meant that the king himself and the political agents at the national level were the focus of the crowd’s attention. State visits, receptions, public appearances of the monarch before the opening of Parliament and even seemingly private royal visits to the theatre attracted curious onlookers and crowds in great numbers. This resulted in the repeated appearance of great assemblies of people on the streets of London at short intervals. Given this situation, the well-documented events in London during the Queen Caroline Affair seem to confirm Mark Harrison’s interpretation of the celebrations of the Crown as well as the notion that London was the traditional centre of radical agitation. Over the course of months in 1820, violent masses demonstrated their support for Queen Caroline day after day and tied their protests against the humiliation of the king’s wife to radical demands for parliamentary and constitutional reforms. For a while, it seemed as if the capital stood on the brink of a revolution.60 Support for the queen was repeatedly expressed in demonstrations on the streets and celebratory parades in which hundreds of thousands of signatures on greetings and petitions from followers around the country were handed over, sparking great riots more than once. George IV, in

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contrast, bore the brunt of public criticism like almost no other monarch before him. Just a few months after Peterloo, he was booed by a large crowd at the opening of Parliament in November 1819 and greeted by calls of ‘Manchester, Murder, Shame’. In autumn 1820, the cheers for Caroline meshed with a sharper critique of the king and his political convictions. Later, in September 1821, Caroline’s funeral sparked a wave of large riots in which radical supporters of the dead queen clashed with the military stationed in London.61 Nonetheless, the general attitude of the crowds on the official Crown holidays in London at the beginning of the 1820s was surprisingly positive. The proclamation of George IV in London at the end of January in 1820, for example, was met with large crowds cheering the new king. After the proclamation was read for the first time before George’s residence at Carlton House, although the king himself was not present, a parade with the magistrates of the city of Westminster and high-ranking representatives from the royal household, accompanied by the Life Guard of the king, marched along Pall Mall in the direction of Charing Cross, where the proclamation was read again. The parade then turned toward the City of London and crossed Temple Bar to Chancery Lane after having been stopped briefly by the Lord Mayor on the border as part of the traditional ritual in which the parades were formally granted permission to enter the City. As the parade made its way through the City, it was accompanied by a long procession, led by the Lord Mayor, members of the City Council and other representatives of the City, followed by a delegation from the royal house. As the crowds cheered, the proclamation was read aloud several times at different locations in the City, followed by the singing of the national anthem, cheers to the new king, and gun salutes. An extraordinarily large number of people took to the streets on this day. The reports in The Times and the Observer repeatedly mentioned that the procession had difficulty making its way through the masses assembled on the streets. Unlike at the opening of Parliament in December, the political tensions between radicals and conservatives did not bloom into protests against the monarchy. Only the conservative Lord Mayor of the year before, Alderman Atkins, who had already been repeatedly attacked by radical crowds in public for his defence of the use of the military in Manchester, was booed and ridiculed once again by the crowds attending the proclamation. In general, the day was surprisingly harmonious. It was not the protests against conservative magistrates or symbolic gestures of solidarity with the radical victims of the events in Manchester that dominated the celebrations, but rather enthusiasm for the Crown and a ‘general sense of pleasure’.62 As in Leeds and the West Riding, there also appeared to be a rather striking coexistence of protest and celebration. Extensive, sometimes aggressive protests against the king and government often accompanied harmonious celebrations of the monarchy in which the Crown was seen as the symbolic head of the nation and a conservative understanding of the monarchy reigned on the streets.

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Without calling into doubt the fact that radical views were widespread among the lower classes in 1820, the cheering masses on these occasions attest to the continuance of a tradition of popular monarchism that could not be completely swept away by radical demands for democracy and criticism of the Crown. Not even the months of agitation in support of Caroline could call this popular tradition permanently into question. Rather, on the contrary, classic studies of the Queen Caroline Affair from John Stevenson and Walter Laqueur point out that the radical mobilization of the crowds in London was only possible because solidarity with the ridiculed queen had sprung out of loyalist feelings. Likewise, they note that in a rather curious way, loyalism and respect for the Crown, outrage over the mishandling of a wife and the deprivation of her rights, as well as concerns over the political and economic situation of the population all channelled into support for Caroline. Furthermore, they argue that radical leaders in London were able to sustain such a high level of public protest for so long because they understood that they had to cleverly bind the different strands of the popular reception of the Affair with the political demands of their movement.63 Correspondingly, Stevenson has observed that the popularity of the queen faded noticeably soon after the trial was over.64 On the one hand, this was partly because Caroline accepted a pension from the government in early 1821, which made her seem like a traitor to her supporters in the eyes of many radicals because she joined the corrupt system that had been so heftily criticized in the months before. On the other hand, conservatives and loyalists launched a targeted propaganda campaign with leaflets, pamphlets and the soon widespread popular loyalist weekly John Bull to revive the Church and King tradition that had surfaced in the London proclamation celebrations despite the political crisis raging at the time.65 The coexistence of loyalist and radical tendencies in the crowds on the streets was a decisive factor: it was not the opposition between conservative elites and the radical population that reigned over Crown celebrations and public appearances of the king, but rather the concurrence of radical protest and monarchist enthusiasm on the streets. In the first months of 1821, this was particularly clear to see in the public appearances of the king and queen at the theatre, which had been carefully prepared by both sides. Whereas the behaviour of the audience before and after the performance was relatively easy to control thanks to announcement of the visit and the appropriate placement of supporters, it was virtually impossible to control the reactions of the partly curious, partly unruly crowds of supporters who had been mobilized by their respective camps on the streets around the theatre. For example, in February, George had to fight his way through throngs of supporters and opponents to get to Drury Lane Theatre and Covent Garden.66 Similar scenes occurred in March and May, although the number of people in the crowds who confronted the king with boos and cheers for the queen clearly

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seemed to decline.67 At the same time, the queen could reckon with the support of at least some of the crowd when she went to the theatre.68 Just how difficult it was to gauge the mood of the crowds in London can be seen in the coronation of George IV that took place that summer in Westminster Abbey.69 Whereas the coronation celebrations in 1821 were the last great hurrah for Caroline in much of England, the queen’s attempt to win over the crowds on the streets by demonstratively taking part in the coronation without an invitation went wide of its mark. Numerous observers surprisingly found that the support for Caroline did not extend beyond a small portion of the crowd. They also noted, with a measure of relief, that apart from a few smashed windows on festively decorated houses, the much-feared unrest on the streets never came. Rather, on the contrary, the king received a striking amount of applause from the crowds. Additionally, the extensive celebration, including the festive parade of the court to the cathedral as well as a large public gathering in Hyde Park, the spectacular launching of a hot-air balloon and the illumination of houses and buildings throughout the city in the evening followed by fireworks, all took place without incident.70 Shortly thereafter, however, the city seemed to be once again securely in the hands of radical supporters of the queen. The funeral procession carrying Caroline, who had died just after the coronation, led to one of the worst street battles in the history of London. Tens of thousands of the queen’s supporters pressed forward violently so that her coffin could make its way around the city, giving the people of London the opportunity for one last overwhelming demonstration of glorification.71 All told, the celebrations of the monarchy at the beginning of the 1820s were thus similar to those in Leeds and Bolton. As such, they can be characterized as expressing anything but a conservative consensus. That said, the conflicts that were reflected within them, even in the capital, did not result from a fundamental opposition between conservative elites and radical spectators. Rather, the events in London once again revealed the complexity of the identities within the crowds and the coexistence of different views and attitudes. Even at the height of radical agitation in 1820 and 1821, the behaviour of the crowds demonstrated admiration for the king and support for his politics just as much as antimonarchist positions and radical demands for reform. It was not until years later that England experienced the extent to which radical protests could eclipse the unifying national image of the monarchy and the conservative messages attached to royal celebrations and ceremonies. These celebrations of the Crown revealed how strongly the impression of a contested monarchy lacking the support of the people was linked to the particular political framework of political crises within English society. By the mid 1820s, however, the opposition between radical and conservative voices in the crowds attending the celebrations in London could no longer be heard. As in provincial cities, the king’s birthday in April was celebrated more

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elaborately year after year. Unlike in the West Riding or Bolton, the heart of the festivities in London was not a parade led by the leaders of the London boroughs or the court, but rather a large state reception held by the king for the court and the political elite of the capital. The arrival of the state guests made for a different kind of parade. Great numbers of spectators assembled in Pall Mall to watch the coaches bringing the guests to the residence of the king, cheering them along the way. Military bands entertained the crowds with popular melodies and repeatedly played the national anthem; the marching of the regiments stationed in London, gun salutes, ringing bells and the illumination of houses in the evening along streets decorated with flags rounded out the picture of the celebrations. As in Bolton, the celebrations in 1828 reached a climax; a year later, the conflicts surrounding the emancipation of the Catholics, which had led to riots in London in the fall of 1828, resulted in more modest festivities. Given the fact that the king was often present in the city, the celebrations in the capital were generally less significant than those in the provincial towns. The unspectacular reports printed in the conservative as well as the liberal press differed greatly from the more detailed portrayals of the events published in Bolton and Leeds.72 Cheering crowds at George’s public appearances in and around London were a relatively regular sight in the late 1820s. The king was received with enthusiasm not only during military parades or state visits, but also when he attended the races at Ascot. The races attracted growing crowds year after year, all of whom were more than ready to welcome the royal family.73 Amidst the liberal and radical agitation for the expansion of suffrage in the 1830s, however, clearly radical and liberal mindsets could once again be detected in the crowds on the fringes of the official celebrations of the monarchy in the capital. At the end of May in 1831, William IV’s birthday was celebrated with a great illumination of the entire city after ringing bells and gun salutes as well as waving flags had accompanied the official inspection of the troops that marked the day. The strikingly different character of the celebrations in this year did not go unnoticed by sceptical conservative observers such as those writing in the John Bull, but it was the liberal press of London that really did somersaults over the new enthusiasm for the Crown as well as reforms heard in the voices on the streets. For the Observer, the new king was quite apparently the most popular king since the legendary King Alfred from Anglo-Saxon times. The Times, in turn, made fun of the loyalists who did not know what to do with the ‘Reformer King’.74 Nonetheless, the celebrations in London were not marked by political disagreements between conservatives and reformers as they were in many towns in the rest of the country. This could be seen just a few months later with the coronation of William IV in September 1831. Partisan conflicts did not play any role in the preparations for the day because the planning of the festivities in the capital lay largely in the hands of the court, and many elements were dictated by

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ceremonial traditions. The symbolic participation of radical-leaning unions or the loyalist lodges of the Orange Order, which could lead to hefty conflicts over the intended message of the celebrations in other cities, was out of the question in London. Military associations and official dignitaries presided over the parades or rituals such as the firing of salutes to a much greater degree in the capital than in the provinces. Likewise, the royal couple with their state guests, the court and the upper aristocracy dominated the official celebrations. As a result, both the politicians of the new reform government as well as their conservative opponents were pushed to the sidelines of the festivities in London. Consequently, the coronation in London did not send any kind of message of reform throughout the country. The huge crowds in the neighbourhoods around the palace and the government buildings that followed the new monarch to the coronation or cheered the invited guests as they arrived at the cathedral did not link their curiosity and enthusiasm for the Crown with suffrage demands. The Times made an effort to depict the new popularity of the Crown, in a dubious comparison with the supposed flop of the coronation of George IV, as a sign of the onset of an era of reform. But, as conservatives pointed out, the call for reforms was nowhere to be heard.75 Indeed, liberal newspapers like the Observer could not detect a clear political tendency at the official celebrations, the public festivals in the parks nor during the illumination of the city in the evening.76 Over the course of the year that followed, however, the successful mobilization of the reform movement became more apparent in London. The celebration of William IV’s birthday, for example, was met with more reticence among the population because of his dismissal of the Reform Bill. The official festivities took place as usual and once again attracted considerable crowds on the streets, but the queen complained publicly that she was ‘cruelly and undeservedly insulted and calumniated’ at several opportunities.77 It seemed that the celebrations in years prior had profited from the king’s surmised support for reforms, which led some people to attend the festivities who would have otherwise been put off by the day’s loyalist subtext. This change in tone reflected just how much the crowds’ enthusiasm for the Crown at the beginning of the 1830s was dependent on whether the monarch was truly prepared to support the reform politics of the majority in the House of Commons. Notwithstanding the shifting situation, there were still plenty of opportunities for the king to be celebrated in public, and sometimes the attacks against him only served to further solidify his popular support. For example, the throwing of a stone at William at the Ascot races a few days after his birthday fostered solidarity between the crowds in attendance and the king.78 At the end of the month, in contrast, the king was met with boos and whistles coming from a crowd of several thousands while attending a military parade of the Grenadier Foot Guards in Hyde Park.79 With the climax of the reform crisis in the summer of 1832, the popularity of the Crown among the population of London undoubtedly hit rock bottom. On

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the whole, however, the celebrations of the monarchy in the capital followed a pattern similar to those in Bolton and the cities of the West Riding. The mood of the crowd proved to be capricious – seemingly split, almost decidedly loyalist, sometimes displaying sympathy for radical reform demands. Permanent lines of conflict between protest-oriented lower classes and loyalist elites along the lines of Harrison’s argument, however, are not to be found. Rather, the celebrations offered not only the agents directly involved with the official events, but also the crowds in attendance room to express their own political opinions. These views were shaped by respective perceptions of the Crown and society, but they were also influenced by the contexts surrounding the individual celebrations, which were defined by current political constellations and debates. In practice, the great affinity for loyalist ideas among social groups from the lower classes was clearly demonstrated time and time again. Some may question whether this interpretation goes too far in attributing agency to the crowds. In most cases, the celebrations were organized by local elites, quite often the municipal administration or, in London, the royal court. It was not uncommon for them to be accompanied by free beer or public banquets, which required employers to accept, if not advocate, a pause in work in order to allow for much of the population to take part on normal weekdays. But it seems rather oversimplified to suggest that the peaceful and apparently acquiescent attitude of these large crowds resulted from a manipulative mobilization ‘from above’ that makes it impossible to draw conclusions about the actual political opinions of those involved. Rather recently, Frank O’Gorman has decisively criticized this kind of interpretation of loyalist rituals and celebrations put forth by scholars such as Nicholas Rogers in his study on the burning of Thomas Paine effigies in the winter of 1792/93.80 Two elements of O’Gorman’s critique in particular can be applied to the celebrations of the monarchy in the 1820s. First of all, as with the burning of the Paine effigies, a substantial portion of the English population took part in the celebrations. Although this chapter has only focused on a few cities, numerous other examples from around England could easily be added. There is no indication that the continually large crowds at the festivities in Bolton, Leeds and London were unusual, despite the lack of exact figures. In many cases, at least half of the city must have taken to its feet. This fact alone makes it rather improbable that the crowds of spectators stood under pressure or were coerced to take part in the celebrations of the Crown. Secondly, like the ritual of burning effigies, these festivities were not short-lived. Rather, they often began in the morning and lasted for hours, often extending into the evening, especially if elements such as the illumination of the city or an entertaining fair were involved. Moreover, thanks to the parades at the heart of these celebrations, the festivities spread over a large swathe of the city as different centres of action were created through the repetition of performances, proclamations or gun salutes. Not only were the actual

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participants in the parade constantly in motion, but also a large portion of the spectators moved with the parade through the neighbourhoods. The crowds often changed location several times, breaking up and reforming at other places around the city. It seems hardly imaginable that thousands of people could be coerced into such manoeuvres for hours at a time against their will, especially given that demonstrations of disapproval and protests were not ruled out, but rather often took centre stage. Yet none of these factors can speak to the direct motivations of the participants. This means that only rather vague conclusions can be made about the loyalist or radical notions that may have brought different groups together to attend the celebrations. Insights into the identities of these groups cannot be obtained from an analysis that only looks at the descriptions of the events and evaluates their circumstances. Moreover, the dynamic processes associated with masses of people, as perhaps most impressively articulated by Elias Canetti in his studies on the crowd, can hardly be captured in such an assessment. Aspects associated with crowd behaviour such as the headiness generated by the sheer size and density of a crowd, the parallel behaviour of countless individuals or the complete fixation of the interest of all on a shared centre must have played a role in these celebrations of the Crown; these points are sometimes hinted at within press reports, but they cannot be firmly grasped.81 Consequently, to a certain degree, these crowds remain unpredictable and unfathomable, but in a completely different sense than a fear of the threatening masses would suggest. However, two cautious conclusions can be made about the dissemination of political views among broad portions of the population that contradict the prevailing view shared by many scholars. On the one hand, the celebrations of the monarchy were not rife with class conflicts that erupted in radical critiques against the official subtext of the celebrations and their national symbolism in relation to the monarchy. Rather, it was the specific political and social context, which changed each year, and the respectively dominant viewpoint within the assembled crowds that shaped the contours of these celebrations. The quick shift from a more radical or more loyalist disposition within crowds, for example, influenced the behaviour of those involved and ultimately determined the character of the celebration. On the other hand, evidence suggests that there was not a fundamental break with the tradition of the celebrations, with their loyalist subtexts, stemming from the late eighteenth century. The local festivities after 1820 do not differ markedly from those that took place during the regency of George III, as described by Linda Colley; the monarchy remained a central element of national identification. Moreover, the Crown could also usually count on a great deal of popular support for its celebrations. For radicals and liberals, George IV may have seemed to be a frightening figure to have on the throne, but his role in English society was nonetheless often celebrated in an overwhelming way. Long before its apparent reinvention in the late nineteenth century, the monarchy

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proved its popularity time and again. On the heels of the popular loyalist feelings that erupted around 1800, it continued to serve as a bond between political convictions that formed in opposition to demands for radical reforms.

Notes 1. For a recent summary of the details of ‘Peterloo’ and radical agitation from 1816 to 1821, see R. Poole, ‘The March to Peterloo: Politics and Festivity in Late Georgian England’, Past and Present 192 (2006), 109–53. For a discussion of older literature on the subject, see N. Kirk, ‘Commonsense, Commitment and Objectivity: Themes in Recent Historiography of Peterloo’, Manchester Region History Review 3 (1989), 61–66; and E.P. Thompson, ‘Peterloo’, in E.P. Thompson, Persons and Polemic (London: Merlin Press, 1994), 169–92. 2. The Brighton Herald reported that a crowd of at least fifteen thousand had assembled in Brighton (5 February 1820), while the Liverpool Mercury estimated that a hundred thousand people had attended the festivities in Liverpool (25 February 1820). According to The Times (1 February 1820) and Observer (6 February 1820), huge crowds assembled for the proclamations in London. 3. Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle, 12 February 1820. 4. Ibid. The commander of the troops in Manchester reported to the government in London in a similar manner: ‘My chief inducement to address your Lordship is to inform you how extensively the true spirit of Loyalty seemed to pervade all classes of His Majesty’s subjects – the rich and the poor, the merchant and the labourer, the manufacturer and the lowest artizan’. Letter from Morris to Sidmouth, 20 July 1821, National Archives, Home Office Papers, Disturbance Correspondence, HO 40/16–23: 397. 5. Cowdroy’s Manchester Gazette, 12 February 1820, as quoted in M. Harrison, Crowds and History: Mass Phenomena in English Towns 1790–1835 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 256. See also Manchester Observer, 12 February 1820. 6. M. Harrison, Crowds, 260–67 and passim. See, for example, Vernon, Politics, 79; Although Vernon emphasizes the popularity of the ‘flag-waving, monarchy-loving, patriotic celebrations’, his interpretation of the celebrations as an opportunity for those who were legally or socially excluded from the political nation to protest against the official national identity echoes M. Harrison’s argument. 7. M. Harrison, Crowds, 257–59. Importantly, Harrison’s comments on the situation in Manchester are drawn exclusively from reports in the liberal press as he neglects to take into consideration the conservative account of the festivities in Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle. 8. Ibid. 9. On the tradition of studies of crowds, see J.S. McClelland, The Crowd and the Mob: From Plato to Canetti (Winchester, MA: Unwin Hyman, 1989). While decidedly from a more positive perspective in terms of the uniformity of the crowd, E. Canetti, Masse und Macht (Hamburg: Claassen, 1960) emphasized the disappearance of the individual within the crowd. 10. See E. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels: Studies in Archaic Forms of Social Movement in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959); Rudé, The Crowd; and E.P. Thompson, ‘The Moral Economy of the English Crowd in the Eighteenth Century’, Past and Present 50 (1971), 76–136. On the debate surrounding the concept of ‘moral economy’, see Dickinson, Politics, 125–53; on the influence and spread of this concept, see A. Randall and A. Charlesworth (eds), Moral Economy and Popular Protests: Crowds, Conflicts and Authority (Basingstoke: St Martin’s Press, 2000).

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11. Rudé, The Crowd, 4. On critiques of this definition, see R.J. Holton, ‘The Crowd in History: Some Problems of Theory and Method’, Social History 3 (1978), 219­–33. 12. See, for example, J. Stevenson, ‘Social Control and the Prevention of Riots in England, 1789– 1829’, in A.P. Donajgrodzki (ed.), Social Control in Nineteenth-Century Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1977), 27–­50; idem, Popular Disturbances in England 1700–1870 (London: Addison Wesley Longman, 1979); D. Richter, Riotous Victorians (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1981); and J. Bohstedt, Riots and Community Politics in England and Wales, 1790–1810 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1983). Harrison counts seventeen further studies published in the 1970s and 1980s alone that link crowds and social unrest. More recent examples include: J.E. Archer, ‘By a Flash and a Scare’: Arson, Animal Maiming and Poaching in Norfolk and Suffolk, 1815–1870 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); idem, Social Unrest; N. Rogers, ‘Crowd and the People in the Gordon Riots’, in E. Hellmuth (ed.), Transformation of Political Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990), 39–55; A. Randall and E. Newman, ‘Protest, Proletarians and Paternalists: Social Conflict in Rural Wiltshire 1830–1850’, Rural History 2 (1995), 205–27; R.Wells, ‘Resistance to the New Poor Law in the Rural South’, in J. Rule and R. Wells (eds), Crime, Protest and Popular Politics in Southern England 1740–1850 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1997), 91­–127; idem, ‘Southern Chartism’ in J. Rule and R. Wells (eds), Crime, Protest and Popular Politics in Southern England 1740–1850 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1997), 127–53; idem, ‘Crime and Punishment in a County Parish: Burwash 1790–1850’, in J. Rule and R. Wells (eds), Crime, Protest and Popular Politics in Southern England 1740–1850 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1997), 169–237. On critiques of this tradition, see A.V. Westermayr, ‘Public Festivities in England during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars’, PhD dissertation, University of Cambridge, 1999; and F. O’Gorman, ‘The Paine Burnings of 1792­–1793’, Past and Present 193 (2006), esp. 133–34. 13. M. Harrison, ‘The Ordering of the Urban Environment: Time, Work and the Occurrence of Crowds, 1750–1835’, Past and Present 110 (1986), 134–68; and idem, Crowds, 40–45. 14. M. Harrison, Crowds, 260–61. The interpretation of ceremonies in E. Durkheim, Les formes élémentaires de la vie religieuse (Paris: Alcan, 1912), 295ff., inspired a corresponding interpretation of contemporary coronations in E. Shils and M. Young, ‘The Meaning of the Coronation’, Sociological Review 1 (1953), 63–81. A similar interpretation of funerals for the English royal family can be found in O. Bland, The Royal Way of Death (London: Constable, 1986). 15. L. Colley, ‘The Apotheosis of George III: Loyalty, Royalty and the British Nation 1760–1820’, Past and Present 102 (1984), 94–129; and D. Cannadine, ‘The Context, Performance and Meaning of Ritual: The British Monarchy and the “Invention of Tradition” c. 1820–1977’, in E. Hobsbawm and T. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 101–64. See also Colley, Britons, ch. 5; E. Hammerton and D. Cannadine, ‘Conflict and Consensus on a Ceremonial Occasion: The Diamond Jubilee in Cambridge in 1897’, Historical Journal 24 (1981), 111–46; D. Cannadine and S. Price, Rituals of Royalty: Power and Ceremonial in Traditional Societies (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and D. Cannadine, ‘From Biography to History: Writing the Modern British Monarchy’, Historical Review 77 (2004), 289–312. Coming from a different perspective, Golby and Purdue came to similar conclusions in J.M. Golby and A.W. Purdue, The Monarchy and the British People, 1760 to the Present (London: Areopagitica Press, 1988). For an overview of existing scholarship, see A. Olechnowicz, ‘Historians and the Modern British Monarchy’, in A. Olechnowicz (ed.), The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), esp. 24–26. See also D. Craig, ‘The Crowned Republic? Monarchy and Anti-Monarchy in Britain 1760–1901’, Historical Journal 46 (2003), 167–85. 16. L. Colley, ‘Whose Nation? Class and National Consciousness in Britain 1750–1830’, Past and Present 113 (1986), 97–117; and Colley, Britons, 227–28. Colley concedes that participation in celebrations of the monarchy cannot be counted unquestionably as evidence of a loyalist

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attitude among those taking part, although she also presents examples that seem to lean rather heavily in that direction. See also N. Rogers, Crowds, Culture, and Politics in Georgian Britain (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998), 184–88; T. Blanning, The Culture of Power and the Power of Culture: Old Regime Europe 1660–1789 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 322–56; and S. Semmel, ‘Radicals, Loyalists, and the Royal Jubilee of 1809’, Journal of British Studies 46 (2007), 543–69. 17. The Queen Caroline Affair ensued upon the return of Caroline of Brunswick, the estranged wife of George IV, to England in June 1820. While Caroline, who had been living on the continent for the past six years, demanded to be crowned queen alongside her husband, George was determined to obtain a formal divorce through Parliament. The parliamentary proceedings in autumn 1820 led to an intense opposition campaign throughout the country. 18. See Cannadine, ‘Context’, in which he draws his interpretation of the development of Victoria’s popularity from two earlier studies by K. Martin; see K. Martin, The Magic of Monarchy (London: A.A. Knopf, 1937); and idem, The Crown and the Establishment (London: Hutchinson, 1962). 19. Alongside W. Arnstein, W. Kuhn in particular has criticized Cannadine’s methods and his ‘invented thesis’; however, Kuhn’s own study of the monarchy and ceremony after 1860 from the perspective of the country’s elites fails to propose any kind of fundamental revision in terms of the course of the Crown’s popularity. See W. Arnstein, ‘Queen Victoria Opens Parliament: The Disinvention of Tradition’, Historical Review 63 (1990), 178–94; and W. Kuhn, Democratic Royalism: The Transformation of the British Monarchy 1861–1914 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996). 20. See R. Williams, The Contentious Crown: Public Discussion of the British Monarchy in the Reign of Queen Victoria (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1997). Other studies that have been published in the last decade or so dealing with aspects of the monarchy and its public reception have also left Cannadine’s interpretation unchallenged. See M. Wienfort, Monarchie in der bürgerlichen Gesellschaft: Deutschland und England von 1640 bis 1848 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1993), 149–68; F. Prochaska, Royal Bounty: The Making of a Welfare Monarchy (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); S.C. Schrendt, Royal Mourning and Regency Culture: Elegies and Memorials of Princess Charlotte (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1997); M. Homans, Royal Representations: Queen Victoria and British Culture, 1837–1876 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); S. Poole, The Politics of Regicide in England, 1760–1850: Troublesome Subjects (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2000); and S. Gunn, Public Culture, 163–86. E.A. Smith, George IV: King of Great Britain, Yale English Monarchs (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), sketches a more positive image of George IV in his biography than that of earlier works, and he questions the king’s unpopularity; this perspective has been refuted by S. Parissien, George IV: Inspiration of the Regency (New York: St Martin’s Press, 2002). In contrast, A. Taylor, Down with the Crown: British Anti-Monarchism and Debates about Royalty since 1790 (London: Reaktion Books, 1999); and idem, ‘An Aristocratic Monarchy and Popular Republicanism 1830–1940’, in A. Olechnowicz (ed.), The Monarchy and the British Nation, 1780 to the Present (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 188–219, describe widespread, fundamental critique of the Crown up to the late nineteenth century. 21. See A. Tyrrell and Y. Ward, ‘“God Bless Her Little Majesty:” The Popularising of Monarchy in the 1840s’, National Identities 2 (2000), 109–25; J. Loughlin, ‘Allegiance and Illusion: Queen Victoria’s Irish Visit of 1849’, History 87 (2002), 491–513; and P. Pickering, ‘“The Hearts of Millions”: Chartism and Popular Monarchism in the 1840s’, History 88 (2003), 227–48. On the rule of the monarchy in the media within this context, see J. Plunkett, Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). See also the critique in D. Mares and J. Neuheiser, ‘Review of John Plunkett: Queen Victoria: First Media Monarch’, Neue Politische Literatur 49 (2004), 509–10.

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22. Up to now, celebrations of the monarchy and the participation of broad sectors of the population in the nineteenth century have not been examined in depth. See the few comments in R. Glen, Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution (London: Croom Helm, 1983), 63–64; Arnstein, ‘Queen Victoria’; and R. Williams, Contentious Crown, 266 and passim. Williams ends his discussion of the debates surrounding the monarchy with a strong plea for further local studies. M. Harrison, Crowds, 234–68, only looks at the respective festivities in Bristol, Norwich, Manchester and Liverpool in 1809, 1820/21 and 1831. Pickering, ‘“Hearts of the Millions”’ only takes the celebrations in 1838 into account. The interpretation of the coronation festivities of 1821 in G. Tresidder, ‘Coronation Day Celebrations in English Towns, 1685–1821: Elite Hegemony and Local Relations on a Ceremonial Occasion’, British Journal for Eighteenth Century Studies 15 (1992), 1–16, echoes Harrison’s perspective. Vernon, Politics, 74–79, only cursorily describes the numerous celebrations of the Crown in the voting districts under question; he primarily interprets them as moments in which a local public was constructed that allowed for the city to criticize symbols of the nation and, alternatively, the nation to criticize symbols of the city. C. Whatley, ‘Royal Day, People’s Day: The Monarch’s Birthday in Scotland, c. 1660–1860’, in N. Macdougall and R. Mason (eds), People and Power in Scotland (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1992), 170–88, only examines the case in Scotland and describes the birthdays of the monarchs as a popular occasion for largely unpolitical, rowdy demonstrations. M. Wienfort, ‘Zurschaustellung der Monarchie – Huldigungen und Thronjubiläen in Preußen-Deutschland und Großbritannien im 19. Jahrhundert’, in P. Brandt et al. (eds), Symbolische Macht und inszenierte Staatlichkeit: “Verfassungskultur” als Element der Verfassungsgeschichte, Politik- und Gesellschaftsgeschichte 65 (Bonn: Dietz, 2005), 81–100, only deals with the Crown jubilees of George III in 1807 and Victoria in 1897. 23. See Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle, 19 February 1820; and Bolton Chronicle, 10 September 1831. As in Bristol, Liverpool, Norwich and Manchester, the coronation festivities in Bolton in 1831 were also clearly dominated by liberal positions and imbued with hope for electoral reforms. 24. See Bolton Express, 24 April 1824; Bolton Chronicle, 28 April 1827, 26 April 1828, 25 April 1829. On James Slade and Ralph Fletcher, the anniversary of whose deaths were celebrated annually in the 1830s and 1840s by the Tories in Bolton, see P. Taylor, Popular Politics, 66–67 and passim. Fletcher’s role in the fights against the Luddites and the radicals before 1819 is described in: F.O. Darvall, Popular Disturbances and Public Order in Regency England (London: Oxford University Press, 1934), passim; J.L. Hammond and B. Hammond, The Skilled Labourer 1760–1832 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1919), passim; and M.I. Thomis, The Luddites: Machine-Breaking in Regency England (Newton Abbott: Schocken Books, 1970), 128. 25. In 1828, there were six companies of the 67th Foot Regiment; a year later, the 50th regiment took part. See Bolton Chronicle, 26 April 1828 and 25 April 1829. 26. The reports of the celebrations do not reflect the power struggle described in detail in P. Taylor, Popular Politics, ch. 2, between a radically inclined rising middle class and the old Tory patricians who dominated the municipal institutions in Bolton at the end of the 1820s. 27. Bolton Chronicle, 26 April 1828. 28. Bolton Chronicle, 25 April 1829. Moreover, the Chronicle remarked with satisfaction that Colonel Fletcher only took part in the celebration as a private person and did not join in the cheers for the king. The organization and coordination of the festivities still lay in the hands of the city’s Tory establishment. Nonetheless, alongside the Tory magistrates, Reverend Slade took part in the parade in a prominent position. 29. On the other hand, for M. Harrison, Crowds, 251–60, the attendance or rather absence of the trades in Bristol is evidence for the respective participation or symbolic exclusion of the people from the celebrations.

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30. On the debate surrounding Catholic emancipation and the significance of Protestantism for popular conservativism, see chapters 3 and 4. 31. In his interpretation, G. Tresidder, ‘Coronation Day’, goes even further than M. Harrison, Crowds, in that he sees the conflicts emerging out of the festivities of 1821 as the culmination of an opposition between municipal elites and the plebeian population that had been growing slowly since the beginning of the eighteenth century. He claims the people increasingly used the celebrations as ‘an occasion for their counter-theatre of opposition and sedition’ (p. 12) and reacted in particular to the exclusion of popular elements from the festivities. 32. Leeds Intelligencer, 18 June 1821. 33. Leeds Intelligencer, 7 February 1820; Leeds Mercury, 12 February 1820. 34. Leeds Mercury, 12 February 1820. 35. Leeds Intelligencer, 21 February 1820. 36. Leeds Intelligencer, 1 May 1820. The lack of coverage of the festivities in the Leeds Mercury hints at the fact that the celebrations were rather muted, but it also suggests that they passed without incident. 37. For example, the extent of radical agitation and the conservatives’ fears of a revolutionary overthrow can be detected in the Leeds Intelligencer’s rather hectic reporting on an uprising that took place around Huddersfield at the end of March in 1820. Indeed, a small group of radicals numbering around three hundred people made an attempt to occupy the city, but their plans were foiled beforehand. See Leeds Intelligencer, August 1820. On these occurrences, see also E.P. Thompson, Making, 725; A.J. Brooke, ‘The Folly Hall Uprising, 1817’, Old West Riding 4 (1984), 18–22; and J.A. Hargreaves, ‘“A Metropolis of Discontent”: Popular Protest in Huddersfield ca. 1780–1850’, in E.A.H. Haigh (ed.), Huddersfield – A Most Handsome Town: Aspects of the History and Culture of a West Yorkshire Town (Huddersfield: Kirklees Cultural Services, 1992), 189–220. On the Clothier’s Union, see A.J. Brooke, ‘Labour Disputes and Trade Unions in the Industrial Revolution’, in E.A.H. Haigh (ed.), Huddersfield – A Most Handsome Town: Aspects of the History and Culture of a West Yorkshire Town (Huddersfield: Kirklees Cultural Services, 1992), 221–40; and M. Chase, Early Trade Unionism: Fraternity, Skill and the Politics of Labour (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), 145. 38. See, for example, the corresponding comments in the Leeds Intelligencer on 10 April 1820, 23 October 1820 or 25 December 1820. See also the speeches held at the annual meeting of the Leeds Pitt Club as reported in the Leeds Intelligencer, 29 May 1820, or the eight-part series in the Leeds Intelligencer about radical activities in 1819 printed from 10 April 1820 until 21 August 1820. 39. M. Harrison, Crowds, 254–56. 40. Leeds Intelligencer, 28 February 1820. 41. Hargreaves, ‘Popular Protest’. 42. Leeds Intelligencer, 11 September 1820; Leeds Mercury, 9 September 1820. 43. Leeds Intelligencer, 20 November 1820 and 27 November 1820; Leeds Mercury, 18 November 1820 and 25 November 1820. 44. Leeds Intelligencer, 18 December 1820. 45. Leeds Intelligencer, 2 October 1820. Interestingly, there is no description of the parade in the Leeds Mercury in its report of 7 October 1820. Given that the usual game was one of reporting, contesting and reinforcing one’s own version between the two papers, a liberal attack on the Tory corporation and William Hay was to be expected. The silence of the Leeds Mercury on the matter may indicate that the annual mayoral appointment ceremony, as an expression of the city’s identity, represented the city as a whole on a fundamental level and was therefore uncontroversial; even in other years, there were seldom any reports about the celebrations. William Hay, however, managed to thoroughly divide the city thanks to a combination of his ultraconservative politics and his numerous attempts to prevent or hinder rallies against the king

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during the Queen Caroline Affair. His official acts were heavily criticized by the Leeds Mercury time and time again. Consequently, the lack of protest surrounding his public appointment is quite remarkable. On the Leeds Volunteers, see E. Hargrave, ‘The Leeds Volunteers (1820)’, Publications of the Thoresby Society Miscellany 24 (1919), 451–68. 46. Leeds Intelligencer, 23 July 1821 and 30 July 1821; Leeds Mercury 21 July 1821. Both papers reported briefly, albeit similarly, on the celebrations in Huddersfield, Halifax and other towns and cities surrounding the Leeds area. 47. See the report of the trial against the four supposed ringleaders of the mob in Leeds Intelligencer, 29 October 1821. Neither the Leeds Mercury nor the Leeds Intelligencer commented on the rioting in their own reports of the holiday festivities. 48. Leeds Intelligencer, 29 April 1822, 24 April 1823, 29 April 1824, 28 April 1825, 27 April 1826, 26 April 1827; Leeds Mercury, 27 April 1822, 29 April 1826, 28 April 1827. 49. Leeds Intelligencer, 2 May 1822 and 29 April 1823. On the popularity of similar performances of the coronation by theatre troupes in London, see S. Williams, ‘The Three Coronations of George IV’, Theatre History Studies 14 (1994), 3–10. 50. Chase, Trade Unionism, 125–27. 51. Leeds Intelligencer, 24 April 1828; Leeds Mercury, 26 April 1828. 52. Leeds Intelligencer, 23 April 1829; Leeds Mercury, 25 April 1829. 53. Leeds Intelligencer, 8 July 1830; Leeds Mercury, 10 July 1830. 54. See Rudé, ‘Warum’; W.D. Gruner, ‘Großbritannien und die Julirevolution von 1830: Zwischen Legitimitätsprinzip und nationalem Interesse’, Francia 9 (1981), 369–410; and R. Quinault, ‘The French Revolution of 1830 and Parliamentary Reform’, History 79 (1994), 377–93. 55. The Leeds Mercury already complained on 4 June 1831 that the conservative vicar of the city had refused to the let bells toll in honour of the new king’s birthday. On the other hand, in the days leading up to the local coronation festivities, on 8 September 1831, the Leeds Intelligencer accused the wealthy liberals of the city of being unprepared to bear the costs of a large-scale celebration. 56. Leeds Mercury, 10 September 1831; Leeds Intelligencer, 15 September 1831 (quote). 57. M. Harrison, Crowds, 257–56. 58. Leeds Intelligencer, 31 May 1832; Leeds Mercury, 2 June 1832, 9 June 1832 and 16 June 1832. 59. Leeds Intelligencer, 1 June 1833. 60. The classical depictions of the Queen Caroline Affair come from J. Stevenson, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair’, in J. Stevenson (ed.), London in the Age of Reform (Oxford: Blackwell, 1977), 117–48; and Prothero, Artisans, 132–58. In comparison, see the chapter on ‘Caroline’s Crowds’ in N. Rogers, Crowds, 248–73, with a good overview of the quite extensive corpus of literature on the affair. Most recently, the events were sketched out by A. Clark, Scandal: The Sexual Politics of the British Constitution (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 177–207. 61. See note 60. On the opening of Parliament, see the report in the Observer, 28 November 1819. 62. So surmised The Times on 1 February 1820; the liberal paper had sharply criticized the events in Manchester in its pages in the autumn of 1819 and reported quite favourably on the nationwide protests and demonstrations against the measures taken by the Conservative government. On the events of the Proclamation celebrations, see also the reports in the Observer, 6 February 1820. 63. See Stevenson, ‘Queen Caroline’; and T.W. Laqueur, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair: Politics as Art in the Reign of George IV’, Journal of Modern History 54 (1982), 417–66. 64. Stevenson, ‘Queen Caroline’, 132–34. 65. See ibid.; and J. Fulcher, ‘Gender, Politics and Class in the Early Nineteenth-Century English Reform Movement’, Historical Review 67 (1994), 57–74. N. Rogers, Crowds, 267, questions Fulcher’s portrayal of a complete mood swing in early 1821, but he overlooks the evidence attesting to the queen’s increasingly ambivalent reception at her public appearances.

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66. The Times, 7 February 1821 and 8 February 1821; John Bull, 11 February 1821. 67. The Times, 21 March 1821, 8 May 1821 and 10 May 1821; John Bull, 25 March 1821 and 13 May 1821. E.A. Smith, George IV, 183, argues that the reception of the king in the theatres was too one-sided to serve as evidence of a mood swing in the public opinion of the queen; that said, however, he overlooks the great efforts that went into staging these visits on both sides. 68. The Times, 21 May 1821 and 25 May 1821; John Bull, 27 May 1821. As usual, both papers disagreed over the ratio between supporters and opponents, but they both described simultaneous cheers and boos coming from the audiences in the theatres and the crowds on the streets. 69. For a detailed description of the official festivities, see V. Cumming, ‘Pantomine and Pageantry: The Coronation of George IV’, in C. Fox (ed.), London – World City, 1800–1840 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), 39–50. 70. The prevailing interpretation that the coronation was a failure, as it were, and that it began a negative trend in terms of the popularity of the Crown and its celebrations until the end of the century in Cannadine, ‘The Context’, 115–17, rests on a one-dimensional assessment of the coronation festivities. Granted, the supporters of the queen, and above all The Times, which had taken sides with the queen over the course of the entire conflict, declared the coronation as a failure in its reports, citing the great success of the queen on the streets and the pervasive support for Caroline throughout the city. Both the conservative press as well as others who commented on the festivities, however, presented a similar picture of the celebration in which only a few supporters of the queen made themselves known, but met with some hefty objections from the crowd. See John Bull, 22 July 1821 and 29 July 1821. Reports of eyewitnesses can be found in Stevenson, ‘Queen Caroline’, 135; E.A. Smith, George IV, 189; and Parissien, George IV, 309–10. For a radical interpretation of the events, see The Times, 20 July 1821. Not even The Times contested the great enthusiasm for the festive illuminations in the city and the success of the festivities in Hyde Park. 71. The Times, 15 August 1821; John Bull, 20 August 1821. 72. Observer, 27 April 1828; The Times, 24 April 1828 and 24 April 1829; John Bull, 26 April 1829. The participation of the population in the annual celebrations of the king’s actual birthday in August in Windsor was even more spectacular. See John Bull, 17 August 1828 and 16 August 1829; The Times, 14 August 1828 and 14 August 1829. 73. See, for example, the reports of the cheering masses at the visit of Don Miguel, Prince of Portugal, which was accompanied by a military parade in Hyde Park, in Observer, 6 January 1828 and The Times, 7 January 1828. The numbers attending the Ascot races grew over the course of the 1820s to hundreds of thousands, and they were celebrated by the press as bringing together the ‘highest and lowest alike’; John Bull, 21 June 1829. For reports on the enthusiastic cheering for the king at Ascot, see also The Times, 4–7 June 1828 and 17–19 June 1829. 74. John Bull, 29 May 1831; Observer, 29 May 1831; The Times, 30 May 1831. 75. The Times, 9 September 1831; John Bull, 11 September 1831. 76. Observer, 11 September 1831. 77. The Times, 29 May 1832 and 4 June 1832 (quote). 78. John Bull, 24 June 1832. 79. The Times, 27 June 1832. 80. See O’Gorman, ‘Paine Burnings’; and N. Rogers, Crowds. 81. See Canetti, Masse und Macht.

Chapter 2

‘True Friends of Her Majesty’ Plebeian Conservatives and Crown, Constitution and Patriotism

?

In mid November 1839, around four hundred people assembled in the city hall of Little Bolton for the annual dinner of the Operative Conservative Society. The city’s Anglican vicar, Reverend James Slade, delivered a quite astonishing speech on this occasion. He expressly defended Queen Victoria against the accusations of many Conservatives, asserting that she was a person ‘who ought to be dear to every Conservative heart’. It was not the queen who was responsible for the recent ‘royal acts’, he maintained, but rather the Liberal government whose thoughtless and negligent counsellors had pressured the inexperienced monarch. Conservatives, Slade added, owed Victoria respect as she was the queen, but as she was such a young woman, a bit of leniency was also due.1 The fact that it was Conservative leaders who had to encourage their followers to be loyal to the Crown was the result of an affair that had exposed Victoria’s support of the Liberals’ reform programme. A few months before the banquet, the young queen had refused the request of the leader of the Conservative Party, Robert Peel, to make a symbolic change to her royal household. After the resignation of the Liberal Prime Minister Lord Melbourne in May 1839, the Conservatives were poised to take over the government. Peel asked Victoria to demonstrate her trust for the new government by dismissing the wives of some of the leading Liberal politicians from among the honourable ranks of her ladies of the bedchamber who flanked the queen at official ceremonies. Victoria’s refusal to do so drew sharp criticism from Conservatives, sparking the so-called Bedchamber Crisis. In a demonstrative way, the queen had taken sides with the governing Whigs and hindered a change in Notes from this chapter begin on page 99.

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government by exercising her royal prerogatives. Ironically, it was the Liberals who profited from the queen’s privileges, although they had always called them into question. Meanwhile, the Tories, who traditionally thought of themselves as the party of the Crown and the defender of the rights of the monarchy, were sent to the opposition benches by the young queen.2 Even in years before, Victoria had indicated that she sympathized with the Liberals and their politics of reform. Conservatives were thus confronted with the problem of having to redefine their relationship with the Crown while Liberals could celebrate the queen as a supporter of their platform. In turn, the Liberals were able to bind liberal principles closely with patriotic support for the Crown within their discourse of loyalism.3 In 1837, for example, it was the Liberals in Bolton who campaigned under the slogan ‘For the Queen and Liberty’.4 The Conservatives, on the other hand, propagated their view of the monarchy and the constitution by presenting themselves in the words of Reverend Slade as the ‘real supporters of her [Victoria’s] monarchy and her throne’.5 Towards the end of the 1830s, as in years prior, the heftily contested political concepts of loyalism and patriotism continued to drive a wedge between the political camps linked to the Conservatives, the Liberals and the Radicals across the social boundaries dictated by the hierarchy of English society. The electoral reforms of 1832 led to the establishment of local party organizations belonging to the Liberals and the Conservatives as well as a general political mobilization along party lines that stretched well into the lowest social strata.6 These developments significantly changed the context of the political debates over the proper understanding of loyalism and patriotism. Moreover, the competition to attract members among voters as well as non-voters made it clear that these long-held notions on the role of the Crown, the constitution and patriotism could be used to rally support among all classes. At the same time, they could also be used to formulate demands and expectations addressed to political leaders and local elites. Consequently, the proper understanding of the monarchy and the constitution was contested not only within these organizations themselves, but also in the various disputes between politicians and crowds during election campaigns, the local conflicts over celebrations of the monarchy and the campaigns to encourage men to join in voluntary militias. Discursive and symbolic forms of communication were thus tightly interwoven in this process. By expanding the scholarly perspective to include political discourses surrounding the newly founded Operative Conservative Associations and the local political public, this chapter will illustrate how conservative ideas played an important role in the conflicts over the meaning of the English constitution. As with the clashes between Church and King mobs and their radical opponents in the late eighteenth century, and the celebrations of the monarchy in the decade after Peterloo, the turbulent years of Chartist protests and the

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struggles over the Factory Acts and the Poor Laws were also marked by the juxtaposition of popular conservative, reform-oriented and radical-revolutionary political positions. The careful assessment in this chapter of well-established notions associated with terminology and symbols that were highly significant in the context of the celebrations of the monarchy illustrates how these popular political ideas influenced the construction of identities and the mobilization of the lower classes. At the same time, the debates on popular constitutionalism are used as a new prism through which to analyse the role of Conservative workers’ associations in these processes. This approach thus questions the argument put forth by David Walsh that only the so-called ‘bread and butter’ topics directly related to the lives and work of working-class families were relevant for the success of the Conservatives among the lower classes in the decades before 1850.7 Issues related to labour relations, the calls for humane factory regulations and the repeal of the New Poor Law were dealt with in the hundreds of newspaper reports on the various activities of the Operative Conservative Associations that began to appear in the 1830s, but they were conspicuously absent in the countless speeches held before the assembled members of local associations. Rather than emphasizing these points, most speakers primarily sought to propagate a conservative understanding of the monarchy and the constitution, to defend the role of the Anglican Church as the state church and to refute the attacks on firmly established structures of English society coming from reformers and radicals.8 Amidst a thunder of applause in February 1838, for example, John Moss, the local chairman of the Operative Conservative Association in Bradford, touched upon the special relationship between the Conservatives and the Crown. The Leeds Intelligencer reported: He considered it their duty to be loyal to the reigning monarch – to exhibit not that kind of loyalty manifested by their opponents, who were loyal as long only as a party object was to be attained but who had since cried ‘Down with the Queen’ … This was not the loyalty of the Operative Conservatives. (Loud cheers.) No, their loyalty was founded on the undeviating attachment through good and evil report, to their young queen.9

Angry tirades against the sham loyalty of Liberals and Radicals were met with just as many cheers at these kinds of assemblies as anti-liberal resolutions of the Conservative majority in the House of Lords or the activities of local Tory politicians in the fight against the ‘Disgraceful Whigs’. Given the prevalence of such attitudes, it is all the more essential to reassess the significance of conservative notions of the Crown, the constitution and patriotism within the contested terrain of plebeian identity formation.

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Operative Conservative Associations and Popular Constitutionalism Conservative associations for ‘operatives’ had been founded in numerous English cities beginning in 1835. Initially, their appearance was linked closely with the general blossoming of local party organizations after the expansion of the franchise in 1832. The Reform Act coupled the right to vote with strict property requirements as well as the regular payment of taxes and stipulated the annual inspection of voter lists before newly created registration courts.10 From the very first elections after the reform, it became clear that the success or failure of candidates in the new system often rested on the respective ability to raise objections against potential voters who favoured the competition and to ensure the proper registration of one’s own voters on a regular basis. This factor made it necessary to have powerful party organizations operating in the individual constituencies, which could continually rally support for the party at a local level. Unlike the earlier committees formed for individual candidates, which were usually only active around the time of the elections, these new partisan organizations maintained a constant local presence. Moreover, the electoral reforms brought the dissolution of many tiny constituencies with only a handful of voters (the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’) as well as the creation of new parliamentary seats for industrial cities such as Liverpool and Manchester. These changes were accompanied by a moderate, yet significant, expansion of the suffrage that resulted in a more responsive electorate whose voters were less easily swayed by influential aristocratic property owners or outright bribery.11 With the help of these new organizations, the parties sought to create a permanent bond with their supporters, effectively strengthening political identification along party lines. In the 1830s, the Conservative Party in particular faced the challenge of reorganizing itself following its defeat in the fight against the electoral reforms and the great mobilization of the Liberals from 1830 to 1832. Within a short period of time, new Conservative associations popped up in numerous counties and cities. Some of the impulses for this came from London. Initiatives to better coordinate campaign support for Conservative candidates in the constituencies began to circulate among the party leadership in 1830. Around the same time, a kind of a party headquarters was established thanks to the Carlton Club and the efforts of Francis R. Bonham, a confidant of Robert Peel. However, it was not such national developments, but rather local initiatives that led to the foundation of Conservative Party organizations. Most of these local associations acted without direct support from the rather sceptical party leadership, which had only slowly begun to adapt to the changing framework of the political system. The bulk of the members stemmed from the local elite and the upper-middle class. Together with influential nobles and the old Tory establishment, the clubs sought to expand the political basis of the party, register Conservative voters and ensure

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victory for Conservative candidates in local and national elections. By 1837, Conservative Party associations had been founded in almost every constituency.12 For the most part, Conservative associations drew their members from the leading social strata in the constituencies and established themselves as an important pillar of social life through banquets and balls, alongside their political activities. Yet this relatively elite character meant that they only had a limited amount of influence over the general public and relatively little ability to mobilize support among the lower classes for the Conservative cause. Consequently, special Conservative associations for tradesmen and operatives were founded with the intention of strengthening the bond between the Conservative Party and members of the middle and lower classes.13 Whereas the Conservative tradesmen’s associations mostly recruited small businessmen, shop owners and senior clerks from the lower-middle classes, the operative associations attracted workers and craftsmen. It must be said, however, that a strict separation of the classes was not planned, especially given the fact that only a few cities had both organizations. The operative associations in particular drew members from a mixed plebeian and lower-middle-class milieu comprised of self-employed craftsmen, small shop owners, simple clerks and industrial workers.14 In part, the impetus behind the establishment of the associations stemmed from the members themselves. Usually, however, it was the leaders of the actual party organization who encouraged them and provided the necessary financial means. The events sponsored by the associations were attended by prominent politicians and were often intended to foster opportunities for Conservative nobles, factory owners and politicians to come into contact with lower-class supporters. Apart from the general dissemination of conservative values and ideas, the goal of the organizations was to integrate voters from the middle and lower classes. In doing so, they also sought to cull local knowledge about the financial situations of specific voters who had been targeted in the fights over the registration lists.15 Additionally, member support could be mobilized during the numerous political struggles between the parties and political groups that cropped up during election campaigns and at demonstrations as well as on the margins of the meetings of local administrative committees. It was not seldom that the number of respective supporters ultimately determined who won out in these often boisterous disputes.16 Furthermore, the associations also fulfilled a social function. Similar to trade unions, the organizations associated with the Radicals and Chartists and the politically neutral friendly societies, the Operative Conservative Associations had savings funds to support members in the event of illness or death.17 Usually, the associations also rented rooms for their assemblies in which they sometimes set up libraries and reading rooms stocked with books as well as conservative papers and periodicals that members could read in the evening or on certain days during the week.18 Such educational offerings for members were financed through

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donations from the local Conservative associations or prominent Conservative politicians and businessmen. The frequency of meetings or assemblies is difficult to determine, as this certainly varied from place to place as well as in relation to political issues. The highlights of the year were always the festive annual dinners celebrating the anniversary of the establishment of the association that took on the character of a Conservative demonstration.19 Not only the regular members took part in these dinners, but also guests from the surrounding regions and neighbouring associations. Most importantly, however, these were meetings at which the rank-and-file membership came into contact with local Conservative leaders and listened to speeches from MPs, Conservative vicars and other prominent figures in the Conservative movement. Sometimes the wives of the members were also invited to attend the banquets; occasionally, music and dancing rounded out the festivities.20 This combination of social and political activities under the patronage of influential local Conservatives proved to be a quite successful strategy in the mid 1830s. After the establishment of the first Operative Conservative Association in Leeds in February 1835, others associations soon followed in the industrial cities of northern England. By the end of the year, twenty-two cities boasted such associations, followed by eight additional cities and parishes in 1836.21 In the years to come, the associations made headway into the industrial regions of the Midlands and cities such as Kidderminster and Birmingham. All told, they numbered more than a hundred by the end of the 1830s.22 Apart from their conspicuous absence in the London area, the associations were present in all the major urban areas and industrial regions in England. There were also some associations in Scotland and Ireland.23 As with the actual Conservative Party organizations, the operative associations were founded largely on the basis of local or regional initiatives.24 While some evidence points to the party leadership’s interest in expanding the number of working-class followers, the politicians in London were generally sceptical when it came to the creation of political organizations for non-voters because they feared radicalization and increasing unrest throughout the country.25 The membership figures for the individual associations varied from place to place and could range from a few dozen to a couple thousand. With reference to the numbers provided by R.S. Sowler, the Bolton Chronicle cited approximately 6,500 members in the twenty associations within the county of South Lancashire alone; the number of associations and members continued to climb in the years that followed.26 Cautiously estimated, there were probably a few tens of thousands of operatives who belonged to these Conservative organizations when they peaked at the beginning of the 1840s. Consequently, these clubs were a substantial political force in the cities of England. Admittedly, the Conservative associations by no means represented a mass movement; they were never in a position to muster as many supporters as the Chartists, who had presented the Parliament with a million signatures for their People’s Charter outlining demands

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for universal suffrage and democratic reforms in 1839. But, in many places, the membership figures in the Operative Conservative Associations were indeed comparable to those of the Chartist political unions, trade unions or clubs for lower-class liberals.27 For the Conservative organizations as well as their competition, however, even the relatively small annual membership fees deterred many potential supporters from officially joining the associations. Accordingly, the number of supporters in general was certainly much higher than the number of registered members.28 Indeed, a substantial portion of the lower classes in England had some sort of connection to the Operative Conservative Associations and their political activities.29 It is nearly impossible to clarify with certainty what motives prompted workers to formally join these Conservative organizations. Whereas the liberal and radical press painted the Conservative operatives as turncoats and traitors who were blindly at the beck and call of their superiors, the members of the associations always emphasized their ‘Sound Loyalty and Honourable Independence’.30 It was true, however, that the operative associations partially came about thanks to the initiative of Conservative factory owners and that the combination of patronage and obligation drove many textile workers into the associations. In the Bolton suburb of Horwich, for example, the manufacturer and Tory politician Joseph Ridgway pressed for the establishment of an association in 1836 and the majority of the members seemed to have come from the four hundred workers employed in his bleaching works.31 At the same time, the social benefits offered in the event of illness or death certainly made membership attractive to some. These practical advantages as well as the patronage of such employers are an early indication of the patriarchal factory culture outlined by Patrick Joyce as a development of the 1850s and 1860s, especially in regard to the Conservative manufacturing milieu.32 That said, however, the influence that manufacturers could exert over their employees was always limited. Conservative employers, just as others, could not prevent strikes and other political protests that were detrimental to their own interests. Conservative industrialists may have dominated the industrial suburbs surrounding Bolton, such as Horwich, for example, but this was not necessarily reflected in the local political constellations or the tone of labour conflicts.33 The Conservative workers’ associations competed directly with the Chartists and Liberal workers’ associations as well as Radical reform organizations. To a great extent, they represented a minority within their social milieus in times of turbulent political strife. A large portion of the members, at the very least, must have been highly committed to the Conservative values and norms with which they were confronted at party events or in the reading rooms of the associations, because they were willing to defend the Conservative cause in political conflicts. Yet this social framework cannot be separated from the semantic realm in which these associations operated. Conservative symbols and Tory rhetoric were inherently tied to patronage and social benefits, leisure activities

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and the political demands placed on each member. Through the combination of these various elements, these associations defined a Conservative identity that could be called upon to mobilize support among the lower classes. The language that united the members of the Operative Conservative Associations was above all one of conservative constitutionalism and patriotic loyalism. The history of the first Operative Conservative Association in Leeds, which was founded just one month after the first Conservative electoral victory in the city in 1835, is particularly telling in this respect.34 Unlike many associations founded later, the emergence of this club rested on the initiative of three operatives who do not seem to have had any kind of particular connection to the more wealthy Conservative circles in the city.35 However, it was not long before a close cooperation developed between the operatives and the leading Conservative politicians of the city, most importantly the newly elected MP Sir John Beckett and his campaign committee.36 A year after its foundation and following a rather rocky start, the association counted over two hundred members. At the first annual dinner in March 1836, the chairmen called upon the members to fulfil their duties, maintaining that ‘Truth, justice, independence, loyalty, and patriotism, all summon us to fight the battle of the Constitution’.37 In numerous speeches and pamphlets, members in Leeds were reminded of what a fight for the constitution defined by loyalism and patriotism meant from a Conservative point of view in the years that followed. They were told time and time again that stability and prosperity for all Englishmen depended on the defence of the constitution in its present form; any change to it would endanger peace and order, threatening to catapult the country into a chaos like never before. Under the banner of slogans such as ‘Rally Round the Throne’, speakers praised the English constitution as ‘the very best constitution ever framed by human wisdom’ and as the guarantor of equal and non-partisan rights for all – ‘the high and the low, the rich and the poor, the peer and the peasant’.38 Whereas liberal reformers and radicals cited the tradition of liberty in the English constitution as an argument in favour of democratic reforms and sharply criticized its ‘corruption’, Conservative politicians used the keywords of this radical discourse such as liberty and equality in order to emphasize the virtues of the constitution and warn against any kind of reforms. The monarchy, the Church and the constitution were understood as the ‘safeguards … of liberty and order’; equality could only be achieved through the proper balance between different state institutions and the rights of all social classes.39 Exactly because the English constitution, from a Conservative perspective, ensured ‘privileges and blessings’ for all Englishmen in an exemplary way and guaranteed a ‘limited monarchy’ and ‘limited power and chastened freedom’, the liberal’s continual demands for new reforms and constitutional changes must have seemed particularly reprehensible to Tories.40 Correspondingly, most Conservative speakers sharply distanced themselves from the reformers, pointing

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out the contrast between the relative affluence that the English constitution ensured for all social classes and the threat posed by the insecurities and dangers that would could come from hasty changes to the constitution or exaggerated demands on the state. Time and time again, Conservatives accused their opponents of destroying the very ‘liberty’ that they sought to achieve and creating a ‘tyranny’ with their demands for democracy.41 Conservative politicians not only turned around the meaning of these keywords of radical discourse, but also they cleverly incorporated the widespread disappointment over what resulted from the suffrage reform in 1832 into their Conservative image of the constitution. Neither the reform of 1832 nor the municipal reforms of 1835, they claimed, had given ordinary people a right to participate in government and politics. On the contrary, Conservatives noted, the people were stripped of urgently necessary help in times of need and suffering by the New Poor Law and other measures designed to limit the ability of the Church to support the poor.42 Secret ballots, household suffrage and annual elections were rejected by Conservative politicians as liberal dogmas.43 At party events, the speakers introduced as operatives repeatedly pointed out that many members had fought for reforms or been active radicals in the past.44 Yet it seemed as though the operatives had lost interest in reforms. In Leeds, for example, Conservative workers’ associations gained a foothold in radical strongholds such as Pudsey, a poor suburb of Leeds which had earned a reputation for being particularly stubborn and radical during the agitation for reforms in the 1830s.45 Conservatives also consciously linked this motif of political disappointment and disillusionment among former reformers to the dichotomy between order and chaos. Accordingly, they believed that the ‘glorious and free constitution’ stood for permanence, stability and reliability; their forefathers had fought for the rights anchored in the constitution and paid for it with blood.46 ‘Whig radicalism’ and reforms, on the other hand, were equated with insecurity, unrest and destruction. As the Leeds Intelligencer wrote of the appeal William Paul, the secretary of the association in Leeds, made to his political friends in Pudsey in 1837: ‘They [the Operative Conservatives] were not leagued together in an unhallow confederacy for the purpose of robbing any man of his property; they were not leagued together for the purpose of making man and society miserable; they were not banded together for the purpose of sowing the seeds of anarchy and confusion in any part of the land’.47 The Conservative operatives in Leeds had already presented themselves as the representatives of ‘peace, security and order’ in 1836; liberals, radicals, and reformers of all kinds, on the other hand, were termed ‘destructives’.48 Although favourable remarks on the constitution and order remained rather abstract in Conservatives’ tirades against political opponents, these politicians often referred concretely to institutions at both a national and local level as needed. Whenever specific reform plans surfaced, for instance, they were quick

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to respond by defending the existing institutions of the constitution as they were. After 1835, for example, Conservative speakers devoted a great deal of attention to the debates over the repeal of the Anglican Church’s status as the Established Church and raised objections to the reform of the House of Lords.49 No meeting of the Operative Conservatives went by without a speaker emphasizing the special significance of the House of Lords and its independence, sobriety and prudence. Because the members of the upper house were not influenced by elections and the changing moods of the people, these Conservatives asserted, they were not as susceptible to the excesses of party politics and could be counted upon to oppose wrong decisions even if they benefited political cronies.50 From this perspective, the Lords were thus tasked with fighting the danger of tyranny on two fronts: on the one hand, the Lords prevented the democratic despotic rule of a small majority within the House of Commons; on the other hand, it was the Lords who could truly rein in the rights of the king and prevent an absolute monarchy.51 Conservative speakers also tied these typical arguments about the particular equilibrium in the English constitution and the successful balance between different classes and institutions within English society to current political conflicts raging in the mid 1830s. As the House of Lords had successfully taken sides against the radical reforms proposed by Liberal governments, whose success rested on majorities in the House of Commons and the heavy pressure coming from the streets, the calls for its dissolution had become increasingly louder over the years. In response, Conservatives argued, all those reforms that later proved to be so detrimental to the lower classes in particular would have been even more dangerous if the House of Lords had not acted according to its constitutional role as the protector of tradition. According to this line of thought, moreover, the House of Lords was especially important for the lower classes because the Lords had repeatedly demonstrated that they were the true friends of the poor.52 Sometimes a dose of history was mixed into the reform debates in the 1830s. When talking about the demands for a reform of the upper house, for example, one of the speakers at an anniversary dinner of the Operative Conservative Association in Leeds in 1837 referred to the classic role of the House of Lords in England’s history and quoted – undoubtedly without expecting his audience to know the exact source – the famous words from the Statute of Merton, ‘We will not have the laws of England changed’. The phrase had been used in statutes issued in 1236 by English barons who opposed the attempts to adapt English common law to meet canonical regulations dictated by Rome.53 More typically, however, direct references were made to the Magna Carta and the role of the ‘Barons bold’, who had defended ‘true liberty and constitutional rights’ since the beginning of English constitutional history. Furthermore, when depicting their understanding of the history of the constitution, Conservative politicians once again turned keywords associated with the discourse of liberal demands into Conservative tenets. They linked these ideas emphatically to the rejection of comprehensive

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reforms in order to encourage workers to defend institutions such as the House of Lords.54 The resulting dichotomy between chaos and order in Conservative discourse solidified around the issue of the House of Lords because the Lords had always proved to be an ‘unpassable barrier against the rude and violent torrents of ruin and revolution’.55 Additionally, the speeches made before the Operative Conservative Associations situated the House of Lords within a nationalist framework. The members of the upper house were – in the past as well as the immediate present – always depicted as particularly patriotic and either ‘English’ or ‘British’.56 On the one hand, they were painted as the embodiment of a typical ‘English’ tradition. Some speakers explicitly referred to this point in order to emphasize the national dimensions of the conflicts surrounding the constitution. In doing so, they sought to draw a sharp contrast between the political stability of the English kingdom and, for example, that of France, which had been plagued with revolution ever since it had fatally detached itself from the political influence of its aristocracy.57 On the other hand, Conservative politicians also underscored the national loyalty of the Lords. Inspired by ‘true British feelings’ and guided by patriotic ideals, they claimed, the Lords fought against England’s domestic and foreign enemies for the good of all classes.58 This emphasis on the ‘Englishness’ of the Lords linked the defence of the upper house with the language of patriotism prevalent within the Operative Conservative Associations. Speakers tirelessly described the attitude of the Conservatives toward the constitution using nationalist wording, often greeting the operatives as ‘true Englishmen’ or in ‘old-fashioned English style’.59 They continually referred to the interests of the country that every Conservative would be prepared to defend until his dying day. Similarly, they portrayed the institutions of the English constitution as a special expression of ‘English’ glory and ‘English’ greatness. Accordingly, the monarchy, individual members of the royal family, the Anglican Church, the House of Lords or simply the entire English constitution could be celebrated as ‘England’s glory’.60 Conservative politicians thus offered their supporters from the lower classes a quite patriotic political identity. As part of this discourse, the Operative Conservative Associations were depicted as more than a blessing for the nation, because every member upheld the duties that he owed unto God, himself and his country.61 This self-image always prompted enthusiastic cheers from the members in the audience. In Pudsey, for example, members proudly described themselves as ‘Protestant Patriots of Pudsey’ on their flag.62 Conservative spokesmen were quite conscious of the fact that their idea of patriotism competed directly with that espoused by Liberal speakers and politicians. In general, Liberals described their demands for reforms as the epitome of patriotism and an expression of their commitment to the true political traditions of the country. Contrary to the arguments of many scholars, the Conservatives

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by no means allowed radicalism and patriotism to be used as synonyms. Rather, they fought with determination against such opposing notions of patriotism.63 In their speeches, they expressed this by either strongly emphasizing the patriotism of Conservative Party leaders such as Sir Robert Peel and the Duke of Wellington or sharply attacking leading Liberal parliamentarians. In particular, the parliamentary leader of the Irish Catholics, Daniel O’Connell, often bore the brunt of Conservative criticism alongside Lord John Russell. They accused O’Connell of mobilizing his supporters in Ireland by insulting England and only putting on a patriotic façade when his ‘patriotic’ arguments could be used to further his own interests or damage England.64 At the same time, the entire Liberal government, comprised of such ‘unpatriotic’ vote mongers, stood in the firing line of Conservative critique. For example, in Leeds in 1838, Sir Francis Burdett claimed that especially as a ‘true Englishman’, he could do nothing but make clear to all Englishmen and all friends of England that he would fight against such a government to the bitter end.65 From a Conservative perspective, the Whigs were a disgrace to England; radicals and liberals were not worthy of being called Englishmen.66 Conservative politicians had absolutely no intention of leaving the field of ‘patriotic’ arguments to their political opponents. Long before 1870, they presented their own Conservative notions of patriotism and nationalism, which were linked to their understanding of the constitution. In turn, this discourse was used to aggressively attack political opponents and successfully mobilize support for the Conservative cause among the lower classes of society. Ultimately, the central core of the patriotic mobilization strategies employed in the speeches made before Operative Conservative Associations was the particular emphasis on the Conservatives’ loyalty and allegiance to the English royal house and the institution of the monarchy as part of the English constitution. Although these speakers praised the ‘limited monarchy’ as the obverse of an absolutist tyranny, they nonetheless documented their unconditional loyalty to the throne over and over. They also presented themselves as dedicated soldiers fighting against the republicans and other enemies of the monarchy, which made loyalism their distinctive trademark on the political battlefield.67 Loyalist attacks that pointed to liberals’ and radicals’ lack of loyalism as well as their double moral standards when it came to the throne were also a firmly entrenched part of all association events in Leeds. The constantly recurring motif of the Conservative affinity to the monarchy was often combined with direct personal attacks on one of the most influential Liberals in the city, Edward Baines. As a Liberal politician and owner and chief editor of the Leeds Mercury, which had the highest circulation in the region, Baines was so riled by the hostile attitude of William IV and his wife to reforms in the early 1830s that he encouraged the crowds at a demonstration in favour of electoral reforms to express their displeasure against Queen Adelaide.68 For the city’s Conservatives, his call for ‘three groans for the Queen’ was the incarnation of the sham loyalty of the Liberals. At the same

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time, his actions provided an opportunity for Conservative leaders to clearly demonstrate their entirely different attitude toward the Crown at Conservative workers’ assemblies. Under the motto ‘Fear God, Honour the King’, they also added religious undertones to their allegiance to the monarchy. William Paul, for example, had already accused the city’s Liberals of maintaining a double moral standard in 1835 using biblical language. He claimed that they metaphorically shouted ‘Hosianna’ in the presence of the King, but called out ‘crucify him’ the day after.69 A few years later, after Victoria’s ascension to the throne, when Liberal politicians campaigned on the premise of their close affinity to the young queen, Conservative speakers in the West Riding argued that liberal and radical demands for reforms ultimately sought to establish a republic and abolish the monarchy. In opposition to the Liberal call-to-arms of ‘Queen and Reform’, these Conservatives summarized their loyalism with the words ‘The Queen, the Church, the Constitution, and the People’.70

The Crown and the Constitution in Election Campaigns and Celebrations The influence of the conservative variant of popular constitutionalism on the formation of a popular conservative political identity was not limited to the small circles of the Operative Conservative Associations and those who attended their major annual events. Membership figures for the Operative Conservative Associations grew continually from their establishment in the mid 1830s until the split in the Conservative Party over the proposed Corn Laws. The number of registered members in particular had steadily increased until the associations began to disappear around 1846. At its zenith at the beginning of the 1840s, the association in Leeds counted eight hundred operatives according to its own figures; in Bolton, there were about six hundred members. However, Conservative politicians also had other opportunities to propagate their conservative understanding of the constitution among the lower classes, especially during election campaigns and the conflicts surrounding the celebrations of the monarchy.71 In general, this dispute over the meaning of the constitution defined the political discourse of all the political parties and could be found in every corner of the political sphere. In its symbolic forms, this debate reached a much larger portion of society than just those who listened directly to the differently coloured speeches on the constitution sponsored by different political groups. Likewise, the messages conveyed at the annual banquets and other events sponsored by the Operative Conservative Associations reached a much greater public than just those who were in attendance. The local and national press reported on the speeches and programmes, which made them accessible to a broad readership. Meanwhile, the associations themselves often printed pamphlets on

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specific topics that circulated among members and the interested public.72 Furthermore, the meetings of the Operative Conservatives were not usually isolated events as they were often held in conjunction with other celebratory occasions or consciously integrated within election campaigns. The foundation of the Operative Conservative Association in Kirkstall near Leeds in 1837, for example, was purposely scheduled for the eighteenth birthday of Princess Victoria. Similarly, the Conservative operatives in Bolton delayed their annual dinner in the same year until after the death of William IV, so that they could hold their celebration as part of the festive proclamation of the new queen and the ensuing elections to be held across the county.73 Correspondingly, in many cases, these celebrations adopted the symbolic and ritual forms usually associated with political demonstrations and campaign events in England in the early nineteenth century. Through parades with banners and music, flags decorating the houses of supporters and the construction of special tents and pavilions for the celebrations, these events brought the activities of the associations to the attention of a much broader public.74 More than anything else, the parades associated with these celebrations in cities and villages presented conservative notions of patriotism and the constitution in a demonstrative way. Especially in the first few years after the organizations were established, they made an effort to prove their strength on the street. On placards with sayings such as ‘Church, King and Constitution’ and flags with corresponding slogans or campaign catchwords, the Conservatives condensed their political messages down to a few key words that association members marching along in rank and file could parade before the crowds. Sometimes the Operative Conservative Associations were able to mobilize a few hundred participants for such parades; at times there were even over a thousand members marching in the parades.75 Union Jacks also underscored the national sentiments of the marchers. The typical symbol of the Operative Conservative Associations, the crown above a sceptre and bible, was prominently displayed on many flags and banners, often surrounded by the blue colour of the Conservatives. From early on, the association had established this symbol as a clear indication of the political views of its members. Additionally, the tents, pavilions or assembly rooms of the association where the parades ended were decorated from the outside with corresponding symbols and flags, often reminding passers-by of the celebrations of the Conservatives for a number of days at a time.76 The marching operatives were always accompanied by bands that kept the patriotic melodies in time and entertained those watching the parades. Their repertoire differed very little at first glance from the bands accompanying the parades of liberals and radicals, often consisting of the national anthem and common patriotic songs such as ‘Rule Britannia’. Through the demonstrative bellowing of specific lines such as ‘Confound their politics, frustrate their knavish tricks’, the Conservative operatives could also appropriate songs that were

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relatively politically neutral, including the national anthem, for their own cause. Other songs, such as the popular ‘With a Jolly Full Bottle’, with its refrain, ‘Here’s a health to old England / The King and the Church / May all plotting contrivers / Be left in the lurch’, were unmistakably partisan in nature, and they were often parodied by the political opposition. The similarly classic conservative song, ‘The Fine Old English Gentleman’, which conjured up a nostalgic world of social equilibrium between rich and poor, even had the honour of being satirized by Charles Dickens for the liberal Examiner with the subtitle ‘To be sung at all Conservative dinners’.77 The symbolic communication of conservative patriotism and notions of the constitution on the margins of the celebrations of Operative Conservative Associations followed the usual forms and rituals associated with election campaigns. Consequently, the main contest over the proper understanding of the constitution, the nation and loyalty to the Crown solidified around the election results. Well into the late nineteenth century, the public character of English elections fostered a forum for these kinds of political exchanges. Until 1872, those registered voted openly and had to declare their support for a respective candidate by name. As a result, both voters and non-voters were involved in the voting process. The election began with the nomination of the candidates on large hustings in front of the assembled droves of supporters, opponents and the interested public; this was followed by the actual voting of those who were registered. It ended with the announcement of the results, upon which the new parliamentary representatives and their followers paraded among the local public. In effect, during the elections, the constituencies found themselves in a tense state of emergency wavering between a public fair and a political riot. The actual decision as to who would represent the city or the county remained in the hands of those few who were entitled to vote. But these voters stood under the pressure of the masses of non-voters. They often had to actually fight their way through the crowd to get to the electoral officials and answered to the crowd for their political preferences. Complaints about violent attacks, boycotts against shop owners and tradesmen with party ties, bribery and even the abduction of voters by supporters from the opposing party characterized English elections at this time.78 Furthermore, after the candidates had been named and before the voters declared their preferences, a hand-count was taken in which the assembled crowd ‘voted’ for their chosen candidates. A win by this ‘show of hands’ was quite prestigious and coveted by all the parties because the victorious candidate could claim to be the ‘people’s candidate’ who also represented the non-voters. The speeches of the candidates after their official nomination on the hustings thus played a particularly important role. When the parties marched up to the hustings, the candidates were accompanied by long parades with bands, flags and slogans. After the nominations, however, the aspiring representatives found themselves facing their opponents directly, surrounded by crowds of a few tens

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of thousands. What followed was thus a mixture of spectacle and serious political debate. For the most part, this was the only time that the candidates directly confronted one another. In these fundamental speeches, they introduced themselves and outlined their principles and goals to the accompaniment of cheers from their political friends and the open hostility of the other parties. So that the often inaudible speeches could actually reach the audience, they were frequently written in advance and either distributed as flyers or printed on large posters. Alongside other flyers, the banners of the parties bearing slogans, and newspaper reports on the programmatic campaign speeches held before the election, the actual nomination speeches gave the broader public a better picture of the political views of the respective candidates.79 Especially in the 1830s and 1840s, the nomination speeches of Conservative politicians were clearly shaped by a patriotic and loyalist view of the constitution, which they also propagated at the assemblies of the operative associations. Granted, the remarks they made on the hustings differed from the speeches they delivered at party assemblies because they tended to extol their personal qualities and biography as well as their personal political history before the broader public. They also tended to give quite detailed reflections on current parliamentary debates and the grounds for the respective election.80 Moreover, the political tradition of a deep distrust of party politics and factions in Parliament in England also made it more important for candidates to emphasize their independence and freedom despite their membership in one political camp or the other.81 For example, Colonel Tempest, one of the Conservative candidates in Leeds in the election in January 1835 presented himself with the words: I declare to you, gentlemen, that I can never consent to go into the House of Commons otherwise than as a free and independent representative of the British people. (Hear, hear, and cheers.) And if you do me the honour to return me to Parliament I will not be diverted from my straightforward path of my public duty, either by selfinterest, the frowns of power or the war-whoop of faction.82

However, it is wrong to follow James Vernon in insisting that statements such as these attest to the continuance of a tradition of suspicion against any kind of party politics and the emphasis on the particularities of local identities removed from the context of national party ideologies and organizational structures.83 A few sentences after emphasizing his political independence, for example, Colonel Tempest clearly declared his commitment to the Tories and to the principles of the Robert Peel’s Tamworth Manifesto.84 The political language of the candidates of all colours in the constituencies of the West Riding, Bolton and London oscillated between clear declarations of the political camp to which they belonged and affirmations of their independence as MPs; the latter was intended primarily to stress their personal integrity and incorruptibility. Indeed, it was the references

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to one of the variants of popular constitutionalism that made it possible for candidates to clearly indicate the party to which they belonged while still insisting upon their independence. Well into the 1840s, Liberal and Radical politicians repeatedly spoke of the libertarian reform traditions that they stood for and for which they had fought as part of the expansion of the suffrage in 1832. Conservative candidates, on the other hand, campaigned with their specific notions of patriotism, loyalism and the constitution, and presented themselves as true Englishmen and champions of national interest. In the speech cited above, for example, Colonel Tempest referred to himself as a ‘true and loyal Englishman’ and a ‘staunch supporter of your matchless constitution in Church and State’; he also warned against seeing the election as a fight between Tories and Whigs, claiming that ‘It is for the life and death of your constitution’.85 Moreover, the second Conservative candidate in Leeds, Sir John Beckett, was no less enthusiastic about the constitution than his fellow party kinsman. He, too, outlined his ‘Conservative principles’ for the assembled crowd, including the defense of the constitution with every last drop of blood. He clearly described what he understood as the Conservative agenda: unconditional support for the prerogative rights of the Crown, the protection of the unity of Church and State and the defence of the other institutions of the constitution in their present form as the bond holding society together.86 Two years later, at the election following Victoria’s ascension to the throne, the Conservative William Bolling ironically used Liberal catchphrases before a crowd of thirty thousand in Bolton, declaring his commitment to the principles of ‘Queen and Liberty’, ‘Queen and Constitution’, and ‘Queen and Reform’. He used Liberal vocabulary combined with typical Conservative rhetoric, aiming to combat the Liberal’s campaign tactic of presenting the young queen as sympathetic to their own cause.87 In 1847, William Beckett was presented to the voters in Leeds by his Conservative friends as a committed defender of the constitution. At the same time, the Conservatives warned that adhering to the principles of their Liberal opponents would inevitably lead to the destruction of the ‘glorious constitution’. Numerous supporters accompanied Beckett to the hustings, circling the stage with flags and banners, some of which proudly bore the motto of many of the assemblies of the Operative Conservative Associations, ‘The Altar, the Throne and the Cottage’.88 Six years prior, Beckett had already introduced himself as a sworn defender of the throne, the Church and the constitution. Together with his fellow Conservative candidate, Lord Jocelyn, he also repeatedly appealed to the voters to support him as an ‘Englishman’.89 The crowds heard a similar message coming from the hustings in Bradford as the Conservative William Busfeild spoke in 1837. Even the labour leader Richard Oastler, who campaigned twice in Huddersfield in 1837 for an unusual alliance of Tories and Radicals in a by-election and the later general election, devoted a large portion of his first nomination speech, which lasted over two hours, to explaining his position on

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the constitution, which differed only marginally from that of other Conservative politicians.90 It would be wrong, however, to approach the conservative discourse on the constitution simply as an unchanging and universal recipe used by Conservatives to successfully mobilize supporters up and down the social ladder. Constitutional arguments were not always at the forefront in every electoral campaign in the 1830s and 1840s. Rather, Tory politicians often reacted carefully to the general political mood, local coalitions or other specific circumstances pertaining to their constituency. In the first elections after the advent of the Reform Act in December 1832, for example, Conservative politicians proceeded cautiously in all constituencies, if they dared to campaign for office at all. For two years, Liberals at the head of a massive reform movement had fought for the extension of the suffrage. Across the country, large reform clubs and political unions had been established. They had attracted widespread support among the population for their even more extensive demands for universal suffrage and other democratic constitutional structures. Consequently, in the months leading up to the elections, many observers feared revolutionary unrest following the short-tenured rejection of the Reform Act by the Tory majority in the House of Lords. After the Liberals ultimately won out, tensions gave way to cheers across the country among reformers and their supporters as they warmly welcomed the expansion of the suffrage.91 Given this general situation, Conservative candidates, especially those in the newly created constituencies such as Bolton or Leeds, made an effort to distance themselves from the opposition to the reform movement. For example, in his first candidacy, William Bolling did not present himself as a defender of the constitution and a patriot loyal to the monarchy, but rather as a moderate reformer. He emphasized his acceptance of the reforms that had been passed, highlighting his skills as a businessman as well as the fact that he was someone who had been born locally, since both of his Liberal competitors did not come from Bolton.92 Michael Sadler, a candidate for the Conservatives in Leeds in 1832 who had been a prominent parliamentary leader in the fights against child labour and for legal limits to working hours in factories, as the MP for Newark, faced especially fierce attacks from his Liberal and Radical opponents because he had clearly advocated against suffrage reforms in the debates in Parliament. But even he did not plead for a return to the old franchise laws or a classic conservative notion of the constitution when he stood at the podium, but rather he criticized the reform from a patriarchal Tory perspective. He argued that the new nationwide voting regulations stripped workers of the right to vote who had been registered according to local laws in past elections. In light of this situation, in which voters from the lower classes were no longer able to exercise their influence, he even hinted that he would support the further extension of the vote. In doing so, he built a bridge to demands for more radical reforms without breaking with Conservative

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principles.93 In London, the situation was more extreme. No Conservatives dared to appear on any of the hustings in 1832, neither in traditional constituencies such as Westminster or the City of London, nor in newly created ones like Tower Hamlets or Finsbury.94 Similarly, following the split in the Conservative Party and the collapse of the Peel government after the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1847, Conservative candidates in many constituencies found it difficult to vehemently fight for loyalism, patriotism and conservative notions of the constitution. Consequently, they tended to position their politics along economic lines and comment extensively on their voting records in Parliament over the last few years.95 But even under such difficult political circumstances, some attempts were still made to attract support among voters and non-voters by extolling a conservative understanding of the constitution. James Stuart Wortley waged his campaign in Halifax in 1832 under the slogans ‘King and Throne’ and ‘King and Constitution’.96 In Bolton, William Bolling presented himself as a supporter of the Reform Act at his nomination. But, during his festive entrance into the city a few days earlier after a parade with over nine thousand participants, most of whom were workers from the factories of Conservative employers, he emphasized his role as a defender of the constitution and accused his Liberal opponents of being unpatriotic.97 In 1847, Henry Edwards, in Halifax, used a vehement defence of the Established Church in the constitution in order to weave his position into the conservative discourse on the constitution.98 Three years prior, John Entwistle had campaigned for re-election in the County of South Lancashire in Bolton and other cities in the region primarily on the basis of an economic platform because the question of the Corn Laws was paramount at the time. At his nomination, however, he was expressly celebrated as a committed defender of the ‘Glorious Constitution’ and his supporters maintained that a vote for his Liberal opponent was tantamount to an attack on the constitution.99 The conservative variant of popular constitutionalism was a semantic reservoir that was always available to candidates coming from the Tory camp. As such it was called upon during campaigns when there were no other issues that clearly dominated the election or when the political mood seemed to necessitate reticence. The fundamental popularity of the values expressed within Conservative speeches on the Crown and the constitution during election campaigns and atop the hustings made these appearances highly effective. Even outside the Operative Conservative Associations, Conservative candidates did not have to hide behind sociopolitical issues when they sought support among voters as well as the masses of non-voters. Rather, they could hope to gain sympathy even among the lower classes with their notions of loyalism and patriotism. For the most part, for example, they not only won one of the two seats in Parliament, but also they clearly enjoyed success when the crowd’s show of hand was counted before the hustings in Leeds and Bolton after 1832.100 Although the Conservatives seldom

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achieved a clear majority in the show of hands, neither did their opposition. The assembled voters and non-voters could clearly be moved to support the Conservative cause. Generally speaking, the votes were always close, which indicates that all the political parties could count on support across the population. Indeed, the election results were often contested and election officials were frequently forced to recount the votes several times. And, even when the count was finalized in favour of one side or the other, the officials’ decisions left room for counter interpretations and protests coming from the defeated party.101 Certainly, an assessment of votes by a show of hands among a crowd of several tens of thousands cannot speak fully to the question of the general political mood in a constituency or the social background of those who voted for one candidate or the other. Likewise, it says little about the motivations that led individuals to choose one party over the other. But, if the reports on the behaviour of the crowds during the nomination of the candidates are carefully taken into consideration, a few preliminary conclusions can be reached as to the social composition of the disenfranchised support base for a given party and its possible political motivations. According to the liberal and conservative local newspapers, for instance, around sixty thousand people assembled before the hustings in Woodhouse Moor park in Leeds to hear the introductions of the candidates.102 All the parties paraded with their many followers through the city to the park, accompanied by bands and flags. The Conservative candidate Sir John Beckett was surrounded by a sea of flags and banners on his way through the city, most of which expressed sentiments related to the constitution, patriotism and nationalism, not to mention loyalty to the young queen.103 The members of the Operative Conservative Society took a prominent place within the parade. As part of the protest against child labour, some so-called ‘factory children’ also marched in the Conservatives’ parade, lending it a social-political tone. Becket, however, presented himself to his voters primarily as a defender of the constitution and did not spend any time talking about social problems. After his speech, almost half the crowd – well over twenty thousand people – raised their hands to vote for him in the show of hands.104 In a constituency in which only around six thousand men had the right to vote, and in which an Operative Conservative Association had been active for two years, the fact that the Conservative candidate was heftily criticized for his rejection of the Factory Acts just a year before suggests a few conclusions about the nature of the Conservatives’ campaign, the symbolic appearance of Beckett’s supporters, and the results of the vote.105 On the one hand, Beckett must have received an immense amount of support from among the non-voters in the show of hands, and it cannot be assumed that only those who were bribed or forced by employers raised their hands. After all, nobody could really control these densely packed crowds in such a way. On the other hand, it can be assumed that the approval for Beckett’s candidacy must have had a lot to do with his political positions, and therefore his understanding of the constitution, patriotism and

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loyalism because these motifs clearly dominated the image he presented of himself and the politics of the Conservatives in Leeds. Such evidence suggesting widespread support for a conservative understanding of the constitution was anything but an exception to the rule. Four years later, under similar circumstances and with especially large crowds in attendance, the show of hands ended in a tie between the Conservative and Liberal candidates in Leeds as well as in the West Riding, even though the Chartists had fielded candidates in both districts.106 The fact that the Chartists could not win over the crowds at the hustings in Yorkshire, despite their demands for universal suffrage and their explicit claims to be the representatives of the non-voters and the ‘working classes’, clearly demonstrates that all the parties could drum up support amongst the entire population.107 Moreover, the attacks coming from Liberal and Radical candidates attest to the great ability of the rhetoric of constitution and Crown to bolster the Conservative cause. Time and time again, political opponents used the platform of the hustings to stress the Tories’ dismissive attitude towards reforms, their rejection of the expansion of the suffrage as well as secret, democratic ballots and their support for the House of Lords and other unreformed institutions of the constitution. They continually warned voters as well as non-voters of what would happen if the Conservative candidates came into Parliament. In London, Leeds and Bolton, for example, they tried to paint the Tories in every election in the 1830s and 1840s as the enemies of the majority and the adversaries of the people. In doing so, they reduced the political conflicts down to a matter between ‘Toryism’ and ‘Liberty’.108 Frequently, they also defended themselves against accusations coming from the ranks of the Conservatives that they were working to defeat the constitution. Colonel Torrens, for instance, defended himself vehemently against the notion that he was a ‘destructive’ in Bolton in 1835.109 Similarly, attacks like these also seemed to have presented a challenge to Tory opponents in London. In 1837, the question of just whose idea of the constitution was the destructive one was debated at almost all the hustings in London. In Westminster, J. Temple Leader succinctly summed up the position of the Liberals and Radicals. As The Times reported, he claimed: ‘The Tories were the real destructives. They exposed the institutions of the country to destruction by insisting on the preservation of the abuses which disfigured them’.110 Even as late as 1865, candidates opposing Conservatives cited the Tories’ opposition to the Reform Bill of 1832 in order to paint them as having been the enemies of ‘civil and religious liberty’ for generations.111 Accordingly, the way in which party conflicts flared up during local celebrations of the monarchy also made it quite clear that references to patriotic support and loyalty to the Crown were particularly important when it came to mobilizing popular political support. Especially after Victoria’s ascension to the throne, all political agents – Liberals as well as Conservatives and even the Chartists

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– attempted to draw on the general popular enthusiasm for the Crown as well as widespread loyalist sentiments in order to drape these festivities with their own understanding of the monarchy. The Conservatives clearly had an easier task. As described in the previous chapter, the long tradition of celebrations of the Crown attests to the great popularity of the monarchy among the crowds, which was inherently more closely linked to conservative ideas. Liberal protests and radical boycott attempts were short-lived, even when the reform movement was at its zenith or protests hit hard against unpopular monarchs. In fact, little changed in this respect even after the reform crisis. Only a year after William IV’s support for the Conservative opponents of suffrage reform was clearly deplored on the streets, the parades and other festivities held on his birthday took place without incident. In fact, until William’s death in 1837, the participation of the public increased from year to year.112 The fundamentally conservative character of the celebrations could still be seen as local political constellations changed as a result of the conflicts over the Reform Bill. Although Liberal politicians took over influential positions where they often controlled the city council and other municipal institutions which were generally in charge of the organization of the official celebrations of the monarchy, conservative ideas still hung in the air on these occasions.113 Almost always, Liberals sought to plan the smallest celebrations possible, advocating for limitations on costly elements such as festive illuminations, decorative flags or the ringing of church bells because of the great financial burden.114 Conservative politicians protested against such initiatives, which were not merely accidentally directed at symbolic elements with conservative undertones; they argued that the celebrations were popular because of these very aspects.115 Around 1837, the conflicts over the celebrations escalated as a result of Liberals’ attempts to use Victoria’s apparent sympathy for the reigning Liberal government to underscore their new role as the party of the Crown under the motto ‘Queen and Reform’. In Leeds, where the city council had been dominated by Liberals since the municipal reforms of 1835, the Conservatives were already boycotting the city council’s planning sessions for the celebrations in honour Princess Victoria’s eighteenth birthday in May 1837. Correspondingly, they also refused to take part in the public assembly in which the city’s official words of greeting to the princess were supposed to be voted on; the assembly was rather poorly attended as a result. Simultaneously, the Conservative Party demonstratively celebrated the establishment of an Operative Conservative Association in a suburb of Leeds while the conservative press ranted against the hypocrisy of the Liberals.116 In neighbouring Huddersfield, the celebrations of the princess’s birthday sponsored by the Liberals were seen as a hefty provocation because they took place just after the labour leader Richard Oastler, who had been supported by both the Tories and Radicals, lost the election at the beginning of the month. Several hundred supporters of Oastler pushed their way into the parade, disturbing the celebration that the Liberals had organized with their own band

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and blaring music. Rather than ending with festive dignity as a celebration of the royal house, the evening ended with the burning of an effigy of the Liberal publisher and politician Edward Baines in front of a crowd that had grown to several thousands.117 In Bolton, where the leading Conservative families in the city were able to delay the implementation of the Municipal Corporations Act until 1838 and thereby retain their control over the old municipal structures for longer, there was no direct confrontation between the parties in 1837 as in Leeds. Rather than celebrating the birthday of the Liberals’ beloved Princess Victoria on 24 May, Bolton celebrated the birthday of the fading King William just four days later in the usual fashion with ringing bells, a gun salute by the local militia garrison and a festive evening banquet attended by the Conservative establishment. A parade was not held, but the Operative Conservative Association celebrated the day publicly by decorating its buildings with flags and banners.118 After William’s death at the end of June, Conservative city leaders festively proclaimed the new queen with great ceremony before an enthusiastic crowd of many thousands. Just days later, the different interpretations of loyalism and patriotism espoused by the Conservatives and Liberals were pitted against one another in a fierce electoral battle in July.119 In Bolton, the celebration of the queen’s coronation a year later was the last ceremonial act in honour of the Crown that was organized by the old municipal corporation controlled by the Conservatives. The day passed quite harmoniously with the widespread participation of the population and a large procession of all the local associations, including those of the trades. Yet Conservative politicians could not refrain from emphasizing their interpretation of such celebrations in the press, at the ceremonial events and at the meetings of the Conservative Associations. They maintained that the general harmony, the lack of squabbling between the parties and the coronation itself were an expression of the genuine bond between the English people and the principles of the monarchy; the celebrations as such were also a demonstration along the lines of a conservative variant of popular constitutionalism.120 Not surprisingly, the political parties in Bolton were not able to agree on joint celebrations in the years that followed. After the Conservatives boycotted the first election for the new city council after the municipal reform in the autumn of 1838, Liberal politicians took over responsibility for the official ceremonial festivities in the city for the first time in May 1839. The Liberals did not hold a parade and they generally left the planning of the festivities to the churches, schools and troops stationed in the city. In the evening, the Conservative and Liberal gentlemen of the city attended separate banquets at which both parties heavily criticized the other. Shortly after the Bedchamber Crisis, the assemblies of the Operative Conservative Associations in Bolton also became a venue for hefty polemics aimed against the Liberal pandering to the Crown.121 In the years thereafter, no official celebrations with the involvement of the people took place; the festivities were limited to party

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events until after 1845, when the Conservatives ended their boycott of the city council elections and were slowly able to regain enough influence in the city to make a return to celebrations like those held in the 1820s and early 1830s.122 In Leeds, too, these conflicts between Liberals and Conservatives over the royal celebrations continued well into the 1840s. After the boycott of the celebration of Victoria’s birthday in May 1837, the Conservatives also refused to take part in the local coronation celebrations a year later. Instead, they organized inexpensive festive dinners as ‘Conservative Manifestations’ in all the city’s neighbourhoods and suburbs.123 Public participation in the official municipal procession was quite high despite the new Conservative boycott, but the city leaders could not bring themselves to invest in large loyalist celebrations that were ultimately detrimental their own cause. Beginning in 1839, the festivities in honour of royal holidays were kept to a minimum, despite the protests coming from the Conservative side. What remained both prominent and popular was the annual march of the troops stationed in Leeds through the city who, accompanied by a great crowd of locals, fired off a gun salute to celebrate the queen’s birthday in the city park. Of course, this element of the festivities was beyond the control of the Liberal-dominated city council.124 In sum, a look at Bolton and Leeds as well as the other cities of the West Riding reveals the great extent to which the celebrations of the monarchy were integrated within local political contests over the proper understanding of the Crown, loyalism and patriotism. The fights over symbols and the struggles to dominate the preparations and control the planning of the celebrations were tightly intertwined with the competing notions of the constitution that appeared in political assemblies and on the hustings to generate broad public support for the respective party cause. As local politics were more consolidated along party lines following the Reform Act of 1832, the celebrations of the royal holidays became ever more clearly associated with Conservative notions and convictions. Over the course of the 1820s, Liberals and Radicals had also demonstrated their critical stance on the monarchy in general and individual monarchs in particular in a symbolic way within the context of these celebrations. Consequently, they found themselves largely unable to use their growing political power in the cities and electoral campaigns to appropriate the existing loyalist traditions associated with royal celebrations, as well as conservative notions of the Crown in general, for their own cause. As the crown passed from William IV to Victoria, the Liberals did indeed try to present the young queen as a party sympathizer. Yet rather than continuing with the tradition of the celebrations of the Crown in the face of the Conservative protests and boycotts, the Liberals reduced the festivities to a minimum. In doing so, they avoided a symbolic conflict over loyalism and the monarchy that might have aided and abetted Conservatives in the end. Furthermore, given the immense popularity of the celebrations over the years, which was continually attested to by the great number of spectators and

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enthusiastic participants regardless of which party had organized the events, it was hardly necessary for the political parties to anchor ideas of loyalism and patriotism among the general public. Rather, political actors tried to establish symbolic control over the celebrations and to link their own political perspective to the already widespread loyalism and patriotism found on the streets; they were, in a sense, reacting to popular opinion from below. Around 1837, the Liberals did not really celebrate Victoria as a new proponent of Liberal politics; they sought to use the political sympathies for the young queen, who was incredibly popular thanks to her position as queen as well as the popularity of the Crown in general, to present the Liberals as the party of the Crown in order to gain popular support. The massive failure of these Liberal strategies shows, on the one hand, that the feelings of loyalism that existed up and down the social ladder could not be easily linked to Liberal politics over the long term. On the other hand, it clarifies why the Conservatives were relatively successful with their discourse of popular constitutionalism and their notions of loyalism and patriotism. After all, it was the Conservatives who appropriated the loyalist traditions already anchored within society and propagated values and notions that had been significantly popular for a long time in the ballroom as well as on the streets.

National Elements and Local Differences Whereas the celebrations of the monarchy in Leeds and Bolton at the end of the 1830s were rife with conflicts between local party organizations, the presence of the royal court in London as well as the long-lasting, unchallenged dominance of the Liberals in different boroughs of the city prevented the emergence of party conflicts over official Crown celebrations in the capital. Regardless of the mocking comments of prominent contemporaries regarding the coronation ceremony and the English inability to celebrate such festivities with pomp and circumstance, hundreds of thousands of Londoners took to the streets to catch a glimpse of the royal family or excitedly follow the events of the official celebrations.125 The public proclamation of the new queen in all corners of London, Victoria’s first act of state to dissolve Parliament and her official visit to the City of London – indeed every official occasion tied to the royal house – attracted immense cheering crowds who demonstrated their patriotism in public spaces.126 The mobilization of such enthusiastic crowds reached a zenith at the coronation festivities at the end of June in 1838. A few million people attended the celebrations in London, but there were no signs of disapproval or criticism directed against the monarchy or the constitution coming from the masses on the streets.127 Given that it was just two months earlier that the London Working Men’s Association had formulated the democratic goals of the Chartists for the first time, effectively

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launching the fast growing movement in favour of the People’s Charter, the loyalism on the streets and the popularity of the queen celebrated across the London press scene were quite remarkable.128 Unlike in the West Riding and Bolton, the debate in London over the size and shape of the official celebrations of the Crown was limited to commentary columns in the national press and the leading circles of the parties in Parliament.129 In the discussions, two similar positions emerged as the Conservatives also complained about the Liberals’ stinginess and efforts to keep costs and symbolic extravagance to a minimum. Yet these differences did not result in mobilization strategies that spread down into the very lowest level of political conflict.130 It is important to note such differences between constituencies in order to better assess the role that a conservative variant of popular constitutionalism played in the mobilization of support among the lower classes. In all the constituencies in question, Conservative politicians were able to win support with their particular notions of the Crown, the constitution and patriotism. In so doing, they drew on the widespread loyalism among the public and the great popularity of the Crown that had developed over decades. Even outside of Bolton, Leeds and London, it is easy to find evidence that speaks to the fact that conservative positions on the fundamentals of English society echoed positively within the lower classes. In 1837, for example, it was not merely by chance that the arch-radical Brighton Patriot condemned the Tories for wooing non-voters and ‘conservative little men’ in the county of Sussex with dinners and assemblies, thereby inciting them to protest against universal suffrage and radical reforms. It also claimed that the Tories were gaining political ground by pointing to the Conservative victory in the by-election in Lewes in April where the Conservative candidate Fitzroy won the show of hands and the seat.131 Moreover, strategies that had proved their worth in the north of England in campaigns and Operative Conservative Associations were also successfully implemented in the far south of the country, even if they did not leave their mark in the form of newly established Operative Conservative Associations. The speeches and arguments used in Sussex and documented in detail in the local conservative press did not differ from the conservative rhetoric in the northern industrial cities.132 Likewise, party conflicts over the proper understanding of loyalism and the monarchy were also prevalent outside Bolton and Leeds. In south-west England, for example, the Conservatives met with success in Devon as the Bedchamber Crisis reached its climax. They were able to turn public opinion in a county assembly that had been called by the Liberals. Rather than sending the planned statement addressed to the queen to thank her for her support of the Liberal government, the majority of the huge assembly voted in favour of a Conservative statement that failed to mention the crisis at all.133 Events such as these clearly indicate that the Conservatives were able to win support across much of England and among all the classes with their talk of Crown and constitution.

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Nevertheless, the ability of the Conservatives to successfully mobilize support among the lower classes remained highly dependent on local circumstances. The political coherence of the local Conservative elites, the influence of parliamentary debates in Westminster and the success of liberal and radical counter-movements played into this dynamic. A look at the different paths that the Operative Conservative Associations followed during the phase of their greatest success, at the end of the 1830s and beginning of the 1840s, reveals how developments on the national as well as the local level were equally important. The striking lack of Operative Conservative Associations in the London area, for example, can be explained by the particular nature of the local political public in the metropolis. In London, as opposed to smaller cities, there was no clearly distinguishable city leader or defined administrative structures for the city as a whole. Rather, London was home to a complex conglomeration of competing centres of power, with bodies such as the Court of Common Council chaired by the Lord Mayor in the City of London, the court in Westminster, the national Parliament, diverse administrative bodies presiding over other boroughs and the local Anglican parishes. Consequently, the establishment of local party organizations below the national parliamentary level was quite difficult.134 Eventually, Conservative and Liberal associations were formed along the lines of the parliamentary constituencies in London that operated in lieu of the old election committees for specific candidates.135 For Conservatives, this process took place in London much later than in other cities, partly due to the fact that they had very little hope for an election victory because the Liberals were so dominant in the 1830s. At the same time, the extra-parliamentary reform movements on the liberal and radical side as well as the political unions of reformers around 1832 and the Chartist associations also had great difficulty in establishing effective local organizations in London.136 Moreover, the politics of London could hardly be kept apart from the politics of the national stage. Especially within the Conservative camp, parliamentary party leaders and the Carlton Club controlled the organizational efforts taking place at political levels below that of Parliament. Among these circles, however, there was was a great deal of scepticism when it came to involving workers and others from the lower classes in Conservative associations. Episodes of political unrest and radical demonstrations had repeatedly inspired a fear of revolutionary subversion as well as a mistrust of the irrationality and uncontrollability of the crowds on the street among the party leaders.137 For this reason, a Conservative establishment that sought followers from beyond the actual electorate and which depended on support from ‘the people’ was lacking in London. Correspondingly, there were no initiatives to found Operative Conservative Associations coming ‘from above’ in the capital. In contrast, the prerequisites for initiatives to establish such organizations ‘from below’ were at least partially in place. The long-time Radical spokesman

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and MP for the constituency of Westminster, Sir Francis Burdett, for example, was able to raise considerable support for his new conservative constitutional rhetoric following his move into the ranks of the Conservatives in 1837 as seen in the well-attended events he organized during the election as well as his success in the show of hands.138 His election victory in early 1837 made him a popular favourite among the Operative Conservative Associations. Moreover, his success was celebrated enthusiastically by thousands of operatives during his highly staged tour of Leeds, Manchester, Salford, Huddersfield, Stockport, Liverpool and London.139 However, he was not able to use his popularity across the country to help pave the way for the spread of workers’ associations to London, especially because there was a lack of willingness to provide the necessary financial means in London.140 Furthermore, even in the constituencies in which Operative Conservative Associations were established in the 1830s, the further development of these organizations remained highly dependent on specific local circumstances. This became quite clear in Leeds and Bolton in the 1840s as the associations faced pressure coming from two sides. On the one hand, the political conflicts in both cities intensified as the Chartist movement reached its zenith and the Anti-Corn Law League spurred popular agitation against the duties on corn. The powerful mobilization of social groups from among the lower classes in favour of universal suffrage as well as against the protectionist duties and taxes initially presented the Operative Conservative Associations with a challenge because it popularized political reforms that were spurned by Conservatives. At the same time, associational structures and political milieus emerged out of these movements. While they could not offer the same combination of socialization, social support and patronage at a local level as the Conservative associations, these organizations nonetheless offered a strong sense of social integration with a clear political identity. Furthermore, Chartist agitation in 1838 and 1839 initially led to an intensification of activities among the Conservative operatives and mobilized popular support in favour of conservative notions of the constitution that differed entirely from those of the Chartists. As the second wave of Chartism peaked in the summer of 1842, it became clear that the path that had led many radicals into the Conservative camp in the 1830s was by no means just a one-way street. In Bolton as well as in Leeds, for instance, there were clear signs that the operative organizations had lost support and had to make an effort to relaunch themselves in 1842 and 1843.141 During this time, hefty conflicts within the party, which had plagued the Conservatives since they had taken over the government in 1841, began to take their toll. Peel’s careful approach as prime minister, which avoided a clear break with Liberal reform politics and was slowly leading to the acceptance of a repeal of the Corn Laws, was destined to divide a party that traditionally represented the protectionist interests of the still-influential landed aristocracy and a right-wing fraction with decidedly anti-Liberal politics; indeed, the far right of

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the party continued to reject all the important social and economic changes that had taken place over the last decades, including the emancipation of the Catholics, suffrage reform and the rise of the industrial middle class.142 At a local level, these national conflicts played out in very different ways in Bolton and Leeds. As in many other cities, the Operative Conservative Association in Leeds did not survive the inner tensions that plagued the party in the mid 1840s. The specific details of why it collapsed remain unclear. Generally speaking, as was the case all over the country, the party in Leeds was quarrelling over the question of the Corn Laws in 1846. Unlike in other cities, however, internal struggles within the Liberal camp prevented the Conservatives from losing their political influence in the city as well as with their hold over the parliamentary seats.143 The Conservative establishment in Leeds was dominated by the supporters of the long-time MP William Beckett who had sided with the protectionists under Stanley as the party split and who was re-elected in 1847. Despite this factor, the Conservatives were unable to hinder the disintegration of local organizational structures. In 1852, Beckett declined to run in the election, as the Conservative Association was no longer a viable actor on the political stage. In the end, it was only the last-minute unsuccessful candidacies of two men from the free-trade fraction that prevented Leeds from going without a Conservative candidate on the hustings for the first time.144 It is also quite likely that the Operative Conservative Association lacked the funds it needed, even prior to the actual split in 1846, as a result of the tensions within the party. The last references to the existence of the Operative Association date to early 1843. At this point in time, Conservative workers, just like the rest of the party, were deliberating over the duties on corn. It seems that even a broad commitment to constitutionalism could not keep the members of the association in Leeds from getting caught up in the wake of the conflicts within the party at the same time that they lost their financial foundation. The first attempts to revive the organization came in 1851, but they were never able to move beyond an initial meeting.145 In Bolton, the associational structures for lower-class Conservatives proved to be much more stable. Although the Operative Conservative Association lost a great deal of support around 1846 and appears only to have survived for a few years in a suburb of the city, the crisis of the party had less of an impact on the Conservative milieu in Bolton because the city’s leading politicians had already adopted a moderate stance on free trade and demanded a decrease in corn duties in the 1830s. Consequently, it was relatively easy for the Conservative MP William Bolling to support the new politics of Peel’s government in 1846 without having to openly contradict his earlier position.146 Moreover, the party had dominated all the municipal governing bodies since 1841 and celebrated impressive victories in the annual local elections, not the least because of the support of Conservative workers. Some former leading members of the

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Operative Conservative Association were even able to make their way onto the city council.147 Despite these developments, the Operative Conservative Association in Bolton also disappeared from the columns of the local press in the mid 1840s. However, the association had already been revived in 1848, and it remained an important pillar of Conservative politics in the city until it was replaced by a Conservative Working Men’s Association in 1890.148 Unlike Leeds and London, Bolton thus had a stable organizational foundation over the decades that made it possible for the local Conservatives to pull supporters from the lower classes into local political conflicts with their notions of popular constitutionalism. But even in places where such organizational continuity was lacking, elements of conservative constitutionalism can still be detected well into the 1860s. In Leeds, for example, Conservative politicians could be found atop hustings in the 1850s who vehemently opposed revolutionary changes while expressing old conservative fears about secret ballots and universal suffrage.149 The fact that the speeches of Robert Hall and George Skirrow Beecroft in the elections of 1857 and 1859 sounded much more reticent than those sharp attacks that Conservative candidates had launched at liberal and radical ideas of the constitution in earlier decades had a lot to do with the continued dominance of a Conservative faction in Leeds after 1852 that had followed Robert Peel’s lead in 1846 and positioned itself between the fronts of traditional Conservatives on the one side and right-wing Liberals on the other.150 At the same time, the Liberals, under the leadership of Lord Palmerston and influenced by the revival of patriotic and nationalist sentiments during the Crimean War, moved towards a stance on the constitution that hardly differed from that of conservative constitutionalism.151 In 1857, it was the Liberal candidate M.T. Baines in Leeds who celebrated the English constitution as the best ever in the world and only advocated for cautious reforms. His opponents on the Conservative side praised Palmerston’s foreign policy and supported his patriotism. They also joined in his defence of the ‘honour of the British flag’ in the China War, the critical reception of which in Parliament had led to the dissolution of the House of Commons and new elections. During the show of hands before the hustings, the crowd supported both of these candidates as opposed to the more traditionally Liberal politics of John Remington Mills.152 The infiltration of conservative constitutional rhetoric into Liberal ranks demonstrates just how much the related ideas of society and conservative patriotism could be used to win supporters from across the social spectrum. More so than elections and party slogans, the large celebrations of victory and peace at the end of the Crimean War clearly indicated that a kind of patriotism and loyalism symbolically reminiscent of traditional Crown celebrations – and thus far away from the protest or reform-oriented tones of liberal patriotism in the first half of the nineteenth century – could still mobilize broad swathes of English society. The fall of Sevastopol in September 1855 was greeted by great

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cheers across the country, leading to spontaneous and exuberant celebrations in many cities. The Leeds Intelligencer reported huge crowds assembled on the streets over several days, accompanied by fireworks, ringing bells and thousands of banners and flags gracing the city, to honour the victorious troops and celebrate Britain’s victory. It expressly emphasized the enthusiastic participation of the lower classes. Bands paraded through the crowded streets, playing the wellknown repertoire of patriotic songs; the national anthem was sung repeatedly. ‘Victory’ and ‘Victoria’ were coupled and the cheers for the successful siege of the Russian city could not be distinguished from the cheers for the queen, the monarchy and the English constitution. Just a few days after word had come from the Crimean Peninsula, festive illuminations as well as a number of special services in all the churches and parishes marked the end of the celebrations. In sermons reproduced in detail, clergymen of different confessions justified the war as a necessary defence of Christian values and British civilization against barbaric aggressors. They attributed the victory in part to the piety of the nation and the close link between Church and State that distinguished Great Britain.153 Large celebrations related to the Crimean War also took place again after peace was made in May 1856. As these festivities were combined with the usual celebrations in honour of Queen Victoria’s birthday, they were quite elaborate, with especially long parades of the city government as well as all the clubs and associations.154 As some of the victorious troops returned to the barracks in Leeds in July 1856, great crowds once again assembled to celebrate their homecoming.155 The celebrations in London hardly differed from those in Leeds. The conservative and liberal papers reported similarly on the enthusiasm on the streets, noting that they were overwhelmed by the general patriotic attitude that prevailed.156 As in the West Riding in May 1856, some isolated attempts were made by Radical groups to capitalize on the celebratory mood in order to draw on another patriotic tradition and raise demands for social reforms. In light of the generally festive mood of the masses on the streets, however, the protests of some Chartists, like those in Halifax, were very marginal.157 The close link between the military and the Crown in the celebrations of the end of the Crimean War was by no means a new development. Military elements such as gun salutes and parading troops were not only a natural element of court ceremonial in London, but they had also been an essential component of the celebrations of the monarchy in Bolton and Leeds for decades. But even outside of official Crown celebrations, public appearances of the military constantly attracted large crowds. Events such as military reviews, the inauguration of new warships or public demonstrations of manoeuvres were not only a military spectacle, but also symbolic representations of national strength, patriotism within the army, and most especially, the loyal support of the troops for the Crown.158 A few years after the Crimean War, this tradition reached its zenith in the wake of the establishment of new military volunteer associations. The widespread

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fear of a French invasion following the deterioration of Anglo-French relations after the Crimean War led to the creation of the volunteer troops in 1859. The hesitant Liberal government found itself under intense public pressure to permit the formation of armed local militias and watched these organizations pop up across the country almost overnight with scepticism.159 Although direct membership in these units was mostly restricted to the petty bourgeois and the rural middle classes because of the relatively high costs for uniforms and equipment, the weekly exercises of the militias as well as their parades and manoeuvres on the streets and in the parks attracted the interest of the broader public.160 At the beginning of the 1860s, large crowds were observed in attendance at the appearances of the volunteers in Bolton; corresponding reports can be found for many other regions around the country. Without much further ado, the new troops immediately took on a prominent role in the local celebrations of the queen’s birthday. Moreover, their regional and national demonstrations of manoeuvres developed into special celebrations in which the troops demonstrated their patriotism and loyalism as well as their willingness to go into battle before tremendous crowds.161 Whereas the Grand Reviews attracted tens of thousands in northern England, the largest volunteer parade in Hyde Park, which was attended by the queen, drew a crowd of several hundred thousand spectators at the end of June in 1860. Twenty thousand volunteers from around England, Scotland and Wales marched through the park for several hours and greeted the queen while the crowds cheered. Not only was the park itself filled to the brim, but also crowds formed wherever it was possible to get a glimpse of the troops or the coaches of high-ranking visitors. The London press was generally overwhelmed by the festive mood and patriotic enthusiasm with which the masses greeted the troops and the queen.162 However, despite the close symbolic connection between the Crown and the military, the attendance of the people at military parades, victory celebrations and manoeuvres cannot simply be taken as evidence of widespread acceptance of conservative ideas of loyalism and patriotism. The joy expressed at the end of the bloody Crimean War was surely defined just as much by the relief felt for the soldiers and others involved in the war as well as pride in the accomplishments of the army and the feelings of superiority as a nation that came with victory. Likewise, the enthusiasm for the volunteer brigades at the beginning of the 1860s can be read as evidence of a widespread willingness to defend the country, but it does not necessarily directly correlate with an acceptance of the existing domestic order along conservative lines.163 However, around 1860 an extremely popular kind of patriotism was being expressed in these attitudes toward the Crown as well as in the enthusiastic support of military associations. On the one hand, it was defined in opposition to external enemies, whether it be the Russian troops in Crimea or the feared invasion of the French.164 On the other hand, it was marked by feelings of loyalty

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toward the monarchy that were no longer coupled with demands for social reforms or the idea that fundamental reforms were needed to address problems with the English constitution as well as the widespread corruption of the political system. In all of the constituencies examined, there were traces of a change following the hefty struggles over the proper understanding of the constitution and patriotism that marked the 1830s and 1840s. The fight between the parties, which filtered down into the details of the official celebrations of the king’s birthday and led to boycotts as well as counter demonstrations, was followed by a period in the mid 1850s in which Liberal and Conservative politicians influenced by Palmerston could stand on the hustings and advocate positions on the constitution that in many ways resembled the ideas that Conservatives had vehemently fought for over the years. The festivities at the end of the Crimean War and the enthusiastic support of the volunteers celebrated a British nation that was united from within and stood behind the Crown on the international stage. The monarchy found itself standing neutrally over the parties, no longer plagued by demands to support reform politics.165 At first, however, the divided Conservatives profited little as a party from these developments in the 1850s and 1860s. Yet it was not merely a coincidence that they were increasingly able to present themselves as the party of national interest around 1870. With patriotic slogans and the language of conservative constitutionalism, they were able to win a broad base of support among the lower classes that brought them unexpected victories at the ballot following the expansion of the franchise in the late nineteenth century. The transformation of the concept of patriotism between 1860 and 1870 so often observed in scholarship was not really the result of the disappearance of a kind of liberal reform patriotism and the emergence of a new aggressive and more imperially oriented conservative variant, but rather it came from a conservative victory in the long struggle over the interpretation of the Crown, the constitution and patriotism. All told, a look at the mobilizing power of conservative constitutionalism reveals that despite all the local nuances, there was a long tradition of conservative notions of the monarchy, patriotism and the fundamental structures of English society. Although the popularity of these ideas fluctuated, they could always be used to win support all the way down the social ladder. In particular, there was much continuity in the use of loyalist language that could be traced back to the eighteenth century. In the 1790s, the many pamphlets of the anti-revolutionary Reeves Associations, which circulated widely, were already putting forth positions on the Crown and constitution that hardly differed from the speeches in the Operative Conservative Associations in the 1830s. The meditations on the constitution in William Paul’s work on the history of the Operative Conservative Associations, for example, drew almost word for word on the argument propagated in 1793 in a pamphlet entitled ‘The Advantages Peculiar to a Monarchy, and the English Constitution’.166 Likewise, the stories and edifying episodes of

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Hannah More, which were incredibly popular and published by the millions in the Cheap Repository Tracts, had already brought similar ideas to the homes of many readers in the 1790s.167 This early popularization of such ideas made it easier for later loyalists to put forth their arguments. In the nineteenth century, Conservative politicians often only had to make a few references or use a few key words in order to tap into a distinctive patriotic world view in which the Crown and the nation as well as the constitution and English virtues were closely linked to the politics of the Conservative Party. The use of unchanged slogans, symbols and rituals facilitated the construction of these links. The motto ‘Church and King’ and the symbolic depiction of the Crown and sceptre as well as the singing of specific conservative songs defined the celebrations in the 1790s just as much as those in the 1850s. For many decades, the omnipresent flags and banners that created a patriotic national atmosphere for festive parades, banquets and conservative demonstrations went virtually unchanged, even when the split in the Conservative Party in 1846 made organizational continuity impossible in many constituencies. Therefore, it is not very surprising that the strongholds of the newly created Conservative Working Men’s Associations that began to appear after 1867 were located where the Operative Conservative Associations had been active in the 1830s.168 The appeal that Conservatives made to the English lower classes in the last decades of the nineteenth century rested on the foundation of a long loyalist tradition.

Notes 1. The Times, 15 November 1839. 2. D. Thompson, Queen Victoria: Gender and Power (London: Virago, 1990), 30; W.D. Rubinstein, Britain’s Century: A Political and Social History, 1815–1905 (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 1998), 68; and R. Williams, Contentious Crown, 85–86. The particular symbolic significance attached to the Ladies of the Bedchamber resulted from the close personal proximity of this circle of women to the queen. Usually, these ladies belonged to the upper aristocracy and often became close confidants of the queen. Since the queen, who had just turned twenty, was considered to be young and impressionable, the otherwise rather incidental question of the proximity of these women to the queen became a subject of public debate, prompting Peel’s request. 3. R. Williams, Contentious Crown, 83–85. 4. Campaign poster, ‘The Tory Requiem’ (1837), Bolton Local Studies Library, Bolton City Council Records, Cuttings Books, ZZ 360; Bolton Chronicle, 29 July 1837. 5. The Times, 15 November 1839. 6. On the debate over the significance of the electoral reforms of 1832 on the organizational development of the parties, see primarily P. Salmon, Electoral Reform at Work: Local Politics and National Parties, 1832–1841 (London: Boydell Press, 2002). 7. Walsh, ‘Working Class Political Integration’, ch. 11; idem, ‘Conservative Party Organisation’. Walsh divides the topics of the associations into ‘working-class issues’ and ‘middle-class issues’,

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but never provides any evidence for this interpretation; see ‘Working Class Political Integration’, 402–3 8. Numerous events of the Operative Conservative Associations across much of the country could be reconstructed through reports from the local newspapers for the constituencies in question as well as The Times of London. 9. Leeds Intelligencer, 10 February 1838. 10. On the concrete stipulations and the practical execution of the Reform Acts in the constituencies, see Salmon, Electoral Reform. 11. The extent to which the Reform Act of 1832 represented a profound caesura for the English political system has been controversially debated by scholars. The significance of the rather cautious expansion of the suffrage and the depth of the break with the political structures as they were before the reform, for example, are quite contested. Whereas J.D.C. Clark, English Society, portrays the law as an important step toward the end of the English ancien régime, F. O’Gorman emphasizes the lines of continuity that extended beyond 1832 by looking at the course of the elections and the symbolic forms that came into play; see O’Gorman, Voters; and idem, ‘Campaign Rituals and Ceremonies: The Social Meaning of Elections in England, 1780–1860’, Past and Present 135 (1992), 79–115. In contrast, J.A. Phillips and C. Wetherell have stressed the strongly modernizing aspects of the acts in their studies on the development of the parties and voting behaviour. They see the reform of 1832, with its effects on the organization of the parties and the tighter ties between voters and the parties as the beginning of the two-party system in Great Britain; see J.A. Phillips, The Great Reform Act in the Boroughs: English Electoral Behaviour, 1818–1841 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992); J.A. Phillips and C. Wetherell, ‘Parliamentary Parties and Municipal Politics: 1835 and the Party System’, Parliamentary History 13 (1994), 48–85; and eidem, ‘The Great Reform Act of 1832 and Political Modernization of England’, American Historical Review 100 (1995), 411–36. In recent years, works such as Salmon, Electoral Reform, and the contributions in J. Lawrence and M. Taylor (eds), Party, State and Society: Electoral Behaviour in Britain since 1820 (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1997), indicate a consensus has emerged that puts more emphasis again on the changes brought to the system by the reforms of 1832. See also Harling, ‘Equipoise Regained’. 12. A few constituencies had associations prior to 1830. See Hill, Toryism, 32–70; N. Gash, ‘F.R. Bonham: Conservative “Political Secretary”, 1832–1847’, English Historical Review 63 (1948), 502–22; idem, Age of Peel, 393–427; idem, ‘The Organization of the Conservative Party, 1832–1846’, Part I, Parliamentary History 1 (1982), 137–59; idem, ‘The Organization of the Conservative Party, 1832–1846’, Part II, Parliamentary History 2 (1983), 131–52; C. Petrie, The Carlton Club (London: Carlton Club, 1955); G.B. Kent, ‘The Beginnings of Party Political Organization in Staffordshire, 1832–1841’, North Staffordshire Journal of Field Studies 1 (1961), 86–100; Stewart, Foundation, esp. ch. 7; Walsh, ‘Working Class Political Integration’, ch. 5; and Cragoe, ‘Great Reform Act’. 13. The terms ‘tradesman’ and ‘operative’ are quite imprecise and cannot be taken as an indication that the members strictly came from a certain class. Although semantically speaking, the term ‘operatives’ was associated with descriptions like ‘humbler classes’, ‘lower classes’ or ‘working classes’, it could also indicate something akin to the ‘industrious classes’ crossing all social groups, ranging from the unskilled worker to a banker. For the most part, the term was used to describe a milieu comprised of workers, craftsmen and simple clerks. Likewise, the term ‘tradesman’ could also be used for craftsmen and skilled workers. On the complex nature of such labels based on occupations in the nineteenth century, see W.A. Armstrong, ‘The Use of Information about Occupation’, in E.A. Wrigley (ed.), Nineteenth Century Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972), 191–310; and G. Crossick, ‘From Gentleman to the Residuum: Languages of Social Descriptions in Victorian Britain’, in P.J. Corfield (ed.), Language, History and Class (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 150–78.

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14. The social composition of the membership cannot be reconstructed with precision. Walsh, ‘Working Class Political Integration’, ch. 6, 10, only found detailed information for some of the leading members of the association in Blackburn, an industrial city in northern England comparable to Leeds and Bolton, whose membership was about three hundred in the late 1830s and around four hundred in the 1840s. The leading committee of the association had twenty members; these included textile workers (weavers and spinners) or small, sometimes self-employed craftsmen in the textile industry (drapers, clothiers, cloth finishers, cotton manufacturers) as well as cobblers, hatters and joiners. Some of them came from higher up the social ladder, describing themselves as the clerk of a solicitor, a bookbinder, a grocer, a schoolmaster and a quarry owner. If it is assumed that the accusations made by liberal newspapers that workers in the Conservative associations would run behind their foremen reveal that normal members were lower on the social ladder than members of the committee, then a fairly clear picture emerges of the simple social background of the members of the association in general. Interestingly, the committee members in Blackburn experienced a rise in social status over the years. While the only member with the right to vote in 1837 was the bookbinder, this number rose to fourteen of the twenty members of the committee (whose membership had only changed slightly) in the 1840s. Similarly, Henry Kenyon, Jr, the long-time secretary of the association, at first worked as a power-loom operative in a factory before becoming a solicitor’s clerk. He later became president of the Blackburn Operative Conservative Association. 15. There were voters from the lower classes in cities that were defined as a constituency prior to 1832. Before 1832, suffrage was regulated locally in the boroughs. The individual regulations varied greatly from place to place. In many boroughs, most of the (male) craftsmen and workers qualified to vote. The Reform Act cancelled the local regulations, but it did not strip any voter of the right to vote who could do so before the reform as long as he continued to fulfil the old qualifications. Therefore, the parties initially continued to contend for voters from the middle and lower classes in a few boroughs after 1832; the number of such voters, however, declined over the years. The relative success of the Conservatives can be seen in the election results in the forty-seven boroughs in which workers and craftsmen comprised over a third of the electorate. In 1832, Conservative candidates only won 22 per cent of the vote in these boroughs, whereas in the years after 1835, they won more than 50 per cent of the votes (1835: 51 per cent; 1837: 53 per cent; 1841: 57 per cent). See H.B. Raymond, Jr, ‘English Political Parties and Electoral Organization, 1832–1867’, PhD dissertation, Harvard University, 1952, 189, as quoted in Salmon, Electoral Reform, 66. 16. On the activities of the Operative Conservative Associations in general, see the history of the association in W. Paul, A History of the Origins and Progress of Operative Conservative Societies (Leeds: R. Perring, 1839), a pamphlet from the association in Leeds. 17. See Hill, Toryism, 55–56; Walsh, ‘Working Class Political Integration’, 230; and Salmon, Electoral Reform, 69. 18. A typical report in The Times, 23 January 1836, for example, described the opening of reading rooms in Manchester, Bolton, Wigan and Pilkington with sympathetic astonishment. The reading materials available included all important conservative newspapers and journals (The Times, Post, Standard, John Bull, The Age and Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine) as well as the conservative provincial papers (Manchester Courier, Liverpool Standard, Leeds Intelligencer and Bolton Chronicle). 19. Hardly any records about the daily activities of the associations still exist; only a minute book of the Operative Conservative Society in Bradford for 1837–1839 could be located, which attests to the quite frequent meetings of the committee and quarterly assemblies of all members: Bradford Operative Conservative Society Minute Book, Bradford Archive, Deed Box 4, case 1, no. 3. Reports for other associations sometimes speak of weekly or bi-weekly meetings and occasionally monthly or quarterly assemblies. See, for example, Paul, History; Leeds

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Intelligencer, 26 May 1838 and 29 December 1838. During electoral campaigns, the activities were often even more frequent, as documented, for example, in the Ten Towns’ Messenger, 1841, in the months leading up to the election at the end of June, in which almost every issue reported on the activities of the Operative Conservatives in Kidderminster. In contrast to the argument put forth by Walsh, ‘Working Class Political Integration’, 227, the frequent meetings in smaller circles held in some places rather seem to indicate that the normal members of the individual associations must have been much more independent than their relatively passive role at the annual dinners seemed to indicate. 20. See, for example, The Times, 23 April 1838, on the ‘Salford Operative Conservative Ball’; Leeds Intelligencer, 5 May 1838. 21. In 1835, associations were founded in Leeds, Manchester, Salford, Liverpool, Bolton, Warrington, Oldham, Ashton-under-Lyne, Middleton, St Helens, Blackrod, Pilkington, Stockport, Lees, Bradford, Barnsley, Sheffield, Ripon, Wakefield, Huddersfield, Blackburn and Darwen; Horwich, Atherton, Chadderton, Wigan, Rochdale, Bury, Chorley and Preston followed in 1836. The subordinate associations in the surrounding villages and suburbs of Leeds and Manchester are not included in the count. The dates of establishment given for some associations are not always the same; my count is based on the lists in Paul, History, 26–28; and Bolton Chronicle, 12 November 1836. Walsh, ‘Working Class Political Integration’, ch. 6, cites slightly different numbers. 22. The Times, 3 August 1836 and 5 December 1838; Ten Towns’ Messenger, 28 May 1841. On the regional expansion, see Hill, Toryism, 47–49; N. Gash, ‘Organization’, parts I and II; and Salmon, Electoral Reform, 66. 23. See the reports on the establishment of an association in the following cities: Limerick in The Times, 13 November 1837; Cork in The Times, 17 January 1837. See also the report of a meeting of the Operative Conservatives in Dublin, The Times, 24 January 1842. The development of an Operative Conservative Association in Glasgow has been examined in J.T. Ward, ‘Some Aspects of Working Class Conservatism in the Nineteenth Century’, in J. Butt and J.T. Ward (eds), Scottish Themes: Essays in Honour of Professor S.G.E. Lythe (Edinburgh: Scottish Academic Press, 1976), 141–57. 24. Especially in Lancashire, the establishment of associations seems to have been sponsored centrally. In mid 1836, the barrister Charles Wilkins was appointed as a regional organizer tasked with the establishment of additional associations. See Walsh, ‘Working Class Political Integration’, 211–13. 25. In July 1835, Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, for example, pleaded for the establishment of Operative Conservative Associations across the board and the integration of the lower classes; see Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine, July 1835, 618. Some correspondence between the party leadership hints that there was some interest in expanding support for the party among conservative workers, but no evidence points to the direct involvement of the party leadership in the establishment of Operative Conservative Associations. See Walsh, ‘Working Class Political Integration’; and idem, ‘Conservative Party Organisation’, which falsely attribute a letter from Cavie Richardson, one of the founders of the association in Leeds, addressed to Peel about the establishment of the association, to Feilden, the prominent manufacturer and MP from Blackburn, and interprets it as evidence that those high up in the party were interested in the mobilization of workers; Letter from Richardson to Peel, 26 March 1835, British Library, Peel Papers, Add. 40418, 172 ff.; Letter from Arbuthnot to Herries, undated 1834, on the possibilities for influencing public opinion in the areas around Leeds and Manchester through press and pamphlets; British Library, Herries Papers, Add. 57371, 98 ff. There are also no indications of this in the correspondence of the unofficial party organizer Francis Bonham; British Library, Peel Papers, Add. 40616, 40617. 26. Bolton Chronicle, 12 November 1836.

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27. Salmon, Electoral Reform, 66–69. In 1836 in Bolton, the Liberal politician Robert Heywood complained about the size of the Operative Conservative Association whose membership of about four hundred was much higher than that of the of the Reform Association with its hundred members. See Letter from Robert Heywood to James Coppock, undated [ca. end of December/beginning of January 1836], Bolton Local Studies Library, Heywood papers, ZHE 26/3/110. In Kidderminster, too, the number of Conservative operatives in 1841 was considerably larger than that of those organized in Chartist associations. See Ten Towns’ Messenger, 28 May 1841. 28. The membership fees varied from club to club. In a few exceptional cases, membership was free, but mostly the fees ranged from one to two shillings per year. In Bradford, for example, membership cost six pence per quarter, which adds up to an annual fee of two shillings; the unemployed, however, were explicitly exempt from paying membership. See ‘Rules and Regulations of the Bradford Operatives’ Conservative Society’, Bradford Archive, Deed Box 16, case 22, no. 24. See also The Times, 5 December 1838 and 30 December 1839. In light of average wages of the time, membership fees were quite substantial, especially if the additional monthly payments for the health and death benefits of the associations are taken into account. For example, around 1840, a fully employed weaver in the West Riding earned a maximum of twelve shillings per week, whereas the wages paid to unskilled workers or those in spinning mills were even lower. See A.J. Brooke, ‘The Social and Political Response to Industrialisation in the Huddersfield Area, c. 1790–1850’, PhD dissertation, University of Manchester, 1988, 116–19 and Appendix I. 29. See the estimates in Walsh, ‘Working Class Political Integration’; and Salmon, Electoral Reform. In contrast, see R.A. Sykes, ‘Popular Politics and Trade Unionism in South-East Lancashire, 1829–1842’, PhD dissertation, University of Manchester, 1982; Kirk, Change; P. Taylor, Popular Politics; and B.D.A. Lewis, The Middlemost and the Milltowns: Bourgeois Culture and Politics in Early Industrial England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). Like many other English historians, these scholars base their conclusions about Conservatism among the lower classes too heavily on the anti-Conservative attacks coming from the liberal and radical press. 30. Examples of Liberal accusations made against Conservative workers and the pressure exerted by factory owners can be found, for example, in the Bolton Free Press, 29 October 1836, 5 November 1836 and 19 November 1836. For similar attacks, see Halifax Express, 15 April 1837; Leeds Mercury, 29 April 1837 and 16 April 1842. Paul, History, 7–8 (quote), on the other hand, paints the emergence of Operative Conservative Associations as the expression of Conservative and anti-radical convictions among ordinary workers. 31. Horwich Operative Conservative Association, Horwich Operative Association First Annual Dinner, 1836 (Bolton: n. p., 1836), cited in P. Taylor, Popular Politics, 67. 32. P. Joyce, Work, ch. 4–6. 33. For an analysis of the political convictions of employers in Bolton, see P. Taylor, Popular Politics, 67. 34. Events from all the Operative Associations in the Leeds area were taken into account, especially those in the suburbs of Pudsey and Bramley as well as neighbouring Huddersfield. 35. See the account of the establishment of the association in Paul, History. The founding members named were the ‘operatives’ William Paul, William Beckett and Cavie Richardson. According to the Leeds Times, 29 September 1838, William Paul was a worker in the flax spinning mill belonging to the Tories Hives and Atkinson, and he also worked as a teacher at a Sunday school. He earned about ₤10 a year and could vote in the election in 1837; in 1838 he was struck from the voters’ list because he no longer met the financial qualifications. William Beckett was likely the brother of John Beckett, a reporter for the Leeds Intelligencer whose editor, Robert Perring, supported the operatives’ association; see Fraser, ‘Politics in Leeds’. Cavie Richardson was an activist in the early factory movement and, as a close confidant of Richard

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Oastler, he was employed by the West Riding Central Short Time Committee in Leeds at the beginning of the 1830s. His social background remains somewhat unclear. Around 1830, he apparently worked as a hosier; in 1834, a bookshop owner and a teacher with his name are listed in the Leeds address directory. At no point in time did he have the right to vote. Moreover, in 1831, he was attacked in the Leeds Mercury, 24 December 1831 and 31 December 1831, as a ‘supposed Methodist local preacher’. See the Letter to C. Richardson from 1833 in Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic History, Richard Oastler Collection, Bd. 2, Pamphlet 9: 19; W. Parson and W. White, Directory of the Borough of Leeds, the City of York, and the Clothing District of Yorkshire (Leeds: Edward Baines and Son, 1830); E.A. Baines, General and Commercial Directory of the Borough of Leeds, etc. (Leeds: Baines and Newsome, 1834). Beckett later served as the president of the association and Paul was the secretary for many years, but Richardson left Leeds in 1836. 36. Leeds Intelligencer, 5 March 1836 and 9 April 1836. Alongside Beckett, especially Robert Hall and Thomas Blayds supported the association. 37. First Annual Report of the Leeds Operative Conservative Society, Leeds, 1 March 1836. Printed in Paul, History, 10–11. The whole paragraph reads as follows: ‘What, then, is the duty of the members of the Leeds Operative Conservative Society? Not to grow cold, lukewarm or indifferent in the cause of loyalty, or to suffer themselves to be lulled into a criminal apathy, because the sun of prosperity gilds their [Whig-Radicals] path, and victory places its laurels on their brows. No, this circumstance ought to prompt to increasing action, and invigorate us forward in our constitutional career. Duty prompts, zeal animates, ambition fires. Truth, justice, independence, loyalty, and patriotism, all summon us to fight the battle of the Constitution. We have entered the lists, we have buckled on the armour. Our motto is “onward”; our watchword is “Persevere”. Past success animates our present position, while future prospects irresistably impel us forward, and all conspire to proclaim us a final and undisputed triumph.’ 38. Leeds Intelligencer, 22 April 1837 (banner and speech of Col. Tempest). See also the dinner in Bramley near Leeds as described in Leeds Intelligencer, 20 May 1837 (banner and speech of Rev. Furbank); dinner in Leeds on 16 April 1842 (speech by Mr Hall). 39. See Leeds Intelligencer, 1 April 1837 (quote from the speech by Mr Bond), 22 April 1837, 20 May 1837 and 6 June 1840 (speech by Rev. Jenkins). 40. See, for example, Leeds Intelligencer, 22 April 1837 (letter read aloud from Col. Tempest) and 5 May 1838 (speech by Rev. Jenkins). 41. See, for example, Leeds Intelligencer, 1 April 1837 (speeches by Mr Cariss and Mr Bond), 22 April 1837 (speech by Col. Tempest), 20 May 1837 (letter read aloud from Col. Tempest) and 23 October 1841 (speech by Mr Eggleston). 42. Paul, History, 17–20; Leeds Intelligencer, 5 May 1838, especially the song by Mr William Mathews entitled ‘The Political Ass’; see also the report from 6 June 1840 (speech by Mr Farrar). 43. Paul, History, 16: ‘They are opposed to all dogmas which are trumpeted forth by a certain class of political empirics, viz. Vote by Ballot, Household Suffrage, and Annual Parliaments, &c., believing that the adoption of these measures would, so far from tending to produce the real welfare of the country, lead to a train of national evils the most woeful and lasting in their consequences’. 44. Leeds Intelligencer, 27 May 1837 (speeches by Mr Barrett and Mr Bennett), 22 April 1837, 5 May 1838 and 21 August 1841 (speech by Mr Ray); see also Paul, History. 45. In early 1837, an Operative Conservative Association was founded in Pudsey, which opened a library shortly thereafter and already had over two hundred members by 1838. See Leeds Intelligencer, 22 April 1837 and 5 May 1838. 46. Leeds Intelligencer, 1 April 1837 (speech by Mr Sidney) and 21 August 1841 (speech by Mr Hall).

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47. Leeds Intelligencer, 22 April 1837. 48. See the First Annual Report of the Leeds Operative Conservative Society, March 1836, cited in Paul, History, 10–11; on the use of the term ‘destructives’ in Leeds, see Leeds Intelligencer, 28 November 1835 (speech by G.S. Bull) and 1 April 1837 (speech by Mr Bond). 49. On the role of Protestantism and the question of the disestablishment of the Anglican Church as well as the struggles surrounding the church rates, see chapter 3. 50. Leeds Intelligencer, 22 April 1837 (speech by Col. Tempest), 20 May 1837 (Letter from Col. Tempest) and 22 April 1838 (speech by Lord Wharncliffe). 51. Leeds Intelligencer, 1 April 1837 (speech by Mr Bond) and 22 April 1837 (speeches by Col. Tempest and Mr Perring). 52. Leeds Intelligencer, 22 April 1837 (speech by Col. Tempest) and 28 April 1838 (speech by Mr Dearden). 53. Leeds Intelligencer, 1 April 1838 (speech by Mr Bond). 54. Leeds Intelligencer, 28 April 1838 (speech by Mr Dearden). 55. Leeds Intelligencer, 18 April 1838 (speech by Lord Wharncliffe). 56. E.J. Evans has already pointed out the interchangeable use of ‘English’ and ‘British’ within Conservative circles in England in Evans, ‘Englishness’. 57. Leeds Intelligencer, 21 August 1841 (speech by Henry Hall). 58. Leeds Intelligencer, 22 April 1837 (speech by Col. Tempest) and 28 April 1838 (speech by Mr Dearden). 59. Leeds Intelligencer, 28 November 1835 (speech by Richard Oastler), 1 April 1837 (speech by Mr Paul), 22 April 1837 and 18 April 1838. 60. Leeds Intelligencer, 28 November 1835, 1 April 1837, 22 April 1837 and 20 May 1837. 61. Leeds Intelligencer, 1 April 1837 (speech by Mr Paul) and 20 May 1837. 62. Leeds Intelligencer, 22 April 1837. 63. See, in particular, Cunningham, ‘Language’; and Colley, Britons. 64. Leeds Intelligencer, 1 April 1837 (speech by Mr Cariss) and 28 April 1838 (speech by Francis Burdett). 65. Leeds Intelligencer, 18 April 1838 (speech by Francis Burdett). 66. Leeds Intelligencer, 1 April 1837 (speech by Mr Sidney) and 18 April 1838 (speech by Lord Maidstone). With such accusations, the speakers drew on the parliamentary debates in which Conservative MPs and commentators attacked the Liberals as ‘un-English’. See J. Parry, The Politics of Patriotism: English Liberalism, National Identity and Europe, 1830–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 129–31. 67. See, for example, Leeds Intelligencer, 28 April 1835, 22 April 1837, 4 May 1839 and 23 October 1841. 68. Leeds Intelligencer, 17 May 1832. On Baines’s role in Leeds, see also D. Fraser, ‘Edward Baines jr.’, in P. Hollis (ed.), Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), 183–209; idem, ‘The Life of Edward Baines: A Filial Biography of “The Great Liar of the North”’, Northern History 31 (1995), 208–22; M. Winstanley, ‘Researching a County History: Edwin Butterworth, Edward Baines and the History of Lancashire (1836)’, Northern History 32 (1996), 152–72; D. Thornton, ‘Mr. Mercury – A Biographical Study of Edward Baines with Special Reference to his Role as Editor, Author and Politician’, PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 1999; and idem, ‘Edward Baines, Senior (1774–1848), Provincial Journalism and Political Philosophy in Early Nineteenth-Century England’, Northern History 40 (2003), 277–97. 69. Leeds Intelligencer, 28 November 1835. 70. Leeds Intelligencer, 22 April 1837 (speech by Col. Tempest), 18 April 1838 (speech by Mr Dearden) and 28 April 1838 (speech by Mr Charlesworth).

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71. On the membership numbers in Leeds, see Leeds Intelligencer, 5 December 1840; Bolton Chronicle, 15 July 1837 and 15 November 1839. 72. See, for example, the following pamphlets from the local associations: Warrington Operative Conservative Association, Report of the Speeches at the Dinner of the Warrington Operative Association (Warrington, 1836); Rev. M.A. Gathercole, An Address to the Darlington Operative Conservative Association: Showing it to be the Real Interest of the Working Classes in General, to Unite Themselves Together in Defence of the Ancient and Excellent Institutions of the Country. Delivered at the Society’s Room, on Wednesday Evening, March 8th, 1837 (London: Sherwood, Gilbert and Piper, 1837); and H. Quin, The Corn Laws: Substance of the Proceedings at a Meeting, Held with Reference to the Attempted Anti-Agricultural Agitation at the Reading Rooms of the Hull Operative Conservative Society, on Monday, the 11th of February, 1839 (Hull: Longman and Co., 1839). 73. Leeds Intelligencer, 27 May 1837; Bolton Chronicle, 1 July 1837. The dinner was originally supposed to take place on 5 July, but it was postponed after the death of William IV until 12 July. The date had also already been moved because it was expected that elections would take place in autumn of that year – the actual ‘birthday’ of the association in Bolton was 5 November. 74. Pavilions were set up for especially large celebrations in 1837 in Bolton and in 1838 in Leeds and Salford. See Bolton Chronicle, 15 July 1837 and 21 April 1838; Leeds Intelligencer, 18 April 1838. On the rituals associated with elections in England, see F. O’Gorman, ‘Campaign Rituals’; K.T. Hoppen, ‘Grammars of Electoral Violence in Nineteenth-Century England and Ireland’, English Historical Review 109 (1994), 597–620; and Gash, Age of Peel, ch. 5 and 6. 75. In 1836, for example, parades of the association took place in Horwich near Bolton, Blackburn and Chorley. See The Times, 3 September 1836, 14 November 1836 and 24 November 1836. In December of the same year, over one thousand members paraded through Wigan; see Wigan Gazette, 30 December 1836. 76. The coat of arms of the association can be found, for example, in Paul, History. National flags, special association flags and banners were present at almost every meeting of the Operative Conservatives; the colour blue was the generally recognized symbol of the Conservative workers. The early unity in terms of the identifying colour of the Operative Conservatives is quite noteworthy because Conservative parliamentary candidates and other Conservative associations across the country did not all share the same symbolic colour palette until relatively late. See Vernon, Politics, 164–66; with reference to the disparate use of symbolic colours by the parties and candidates in the constituencies that he examines, Vernon argues for reticence when it comes to the assumption that a unified national political culture had been established early on. Contrary to Vernon, however, it was generally the case in the constituencies examined here that the Conservatives used the colour blue, the Liberals yellow or orange, and the Radicals white or green. The exception to this colour-code cited by Vernon, that of the London Radical William Newton, who campaigned in Tower Hamlets in 1852 with blue, seems to be less an expression of specific local structures than a consequence of the fact that there was hefty competition between several Radical candidates and blue was still available because there was no Conservative candidate. 77. Dickens’s ‘The Fine Old English Gentleman: New Version’ appeared for the first time on 7 August 1841 in the liberal Examiner; as cited in P.V. Allingham, ‘Charles Dickens, the Examiner, and “The Fine Old English Gentleman” (1841)’, Victorian Web, 28 July 2004, retrieved 4 February 2015 from: http://www.victorianweb.org/authors/dickens/pva/pva351.html. 78. See O’Gorman, ‘Campaign Rituals’; Hoppen, ‘Grammars’. Not every election followed this pattern; especially in rural areas, there were not always more candidates than available seats for the constituency because of the clear political power constellations or clear lines of patronage (even after the Reform Act of 1832 and the elimination of most of the rotten boroughs with only a few voters firmly under the control of influential families). Over the course of the nineteenth century, such uncontested constituencies became fewer, but even in Bolton, Liberals

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and Conservatives still agreed to share the seats in 1859 without a campaign. In such cases, the ‘election’ was over with the nomination of the candidates. 79. Numerous examples of placards and pamphlets from the election campaigns can be found in the Election Collections of the Archive in Bolton (ZZ 130 and ZZ 360), Bradford (DB 3, case 50; DB 13), Huddersfield (KC 174 and KC 380), Leeds (WYL 163 and WYL 454) as well as in the collection of the library of the Thoresby Society in Leeds (SA 2 and 22 C 1). 80. As elections in the nineteenth century did not follow a strict rhythm, but rather took place irregularly in response to political crises or the coronation of a new monarch, there were always very current issues that led to the dissolution of Parliament and then dominated the elections to come. 81. On this tradition stemming from the eighteenth century, see J.A.W. Gunn, Factions No More: Attitudes to Party in Government and Opposition in Eighteenth-Century England (London: F. Cass, 1972); J. Brewer, Party Ideology and Popular Politics at the Accession of George III (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), 55–76; and A. Hawkins, ‘“Parliamentary Government” and Victorian Political Parties, c. 1830–c. 1880’, English Historical Review 104 (1989), 638–69. 82. Leeds Intelligencer, 10 January 1835. Similar declarations of personal independence can be found for representatives of all the parties in the constituencies under consideration. 83. Vernon, Politics, 172–77. 84. The Tamworth Manifesto was Peel’s programmatic declaration as candidate for the district of Tamworth in the election of 1835 in which he became prime minister of a minority government. In the manifesto, he accepted the Reform Act of 1832 as a ‘final and irrevocable settlement’ and defined the Conservative political agenda as ‘the firm maintenance of established rights, the correction of proved abuses and the redress of real grievances’. This statement is often cited as the first Conservative Party programme. See G.M. Young (ed.) and D. Douglas (general ed.), English Historical Documents, vol. 12.1, 1833–1874 (London: Eyre and Spottiswoode, 1956), no. 52. 85. Leeds Intelligencer, 10 January 1835. 86. Ibid. 87. Bolton Chronicle, 29 July 1837. 88. Leeds Intelligencer, 31 July 1847. 89. Leeds Intelligencer, 3 July 1841. 90. Halifax Express, 6 May 1837. On the role of Tory Radicals such as Richard Oastler, see chapter 5. 91. N.D. LoPatin, Political Unions: Popular Politics and the Great Reform Act of 1832 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 155–56; and Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous, 420–22. 92. Bolton Chronicle, 15 December 1832. 93. Leeds Intelligencer, 13 December 1832. On Sadler’s politics in general, see R.B. Seeley, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of Michael Thomas Sadler (London: R.B. Seeley and W. Burnside, 1842); and K. Lawes, Paternalism and Politics: The Revival of Paternalism in Early NineteenthCentury Britain (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000). 94. John Bull, 9 December 1832; Observer, 9 December 1832 and 16 December 1832; The Times, 10–13 December 1832. 95. See, for example, the reports of the elections in Bradford, the West Riding of Yorkshire and Bolton: Leeds Intelligencer, 31 July 1847 and 14 August 1847; Bolton Chronicle, 24 July 1847 and 31 July 1847. 96. Leeds Intelligencer, 5 July 1832. On the election in Halifax in general, see E. Webster, ‘Parliamentary Elections in the Parish of Halifax 1806–1837’, Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society (1993), 43–61. 97. Bolton Chronicle, 8 December 1832.

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98. Leeds Intelligencer, 31 July 1847. On this election, see also J.A. Jowitt, ‘Parliamentary Politics in Halifax, 1832–1847’, Northern History 12 (1976), 172–201. 99. Bolton Chronicle, 25 May 1844. 100. In Bolton, the Conservatives won a seat in 1832, 1835, 1837, 1847, 1859 and 1865. In Leeds, they won a seat in 1835, 1841, 1847, 1857 and 1865. Overviews of the election results can be found in Clegg, Annals of Bolton; and J. Mayhall, The Annals and History of Leeds and Other Places in the County of York (Leeds: Joseph Johnson, 1860). 101. There were contested or close results in the show of hands in Bolton in 1832 and 1835; in 1847 and 1865, the Conservatives clearly won the open vote. In Leeds, the election was close in 1832, 1835, 1837 and 1841; a Conservative candidate won in 1847. 102 For a description of the 1837 election, see Leeds Intelligencer, 29 July 1837; and Leeds Mercury, 29 July 1837. 103. The Leeds Intelligencer counted thirty-four banners and flags with inscriptions in the parade of the Conservative candidate Sir John Beckett, sixteen of which could be subsumed under the heading of conservative popular constitutionalism: ‘The Queen, the Church and the Constitution’, ‘The Altar, the Throne and the Cottage’, ‘The Queen’s Prerogative – the People’s Rights’, ‘Our Glorious Constitution’, ‘For our Country and our Queen’, ‘Our Cause is our Country’s’, ‘England expects that every Conservative will do his duty’, ‘Victoria – Long to reign over us, happy and glorious, God save the Queen’, ‘Rally round the Throne’, ‘Order in the Land and Prosperity to the People’, ‘Church and King’, ‘Queen and Constitution’, ‘Conquer to save’, ‘Beckett and Old England for Ever’, ‘Pro Rege, Lege, Grege’, ‘The Queen, the Constitution and the Established Church’, ‘We stand firm, but not stand still’. Twelve banners advocated for Beckett personally in opposition to his opponent, either complaining that the Liberals with their two candidates sought to achieve a monopoly in the representation of the constituency or demanding an orderly and fair election: ‘Beckett a Plumper’, ‘Plump for Beckett’ (a ‘plumper’ was the term for giving only one vote for a candidate; in constituencies with two seats, the voters otherwise had two votes), ‘Yorkshire not Cornwall’ (one of the Liberal candidates came from Cornwall), ‘Beckett’, ‘A Beckett never failed us yet’, ‘Blue for Ever, No Surrender’, ‘A clear stage and no favour’, ‘Performance not Profession’, ‘Confident because honest’, ‘The Independence of Leeds’, ‘Beckett and no Deception’, ‘Down with Monopoly’, ‘The Independent Electors of Stanningley’. Five placards dealt with economic issues; concrete social issues were only addressed on two banners, which dealt with the New Poor Law: ‘Beckett the Poor Man’s Friend’, ‘Beckett and no New Poor Law’, ‘Manufactures, Commerce and Trade’, ‘The Loom, the Plough and the Sail’, and lastly, a blue banner that read ‘Trade protected, the Poor supported, and the Mechanic fully employed’ with a yellow (Liberal) reverse side reading ‘Trade neglected, the Poor imprisoned in Bastiles, and the Mechanic reduced to poverty’. 104. The vote was counted three separate times because the mayor could not discern a clear majority. Ultimately, he declared a Liberal win, to the great protest of the Conservatives, but the Leeds Intelligencer maintained that Beckett was actually ahead of the Liberal candidates. 105. On the criticism directed at Beckett for his stance on factory reform, see chapter 5. 106. Leeds Intelligencer, 23 June 1841 and 10 July 1841. In Halifax, the local Conservative candidate was even able to win the show of hands in 1841. On the election in Halifax and the relatively, if not quite properly assessed, broad popularity of the Tories there, see Jowitt, ‘Parliamentary Politics’. 107. In his classic account of Chartism in Leeds, J.F.C. Harrison argues that the failure of the Chartists in the show of hands in 1841 was due to a split between Radicals and Chartists as well as the general weakness of Chartism in Leeds after the collapse of the first phase of Chartism from 1838–1840; see J.F.C. Harrison, ‘Chartism in Leeds’, in A. Briggs (ed.), Chartist Studies (London: Macmillan, 1959), 65–98. Even if one considers the Chartists’ frequently

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108. 109. 110. 1 11. 112.

113.

114.

115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123.

cited lack of a solid foothold among the working class in Leeds, this cannot explain the defeat suffered in the show of hands in the West Riding because voters and non-voters from around the entire region, including cities like Wakefield, Bradford, Halifax and Huddersfield, where the Chartists were relatively strong, were in attendance at the hustings in the West Riding. On Chartism in West Yorkshire, see also G.R. Dalby, ‘The Chartist Movement in Halifax and District’, Transactions of the Halifax Antiquarian Society (1956), 94–111; D.G. Wright, ‘Politics and Opinion in Nineteenth-Century Bradford 1832–1880, with Special Reference to Parliamentary Elections’, PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 1966; Brooke, ‘Industrialisation’, ch. 8; and Fraser, ‘Politics and Society’. Such accusations were particularly hefty in Bolton in 1837, 1847 and 1852; see Bolton Chronicle, 29 July 1837, 31 July 1847 and 10 July 1852. Bolton Chronicle, 3 January 1835. The Times, 26 July 1837. See also the other election reports for the City of London, Lambeth, Finsbury and Westminster in The Times, 22–27 July 1837. See, for example, the speeches at the nomination cited in the Bolton Chronicle, 15 July 1865. Leeds Intelligencer, 1 June 1833, 31 May 1834 and 30 May 1835; Bolton Chronicle, 1 June 1833, 31 May 1834, 30 May 1835 and 4 June 1836. For London, there are only references to the official celebrations at court in the national newspapers from 1833 to 1836. These included public elements, but they generally did not take heed of the reactions of the crowd. However, conflicts and expressions of disapproval as in 1832 would most likely have been noted. Above all, Derek Fraser has described the local contests for control of the municipal corporations and local administrative offices in Leeds in several publications, succinctly summarized in Fraser, ‘Politics and Society’. For Bolton, see P. Taylor, Popular Politics. In both cities, as of the 1820s, the influence of the Liberals continued to grow, and in conjunction with the nationwide reorganization of municipal administration with the Municipal Corporations Act (1835), they came to control both the old and new municipal offices. In Leeds in November 1832, for example, the Liberals withdrew the funds for the ringing of the bells on the king’s birthday; see Leeds Vestry Minute Book, 22 November 1832, Leeds City Archive, Parish Records of St Peter, RDP 68. On the general rejection of elaborate municipal ceremonies under the Liberals and the typical drastic limits put on municipal celebrations in the ‘Liberal decade’ after 1832, see R. Sweet, The English Town, 1680–1840: Government, Society and Culture (London: Pearson Education, 1999); and eadem, ‘Civic Political Ritual in Eighteenth-Century Towns’, in J. Neuheiser and M. Schaich (eds), Political Rituals in Great Britain, 1700–2000, Arbeitskreis Deutsche England Forschung-Schriftenreihe 55 (Augsburg: Wißner, 2006), 37–54. See, for example, Leeds Intelligencer, 1 June 1839, in which the Liberals’ hypocritical dealings regarding the ringing of the bells on the monarch’s birthday were mocked. See the respective reports in the Leeds Mercury and Leeds Intelligencer from 13 May 1837, 20 May 1837, 27 May 1837 and 3 June 1837. Halifax Express, 27 May 1837. Bolton Chronicle, 3 June 1837. Bolton Chronicle, 1 July 1837. Bolton Chronicle, 30 June 1838. Bolton Chronicle, 25 May 1839; The Times, 15 November 1839. Bolton Chronicle, 30 May 1840, 27 May 1843, 24 May 1845, 30 May 1846, 29 May 1847, 27 May 1848 and 26 May 1849. See also Bolton Free Press, 28 May 1842. Even during these years, however, the Conservatives were not able to reintroduce the parade with the city’s leaders. Leeds Intelligencer, 16 June 1838 and 30 June 1838.

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124. See the short reports of the celebrations in the issues of the Leeds Intelligencer and Leeds Mercury from the end of May/beginning of June from 1839 to 1853; the picture in Leeds differed only marginally from that of the other cities in the West Riding. For example, the Conservatives criticized the festivities in honour of the marriage of Victoria and Albert in February 1840 as deplorable; see Leeds Intelligencer, 15 February 1840 and Halifax Guardian, 15 February 1840. 125. Cannadine’s misleading description of the prevailing deep unpopularity of the Crown well into the late nineteenth century rests on, among other things, a false assessment of negative comments aired about the coronation and other court holidays at the beginning of Victoria’s regency. See Cannadine, ‘The Context’, 114–16. 126. John Bull, 25 June 1837, 23 July 1837 and 12 November 1837; The Times, 22 June 1837 and 10 November 1837. 127. John Bull, 1 July 1838; The Times, 29 June 1838. 128. The People’s Charter was published on 8 May 1838 in London. See Goodway, London Chartism, 24. 129. For a detailed analysis of the attitudes of the liberal and conservative press towards the Crown, see R. Williams, Contentious Crown. 130. One of the few exceptions was a well-visited public meeting in Southwark during the Bedchamber Crisis at which supporters of the Liberal government agreed on an address to the queen in which they thanked her for the dismissal of Peel. A strong group of Conservatives under the leadership of Alan Day sought to disrupt the meeting and push through a Conservative statement, but ultimately failed. See The Times, 22 May 1839 and 23 May 1839. 131. See, for example, Brighton Patriot 31 January 1837 and 25 April 1837; quote from 23 May 1837. 132. Sussex Agricultural Express, 27 May 1837. 133. The Times, 11 June 1839. 134. The complex nature of the administration in London led The Times to conclude in 1855 that the metropolis was governed by over three hundred different offices and institutions whose tasks had been outlined in 250 acts of Parliament pertaining specifically to London. The administration of the city was not centralized until 1888 when the London City Council was created. See K. Young and P. Garside, Metropolitan London: Politics and Urban Change 1837–1981 (London: Holmes and Meier, 1981), 21; and Schwarz, ‘London 1700–1840’. 135. Prior to 1837, Conservative Associations only existed in a few boroughs; around election time, the Carlton Club made an effort to improve the organizational structures in the city by ensuring the establishment of new associations and creating the short-lived Metropolitan Conservative Journal to improve the network of Conservatives in the city; see Metropolitan Conservative Journal, 13 January 1838. Reports on the foundation of new Conservative Associations can be found in John Bull, 5 November 1837 (Tower Hamlets) and 17 December 1837 (Shoreditch). 136. On the difficulties of the Chartists in London before 1840, see I. Prothero, ‘Chartism in London’, Past and Present 44 (1969), 76–105; and Goodway, London Chartism, 3–38; on political unions and other Liberal and Radical associations, see D.J. Rowe, ‘The Failure of London Chartism’, Historical Journal 14 (1971), 472–87. 137. See section ‘Operative Conservative Associations and Popular Constitutionalism’ above. 138. John Bull, 7 May 1837 and 14 May 1837; The Times, 4 May 1837, 5 May 1837, 11 May 1837, 12 May 1837 and 13 May 1837. On the politics and importance of Burdett prior to his switch to the Conservatives, see J. Dinwiddy, ‘Sir Francis Burdett and Burdettite Radicalism’, History 65 (1980), 17–31; and C.S. Hodlin, ‘The Political Career of Sir Francis Burdett’, PhD dissertation, University of Oxford, 1989. Some hints as to the political motives for his move can be found in M.W. Patterson, Sir Francis Burdett and His Times, 1770–1844 (London: Macmillan, 1931).

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139. Leeds Intelligencer, 21 April 1838 and 28 April 1838; Leeds Mercury, 21 April 1838; Bolton Chronicle, 21 April 1838; Metropolitan Conservative Journal, 28 April 1838; John Bull, 30 April 1838 and 27 May 1838; The Times, 22 May 1838. 140. Furthermore, after his success in the election in early 1837, Burdett did not run for election in Westminster again after the throne changed hands; instead, he won a seat in North Wiltshire for the House of Commons. As an MP, he was naturally still present in London. 141. In Leeds, for example, the association had to plead openly for donations to support its library in March 1842; a year later, a new debate society was established within the club; see Leeds Intelligencer, 26 March 1842 and 1 April 1843. In Bolton, on the other hand, the organization’s finances were in good order at the end of 1841, although this changed after 1842. Its activities were limited to the suburb of Atherton; the long-time backer of the association, Joseph Ridgway, sought to attract more supporters in the neighbouring suburb of Horwich in 1843 with the prominently staged wedding of his son; see Bolton Chronicle, 24 December 1841, 27 May 1843 and 10 June 1843. 142. On the split in the Conservative Party around 1846, see Stewart, Foundation; B. Coleman, Conservatism; and Ramsden, Appetite. 143. On the strife within the Liberal camp in Leeds, see D. Fraser, ‘Voluntaryism and West Riding Politics in the Mid-Nineteenth Century’, Northern History 13 (1977), 199–231; see also idem, Politics in Leeds; and idem, ‘Politics and Society’. 144. Leeds Intelligencer, 29 May 1852, 5 June 1852 and 10 July 1852. 145. Leeds Intelligencer, 1 April 1843 and 15 April 1843. On the debates over the duties on corn, see chapter 5. The attempt to re-establish the Operative Conservative Association failed at the end of 1851 or the beginning of 1852. See Leeds Intelligencer, 8 November 1851, 17 January 1852 and 24 January 1852; Leeds Mercury, 24 January 1852. 146. See, for example, Bolling’s speech in Bolton Chronicle, 15 December 1832. Even the candidate in the by-election for South Lancashire, Entwistle, spoke out against the corn duties in 1844 with the support of the Conservatives in Bolton; see Bolton Chronicle, 25 May 1844. 147. Before the municipal elections in 1847, the Conservatives approved a thank-you address for the existing city council members; listed among the members was Johnson Lomax, who had belonged to the board of the Operative Conservative Association a few years before; see Bolton Chronicle, 24 December 1841 and 18 October 1847. 148. In the mid 1840s, the press in Bolton could only report about meetings of the association in the industrial village of Atherton located outside Bolton. In 1848, a new association was established in the city that initially called itself the Operative Conservative Sick and Burial Club. Although Conservative Working Men’s Associations had been spreading across the country since the 1870s, the club in Bolton did not change its name until late, given its almost continuous existence for decades; see Bolton Chronicle, 7 June 1845, 16 June 1849, 20 July 1850 and 13 September 1890. 149. Leeds Intelligencer, 28 March 1857, 6 June 1857 and 30 April 1859. 150. Leeds Intelligencer, 28 March 1857, 6 June 1857 and 30 April 1859. During his candidacy, Robert Hall emphasized that he would not sit on the benches of the Conservative opposition in Parliament, but rather take a seat as an independent on the so-called ‘cross benches’. His successor, Beecroft, supported the Liberal government under Palmerston as an independent Conservative in Parliament until Lord Derby took over, which prompted him to return to the ranks of the Conservatives. 151. On Palmerston’s politics in the 1850s, see D. Brown, Palmerston and the Politics of Foreign Policy, 1846–1855 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002); see, in particular, Brown’s overview of older scholarship. On the development of patriotic arguments among the parliamentary elite of the Whigs and Liberals, see Parry, Patriotism.

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152. Leeds Intelligencer, 28 March 1857. These results were repeated in the by-election held after Robert Hall’s death. Mills’ supporters attacked Hall’s successor Beecroft as a traditional Tory along classical Liberal lines, and described the Conservatives as having been opposed to all the reforms necessary to protect ‘civil and religious liberty’ for decades. Mills was defeated in the show of hands as well as at the actual ballot box; see Leeds Intelligencer, 6 June 1857. 153. Leeds Intelligencer, 18 September 1855. On the practice of the Crown and government calling special official nationwide church services, see P. Williamson, ‘State Prayers, Fasts and Thanksgivings: Public Worship in Britain 1830–1897’, Past and Present 200 (2008), 121–74. 154. Leeds Intelligencer, 31 May 1856. 155. Leeds Intelligencer, 24 July 1856. 156. The Times, 12 September 1855 and 14 September 1855. 157. Leeds Intelligencer, 31 May 1856. On Chartism in Halifax after 1847, see K. Tiller, ‘Late Chartism: Halifax 1847–1858’, in J. Epstein and D. Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–1860 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 311–44. 158. For the London metropolitan area with its garrison in Woolwich and its shipyards, there were frequently reports of manoeuvres, ship christenings, maiden voyages and troop reviews attended by large crowds at different times throughout the year. Public participation was especially high whenever members of the royal family were involved in events. See, for example, The Times, 11 October 1828 (launch of the frigate The Clyde), 23 September 1831 (ship christening by Queen Adelaide accompanied by William IV), 20 May 1837 (review in Hyde Park), 6 July 1838 (review in Woolwich with one hundred thousand spectators), 28 May 1845, 2 June 1851 (reviews in Hyde Park on the queen’s birthday), and 28 August 1859 (review in Hyde Park). 159. On the formation of the Volunteers, see H. Cunningham, The Volunteer Force: A Social and Political History 1859–1908 (London: Croom Helm, 1975); see also M. Hale, Amateur Soldiers; or, the Volunteers of Great Britain (London: Wyman, 1886); I.F.W. Beckett, ‘The Amateur Military Tradition: New Tasks for the Local Historian’, Local Historian 13 (1979), 475–80; idem, The Amateur Military Tradition, 1558–1945 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1991); G. Cousins, The Defenders: A History of the British Volunteer (London: Frederick Muller, 1968); R. Westlake, The History of the Rifle Volunteers 1859–1908 (Chippenham: Piction Publishing, 1982); idem, Royal Engineers (Volunteers), 1859–1908 (Chippenham: Piction Publishing, 1983). 160. See Cunningham, Volunteer Force, 33–35. There was indeed a great deal of interest in membership in the corps among the lower classes, which was reflected in the successful formation of a Workman’s Volunteer Brigade in Tower Hamlets, for example. See The Eastern Times and Tower Hamlets Gazette, 29 September 1860 and 6 October 1860. 161. On the parades in Bolton, see, for example, Bolton Chronicle, 24 March 1860, 26 May 1860, 13 July 1861 and 9 July 1864. The Times reported on cross-regional reviews of the volunteer brigades, for example on 16 July 1860 (Liverpool), 8 September 1860 (Lancashire) and 29 September 1860 (York). A ‘Great Review’ in London’s Regents Park drew a crowd of fifty to sixty thousand according to a report in The Times on 19 June 1860; The Eastern Times and Tower Hamlets Gazette and the East London Observer and Tower Hamlets Chronicle reported on smaller manoeuvres attended by the public in London’s Tower Hamlets in almost every issue at the beginning of the 1860s. 162. The Times, 25 June 1860; The Eastern Times and Tower Hamlets Gazette, 30 June 1860. 163. See Cunningham, Volunteer Force. 164. In this context, for example, there were David Urquhart’s xenophobic Foreign Affairs Committees, which were quite widespread for a short time. See A. Briggs, ‘David Urquhart and the West Riding Foreign Affairs Committees’, Bradford Antiquary 39 (1958), 197–208; R.

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1 65. 166.

167.

168.

Shannon, ‘David Urquhart and the Foreign Affairs Committees’, in P. Hollis (ed.), Pressure from Without in Early Victorian England (London: Edward Arnold, 1974), 239–61; and M. Taylor, ‘The Old Radicalism and the New: David Urquhart and the Politics of Opposition, 1832–1867’, in E. Biagini and A. Reid (eds), Currents of Radicalism: Popular Radicalism, Organised Labour and Party Politics in Britain, 1850–1914 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 23–43. On the self-styling of Victoria as a non-partisan figure, see Homans, Royal Representations. See Paul, History. See also Reeves-Association [Society for Preserving Liberty and Property against Republicans and Levellers], Association Papers. Part I: Publications, Part II: A Collection of Tracts, to which are Prefixed a Preface and the Proceedings of the Society (London: J. Sewell, 1793), no. VII. See also the other pamphlets in this collection. On the Reeves Association, see the introduction above and the literature cited there in footnote 13. See H. More, Village Politics Addressed to All the Mechanics, Journeymen and Day Labourers in Great Britain, by Will Chip a Country Carpenter (London: Simmons, Kirby and Jones, 1793); eadem, Remarks on a Speech of M. Dupont Made in the National Convention of France on the Subjects of Religious and Public Education (London: T. Cadell, 1793); eadem, Hints Towards Forming the Character of a Young Princess (London: T. Cadell and W. Davies, 1805); and eadem, Cheap Repository Tracts suited to the Present Times (London: R. Gilbert, 1819). On the astonishingly influential role of More as a female writer, see Pedersen, ‘Hannah More’; E. Kowaleski-Wallace, Their Father’s Daughters: Hannah More, Maria Edgeworth and Patriarchal Complicity (New York: Oxford University Press, 1991); A. Stott, ‘Patriotism and Providence: The Politics of Hannah More’, in K. Gleadle and S. Richardson (eds), Women in British Politics 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat (Basingstoke: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 39–55; eadem, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003); M. Scheuermann, In Praise of Poverty: Hannah More Counters Thomas Paine and the Radical Threat (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2001); and Gilmartin, ‘Counter-Revolution’. P. Tether, Clubs: A Neglected Aspect in Conservative Organisation, Hull Papers in Politics 42 (Hull: Hull University Politics Department, 1988).

Chapter 3

‘Above All, Be Faithful to Your God’ Confessional Conflicts and Plebeian Conservatives

?

On Friday 24 October in 1828, around forty thousand people assembled on Penenden Heath, which was east of Maidstone, the most important city in the county of Kent. Some observers even counted a crowd of up to a hundred thousand.1 This open, slightly hilly historic battlefield about forty miles from London was used traditionally as a place to hold court and to assemble for elections. Around midday, an assembly of the ‘Men of Kent’ began, which had been anxiously awaited in political circles around the country for a few weeks. The question of the day was whether those Conservatives who continued to fight against the majority in the House of Commons supporting Catholic emancipation would actually be able to organize a mass demonstration to show that large portions of the English public opposed legal concessions to Catholics? The question of the legal status of Catholics had been a matter of hefty debate in Great Britain for decades. Since the seventeenth century, Catholics had been prohibited from serving in Parliament or holding government offices.2 In the 1820s, the conflicts between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland had generated increasing support among English liberals and radicals for a repeal of the restrictions affecting Catholics. These calls for change were often coupled with demands for other social reforms, some of which even went so far as to advocate democratic elections, the repeal of the special status of the Anglican Church as the Established Church and the fundamental separation of Church and State. Beginning in 1823, Irish Catholics had built up a mass organization to fight for their legal emancipation, the Catholic Association, which was seen by Irish Protestants and their political friends in Great Britain as a dangerous state within the state. In response, organizations such as the Protestant Orange Order were used to spearhead efforts to defend the privileges for Protestants.3 Notes from this chapter begin on page 145.

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Amidst this charged atmosphere, hefty political conflicts as well as violent unrest began to escalate in the mid 1820s. At the beginning of July in 1828, the leader of the Catholic Association, Daniel O’Connell, was elected for the parliamentary seat in County Clare in a by-election even though he could not serve in the House of Commons because he was Catholic. It was the first time that the Catholic Association did not limit its successful election campaigning to merely supporting pro-Catholic Protestant candidates. This was a clear sign of the organization’s radicalization, prompting widespread fear of a national revolution of Irish Catholics. A few days later on 12 July, despite the different prohibitions issued by Parliament and the government, the parades of the Orange Order in the north of Ireland reached a zenith, sparking considerable unrest accompanied by violent riots.4 Confronted with the threat of civil war in Ireland and the parliamentary pressure of the Liberal opposition in Westminster, leading Tory politicians, especially Prime Minister Wellington and Sir Robert Peel, began to reconsider their objections to Catholic emancipation. Rumours over an impending change of course in the government raised fears among right-wing Conservatives. In turn, this led to the establishment of Protestant associations called Brunswick Clubs in England and Ireland that were supposed to bolster the resistance against the legal emancipation of the Catholics.5 The initiative for the county meeting in Kent fittingly came from the socalled Tory Ultras in Parliament, headed by Lord Kenyon and the king’s brother, the Duke of Cumberland and later Ernest Augustus I of Hannover.6 The most important Ultras in Kent, Lord Winchelsea and Sir Knatchbull, sponsored the assembly that was called in order to pass a petition against the emancipation of the Catholics. However, pro-Catholic politicians also called upon their supporters to attend. Parliamentarians, including the pro-emancipation, yet Conservative Lord Camden and the Liberal Lord Darnley were planned as speakers. The two men had also mobilized their own followers in the days leading up to the meeting.7 Moreover, important members of the Catholic Association, including its London secretary Shea and the famous Irish speaker Richard Lalor Sheil, as well as prominent radicals such as William Cobbett and Henry Hunt, travelled from London to Maidstone. Apparently, all these political groups sought an open exchange of blows in order to parade the broad public support for their respective positions before the eyes of the opposition. The meeting was tumultuous. The speakers of the different parties stood on platforms across from the audience, kept apart by the County Sheriff who repeatedly lost control of the crowds despite his efforts to keep order. The politicians made their way onto the field accompanied by large parades of supporters bearing instruments and waving flags, decked out with insignia to identify their affiliation as if there were an election. Whereas the Ultras adopted the battle cry of ‘No Popery’, liberals and radicals propagated ‘Civil and Religious Liberty’. Until dusk, the speakers of all sides tried to win over the crowds despite the disruptions

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caused by the opposing parties. Placards and flyers were used in order to make arguments accessible to the entire audience, which was hardly able to follow what was being said on the platforms because of the masses in attendance as well as the constant unrest on the field. Despite the mobilization of support for all sides, the Conservative Ultras emerged clearly victorious at a relatively early stage. Whereas their speeches met with the approval of the great majority of the crowd and triggered storms of applause, their opponents could hardly be heard above the clamour. Sheil, perhaps the most important and experienced pro-Catholic orator, complained vehemently about the unusual noise and constant disruptions that interrupted his speech.8 Henry Hunt and William Cobbett, celebrated radicals who were feared for their demagogic skills in front of crowds, even had to give up on their speeches because of the angry insults coming from the masses on the field. As the vote on the petition came in the evening, The Times (pro-Catholic) estimated that about two-thirds of those assembled raised their hands and cheered for a clear rejection of Catholic emancipation. The assembly came to an end with calls of ‘No Popery’ and the festive singing of the national anthem. The Conservatives who spoke that afternoon raised the memory of the historic conflicts between Protestants and Catholics in the kingdom. In so doing, they drew on a long-standing, widespread repertoire of hefty tirades in England that painted the Catholic Church as bloodthirsty, power-hungry, morally corrupt and promiscuous.9 These speeches, despite a few concessions to the Catholic spokesmen in attendance, made it clear that Catholic promises were not to be trusted, the principles of the Catholic faith rested on intolerance at the core and the present agitation sponsored by the Catholic Association in Ireland was proof that the Catholic Church still posed a great danger. Considering the situation in Ireland, the Conservatives also doubted that emancipation would truly lead to a lasting solution to the confessional conflicts in the country. Above all, however, Conservative speakers formulated their rejection of Catholic emancipation using a constitutional language that harkened back to the establishment of the English constitution during the Civil War, around 1688, and tied England’s greatness closely to its identity as a Protestant nation. They claimed that concern for the Protestants and their right to exercise their religion had brought the reigning royal family to the throne and created a new constitution under which the country had flourished and become great, happy and free. Furthermore, they argued that loyalty to the Crown, English patriotism and Protestantism were mutually dependent and inseparable. In so doing, these Conservative speakers tapped into a kind of political Protestantism in which national and religious identity were coupled to the elements of conservative constitutionalism discussed in the last chapter. Cheered on by the great majority of the assembled crowd, they warned against endangering the privileges of the English constitution by once more making concessions to the Catholics, and called for the defence

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of the constitution in its entirety. In the end, the assembly passed a petition addressed to the House of Commons in which it called for the protection of the ‘Protestant Constitution of the United Kingdom’ as a whole and without amendment. The Conservative orator Plumtree summed up the mood of the crowd as he called to the audience: ‘Be loyal to your King – be firm to the Constitution – but above all, be faithful to your God. Do this, and depend upon it this great country will continue to be the glory of the world!’10 The Kent County Meeting soon went down as a famous event in the annals of English history. Within no time at all, contemporaries were already debating its significance. There was no doubt as to the victory of the anti-Catholics, but opponents nevertheless made an effort to downplay the importance of the assembly. The Times, for example, described the day as a disaster characterized by the concentrated mobilization of the tenants of Conservative aristocrats and landowners as well as the aggressive recruitment of support by the Ultras. Effectively, the paper questioned whether the vote against Catholic emancipation had been bought.11 In contrast, William Cobbett tried to interpret the victory of the other side as a simple misunderstanding. He claimed that his supporters, which he counted at fifteen thousand and therefore almost half of the assembly, had mistakenly believed that the petition of the opposition was being voted on as the sheriff called for the count of hands. This, however, was hardly a credible explanation given the utterly negative reception he had received from the assembled crowd.12 In contrast, the conservative press celebrated the meeting as a triumph. From this perspective, the outcome of the meeting was a declaration of the people’s commitment to the Protestant identity of the British nation as well as a rejection of any concessions to the Catholics.13 The meeting in Kent has also been the subject of much controversy in scholarship. The fact that the emancipation of the Catholics was pushed through in early 1829 raises the question as to what degree demonstrations like those in Kent were truly an expression of widespread public opinion in Britain. Older scholarship primarily attributed the failure of the Ultras in Parliament to their lack of determination when it came to mobilizing the decidedly anti-Catholic population, and saw the county assembly in Kent as evidence of the ‘radical and rooted antipathies of the English masses’. Recent scholarship, in contrast, has cited the meeting as one of the last peaks of a still virulent, yet definitely faltering English national identity in the 1820s that was defined by its Protestantism.14 For Linda Colley, for example, the advent of Catholic emancipation marked the end of an era in which the Protestant identity stemming from the English Reformation belonged to the core elements of British patriotism.15 While Colley has argued that the remainders of this identity flourished especially among the English lower classes, other studies on anti-Catholicism in the High Victorian period have emphasized that it was exactly the working classes who were rather indifferent to an aggressive form of conservative Protestantism.16 It was not until

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the late-nineteenth century, these studies claim, that the Tories were able to use the ‘No Popery’ cry to rally support among the lower classes.17 In contrast to Linda Colley, John Wolffe in particular has argued that the zenith of this link between Protestantism and English nationalism was not reached until the early twentieth century.18 The following chapter will look at how the close connection between Protestant identity and English patriotism was a core element of the conservative version of popular constitutionalism in the battles over the emancipation of the Catholics as well as in the decades that followed. It will also examine the great extent to which public opinion among the lower classes was shaped by these conservative notions. Religious identities were an important factor in local political conflicts and could be used to mobilize supporters from all classes along the border dividing the political camps. On the conservative side, not only antiCatholic positions, but also differences between Protestant confessions marked by disagreements over the role of the Anglican Church in society were important factors on the political stage. As 1829 did not mark the end of the era of Protestant nationalism in England, the English lower classes did not remain immune to constitutional arguments in which religious aspects played a key role after the Emancipation Act. The emancipation of the Catholics was an important element in the definition of political identities and the fight over the proper understanding of the English constitution, especially when it came to the role of religion and the State.

The Conflicts over the Emancipation of the Catholics The argument put forth by Linda Colley and J.C.D. Clark, that the emancipation of the Catholics marked a deep caesura in the history of English Protestantism and was therefore highly significant for the development of an English national consciousness, rests on a rather restrictive view of the conflicts surrounding the legal status of the Catholics in the kingdom from the 1770s to 1829.19 From this perspective, there was a clear trajectory of increasing efforts on the part of parliamentary elites, leading from the first legislative improvements to the achievement of almost complete legal emancipation, that ran parallel to a continual decrease in resistance to the integration of the Catholics within English society. Whereas legal concessions to the Catholics sparked the Gordon Riots in 1780 and rowdy crowds tore apart the city for days, costing numerous lives, later conflicts over Catholic emancipation in 1813 and 1821 remained peaceful. Moreover, despite all the protests against Wellington’s proposed law, almost no one came to harm in 1829. In the 1790s, violent mobs formed in reaction to the military threat posed by Catholic France. These crowds sought to affirm their English identity with reference to their loyalty to ‘Church and King’ against radical followers of French

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ideals of reform and revolution. In 1829, the end of the legal establishment of the Protestant character of the British state opened the door for further demands for constitutional reforms. In fact, three years later, cheering crowds across England celebrated the passing of the first Reform Act. Given these developments, historians have tended to interpret later disputes over the relationship of the Catholics to the State or the status of the Established Church as a weak echo of earlier conflicts, leading them to the conclusion that a Protestant identity was no longer part of a social consensus after 1829.20 Without questioning the great significance of the Roman Catholic Relief Act for the debates over the English constitution and the understanding of English identity, the assumption of a continual progression from an anti-Catholic consensus in the eighteenth century to the political marginality of an aggressive Protestantism after 1829 nevertheless seems to be rather cursory. To begin with, even the assumption that there was a Protestant consensus is problematic. Although Linda Colley has impressively demonstrated the far-reaching importance of Protestantism for the construction of a British national consciousness in the eighteenth century, the conflicts between loyalists and radicals in the 1790s were already indicative of a lack of consensus on the Protestantism of the nation and the constitution itself.21 The equation of Christianity with loyalty to the constitution as well as the contrast between English Protestantism, protected by God, and the impiety of the French Revolution, or the Catholicism of the Irish rebels, were closely linked with the propagation of those conservative notions of society that pushed liberal Whigs and moderate reformers out of the loyalist camp.22 The battle cry ‘Church and King’ took hold of a large portion of English society, mobilizing many within the lower classes. At the same time, it was an expression of great political polarization and clearly belonged within the context of an aggressive kind of loyalism that emphasized the constitution, the Crown and the Anglican Church as a response to the spread of liberal and radical reform movements. Furthermore, developments within the debate over the emancipation of the Catholics by no means followed a linear course. Demands for the legal equality of the Catholics always became stronger when English politicians were intensively searching for a permanent solution to the confessional conflicts in Ireland. Debates over emancipation thus tended to emerge during crisis phases or after particularly hefty outbreaks of confessional violence. Conservative defenders of Protestant privileges reacted to the situation around 1800 by emphasizing the Protestant nature of the constitution, which had been less important to them at other times when they sought to drum up resistance against demands for other reforms of the British state. In the early pamphlets of the Reeves Association from 1792 and 1793, for example, the Established Church and Protestantism only played a subordinate role in conservative rhetoric despite the fact that Parliament had made legal concessions to Catholics in Ireland at this time. Despite

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the constant emphasis on the unity of Church and Crown, direct references to religious aspects of the constitution and the Protestant character of loyalism and patriotism were not prevalent at all.23 This dynamic changed a few years later after the confessional disputes between Catholics and Protestants in Northern Ireland took on dimensions reminiscent of a civil war in the mid 1790s and an alliance was formed between Irish nationalists (mostly Catholic) and England’s enemy France during the rebellion of the United Irishmen in 1798.24 Loyalist propaganda answered these developments with religious arguments. The defence of the English state against her domestic as well as foreign foes was thus coupled with determinedly anti-Catholic positions that emphasized the close connection between British and Protestant identity.25 Founded in 1795, the Orange Order was an alliance whose parades in Ireland created a public ritual reaffirming the special privileges of the Protestants. The Order quickly took on the character of a mass movement among Irish Protestants. It spread to England with the English troops who had been sent to quell the rebellion in Ireland in 1798, leading to the establishment of numerous lodges across the country. As such, the Orange Order became part of the loyalist reaction to different attacks on the British constitution.26 The Protestantism of the English state actually became more of a central element in social debates around 1800 than it was just a few years before, questioning the idea of a linear development in the formation of a Protestant identity since the 1770s. The sharp increase in Protestant overtones within political disputes around the turn of the century also revealed a divide between conservative circles outside Parliament and Tory politicians in government who were seeking pragmatic solutions for the tense situation in Ireland and, over the long run, the permanent integration of Catholics in British society. William Pitt, for example, wanted to couple the emancipation of the Catholics with the union with Ireland that had been made in 1801, but his attempts were thwarted by the resistance of George III. Similarly, in 1812, the Tory government under Lord Liverpool was split over the Catholic question. Liverpool chose to let his ministers decide how they would vote on the pro-Catholic petition of the Tory MP George Canning. In the end, Canning’s petition found support in the Cabinet as well as among the rank-andfile Tories in Parliament.27 In contrast, outside of parliamentary and government circles, the rejection of concessions to the Catholics increasingly became a more important element of conservative identity. After 1801, the conservative press consciously propagated the close link between religion and politics as well as the Protestant character of the English state. Whereas up to 1800, numerous publications in the Tory camp had signalled support for the legal emancipation of the Catholics, anti-Catholic attitudes and the unconditional defence of the state church now became the link holding together different strands of conservative thought. As such, antiCatholicism was a driving force behind the popularity of conservative circles

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and politicians who were relatively independent of the Conservative Party.28 The veneration of the existing constitution with the unconditional profession of Protestantism as well as the refusal to support any political concessions to the Catholics became a central element of the conservative variant of popular constitutionalism. Under the slogan ‘No Popery’, this conservative constitutionalism integrated and perpetuated older forms of English anti-Catholicism whose popularity peaked at the end of the 1820s. The wave of anti-Catholicism that broke out over England as Parliament finally moved toward a draft bill on the emancipation of the Catholics made it clear that conservative constitutionalism had already become popular outside the circles of the political elite and the relatively well-to-do subscribers of conservative monthlies and national papers at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In the winter of 1812/13, for example, public assemblies were held in numerous English cities and counties in which petitions against the pro-Catholic initiatives were approved. For weeks, both houses of Parliament received long lists with thousands of signatures protesting the plans for Catholic emancipation. Petitions came from all over the country – from Bristol as well as Cornwall, Kent and even northern England. There was also a popular mobilization of anti-Catholicism in Bolton, Leeds and London. In Bolton, for example, over six thousand men (out of a population of about twenty-four thousand) signed petitions. In Leeds there was more than one petition, and between six and ten thousand signatures were acquired (from a population of about sixty-two thousand). In London, with its population of about one million, over sixty thousand signatures were collected for one of these petitions.29 The number of signatures was quite impressive and so high that many of them must have come from the very lowest echelons of society. Proponents of the emancipation in Parliament complained about the methods used to collect these signatures, although they also put forth their own pro-Catholic petitions.30 Their accusations that anti-Catholic signatures were collected in London in churches and pubs as well as among the dregs of society, combined with their complaints over the hefty and truth-distorting anti-Catholic flyers, prints and polemics that had stirred up the country, actually attest to the wide dissemination of the ‘No Popery’ cry across the population.31 Moreover, the political polarization between conservatives and their opponents on this issue began to show itself. It was not merely coincidental that it was mostly the Ultra Tory parliamentarians who rose from their seats in early 1813 to present antiCatholic petitions. Nor was it surprising that MPs such as Francis Burdett, one of the symbols of radicalism in London, were the ones doubting the significance of these petitions or pointing to the existence of pro-Catholic demonstrations and petitions.32 Although the draft bill in the House of Commons ultimately failed because of the split within the pro-Catholic camp as well as the opposition of the prince regent (later King George IV), the strength of the anti-Catholic mobilization in England definitely left a mark.33

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That said, however, it would be wrong to count the wave of anti-Catholicism in early 1814 as evidence of a fundamentally dominant, ever-present Protestant identity that could be mobilized to oppose Catholic offensives at any time. It is not only the assumption of a continual decline in the importance of Protestantism for the English national consciousness that oversimplifies the religious aspects involved in political identities among the lower classes in the nineteenth century; rather, the notion that the anti-Catholic masses were ready and willing to respond to Ultra Conservative impulses can also be misleading. The question of the emancipation of the Catholics, for example, was debated in Parliament every year after 1813 without sparking a strong anti-Catholic movement on the streets or a wave of petitions addressed to Westminster. Even as a slight majority was reached for the first time in the House of Commons for a law on emancipation at the beginning of the 1820s, the public reaction was astonishingly peaceful until the House of Lords stopped the proposed law.34 The emancipation debates in Parliament broke out in 1821 shortly after the end of the Queen Caroline Affair and the months of tumultuous protests against the divorce of George IV. The heightened political conflicts between conservatives, liberals and radicals revealed a great deal of popular support for radical reforms.35 Alongside the ubiquitous call for suffrage reforms and a guarantee of the freedoms of press and assembly, the call ‘Justice for Ireland’ often stood for a demand for universal freedom of religion and the emancipation of the Catholics.36 Although the conservative press argued vehemently against the Catholics and in favour of the defence of the Protestant constitution as well as the protection of England’s Protestant identity, a strong protest movement outside the circles of the Tory elite failed to appear in early 1821.37 Nonetheless, demonstrations in 1819 and 1820 had shown that the pro-Catholic views of radical politicians met with less support among the assembled crowds than their demands for democratic reforms. Moreover, it was Conservative candidates in the election following George IV’s ascension to the throne in March 1820 who were able to shake up the reform camp in London’s strongholds of protest with their antiCatholic arguments.38 However, these stirrings did not manifest themselves as a broad public rejection of emancipation a year later. Only a few petitions against the proposed law made their way to Parliament. The swing in public opinion against the radical protest movement and the followers of the queen, which manifested in events such as loyalist celebrations and clear professions of loyalty to the Crown, coagulated around the positive perception of the monarchy as well as a form of patriotism that hardly drew on Protestant elements.39 Even the elite Pitt clubs, in which national and local Tory leaders met across the country in 1821 to combine the remembrance of Pitt with the propagation of conservative views, speeches and debates, advocated the rejection of radical demands and upheld the qualities of the existing English constitution without resorting to the use of anti-Catholic resentment or emphasizing the Protestant character of the

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English constitution.40 Given the widespread fear of a democratic revolt in 1821, Protestant identities once again receded to the background within the conservative camp, as they did before 1800. However, shifts such as these during specific phases of the political conflicts between conservatives, liberals and radicals are not evidence of a fundamental transformation in the role of Protestantism in English society nor the triumph of pro-Catholic views among the public. Rather, these shifts within the public debate over emancipation between 1790 and 1820, as well as the fluctuations in the popularity of competing notions of loyalism and patriotism, show that there was a kind of up-and-down cycle of political ideas. This dynamic, in turn, attests to the complexity of mechanisms of mobilization functioning at the lowest political level as well as the interplay of seemingly diametrically opposed political identities. After the end of the Napoleonic wars, radical politicians successfully created a broad movement in favour of the fundamental reform of English society. The popularity of the radicals stemmed in part from the fact that they were able to channel reactions to the economic crisis following demobilization after the war and the social tensions arising from the disappearance of traditional trades that were being replaced by industrial production into protests against long-standing structures outlined by the English constitution.41 The zenith of this movement was reached during the Queen Caroline Affair as the new King George IV became an agent at the head of the political system in 1820. His selfrighteous way of dealing with power and the demands of his wife seemed only to reinforce the image of a corrupt and degenerate English state that was propagated by radical leaders. The celebrations of the monarchy during these years reveal that the image of a radical, protest-ready lower class was not really a fitting one, not even as radical protests were at their height.42 Indeed, the interplay of political power at this time was characterized by the parallel existence of protesting voices as well as loyalist and patriotic views among the heterogeneous lower classes. More importantly, the key terminology associated with liberal and radical protests, such as demands for ‘civil and religious liberty’ and the protection of traditional English liberties, or patriotic complaints against the corruption of the political elite at the head of the state, could be appropriated to fit within a conservative context by shifting the meaning ever so slightly. Mark Philp’s argument that loyalist conservatives among the lower class could easily drift toward the radicals around 1800 was also quite possibly true in the reverse.43 For radicals, the call for ‘civil and religious liberty’ was necessarily coupled with demands for a universal freedom of religion and the emancipation of the Catholics. But, with reference to the historical conflicts between Protestants and Catholics as well as Catholic intolerance for other religions, the same slogan could become a symbol for the defence of the legal discrimination against the Catholics. At the zenith of the political crisis in 1820 and 1821, the dominance of radical voices was so high that it prevented the quite popular anti-Catholic positions from sparking

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a general change in public opinion. But, even at this time, there were signs that the demands for the emancipation of the Catholics also met with resistance among supporters of radical ideas. Only a slight shift in social circumstances was necessary in order to bring the Protestant identity of English nationalism back to the forefront so that it could be used to pull together a completely oppositional popular movement operating within the framework of conservative notions of society. Just a few years later, this shift had taken place. Three factors played an important role in this process. Firstly, the influence of the radical protest movement waned in the aftermath of the Queen Caroline Affair. To a degree, this was a delayed consequence of the repressive measures undertaken by the government after the Peterloo demonstration in 1819, which were further heightened in 1820. Alongside restrictions on the freedom of the press and the freedom of assembly, the imprisonment of leading radicals like Henry Hunt and the harsh sentences against those who participated in some of the violent riots had a dampening effect on the movement. Additionally, the success of the conservative counter-movement in propagating loyalist views following the disappointing – from a radical viewpoint – end of the Caroline Affair contributed to the weakening of demands for reforms. Moreover, the general economic situation improved noticeably at the beginning of the 1820s, which in turn reduced some of the social tensions that had heightened political conflicts after 1816.44 Secondly, the escalation in confessional disputes between Catholics and Protestants in Ireland after 1823 led to increased pressure within government and parliamentary circles to find a permanent resolution for the Catholic question. At the same time, the English press reported in detail on the violent riots between the enemy groups in Ireland. This once again brought the significance of religious identities in British society to the attention of the broad public, reviving the question of the emancipation of the Catholics within political debate in England once again.45 Thirdly, toward the end of the 1820s, there was a peak in the religious revival movement that had been strengthening the Puritan and evangelical tendencies within British Protestantism since the end of the eighteenth century. The message of an evangelical awakening coming from Methodists and Nonconformists was becoming increasingly popular thanks to travelling preachers, bible societies and newly founded parishes; it even made its way into the Anglican Church. At the same time, it was also coupled up with millennial and chiliastic notions of the coming of the apocalypse that had gained influence as a result of the recent national experiences with war and revolution. With these ideas of a ‘second Reformation’, anti-Catholic views were strengthened within the Protestant denominations in England. Simultaneously, the expected return of Christ led to a religious zealousness that espoused the uncompromising declaration of Protestant belief as an important individual and social duty.46 In general, the entire political climate had changed so much in such a short time that a renewed attempt to push through

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the emancipation of the Catholics brought the national significance of Protestantism to the forefront of the debates between conservatives and those ready for reforms. The parliamentary elections in June 1826 clearly revealed this political shift. In the county of Yorkshire, the two Conservative candidates, Richard Fountayne Wilson and William Duncombe, campaigned with clearly anti-Catholic slogans and propagated a decidedly Protestant understanding of English society in order to set themselves apart from their Liberal opponents. During their campaign trips through the cities of the West Riding they not only underscored their rejection of Catholic emancipation, but also they presented themselves as the defenders of the English constitution, with Protestant principles at its core. For them, every form of government had to be built upon divine law and the true faith.47 In front of the twenty to thirty thousand listeners who had assembled before the hustings for the nomination of the candidates in York, Henry Hall, the mayor of Leeds and one of the city’s most prominent Tories, justified his support for Wilson by claiming that the election was not about the question of whether the vote went Tory or Whig, but rather about the defence of the constitution against further concessions to the Catholics that endangered its existence.48 At this point in time, the Conservative candidates already had a long journey behind them. From Leeds to the capital of the county, they had been met by cheering crowds bearing blue flags and banners with slogans such as ‘Protestant Cause’, ‘King and Constitution’ and ‘No Popery’ in towns and villages along the way. The crowning glory of this demonstration was the victory of the Tory candidates at the end of the nomination. The Conservatives had been able to open up a gap between their Liberal opponents and the assembled crowd during the vote by sharply attacking the unchanging as well as fundamentally unchangeable intolerance inherent within Catholicism. Six years after the Tory candidate Stuart Wortley had been heftily attacked by angry crowds in Leeds and York during the county election campaign in 1820, the Leeds Intelligencer celebrated a ‘Protestant Triumph’ in 1826 following the completely different public reception of the Conservative candidates.49 A more detailed reconstruction of the election campaign of 1826 does raise doubts as to the extent of the Protestant triumph of the Conservatives in York. In contrast to the Leeds Intelligencer, the liberal press came to the conclusion that the Conservative majority in the show of hands was only very slight. The reports noted that the vote had to be repeated three times before the result was clear, despite the fact that influential Tory landowners had unfairly made sure that their tenants and other dependants had assembled in great numbers.50 Moreover, the liberal papers claimed, the independent candidate Richard Bethall received more votes than the Conservative candidates although he clearly supported the emancipation of the Catholics. Nonetheless, the generally positive assessment of the day by the Conservatives seems entirely plausible. Given the fact that the defeated party almost always attributed the victory of the other side to the

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unfair methods used to mobilize supporters, the Liberals’ reference to the role of patronage and coercion is not very significant. The influence of Conservative landowners in the area of York was hardly extensive enough to be able to gather a pliable mass of supporters at the drop of a hat; otherwise, public votes at the hustings in the county would have resulted in a clear Tory victory every time.51 Furthermore, the Intelligencer could point out that Bethall’s success was above all due to the fact that Conservatives as well as Liberals speculated that by supporting him, they would be able to ensure that at least one candidate from the other party would not receive one of the four seats in the county. For this reason, Bethall had refrained from taking a clear position on the emancipation question. Following his speech in York, however, he could no longer count on the support of Conservative voters, so he withdrew his candidacy right after the crowd had voted.52 Even if the Conservatives could not achieve a triumphant victory, the conflicts between the parties during the election attest to the fact that the Conservative propagation of the idea of a Protestant constitution received a great deal of support among broad swathes of the public in Yorkshire just a few years after the great reform movement had peaked in the 1820s. Additionally, they demonstrate that questions related to religious identity were once again at the forefront of political debate in 1826. The question of the emancipation of the Catholics dominated the election campaigns in London in a similar way. Whereas in the constituency of Southwark, a Conservative candidate with a clear commitment to the Protestant constitution was running in the election, six candidates more or less from the Liberal and Radical camps in the City of London were battling over the Catholic issue. In Southwark, the Liberal candidates reacted defensively to the widespread antiCatholic sentiments in the city. Charles Calvert, for example, admitted at the nomination that his pro-Catholic stance was quite obviously not supported by the majority of the public. At the same time, however, he warned against letting these differences weaken the struggle for other reforms such as the expansion of the suffrage by giving a victory to the Tories. Many supporters of the Conservative candidate Polhill had made their way to the hustings, and their placards and flags bearing ‘No Popery’ slogans ensured that the nomination was accompanied by brawling and riots.53 Likewise, the candidates at the husting in the Guildhall in the City of London found themselves facing a crowd that was anxiously waiting to hear what stance the candidates would take on the emancipation question; pro-Catholic statements were met with sharp protest while cheering erupted when any declarations in favour of the Protestant identity of the English constitution were made.54 In the City, as in Southwark, the reform candidates ultimately emerged victorious and had relatively clearly won the show of hands among the crowd. Yet over the course of the campaign, it had become quite apparent that anti-Catholic positions played a large role in London, just as in Yorkshire, and that there was a growing potential for a popular conservative movement.55

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A corresponding development did not occur in the Bolton area until two years later, when the parliamentary debates on the emancipation of the Catholics were nearing their climax. In 1826, the election in the county of Lancashire was dominated by a controversy over the personal integrity of the three nominated politicians. After one of the candidates withdrew at the last minute, one Liberal and one Conservative candidate gained a seat in Parliament.56 Beginning in early 1828, however, questions of religious identity became a focal point of Conservative mobilization strategies in Bolton and formed the central battleground between the Tories and their Liberal or Radical opponents. Such disputes were reflected in the columns of the reform-oriented and pro-Catholic Bolton Chronicle in the form of increasingly harsh polemics and attacks aimed at the local Tories as well as the national conservative press.57 A Church and King Club had existed in Bolton since 1792 in which the Tory-Anglican leaders of the city conglomerated; alongside the vicar and Colonel Fletcher, the club was dominated in 1828 by prominent families from among the local gentry and the industrial middle class.58 In March 1828, as the Parliament in Westminster debated the repeal of the legal restrictions against Nonconformists, the Church and King Club began a petition campaign for the preservation of the privileges of the Anglican Church and the strengthening of its national importance as the Established Church.59 In the autumn of the same year, this campaign became part of the fight against the emancipation of the Catholics; only a few weeks after the demonstration on Penenden Heath in Kent, a Brunswick Club was founded in Bolton that campaigned for the preservation of Protestant privileges and the Protestant character of the British state. It sponsored several public events and collected long lists of signatures.60 Even if the one-sided reports of the Bolton Chronicle repeatedly ridiculed conservatives like the Brunswickers and never tired of emphasizing the insignificance and absurdity of their efforts, the only paper in the city did have to concede that in Bolton – which had been a ‘hot bed’ of the Orange Order – a popular anti-Catholic movement had come to dominate local political debate.61 The Bolton Chronicle commented on activities such as the collection of signatures for petitions against emancipation with the usual heavy accusations of manipulation; nonetheless, it could not ignore the fact that the first petition, which was presented by Wellington in the House of Lords in mid February 1829, had received over ten thousand signatures from Bolton.62 A few weeks later, twelve thousand Bolton residents signed a second petition, which was an attempt by the Tories of the city to react one more time, at the last minute, to the impending vote that was likely to pass the reform.63 The editors of the newspaper complained that the petitions had been pushed in workshops and factories, and that the workers only signed because they feared for their jobs.64 Alternately, they deplored the humble origins of those who signed, claiming that they were lacking in respectability, dumb and uneducated; as illiterates, moreover, they could

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hardly have understood what emancipation really meant.65 At the same time, the paper described the heated atmosphere in Bolton and surrounding cities in which countless walls were covered with slogans such as ‘Hell and Purgatory to the Papists’ and placards on every corner bore anti-Catholic sentiments such as the ‘Appeal to England’ of the Earl of Winchelsea.66 Winchelsea’s solemn call to defend the ‘Protestant Constitution and Religion’ against the traitorous reform attempts of degenerate parliamentarians, which were bordering on rebellion, can also be linked to traditional forms of anti-Catholic propaganda. In January, for example, prints from John Foxe’s Book of Martyrs were circulating in factories in Bolton. With its drastic depictions of the suffering of Protestant martyrs under Catholic persecutors since the seventeenth century, it was one of the most popular and widespread books in England.67 Thus, despite the contrary reports of the Bolton Chronicle, there can be no doubt as to the success of Tory mobilization attempts in Bolton. Not only the number of signatures collected from among the forty thousand or so residents of the city, but also the heftiness of the local polemics, in which for over a year Liberals and Radicals sought to disband the connection between conservative constitutional rhetoric and an aggressive form of Protestantism, underscore the substantial amount of support for anti-Catholic and Protestant national viewpoints.68 Indeed, the reference to the use of the Earl of Winchelsea’s plea as part of the propaganda on the streets attests to the way in which religiously laden constitutional discourse strengthened the conservatives’ appeal among the public. Linda Colley has already pointed out that the wave of petitions against the emancipation of the Catholics in the winter of 1828/29 was larger than ever, both in terms of the number of signatures collected as well as the origins of the petitions.69 With its two petitions, Bolton was no exception. Hardly a town, village or city across the country did not become involved. For the most part, Colley interpreted this wave as the last rally of an already waning Protestant British identity because she overlooked the fact that the conservative link between the constitution and Protestant identity played a more significant role this time around compared to earlier conflicts over the legal status of the Catholics. For the first time, motifs that turned aspects of liberal and radical constitutionalism on their head took a prominent place in popular politics. Winchelsea’s attacks on the ‘degenerate’ Parliament and political elite, who were betraying the core of the constitution and the liberty of the nation, played the same tune as the speeches against ‘Old Corruption’ within the English reform movement.70 His appeal to his countrymen to rescue the constitution and prove that they were the true protectors of Protestant principles used the idea of people’s sovereignty – without explicitly stating it – in order to plea for the retention of existing social structures as they were. Additionally, he bound the people more closely to the Crown by inciting a large movement that would make it possible for George IV, with the support of his ordinary subjects, to uphold his oath of coronation in which he pledged his

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commitment to Protestantism and promised to reject the emancipation of the Catholics in spite of the parliamentary majority. The motifs of treason and an alliance between the king and people dedicated to saving the constitution also dominated other appeals that had been appearing all over the place since the summer of 1828. Beginning in August, Lord Kenyon publicized a series of letters addressed to the ‘Protestants of Great Britain’, which became the founding documents for the newly formed Brunswick Clubs. His letters openly expressed his anger over Wellington and Peel for changing their position on the emancipation issue.71 In February 1829, he even wrote that the king had been forced against his will to approve a reform that would actually threaten the succession to the throne of the House of Brunswick: ‘Rescue your Sovereign and this free country from the foulest disgrace that can befall this Protestant island’.72 Statements such as these gave the impression of a mass movement in which loyalty to the Crown, a conservative understanding of the constitution and an anti-Catholic, Protestant identity united to oppose Liberals as well as those Tories in favour of reforms. Similar sentiments drove conservative mobilization efforts at all political levels in 1828 and 1829. At the meeting in Kent, they were not just propagated by Conservative speakers atop the platforms because the Leeds Intelligencer had printed a flyer shortly after the demonstration that was then distributed on Penenden Heath. The leaflet linked the rejection of emancipation efforts with the defence of the constitution and loyalty to the king in particular. ‘Long live our Protestant Monarch George the Fourth!’ was its main message, which spread across the country in the press as well as in speeches.73 As part of a tour of Lancashire, Sir Robert Peel appeared at well-attended events hosted by the Tory establishment in Bolton, Salford, Liverpool and Manchester where he was heavily pressed to reinforce his commitment to a Protestant constitution. Peel avoided any kind of public declaration, which made it possible for the conservative press to celebrate him once again as a guarantor against emancipation although rumours had been spreading for weeks that he had changed his mind on the issue.74 After it became undoubtedly clear that Peel had switched sides, he faced sharp accusations coming from his disappointed colleagues. Leaflets appeared in Staffordshire in early 1829 bearing the words ‘Fellow Countrymen! The Constitution is betrayed. The citadel is in peril … To your tents, O Israel!’75 At the beginning of December in 1828, Henry Hall used similar language as he addressed over twenty thousand men attending an assembly in Leeds to draft a petition to the king. He outlined which principles of the constitution were indispensable components of the ‘Englishman’s creed’: Loyalty to the King as our Supreme Governor; acquiescence in an Established Church, with perfect freedom to join any other form of worship; obedience to the laws which

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are necessary for the preservation of our several interests, and a willing support to the several branches of government and authorities in the state.76

To him, the emancipation of the Catholics stood in stark opposition to each of these principles because it endangered the position of the Crown and the Church, and because it was imbued with an anti-social and anti-religious spirit akin to that of the earlier demagogues of the French Revolution. Conservatives across the nation sought to oppose the practically unstoppable advent of Catholic emancipation by mobilizing a broad movement opposed to the reform with demonstrative loyalty against public treason, the reaffirmation of the Protestantism of the constitution against Catholic infiltrations and steadfastness against revolution and rebellion. The tremendous numbers of petitions and signatures that reached both houses of Parliament as well as the Crown are not the only evidence attesting to the often underestimated success of these efforts. That said, however, this mindset did not go unchallenged. For example, Henry Hall spoke before a crowd crushed into the courtyard of the Cloth Hall in Leeds that – apart from a few undecided listeners – was clearly divided into two enemy camps. This public meeting had been sponsored by Liberals associated with Edward Baines who wanted to affirm a declaration of support for the emancipation of the Catholics. The Conservatives and their supporters made their way to the event after a war of words had been fought for days in the city by means of placards, appeals and flyers. They sought to hinder a public victory for the reformers. Their banners bearing ‘No Popery’ slogans provoked the Liberals; both groups could hardly be torn apart. Of course, in this loaded atmosphere, small incidents of violence could not be avoided. After a tumultuous course of events in which speakers from both sides pleaded for petitions for and against the emancipation of the Catholics, accompanied by cheers and shouts from the crowd, the head of the assembly decided that the pro-Catholic side had finally won the majority in the show of hands. The vote had been repeated a number of times because the results had been too unclear.77 The assembly in Leeds, with its large crowd divided into two almost equal parts, was quite an accurate reflection of public opinion in the kingdom as a whole. Conservatives did emerge triumphant at great assemblies in Exeter and Bristol in early 1829 thanks to angry anti-Catholic crowds, which reconfirmed the impression left by the Kent meeting. But these were the only anti-Catholic demonstrations that had a national impact. Many other such meetings took place within much smaller frameworks and often produced similarly ambiguous results as in Leeds.78 Leeds, where the local debate over the status of the Catholics was otherwise similar to that in Bolton, was also a typical example in that two petitions addressed to Parliament in 1829 came from Leeds – one pro-Catholic and one anti-Catholic, each of which counted over ten thousand signatures.79 While an extended newspaper war between the Leeds Mercury and the Leeds Intelligencer

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questioned which side had more support and whether legitimate means had been used, the impression of a deeply divided society grew stronger. Reformers as well as conservatives mobilized camps of similar size by referring to their respective understandings of the constitution. Whereas liberals maintained that the concept of liberty imbued in the English constitution demanded the emancipation of the Catholics, conservatives saw emancipation as a perversion of the fundamental principles of English society. The successful implementation of the reform in April 1829 and the almost simultaneous collapse of anti-Catholic agitation may seem to indicate that the importance of Protestantism for British identity took a dramatic downturn. However, it is misleading to underestimate the future impact of the deep split within society that had emerged out of these disputes over the proper understanding of the constitution and the constitutional significance of the Protestant religion. Time and time again, political debates during the emancipation crisis revealed that this societal divide ran across the entire social spectrum from the upper aristocracy all the way down to the plebeian mobs on the street. Not least in London, it became clear just how much the outrage over these deep fissures in long-standing social structures could overcome social differences. In the capital, which was home to the largest and most influential club of the Brunswick movement, elites and the great masses agitated against the reforms alongside one another. Parliament felt the pressure coming from the protests and unrest of the lower classes who even physically attacked some politicians.80 In March 1829, for example, Prime Minister Wellington, who was otherwise one of the most popular statesmen in the country because of his earlier military victories, had to flee to Downing Street more than once to avoid being attacked or hit by stones thrown from an angry mob on the streets.81 Many contemporaries believed that he had pushed through the emancipation of the Catholics against the clear majority of the population that was opposed to the measure.82 Granted, it is virtually impossible to determine the size of the political camps outside Parliament with certainty. Over the course of the emancipation debates, a variant of popular constitutionalism became more dominant on the conservative side where political Protestantism could be used to mobilize support from among the lowest social classes. None of these constitutional Protestant arguments appeared for the first time in a specifically conservative context at the end of the 1820s. Yet this rhetoric, combined with the open appeal to the people to rescue the constitution and uphold the special role of Protestant institutions in English society, indicated the emergence of a new form of popular conservative politics. This now thoroughly developed conservative constitutionalism stood in clear opposition to liberal notions. The schism between government politicians and ultra-conservative Tories at the parliamentary level concealed just how widespread such views were among conservatives outside elite circles in London and local clubs within the Tory establishment.

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Contesting the Cities: Confessional Conflicts in Local Power Struggles The hefty debates over the emancipation of the Catholics were only one part of a larger clash in which religious and confessional issues were tied up with conflicting understandings of the constitution. Local disputes over the emancipation issue were embedded within political power struggles in which the boundaries between opposing camps were often drawn along confessional lines. Henry Hall, for example, spoke in the Cloth Hall in Leeds in December 1828 not only as a representative of local Conservative opinion regarding the importance of Protestantism for the English constitution, but also on behalf of the city’s Anglican establishment. In contrast, the speakers from the Liberal camp were almost all Nonconformists.83 This constellation was quite typical: thanks to the close link between State and Church, most of the political conflicts in England in the early nineteenth century had a religious dimension that was heavily influenced by the fact that the Anglicans enjoyed special privileges and generally held a monopoly on influential social positions at both a national and local level. Demands for reforms often touched on the privileges enjoyed by the Anglican elite and encouraged close links between the Church of England and the Conservatives on the one hand and between the Liberals and the Nonconformists on the other, regardless of whether the actual reforms targeted the reorganization of the suffrage, the equality of the confessions or a fair system of taxes and duties.84 The conservative veneration of the existing constitution therefore largely corresponded to an Anglican understanding of the state. These close links between confession and constitution were reflected in different ways in local conflicts. First of all, national debates such as the question of Catholic emancipation were also heatedly discussed at the lowest political level, ensuring for a broad mobilization of support along the lines of local political and religious camps. Simultaneously, local power structures reproduced the confrontation along national lines. Until 1835, much of the municipal administration in many cities and parishes lay in the hands of magistrates or city councillors who came from among the traditional elites and had an Anglican-Conservative background; these men were not subject to any independent controls or elections. Over the course of the national reform debates, conflicts emerged in many places around the country in which Liberals and Radicals attacked the Tory bastions of power, demanding a far-reaching reform of the local administration. As a result, seemingly superficial matters handled by the municipal authorities, such as the maintenance of streets, the removal of rubbish or the expansion of cemeteries, repeatedly landed between the fronts of two fundamentally different notions of the constitution and society. These issues could not be resolved without taking into consideration the local constellations of power as well as demands for more rights of participation or democratic controls. Moreover, these conflicts also took

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on a confessional colour because much of the local administration was taken care of by officials and councils within the Anglican Church. Consequently, the election of the churchwardens, for example, was always heavily contested. Moreover, as the decision whether to raise the church rates was decided at a local level, and Nonconformists generally protested having to give money to another denomination, liberal notions of society and Nonconformist objections to the status of the Established Church were thus directly linked at the municipal level.85 The most important stage of local power struggles became the vestry of the Anglican parishes because it was here that the churchwardens were elected, the church rates were determined and a number of other local political matters such as the care of the poor were decided upon. At this time, the vestry was controlled by the church assembly in which every tax payer in the parish who had to pay a church rate on the basis of income, regardless of confession, had a vote. Furthermore, this was an open assembly in many places and the vote was done by a count of hands or applause without checking whether those present actually had a right to vote. As an almost fully democratic body, this assembly created a forum for a direct confrontation between opposing parties. Additionally, it could be effectively controlled through the mobilization of crowds of followers.86 After Liberal and Radical reformers had begun to demand extensive rights of participation in matters of municipal politics in the mid 1820s, the vestry took on more of the character of a local public parliament than ever before. It was where opposing political positions met head on, often resulting in turbulent meetings with a pub-like atmosphere and a great number of participants. Although attempts were already made in 1818 and 1819 to replace the deadlocked assembly with elected vestry committees and to weight the vote according income levels, the structure of political conflicts in the vestry only changed slowly.87 Due to many local particularities with regard to the powers of the church assembly, reforms could never be implemented across the board and attempts to introduce them met with resistance that often only escalated existing local political conflicts. Until the national reorganization of local power structures with the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835, the vestry remained the most important local political body across most of the country, and it continued to play an important role in English municipal politics even after the reforms. The battles between Liberal and Radical challengers and the Anglican-Conservative circles in the vestries has been well-documented by local historians since the 1970s.88 For Bolton, Paul Phillips, Brian Lewis and Peter Taylor have recounted in rich detail how Nonconformist Radicals led by local politicians, most of whom came from the lower-middle class, won considerable influence over the municipal administration through the vestry between 1827 and 1837 and took over local offices.89 In several studies, Derek Fraser has described similar conflicts in Leeds where the social background of aspirant Radical and Liberal politicians was more upper-middle class, but the course of events and the ultimate results

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of the conflicts were much alike.90 In addition, Fraser has described similar local power struggles in cities such as Manchester, Liverpool and Birmingham. He has also pointed out the great political significance attached to the numerous vestries in the London metropolitan area because they fulfilled administrative functions that were especially important for the whole city. Consequently, many London parishes found themselves embroiled in conflicts at the end of the 1820s.91 Moreover, at the beginning of the 1830s, Nonconformist Liberals and Radicals were able to win dominant positions at the local level in numerous other cities. With demands for a reduction in municipal expenditures, lower taxes and duties and the elimination of the church rates, these reformers were able to push back the influence of the traditional Anglican elite.92 Like Taylor and many other historians, Fraser interprets this development on the whole primarily as a ‘battle between rival elites within the urban middle classes’ and he does not see the masses who supported or protested the positions of the speakers in the vestries as independent agents within the local conflicts of the middle class.93 Although he describes vestry meetings in Bolton where the Tories were also able to successfully mobilize large crowds to deflect attacks to their bastions of power, Taylor relegates the participation of the lower classes to that of passive support for a Radical lower-middle-class elite.94 At the beginning of the 1830s in Leeds, Conservatives regularly lost in the election of the churchwardens because they found themselves facing a large Liberal majority among the several thousand participants taking part in the assembly.95 However, the heated battle of words and the often shifting majorities within the assembly – despite the clear dominance of Liberals and Radicals at times – indicate that leading politicians from both sides could not count on the unconditional support of firm blocks or dependent claqueurs; rather, they had to fight for their positions across all levels of society.96 In the vestries, as in the local conflicts surrounding the great national debates on Catholic emancipation, it was manifest that the political fronts did not form along social boundaries, but rather ran through broad alliances comprised of the different social groups. Around 1830, it became clear that the Conservatives could not stop the emergent spirit of reform arising after the collapse of the anti-emancipation movement; their local bastions of power would have to give in to the pressure of Liberal and Radical demands for reform. However, because of their popular character, confessionally tainted conflicts over the control of the local administration also offered the chance to propagate a Protestant understanding of the constitution and to defend the inseparability of Church and State. The everpresent bond between religion and patriotism in the conflicts over the vestries thus made it possible to keep alive identities and front lines that had formed during the emancipation crisis, even during a peak phase in reform agitation. At the same time, it made it easier to win support for conservative positions outside Anglican circles.

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In Leeds, for example, one such opportunity emerged in the summer of 1828. A hefty controversy began in the vestry in June over the use of funds from the church rates after six of the eight churchwarden posts had been filled with reformers for the first time earlier in the year.97 Under the direction of Edward Baines, Radicals and Liberals protested vehemently against the current use of money from the parish church for the construction and outfitting of three new Anglican churches on the outskirts of the city. They also accused both of the Conservative parish leaders of misappropriation.98 Shortly thereafter, the conflict turned into a more fundamental clash. As the reformers were repeatedly able to win a majority in the vestry, they were able to sink the church rates considerably and drastically limit the expenditures of the Anglican parish.99 In this fight, Michael Sadler initially became the leading speaker for the Conservatives. He argued that the actions of the Liberals were an attack on the status of the Anglican Church. In the vestry as well as in the festive ground-breaking ceremony for the new church in the suburb of Kirkstall, he defended the link between Church and State before large crowds using constitutional arguments similar to those used shortly thereafter in the debate over the emancipation of the Catholics. Moreover, he emphasized the particular merits of the Anglicans for the nation and the motherland in the history of England and refuted Nonconformist demands for a separation of Church and State.100 After the Roman Catholic Relief Act was passed in early 1829, the constitutional rhetoric used by Anglican Conservatives and Nonconformist reformers in the contests over emancipation became an important element of debate in the vestry. Although the Conservatives were not able to achieve victory in terms of churchwarden positions or stopping the drastic reduction of the church rates by the mid 1830s, they nonetheless kept up their efforts to win back their influence at the level of municipal administration. After Michael Sadler was elected to the House of Commons for the constituency of Newark in 1829, the new editor of the Leeds Intelligencer, Robert Perring, became the leading representative of the Conservatives in the vestry.101 After the agitation for the expansion of the suffrage peaked in 1831 and 1832, and the Conservatives were defeated in the first parliamentary election in Leeds in December 1832, Perring sought to win support for Conservative positions in the vestry year after year; he also sought to push through higher church rates and to limit the influence of Nonconformist Liberals in the city. Confessional ties defined these conflicts on both sides, but belonging to a certain church did not necessarily lead to the same political orientation. For example, a number of Liberal and Radical community leaders in Leeds were Anglicans, and Conservatives were repeatedly able to gain support among Nonconformists, in particular Methodists.102 Even in the autumn of 1828, prominent Methodists in the city had determinedly pleaded against the emancipation of the Catholics, sparking a newspaper war in which the Tories and the Liberals fought

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over the proper Nonconformist approach to the Catholic question and sought to build cross-confessional alliances on each side.103 The zenith of these confrontations was reached with the assembly in the Cloth Hall in which the Methodist preacher Reverend T. Galland quoted numerous Nonconformist theologians and Church Fathers to object to equality for the Catholics.104 At the beginning of the 1830s, these conflicts continued in a series of anonymous letters in which ‘a local Methodist preacher’ argued against Liberal demands for reform by tying his Methodism to Conservative positions on national and local issues. These letters were more than just a little provocative because James Mulgrave, an influential Methodist, had played an important role among local Liberals since 1827, and he became one of the first Aldermen of the city after the municipal reform of 1835.105 Additionally, Methodist preachers had attacked the Conservatives in 1831 for not fighting energetically enough against slavery in the colonies.106 The Leeds Mercury made a serious effort to strip the letters of their anonymity, identifying the source as Cavie Richardson, the secretary of the local committee against child labour and a close confidant of the popular Tory Radical leader Richard Oastler. Richardson, who together with Perring represented Conservative positions in the vestry, was deplored as a traitor who had betrayed the Methodists, provoking a strong response from the man in question.107 The result was a typical sparring of words between the Leeds Mercury and the Leeds Intelligencer, with accusations flying on both sides. Above all, this conflict demonstrates that despite the fundamental affinity of individual confessions to certain political positions, there was a field of ideological conflict in which the parties, especially at a local level, were able to campaign for support regardless of religious differences. Despite such room for manoeuvre in politics, the Tories were not able to break the hold of Liberals and Radicals over municipal politics in Leeds before 1835. Although the Conservatives made an effort, year after year, to maintain their position within the vestry, and the yearly elections for the churchwardens threw the city into hectic campaign chaos for weeks that was akin to that of parliamentary elections, the vote always ended in a considerable victory for the Liberals and the election of preponderantly Nonconformist churchwardens. In addition, the elections for the city council in 1835, which had been completely restructured as part of the Municipal Reform Act, also resulted in a Liberal majority.108 The situation in Leeds first changed after the establishment of the Operative Conservative Association because it was able to better organize Conservative supporters from among the lower classes who were needed to secure a victory in the vestry. It was not a coincidence that Perring and Richardson had played an important role in the establishment of the association in Leeds; in addition to providing local support for the national parliamentary elections, the presence of a Conservative working men’s association was direly necessary in terms of local political contests. Beginning in 1836, the activities of the Conservative operatives slowly led to a change in the local balance of power.

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The focal point of local political debate still remained the church rates. Together with the question of the actual amounts associated with the church rates, the fundamental clash over whether or not such church rates were warranted had come to a climax as the Liberal government under Lord Melbourne turned toward a more fundamental reform of the Church’s finances and the elimination of the rates in early 1836.109 In Leeds, the Liberals supported a campaign for the complete elimination of the rates without a replacement while the government pondered merely a limited financial adjustment. In one of its first local activities, the Operative Conservative Association sought to prevent the passing of a petition sponsored by the Nonconformists parishes at a demonstration. Led by Robert Perring, Henry Hall and George Hirst, the Conservatives defended the taxes going to the Church of England by citing the open nature of the Church in particular. As the ‘Church of the Poor’, they claimed, it was open to all classes and especially to those who could not make their own contribution towards financing a parish. The church taxes, they maintained, guaranteed that churches and parishes all over the country would offer the poor, without judgement, access to religion and Christian values. Moreover, they noted, the Anglican Church used a large portion of its financial means for charitable purposes that did not take into consideration the confession of those who received support. From this point of view, the church rates therefore contributed to the general welfare of the nation as well as to the divine mission to spread Christianity. At the end of the assembly, the Tories were defeated only by a small margin. But, thanks to the mobilization of the operatives, they had left a lasting impression. Their arguments must have presented a challenge to the Nonconformists as they drove the Baptist preacher Reverend Giles to react angrily. They brought the discussion down to the fundamental question as to whether the Bible intended for a state church, which would ultimately make the Nonconformist confessions less Christian than the Anglican confession. The Liberal majority within the assembly ultimately pushed through the petition, which demanded the complete separation of Church and State.110 The intervention of the Operative Conservative Association in the assembly, attended by a few hundred people, made it clear just how much local political conflicts were defined by fundamentally divergent notions of society and the constitution that were directly linked to the political identities of social groups from among the lower classes. Although the operatives were led by prominent Conservatives, they were by no means the spineless claquers that many of their opponents and some historians have believed them to be. After the Liberal victory, for example, Perring complained in the Leeds Intelligencer that the Conservative workers had been abandoned by the Tories from the middle and upper classes in their fight for the constitution.111 When Perring was defeated in the open ballot for the election of the churchwardens in 1835, he was able to force through a paper ballot in the vestry in which the right to vote of those submitting ballots was verified. As the ballot shows, many well-to-do Conservatives were not

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particularly belligerent when it came to demanding higher taxes for themselves. As the Liberals had expected, many taxpayers from among the Tory camp voted for Nonconformist candidates and therefore lower church rates.112 The members of the Operative Conservative Association were immune to these considerations. They carried on with their campaign for the rates in 1837 with a petition to secure the church rates that was adopted in January. By the end of February, they had collected almost eight thousand signatures – less than the thirteen thousand signatures on the Liberal petition against the rates, but still quite a respectable number.113 They further demonstrated their autonomy by suggesting a ₤250,000 limit to the rates in their petition as well as a change in the levy along the lines of an old plan of Lord Althorp.114 At the same time, Conservative workers in neighbouring Huddersfield supported the position of Richard Oastler, who countered Liberal demands for the abolition of the church rates by suggesting that the rates, which he understood to be the property of the poor, be transformed into a direct tax to be used to finance social welfare measures.115 The associations in the West Riding thus had space to manoeuvre when it came to determining their position and acted on their own accord in political conflicts. Together with other Conservatives, however, they always saw Liberals as the enemy of the constitution and true religion. In any case, they cheered along as the chairman at a local district meeting of the Conservatives in Leeds in December 1838, which was attended by numerous operatives, solemnly proclaimed: ‘Church and State – and may they never be separated by the bands of infidels and Whigs who are now arrayed against us!’116 With the support of the Operative Conservative Association, the Tories in Leeds were able to achieve a majority in the vestry in 1837 for the first time in years; they were also able to ensure Conservative dominance within the Improvement Commission which was tasked with issues related to city infrastructure.117 Furthermore, with the help of the operatives, Conservative candidates were able to achieve victories in the city council elections. At the beginning of the 1840s, they were also able to mobilize a substantial Conservative minority on a regular basis within the city council, which had come to be dominated by Chartists.118 Together with the charismatic Anglican vicar, Walter Farquhar Hook, who had been appointed in 1837, the Conservatives fought for a strong church presence in working-class suburbs and the self-conception of the parish as the church of the poor. All told, the establishment of the Operative Conservative Association may not have led to a fundamental swing toward the Conservative side in the city’s local politics, but the activities of the association strengthened the Anglican side in the confessionally defined conflicts. The inclusion of the self-conception of the Church of England as the Established Church in popular conservative constitutionalism added considerable weight to the local Tory cause. As in Leeds, the influence of Operative Conservative Associations over local conflicts with confessional dimensions became noticeable in other cities after

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1835 as well. For example, Tory operatives pushed through the election of Conservative councillors in Oldham in 1836.119 A year later, tumultuous vestry assemblies in Salford in which Radicals and members of the Operative Conservative Association stood against each other led to long legal conflicts over the appointment of administrative offices. In the end, the Conservatives could celebrate victory as their candidates took office.120 Almost simultaneously, thanks to the support of large crowds, the Tories in Chorley were able to raise a church rate against dismayed Nonconformists after facing years of defeat.121 Two years later, Chartists and Conservative operatives in Wigan landed in a fistfight after a demonstrative ‘Church visit’ by the Chartists, who had first paraded through the streets and then attacked the vicar during the service.122 In Bolton, too, the establishment of the Operative Conservative Association in 1836 changed the balance of power in local politics. As Reverend Slade had made a compromise after the victories of the reformers at the beginning of the 1830s and refrained from applying for a church rate for his parish, the parish assemblies in the years to follow were mostly peaceful, although not completely without party conflicts.123 Nonetheless, Conservative operatives organized events in which they campaigned for the retention of the church rates.124 As the Tories in Bolton gave up on their boycott of the newly created city council in 1842, they were quickly able to gain a permanent majority with the help of the operatives. After the defeat in the municipal elections of 1851, the Bolton Chronicle commented that the Conservative victories of the last twelve years were thanks to the working classes in the ranks of the party; it noted that the party leadership’s negligence of the operatives was responsible for the weakening of the local Conservative hold on power.125 The establishment of specifically Protestant Operative Associations shows just how much a Protestant understanding of the constitution and a fundamental commitment to the role of the Church of England could be used to mobilize support among the lower classes. These clubs were local branches of the Protestant Association, which had been founded in 1835 as a response to recent flare-ups in the confessional conflict between Irish Catholics and Protestants in London.126 This anti-Catholic organization was dominated by evangelical Anglicans and nationally well-known preachers such as Hugh McNeile from Liverpool and Hugh Stowell from Salford as well as the Irishman Mortimer O’Sullivan. McNeile founded the first Protestant Operative Association in 1839 in Liverpool following the model of the Operative Conservative Associations.127 It was not long before over five hundred people regularly attended the club’s monthly meetings. Local associations were also established in the suburbs and surrounding villages, and committees began to circle systematically through plebeian neighbourhoods to distribute tracts, attract new members and encourage regular church attendance. The associations quickly spread out beyond Liverpool. In his study of the Protestant Association from 1839 to 1845, John Wolffe counted

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twenty-one Protestant Operative Associations, citing substantial membership figures of several hundred per club.128 No other lower-class organization stressed the Protestant constitutional ideal as much as these associations. However, these clubs are difficult to differentiate from the Conservative Operative Associations. Quite noticeably, they tended to appear in cities in which there was no Operative Conservative Association, although sometimes the organizations existed side by side in cities such as Salford, Bolton or Liverpool. Granted, some of the clubs appear to have been more strongly influenced by the parish vicars, and the local Sunday schools of the Anglican parish were a more important recruiting basis for these clubs than for the Operative Conservative Associations, but the political activities of the two organizations hardly differed. In conflicts in the vestry, for example, the Protestant operatives resembled their Tory counterparts, although they did refrain from any direct association with the party. From 1840 onwards, Protestant Operative Associations were even able to organize noteworthy numbers of workers with a loyalist Protestant social outlook in London. In almost all of the city’s boroughs, associations were founded. However, it is difficult to assess the membership structures in detail. Most likely, the clubs recruited their members primarily from among the small tradesmen and craftsmen so abundant in London, who often dominated the organizations of the Radicals and Chartists. In 1842, the chairmen of the organizations in the poorer boroughs of Tower Hamlets and Southwark counted 228 and 631 members, respectively.129 The membership figures for other boroughs were probably lower. All told, there were most likely two to three thousand operatives who belonged to the nine associations in the capital. Even though the local chairmen occasionally complained about the passivity of the members at large, the associations still enjoyed significant influence in the city.130 At the zenith of their activities in London in 1841 and 1842, even the Chartists did not have more than eight thousand registered members; when it came to smaller political acts, they relied on a core of a few hundred activists. The plentiful crowd of a hundred thousand people who attended the demonstration in which the petition for the Charter was turned over to Parliament in May 1842 may have made it clear that there was considerable support for universal suffrage, but it remained an exception rather than the rule. In London, moreover, the Chartists were continually able to mobilize well over half of their official membership. Because of their strength, other political opinions among the lower classes receded into the background.131 The Protestant Operative Associations made an effort to create a counterweight to this Chartist agitation. They believed the Chartists to be the greatest danger in the country with their ‘antichristian doctrines of Popery, the abominable tenets of Socinianism … and the filthy notions of Socialism’.132 The presence of the Protestant operatives in London was less noticeable than in other cities because they had less of a direct influence over local political conflicts or

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city council assemblies. Although newspaper reports and speeches as well as the publications of the association repeatedly mention the defence of the Church of England as an indispensable element of the ‘Protestant Constitution’, such references are largely lacking for the capital. After the Conservative change of government in 1841, the annual reapproval of the government funding of the Irish college to educate Catholic priests in Maynooth became a point of interest for the association. The local Protestant operatives regularly resolved petitions against the ‘Maynooth Grant’ and sent them to Parliament with many signatures. They also supported Conservative candidates in the parliamentary elections, especially if the politicians took a decisive ‘No Popery’ stance to protect the position of the Anglican Church and rejected any kind of concessions to the Catholics or the Catholic Church.133 Their opponents also took them quite seriously. There are repeated references to disruptions or attacks by the Chartists or Catholics on the Protestant Operative Associations.134 John Wolffe has already pointed out the noticeable coincidence between the zenith of Chartism and the peak of the activities of the Protestant Operative Associations in London; both movements were not able to gain a foothold in the capital until relatively late.135 Although Wolffe tends to see ties to Tory Radicalism along the lines of Richard Oastler, he overlooks the connection between Protestant and Conservative working men’s associations. With the emergence of the Protestant Operative Associations, organizations that appealed to the English lower classes with a firmly Protestant identity spread across all of England, reaching those regions that had not been touched by the wave of Operative Conservative Associations founded between 1835 and 1837. Both these organizations played a comparable role in local conflicts; it was not seldom that they emerged out of local confessional conflicts. The success of the Protestant Operative Associations demonstrates just how much an aggressive Protestantism combined with a clear commitment to the Anglican Church as the Established Church as well as a loyalist brand of patriotism were fundamental to the views on society and the constitution held by important sectors of the English lower classes long after 1829.

Conservative Constitutionalism after Catholic Emancipation Although the analysis of local political conflicts and the involvement of Operative Conservative Associations within them suggests that Protestant identities still played an important role in the political manoeuvrings of a rather substantial portion of the English lower classes in the decades after 1829, recent scholarship in social history seems to be unanimous in its judgement to the contrary. Linda Colley depicts the emancipation of the Catholics as a deep caesura in British history and the end of the era of Protestant patriotism. John Wolffe and Denis

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Paz argue that social groups from the lower classes seldom came into contact with the middle-class organizations that continued to propagate anti-Catholic and decidedly Protestant points of view after 1830. David Walsh maintains that Protestantism and anti-Catholicism only played a subordinate role in the Operative Conservative Associations. Neville Kirk goes even further, claiming that the Tory operatives as well as Protestant/conservative driven politics were an insignificant aspect within the history of the English working classes for much of the nineteenth century. Even for Liverpool, which is normally considered an unusual example of a major English city because the particularly strong presence of Irish immigrants meant that politics in the city were defined by confessional conflicts and dominated by Protestant Conservatives, Kevin Moore has recently questioned whether anti-Catholicism and ‘No Popery’ politics were important factors in the Conservative mobilization of workers in the 1830s and 1840s.136 There are only a few voices within recent scholarship that question this scholarly consensus that has been built over the last few years.137 In contrast, a cursory look at the activities of the Operative Conservative Associations exemplifies the centrality of a Protestant identity for the members of the organization at the very least. In Bolton and Leeds, no meeting of the operatives went by without long hymns of praise for the country’s Protestant institutions, the ‘Protestant Constitution’, and the close ties between Church and State as well as between the altar and the Crown. The Conservative understanding of loyalism and patriotism could not be separated from religious-confessional notions that linked the basic tenets of the English constitution with the Protestant character of the English nation. These included the veneration of the Church of England as well as the emphasis on the Protestant succession to the throne, the rejection of any kind of ‘popery’ and the refusal to accept any further limits on the privileges of the Church of England. Additionally, the fame and glory of England was seen as an expression of God’s mercy bestowed upon a Protestant nation. Not only local conflicts, but also the storms of applause that accompanied the speeches held at assemblies and celebrations indicate that these views reflected the convictions of the Conservative operatives.138 If specific speeches are taken more closely into account, as those in Bolton for example, it also becomes clear just how much this Protestant identity of the associations was defined after 1830 by the collective experiences of the emancipation crisis as well as the Protestant constitutionalism that had developed in the 1820s. ‘Hitherto shalt thou come and no farther’, William Bolling proclaimed at an assembly of the operatives in July 1837, highlighting the typical way in which members were repeatedly reminded of the emancipation of the Catholics and the crushing defeat of the Ultra Conservatives in 1829.139 The praise of the constitution with its Protestant institutions was often mixed together with complaints over the damage that had already been done. For John Roby, the constitution was nothing more than a ‘Beggar’s Cloak’ since the Catholics had entered Parliament;

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at the same time, he maintained that it was now even more important to defend the remains of the original cloak.140 The motif of treason, which had begun so prominently when leading Tories had consented to the emancipation of the Catholics, reappeared in almost every assembly of the Bolton operatives in the form of sharp attacks against the Whigs and the Irish Catholics, but most especially against their leader in Parliament, Daniel O’Connell. While Conservative speakers accused the Liberals of having abandoned and sold the Protestant core of civil and religious liberty, they also saw the lasting confessional conflicts in Ireland as proof of the fact that all the assurances that emancipation would help settle the situation in Ireland and satisfy all the demands of the Catholics were fraudulent and false.141 In light of this ‘Whig Trickery’ and ‘Popish Plotting’ even Peel and Wellington could once again be accepted as Conservative leaders despite their considerable contributions to the emancipation. They may have let themselves be deceived by the pro-Catholic agitators, but they had since admitted their mistakes and once again taken up their posts as the leaders of all those who were deeply committed to defending the Protestant constitution against further attacks.142 Lastly, the close ties between the people and the throne remained present in the speeches. It was exactly the constant repetition of the idea that ordinary workers and the English people had to defend the Protestant succession against the continued attacks of the Catholics and other enemies of the constitution that allowed for such a close connection between Protestant identity and Conservative notions of loyalism and patriotism.143 The most striking difference separating the Operative Conservative Associations from the Protestant Operative Associations was the fact that the Protestant clubs were more strongly anti-Catholic and had campaigned longer and more often against supposed Catholic ideas. In speeches before members as well as in flyers or the Penny Protestant Operative, there was an endless series of one-sided depictions of historic conflicts between Protestants and Catholics; false Catholic doctrines and ‘papist’ heresies were attacked and warnings were issued against the political endeavours of the Vatican and the Pope.144 Historical excursions and references to the unchanging, deeply ‘un-English’ nature of Catholicism did play an important role in the Operative Conservative Associations, but they took on a new dimension in the Protestant clubs. Whole series of lectures on ‘popery’ were offered, and no other topic seems to have mobilized the members as much as the threat that politicized Catholicism presented for England and its constitution.145 Whereas differences between Nonconformists and a truly Protestant identity appeared repeatedly in the assemblies of the Conservative operatives in Bolton, efforts were made in the Protestant associations – despite the similarly close ties to the Church of England – to present a more strongly pan-Protestant identity to the outside and to report on members from within Nonconformist circles.146 One reason for the tendency of many historians to underestimate the Protestant/anti-Catholic link that bound social groups among the lower classes to the

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Conservatives may be that these topics and attitudes only seldom made a difference in the election campaigns. After 1826, the motif of the ‘Church in danger’ only played a noteworthy role on the hustings in 1837. Moreover, directly antiCatholic slogans that went beyond the inscription of ‘No Popery’ on placards were also hardly ever used. The general election when the crown changed hands took place close to the parliamentary debates on the church rates and shortly after the repeal of the remaining tithes to the Church of England. Consequently, in Leeds and London, Conservative politicians emphasized their support of the Church of England and the great importance of Protestantism for the English constitution.147 Granted, the reaffirmation of the Established Church was also part of the standing repertoire of Conservative candidates in other elections, yet it was usually the rather formulaic constitutional phrase of ‘Church and State’ that was used, as in Bolton in 1837.148 In direct confrontations with Liberal and Radical opponents, however, other aspects of the constitution stood at the forefront of the debates, not the least because local Conservatives faced a growing dilemma when it came to the question of the Maynooth College at the end of the 1830s. The fact that Peel, the parliamentary leader of the Tories, supported the state financing of the college as of 1841 was a thorn in the eye of many Conservatives across the country. Like the Protestant Operative Associations, broad swathes of English society could not come to terms with public money flowing to a Catholic institution.149 However, it was difficult for Conservative candidates to position themselves at the head of these protests – and therefore against their own party leader – during the elections. Consequently, this question, which was ultimately tied to the more fundamental question about the importance of Protestantism for English society, contributed greatly to the split in the Conservative party in 1846. Ironically, it was rather insignificant in the actual elections and, in fact, hindered a major Protestant/conservative mobilization. It is therefore important not to underestimate the significance of a Protestant national identity for lower-class conservatives. For those who chose to join one of the Conservative associations, this identity played a decisive role in their bond with the organization. Furthermore, the link between Protestantism and nationalism was a substantial factor in local conflicts when it came to the mobilization of support from beyond the circle of registered members, even if the offensive use of anti-Catholic slogans proved to be difficult in parliamentary election campaigns. It all depends on a precise assessment of the relative importance of conservative notions of religion and the nation: The Protestant language of the Tories stood in a competition with liberal and radical discourses that also based their political demands on a Protestant foundation, albeit one that was opposed to a state church and social hierarchies. The loud support for conservative voices in the struggle against the emancipation of the Catholics in 1828 did not preclude someone from becoming a dedicated proponent of electoral reforms along liberal lines two or three years later. Likewise, a signature below the list of democratic

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reforms on the People’s Charter did not mean that those who signed wished to have Irish Catholics in their neighbourhoods or would refrain from supporting Conservative politicians who warned against ‘Popery’ in the name of the Crown and the Church. The parallel existence of opposing identities shaped the conflicts taking place on the level of popular politics; actors from the lower classes could mix elements from one side with the other, unwittingly come to contradictory answers to different problems or even change their minds from time to time. As a result, political alliances had to be recreated time and time again as the contexts changed. The conservative variant of popular constitutionalism could always count on a great deal of support because of its particular understanding of Protestantism, not the least because it appealed to notions and convictions that were deeply anchored in the popular culture of the English lower classes.

Notes 1. On the Kent meeting, see The Times, 25 October 1828; Observer, 26 October 1828; John Bull, 26 October 1828; Cobbett’s Weekly Register, 1 November 1828. The quotes are taken from the reports of the Observer. A detailed description of the events can be found in K. Beresford, ‘The “Men of Kent” and the Penenden Heath Meeting 1828’, Archaeologia Cantiana 125 (2005), 151–71. 2. Two laws from 1661 and 1673, later often called the Test and Corporation Act, demanded that all those holding royal or communal offices, including members of Parliament, had to take Communion at least once a year in the Anglican Church as well as swear an oath of loyalty to the Crown and renounce the doctrine of transubstantiation. In addition to Catholics, this legislation also officially excluded Nonconformists from public office; many Nonconformists, however, found themselves personally able to fulfil the requirements. 3. On the Catholic Association and the emancipation crisis in Ireland, see R. Foster, Modern Ireland, 1600–1972 (London: Allen Lane, 1988), 289–317; and J. Elvert, Geschichte Irlands (Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch-Verlag, 1996), 323–40. On the Orange Order, see H. Senior, Orangeism in Ireland and Britain, 1795–1836, Studies in Irish History, Second Series IV (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1966). 4. J. Neuheiser, Erinnerung von unten. Die Paraden des Oranierordens in Irland (1796–1846) aus kulturgeschichtlicher Sicht, Studien zur englischen Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaft 4 (Trier: Wissenschaftler Verlag Trier, 2002), ch. 4. 5. See G.I.T. Machin, The Catholic Question in English Politics 1820 to 1830 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964); and Senior, Orangeism. 6. See G.F.A. Best, ‘The Protestant Constitution and Its Supporters, 1800–1829’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 8 (1958), 105–27; and Simes, ‘Ultra Tories’. 7. The Spectator, 18 October 1828. 8. R.L. Sheil, Sketches, Legal and Political, ed. M. Savage (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1855), 211–13, as reprinted in M. Hurst (ed.), Political and Cultural Analyses of Ireland, vols. 3 and 4 (Bristol: Thoemmes, 2002). 9. See C. Haydon, Anti-Catholicism in Eighteenth-Century England, c. 1714–1780 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); and idem, ‘“I Love My King and My Country, But a Roman Catholic I Hate”: Anti-Catholicism, Xenophobia and National Identity in

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Eighteenth-Century England’, in T. Claydon and I. McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–c. 1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 33–52. 10. Observer, 26 October 1828. 11. The Times, 26 October 1828 and 27 October 1828. 12. Cobbett’s Weekly Register, 1 November 1828. 13. For example, John Bull, 26 October 1828 and 2 November 1828. 14. For older scholarship, see, for example, B. Ward, The Eve of Catholic Emancipation (London: Longmans, 1911); idem, The Sequel to Catholic Emancipation (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1915); D. Gwynn, The Struggle for Catholic Emancipation, 1750–1829 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1928); idem, A Hundred Years of Catholic Emancipation, 1829–1929 (London: Longmans, Green and Co., 1929); J.H. Hexter, ‘The Protestant Revival and the Catholic Question in England, 1778–1829’, Journal of Modern History 8 (1936), 297–311, quotation from p. 319; G.A. Cahill, ‘Irish Catholicism and English Toryism’, Review of Politics 19 (1957), 62–76; Best, ‘Protestant Constitution’; idem, ‘The Constitutional Revolution, 1828–1832 and its Consequences for the Established Church’, Theology 39 (1959), 226–34; idem, ‘Popular Protestantism in Victorian Britain’, in R. Robson (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain (London: G. Bell and Sons, 1967), 115–42; G.I.T. Machin, ‘The NoPopery Movement in Britain, 1828–1829’, Historical Journal 6 (1963), 193–211; and idem, Catholic Question, 131–33. Hickman has vehemently advocated the thesis that anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments had dominated among the population from the seventeenth century to the twentieth century; see M.J. Hickman, Religion, Class and Identity: The State, the Catholic Church and the Education of the Irish in Britain (Aldershot: Avebury, 1995). But her strongly one-sided depiction of English society and her ignorance of all the political conflicts over the role of Catholicism and religion for English national identity significantly weaken her position. 15. Colley, Britons, 324–34. A similar interpretation of the Kent meeting and the protests against the emancipation of the Catholics can be found in W. Hinde, Catholic Emancipation: A Shake to Men’s Minds (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 117–19. 16. See J. Wolffe, The Protestant Crusade in Great Britain, 1829–1860, Oxford Historical Monographs (New York: Clarendon Press, 1991); and D.G. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism in MidVictorian England (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1992). 17. Kirk, Change, 95–107. 18. See J. Wolffe, God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843–1945 (London: Routledge, 1994); and idem, ‘Change and Continuity in British AntiCatholicism, 1829–1982’, in F. Tallett and N. Atkin (eds), Catholicism in Britain and France since 1789 (London: The Hambledon Press, 1996), 67–83. 19. See J.D.C. Clark, ‘A General Theory of Party, Opposition and Government, 1688–1832’, Historical Journal 23 (1980), 295–325; idem, English Society, 393–95; and idem, ‘Protestantism’. 20. On the critiques of this position, see J. Wolffe, ‘A Transatlantic Perspective: Protestantism and National Identities in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Britain and the United States’, in T. Claydon and I. McBride (eds), Protestantism and National Identity: Britain and Ireland, c. 1650–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 291–309. 21. See the introduction to this book. 22. See K. Watson, ‘Liberty, Loyalty and Locality: The Discourses of Loyalism in England, 1790– 1815’, PhD dissertation, Open University, 1995, esp. 47–90. 23. A look at the pamphlets of the Reeves Association underscores the surprising lack of references to the Protestant character of the constitution despite the Church and King ideology. See Reeves-Association, Association Papers. On the views of the loyalist associations in general, see J.A. Caulfield, ‘The Reeves Association: A Study of Loyalism in the 1790s’, PhD dissertation, University of Reading, 1988, 221–23.

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24. See Watson, ‘Liberty’, ch. 2, esp. 114. 25. See J. Smyth, ‘Anti-Catholicism, Conservatism and Conspiracy: Sir Richard Musgrave’s Memoirs of the Different Rebellions in Ireland’, Eighteenth Century Life 22 (1998), 62–73. 26. On the spread of the Orange Order to England, see Senior, Orangeism, 151–76; and chapter 4 of this book. 27. See Machin, Catholic Question, 12–14; and Hinde, Catholic Emancipation, 1–18. In June 1812, Canning’s petition to the government to begin preparing for the legal emancipation of the Catholics won a majority of over one hundred votes in the lower house. 28. See Sack, Jacobite to Conservative. 29. See the remarks on the petitions in the Parliamentary Papers, Hansard, Series 1, vol. 24, January and February 1813. The numbers of signatures from Bolton and London were taken from the reports (ibid., col. 394 and col. 693); the number of signatures from Leeds was discussed during the Emancipation crisis in 1828 in the Leeds Intelligencer, 1 May 1838. Petitions from Leeds against the emancipation were introduced in the House of Commons on 8 February 1813 and 23 February 1813; additional petitions from the Leeds area were also submitted to Parliament around the same time (Huddersfield Petition: 5 February 1813 in the House of Lords and 8 February 1813 in the House of Commons; Halifax Petition: 25 February 1813 in the House of Lords). On the population figures for Bolton, see Clegg, Annals of Bolton, 24; for Leeds, see C.J. Morgan, ‘Demographic Change’, 48; and for London, see Schwarz, ‘London 1700–1840’. 30. On the petition from Leeds in the lower house on 25 February 1813, for example, see Hansard, Series 1, vol. 24. 31. Corresponding discussions accompanied the introduction of many petitions; the petitions from Westminster and London, for example, were very intensively discussion; see ibid., col. 693. 32. Ibid. 33. On the parliamentary debates, see Machin, Catholic Question, 14–15; and Hinde, Catholic Emancipation, 2–3. 34. See Machin, Catholic Question, 14–15; and Hinde, Catholic Emancipation, 2–3. 35. See chapter 1. 36. See Belchem, ‘Working Class Radicalism’. 37. On the corresponding articles and commentaries in conservative papers, see, for example, John Bull, 25 March 1821, 15 April 1821 and 22 April 1821; Leeds Intelligencer, 12 March 1821, 26 March 1821 and 2 April 1821. 38. At a demonstration in July 1819 in Smithfield in London, Henry Hunt had vehemently pleaded for the emancipation of the Catholics. The corresponding passage in the petition that was ultimately agreed upon received a clear majority in the vote taken among the twenty thousand or so participants; however, it was only these pro-Catholic demands that provoked negative reactions among the crowd. See The Times, 22 July 1819; and Observer, 25 July 1819. Anti-Catholic votes appeared in March 1820 at the nomination of candidates in Southwark where the Conservative candidate Turton’s demands for ‘No Popery’ were almost able to defeat the Liberal-Radical candidates; see The Times, 9 March 1820 and 11 March 1820; Observer, 13 March 1820. 39. See above, chapter 1, section ‘The Capital Celebrates the Crown’; and Fulcher, ‘Loyalist Response’. 40. See the reports on the Pitt Club meetings in 1820 and 1821 in London and Leeds in The Times, 29 May 1820 and 29 May 1821; Leeds Intelligencer, 29 May 1820 and 4 June 1821. On the role of the Pitt Clubs in general, see J.J. Sack, ‘The Memory of Burke and the Memory of Pitt: English Conservatism Confronts its Past, 1806–1829’, Historical Journal 30 (1987), 623–40.

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41. See E.P. Thompson, Making, ch. 15; D.G. Wright, Popular Radicalism, ch. 4; and Belchem, Class, 70–83. 42. See chapter 1. 43. See Philp, Vulgar Conservatism, 66–67. 44. See E.P. Thompson, Making, ch. 16; D.G. Wright, Popular Radicalism, ch. 4; and Belchem, Class, 82–89. 45. In the early 1820s, the reports on the situation in Ireland took up a noticeable amount of space within the pages of all the national and local papers read for the purposes of this book. 46. See Wolffe, Protestant Crusade; idem, ‘Change’; Hempton, ‘Religion and Political Culture’, 93–95 and passim; idem, The Religion of the People: Methodism and Popular Religion, c. 1750– 1850 (London: Routledge, 1996); and B. Hilton, Corn, Cash and Commerce: The Economic Policies of the Tory Governments 1815–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), ch.1. 47. Leeds Intelligencer, 8 June 1826 and 15 June 1826. 48. Leeds Intelligencer, 15 June 1826. 49. See ibid.; on the election of 1820, see Leeds Intelligencer 6 March 1820 and 27 March 1820. 50. The Times, 14 June 1826. 51. In addition, the next issue of the Leeds Intelligencer used words similar to that of the liberal press to point out the fact that the Liberals had made a special effort following the defeat at the nomination to make sure that that their candidates were supported by a pro-Catholic crowd just a few days later when the official results of the ballot were announced. Despite intimidation attempts and mobilizing in the factories of Liberal entrepreneurs, the crowd still leaned towards the Conservative side. See Leeds Intelligencer, 22 June 1826. 52. Ibid. In previous elections, the seats in the county of Yorkshire were divided among Conservative and Liberal candidates without an actual ballot. In 1826, both parties hoped that the election would end the tie in the county, but they also refrained from nominating any additional candidates from among their own ranks. The reason for this may have been that the number of seats for the county was raised from two to four, which made it difficult to find suitable candidates who had the financial means to enter into a costly campaign. On the Conservative side, moreover, the former MP Stuart Wortley only ruled out his candidacy shortly before the actual election. 53. The Times, 7 June 1826 and 8 June 1826. 54. The Times, 10 June 1826. 55. In the show of hands in the City of London, moreover, both of the Liberal candidates who had clearly taken sides against Catholic emancipation achieved clear majorities. In a field of candidates proposing similar reforms for other political issues, an anti-Catholic stance seemed to dramatically improve the chances of being elected. See ibid. 56. The Times, 19 June 1826. 57. For polemics against London’s John Bull or the Standard, see, for example, Bolton Chronicle, 26 January 1828. 58. See P. Taylor, Popular Politics, 65–73. These families included the Stanleys, the Bridgemans and the Egertons, who continued to dominate Conservative circles in the 1830s and were key players involved in the Operative Conservative Association in Bolton. 59. Bolton Chronicle, 8 March 1828 and 22 March 1828. 60. Bolton Chronicle, 22 November 1828, 6 December 1828, 10 January 1829 and 14 March 1829. 61. On the description of Bolton as a former stronghold of the Orange Order, see Bolton Chronicle, 22 November 1828. 62. Bolton Chronicle, 14 February 1829; Hansard, Series 2, vol. 20, col. 131. Wellington read aloud the plea from Bolton in Parliament, although it was already known at this point in time that he had come to support the emancipation of the Catholics.

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63. Bolton Chronicle, 14 March 1829, 4 April 1829 and 11 April 1829; Manchester Courier, 14 March 1829. 64. Bolton Chronicle, 10 January 1829. 65. Bolton Chronicle, 28 February 1829. 66. See ibid.; reports on the spread of corresponding placards and pamphlets can also be found in W. Brimelow, Political and Parliamentary History of Bolton, reprinted from the Bolton Journal vol. 1 (Bolton: Tillotson and Son; G. Winterburn, 1882), 70. 67. Bolton Chronicle, 10 January 1829. 68. Articles that generally report negatively on the activities of the Church and King Club as well as anti-Catholic positions on the whole can be found in numerous issues of the Bolton Chronicle from January 1828 onward; these kinds of commentaries and reports first disappeared after the Catholic Relief Act had been passed in Parliament. On the population figures for Bolton, see Clegg, Annals of Bolton, 28, which lists the number of residents in Bolton according to the census of 1831 at 43,396. 69. See Colley, Britons, 329–30. In contrast, Machin underestimates the significance of the wave of petitions quite considerably because he bases his interpretation primarily on the effect of the petitions on the parliamentary ratio between those for and against; see Machin, Catholic Question, 148–49. See also Hinde, Catholic Emancipation, 138–39. 70. See the text of his appeal as it was repeatedly cited in the conservative Press: ‘TO THE PROTESTANTS OF GREAT BRITAIN. Fellow Countrymen, Brother Protestants, In the name of our Country and our GOD I call upon you, without one moment’s delay, boldly to stand forward in Defence of our PROTESTANT CONSTITUTION and RELIGION – of that Constitution which is the foundation of our long-cherished Liberties – of that Religion which is the source of the many Blessings which this Nation has received from the hands of the Almighty Governor of the Universe. Let the voice of Protestantism be heard from one end of the Empire to the other. Let the sound of it echo from hill to hill, and vale to vale. Let the tables of the Houses of Parliament groan under the weight of your Petitions; and let your Prayers reach the foot of the Throne; and, though the great body of your degenerate Senators are prepared to sacrifice, at the shrine of Treason and Rebellion, that Constitution for which our Ancestors so nobly fought and died, yet I feel confident that our gracious Sovereign, true to the sacred Oath which he has taken upon the Altars of our Country to defend our Constitution and our Religion from that Church which is bent upon their destruction, will not turn a deaf ear to the Prayers and Supplications of his loyal Protestant Subjects. I have the honour to be, With every respect, Your humble and devoted servant, Winchelsea and Nottingham’. Printed, for example, in John Bull, 15 February 1829. On the radical theme of ‘Old Corruption’, see W.D. Rubinstein, ‘The End of Old Corruption in Britain’, in W.D. Rubinstein, Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British History (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1987), 265–305; P. Harling, ‘Rethinking “Old Corruption”’, Past and Present 147 (1995), 127–58. 71. On the background of these letters and their significance for the new Brunswick Clubs, see Machin, Catholic Question, 131–33. The texts were printed in the conservative press, but were also broadly discussed in liberal newspapers. 72. John Bull, 15 February 1829. 73. Leeds Intelligencer, 6 November 1828. 74. The Times, 10 October 1828; Bolton Chronicle, 11 October 1828. 75. Colley, Britons, 331; Colley also points out that the motif of treason was a new element emerging in the debate in 1829, quoting this leaflet as cited in the Parliamentary Papers. 76. Leeds Intelligencer, 11 December 1828; and Leeds Mercury, 13 December 1828. 77. Leeds Intelligencer, 11 December 1828; and Leeds Mercury, 13 December 1828. 78. See Machin, Catholic Question, 142–44; and Hinde, Catholic Emancipation, 120.

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79. Leeds Intelligencer, 18 December 1828, 25 December 1828 and 19 March 1829; Leeds Mercury, 20 December 1828 and 21 March 1829. 80. In February 1829, a mob attacked Daniel O’Connell as he arrived in London; at the beginning of March, an angry mob broke the mayor of London’s windows during a riot. See John Bull, 15 February 1829 and 15 March 1829. 81. See John Bull, 22 March 1829; The Times, 21 March 1829 and 28 March 1829. On Wellington’s popularity, see I. Pears, ‘The Gentleman and the Hero: Wellington and Napoleon in the Nineteenth Century’, in R. Porter (ed.), Myths of the English (Oxford: Wiley, 1992), 216–36. 82. See Hinde, Catholic Emancipation, ch. 6. 83. Leeds Intelligencer, 11 December 1828; and Leeds Mercury, 13 December 1828. 84. On the links between Conservative and Anglican positions and Nonconformist and liberal positions respectively, see O’Gorman, Voters, 359–68. 85. See D. Fraser, Urban Politics in Victorian England: The Structure of Politics in Victorian Cities (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1976). 86. This description applies primarily to the typical ‘open vestry’. Alongside this body, there were also so-called ‘closed’ or ‘secret’ vestries that were controlled by local elites. See the still unsurpassed study of local administration by S. and B. Webb, English Local Government (1906–1929, reprint London: Cass, 1963), vol. 1. For a short summary of the functions of the vestry, see Fraser, Urban Politics. 87. See ibid. 88. The local administrative structures were not always dominated by Anglican Conservative Tory circles; cities such as Coventry and Nottingham were already firmly in the hands of Nonconformist Whigs in the eighteenth century; see J. Innes and N. Rogers, ‘Politics and Government 1700–1840’, in P. Clark (ed.), The Cambridge Urban History of Britain, 1540–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 529–74. 89. See P.T. Phillips, The Sectarian Spirit: Sectarianism, Society and Politics in Victorian Cotton Towns (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1982); B.D.A. Lewis, ‘Bourgeois Ideology’; idem, Middlemost; and P. Taylor, Popular Politics. 90. See the numerous studies by D. Fraser from 1969 to 1980 and S. and B. Webb, English Local Government, vol. 1, 91­–93. 91. See Fraser, Urban Politics, ch. 1; and S. and B. Webb, English Local Government, vol. 1, 227– 78. In London in particular there was a high density of closed vestries; in the 1820s, therefore, a great number of the conflicts were about opening the vestries. 92. See Sweet, English Town, 115–63. 93. Fraser, Urban Politics, 29. The strong dominance of petit bourgeois Radicals in the political conflicts of the 1820s and 1830s was emphasized in particular in Crossick, ‘Petite Bourgeoisie’, 71–81; Crossick clearly separates the class of shop owners, well-to-do craftsmen and lower clerks from workers’ political activities. 94. See P. Taylor, Popular Politics, ch. 2. 95. See D. Fraser, ‘The Leeds Churchwardens 1828–1850’, Publications of the Thoresby Society Miscellany 15 (1971), 1–22. 96. See, for example, the conflict over the election of a new parish organist in 1828 or the expansion of the cemetery in Leeds in 1829; Leeds Intelligencer, 14 August 1828 and 19 February 1829. 97. On the elections and the background regarding the parish finances, see Fraser, ‘Leeds Churchwardens’. 98. Leeds Intelligencer, 26 June 1828; Leeds Mercury, 21 June 1828; and Leeds Vestry Minute Book, 20 June 1828, Leeds City Archive, Parish Records of St Peter, RDP 68. 99. See Leeds Intelligencer, 4 December 1828; Leeds Vestry Minute Book, 28 November 1828, Leeds City Archive, Parish Records of St Peter, RDP 68.

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100. See Leeds Intelligencer, 4 December 1828; Leeds Vestry Minute Book, 28 November 1828, Leeds City Archive, Parish Records of St Peter, RDP 68, and his speech in Kirkstall as reported in the Leeds Intelligencer, 10 July 1828. 101. Perring took over the Leeds Intelligencer with John Hernaman in November 1829 and became editor-in-chief at the same time. In their first editorial, both men declared themselves on the side of ‘Tory Principles’ and the ‘Protestant People of England’ as well as the true interests of the English working classes; see Leeds Intelligencer, 5 November 1829. Perring quickly became an important Conservative figure in Leeds, and in many ways he was the direct counterpart to the Liberal politician and publisher of the Leeds Mercury, Edward Baines. 102. Methodists are usually grouped in with the Nonconformists, although the founder of the Methodists, John Wesley, never actually broke with the Anglican Church. Many authors therefore make a distinction between Methodism and traditional Nonconformism; see, for example, Larsen, Friends. 103. Leeds Intelligencer, 20 November 1828 and 27 November 1828. 104. Leeds Intelligencer, 11 December 1828 and 18 December 1828; Leeds Mercury, 6 December 1828 and 13 December 1828. 105. See Fraser, ‘Leeds Churchwardens’, 10. The city councils newly created in 1835 were made up of directly elected councillors and aldermen elected from among the councillors. 106. Leeds Intelligencer, 27 October 1831. 107. Leeds Mercury, 24 December 1831, 31 December 1831 and 7 January 1832; Leeds Intelligencer, 5 January 1832. 108. The Conservatives were already able to count a first victory in the parliamentary elections in 1835. See chapter 2. 109. See J.P. Ellens, Religious Routes to Gladstonian Liberalism: The Church Rate Conflict in England and Wales, 1832–1868 (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1994). 110. Leeds Intelligencer, 24 December 1836. 111. See ibid., editorial. 112. Fraser, ‘Leeds Churchwardens’, 8–9. Perring also seems to have represented the views of Conservatives from the lower classes in earlier vestry conflicts as well – at least the tactical conflicts within Conservative ranks between 1832 and 1835, which Fraser outlines, seem to indicate this. 113. Leeds Intelligencer, 25 February 1837. 114. Leeds Intelligencer, 14 January 1837. 115. Halifax Express, 15 April 1837. 116. Leeds Intelligencer, 1 August 1837. Fraser comments on this meeting, but he overlooks the fact that it was largely comprised of operatives. 117. Leeds Intelligencer, 7 January 1837. 118. Fraser describes the conflicts in the vestry at the beginning of the 1840s in a cursory way and therefore overlooks the fact that the majorities in the votes were only marginal; see Fraser, ‘Leeds Churchwardens’. See, for example, Leeds Intelligencer, 22 April 1843. 119. Leeds Intelligencer, 9 April 1836. 120. Bolton Chronicle, 14 October 1837. 121. Bolton Chronicle, 21 October 1837. 122. Wigan Gazette, 2 August 1839. 123. See P. Taylor, Popular Politics, ch. 1. On the political role of Slade in Bolton, see also Rev. J.A. Atkinson, Memoir of Rev. Canon Slade, M.A., Vicar of Bolton, Canon of Chester, Rector of West Kirby (Bolton: Daily Chronicle Office, 1892); and H.O. Fielding, James Slade: Vicar of Bolton 1817–1856 (Bolton: Friends of Bolton Parish Church, 1983). 124. Bolton Chronicle, 29 April 1837. 125. Bolton Chronicle, 24 July 1852.

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126. Wolffe, Protestant Crusade, 171–72. 127. On the foundation of the association in Liverpool, see J. Murphy, The Religious Problem in English Education (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1959), 220. Occasionally, references to earlier Protestant workers’ associations are made in scholarly works. In R.C. Greenall, The Making of Victorian Salford (Lancaster: Carnegie Publishing Limited, 2000), 99; and G.A. Cahill, ‘The Protestant Association and the Anti-Maynooth Agitation of 1845’, Catholic Herald Historical Review 43 (1957), 273–308, for example, the Protest Association was mixed up with the Operative Conservative Association. 128. See Wolffe, Protestant Crusade, 175, and his map showing the spread of Protestant organizations on p. 151. On the Protestant Association, see also Cahill, ‘Protestant Association’; and idem, ‘Irish Catholicism’. 129. The Penny Protestant Operative, April 1842 and September 1842. Other associations existed in Finsbury, Marylebone, the City of London, Westminster, Spitalfield, Lambeth and Chelsea. 130. On the complaints over the lack of activity on the part of the members, see the annual report of the association in Southwark, The Penny Protestant Operative, August 1841. 131. For the membership figures, see J.A. Epstein, The Lion of Freedom: Feargus O’Connor and the Chartist Movement, 1832–1842 (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 231; and Goodway, London Chartism, 38–40. 132. The Penny Protestant Operative, April 1840. 133. The Penny Protestant Operative, October 1845 and July 1847. 134. See, for example, The Times, 9 May 1840; The Penny Protestant Operative, May 1840, March 1841 and May 1841. 135. See Wolffe, Protestant Crusade. On the reasons for the later development in London, see chapter 2 in this book. 136. See Colley, Britons; Wolffe, Protestant Crusade; Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism; Walsh, ‘Working Class Political Integration’; Kirk, Change; and K.C. Moore, ‘“This Whig and Tory Ridden Town”: Popular Politics in Liverpool in the Chartist Era’, in J. Belchem (ed.), Popular Politics, Riot and Labour: Essays in Liverpool History 1790–1840 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992), 38–67. For a counter-argument with regards to Liverpool, see F. Neal, Sectarian Violence: The Liverpool Experience, 1819–1914 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988). 137. See, above all, P. Joyce, Visions; and Vernon, Politics; these two scholars also tend to emphasize the growing importance of Tory populism in the late nineteenth century. 138. See, for example, the speeches from Bolton, Leeds, West Bromwich and Barnsley: Bolton Chronicle, 4 June 1836 (Philip Halliwell, Charles Rothwell), 12 December 1840 (Richard Booth); Leeds Intelligencer, 1 April 1837 (Flower, Denham), 23 October 1841 (Rev. D. Jenkins); The Times, 5 January 1838 (West Bromwich, Rev. Gordon), 26 November 1839 (Barnsley, Mr Roby). This list could easily be lengthened. 139. Bolton Chronicle, 15 July 1837. 140. Bolton Chronicle, 15 September 1838. 141. See, for example, Bolton Chronicle, 4 June 1836 (speech by Halliwell), 15 July 1837 (Slade), 15 November 1839 (Slade) and 10 June 1843 (Cooper). 142. Bolton Chronicle, 4 June 1836 (speeches by Foster and Wilkins), 14 January 1837 (Foster) and 15 July 1837 (Egerton). 143. Bolton Chronicle, 15 July 1837 (speech by Rev. Slade), 15 September 1838 (Holt) and 15 November 1839 (Ruby). 144. See the activities of the associations as described in the remaining issues of The Penny Protestant Operative, the monthly paper of the organization, vol. 1–7 (1840–1848). 145. See, for example, The Penny Protestant Operative, May 1843, with reports on a twelve-part lecture series in the London borough of Marylebone. 146. See, for example, The Penny Protestant Operative, August 1841 and December 1846.

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147. The Times, 24 July 1837 and 25 July 1837; Leeds Intelligencer, 29 July 1837. 148. Bolton Chronicle, 29 July 1837; Leeds Intelligencer, 13 December 1832, 10 January 1835, 3 July 1841 and 31 July 1847; The Times, 30 June 1841. 149. See Cahill, ‘Protestant Association’; G.I.T. Machin, ‘The Maynooth Grant, Dissenters and Disestablishment, 1845–1847’, English Historical Review 3 (1967), 61–85; E.R. Norman, ‘The Maynooth Question of 1845’, Irish Historical Studies 15 (1967), 407–37; Wolffe, Protestant Crusade, ch. 6; and Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, ch. 7 and passim.

Chapter 4

Conservative Antics, Protest or Racism? Anti-Catholic Aspects of English Street Culture

?

On the fifth of November 1831, a quickly growing crowd assembled at dusk around the market square in Huddersfield. They met to celebrate the anniversary of the failed Gunpowder Plot of 1605 in which the king and the House of Lords escaped an assassination attempt planned by a group of Catholic conspirators. As usual on Guy Fawkes Day, fireworks and firecrackers lit up the sky, despite the year-long efforts of the local authorities and shopkeepers to dampen these dangerous displays. In 1831, however, tensions were running particularly high as the crowd assembled on the square. At the beginning of October, the House of Lords had refused to support the suffrage reforms introduced by the Liberal government under Lord Grey. This move sparked renewed campaigns for the expansion of the suffrage, which soon reached Huddersfield. As a result, the Guy Fawkes celebrations were tinged with angry protest. Around 9 p.m., a group of about a hundred men assembled on the market square bearing an effigy of the Welsh Bishop of Llandaff rather than the usual straw figure of Guy Fawkes. The bishop’s rejection of the Reform Bill in the House of Lords had evoked a particularly strong response because he had previously been considered a proponent of reform. Before arriving at the square, the men had been accompanied by a band with lighted torches as they marched through the town, carrying their effigy past the vicarage as well as the homes of prominent townsmen. The leaders of the group took to an improvised pedestal to make a declaration in which they celebrated the end of the fifth of November as a holiday honouring a conspiracy used by the State and the Church to advocate for taxes for the Church and its representatives as well as the corrupt system of ‘Old England’. After the crowd applauded the calls for the disbandment of all monopolies, suffrage reform, and justice for the people, the effigy was burned as a prayer was said: Notes from this chapter begin on page 187.

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Good Lord, put down aristocracy Let boroughmongers be abhorred, And from all tithes and shovel-hats Forthwith deliver us good Lord!1

Similar scenes took place in London on the same day where a bishop was often declared to be the ‘Guy of the Day’. In the borough of Clerkenwell, for example, twenty-one effigies of bishops were burned to mark the number of bishops in the House of Lords who had rejected the Reform Bill.2 The festivities in Huddersfield and London easily fit within the vision of Guy Fawkes Day that has prevailed in historical scholarship over the last two decades. For scholars, the fifth of November was generally marked by protests and unruly crowds who thoroughly enjoyed the fireworks, alcohol and rough exuberance that the day brought. Robert Storch describes Guy Fawkes Day as a holiday bearing little resemblance to official celebrations with symbolic significance for the State; he associates it with a ‘ritual of reversal’ similar to that of carnival in Basel. As the nineteenth century dawned, Storch maintains, the majority of those involved in the day’s celebrations moved closer to the social protest movement, and consequently social elites gradually withdrew from the celebrations. The festivities were left to groups from the lower classes who could express their social critique masked by wild music and aggressive rites. According to Storch, the direct links to questions of national significance waned over the course of the nineteenth century, but a culture of protest and disobedience lived on; this could be seen in the resistance to police controls and government interference in the planning of the events as well as the influence of local political conflicts. Alongside anti-Catholic and patriotic elements, as Storch argues, the commemoration of the plot against the king and Parliament that had dominated the day’s festivities since the seventeenth century receded to the background.3 Deniz Paz, in contrast, questions the subversive character of the rituals of Guy Fawkes Day. He sees the origins of the political aspects of the celebrations in the rivalries among the middle class. More so than others, he argues, the Tories sought to use the holiday for their own purposes. With respect to the participation of the lower classes in the day’s events, however, Paz ultimately agrees with other scholars. He maintains that when the celebrations were revived after they had almost died out by the mid century, they got out of hand as the crowd took control. The crowd, he claims, was not pursuing political goals and so it was indifferent to expressions of anti-Catholicism. Rather, for Paz, the masses were most interested in the excessive drinking and brawling associated with the celebrations. It was for this reason, he argues, that the crowd was willing to take up arms against attempts to dampen or control the festivities.4 In his studies on Northamptonshire and Cambridge he thus reaches conclusions similar to those of Guildford and Lewes who see the celebrations less as an opportunity for

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protests or anti-Catholic demonstrations and more as predominantly apolitical rituals that solidified social relationships and local identities among the lower classes.5 Other existing scholarship also tends to downplay the anti-Catholic aspects of English street culture. This applies in particular to outbreaks of violence between Englishmen and Irish immigrants in which confessional conflicts overlapped with ethnic distinctions as well as combative demonstrations against what was known as the ‘Papal Aggression’ when the pope reinstated bishoprics in 1850. Several studies have been published on these kinds of events, but most of them emphasize the fact that apart from the centres of confessional tension in Liverpool and Glasgow, there was very little violence between the English and the Irish in other places in Britain.6 Moreover, they claim, this topic hardly made its way into the political conflicts between the parties at a local level. For the most part, scholars attribute any existing tensions to the economic competition between local and immigrant workers, which often led to violence when the English believed that their social status was being threatened by the Irish.7 Correspondingly, the Anglo-Irish conflicts of the 1850s and 1860s are mostly portrayed as the result of the increasing number of Irish immigrants following the famine that began in 1845. Scholars of immigration and political history maintain that a link between anti-Irish tendencies and conservative Protestantism first emerged in the wake of these developments. These ties, they claim, became highly relevant in the late nineteenth century as the question of Irish self-government became a focal point of political debate and the Tories benefited more and more from the reorganization of the English branch of the Orange Order.8 Along the same lines, Denis Paz sees not only the participation of lower-class groups in the Guy Fawkes Day celebrations, but also their support of the demonstrations against the ‘Papal Aggression’ as largely apolitical. Accordingly, he has suggested that the burning of effigies of the pope as well as the bashing of Irish heads was simply the result of the misguided actions of drunken teenagers or frustrated workers.9 Although the more differentiated character of the research published over the last decades, with an emphasis on local contexts, is definitely a step in the right direction, this chapter will suggest another way to think about the celebrations, anti-Catholic protests and the outbreaks of violence between the English and the Irish. Regardless of the fact that Guy Fawkes Day could be used for radical protests and as a forum for local conflicts between the middle and lower classes, its prevailing message was one of anti-Catholicism and one that fits within a conservative way of thinking. The lower-class crowds that attended the festivities on the fifth of November as well as the protests against the ‘Papal Aggression’ were by no means passive participants or merely part of an event staged ‘from above’. Rather, the development of the English Orange Order and the protests against the reintroduction of Catholic elements in the Anglican Church demonstrated just how

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closely anti-Catholic and anti-Irish sentiments were linked in the minds of many in the English lower classes. Because of the popularity of such attitudes, it is easy to understand why the loyalist Protestant notions of the constitution described in the last chapter were able to mobilize political support across social divides well before the late nineteenth century. Conservative discourse effectively made use of ideas that were firmly anchored within the rituals of English street culture.

Guy Fawkes Day Celebrations before 1850 At first glance, Guy Fawkes Day was not a major public celebration in nineteenth-century England. Apart from the notorious centres of Guy Fawkes festivities in Exeter, Hastings, Guildford and Lewes, which scholars have repeatedly cited and analysed in studies of the day, most newspapers published only short notices about the day’s events, which were linked to schoolboys, serious injuries and irksome fireworks. Even the conservative and by no means reticent John Bull noted with a measure of relief that, thanks to the measures taken by the police, the celebrations had not been as dangerous as in the past, nor had they resulted in as many mobs.10 The scenes of protesting radicals depicted in Huddersfield and London seem to be an exception rather than the rule. After 1815, The Times only mentioned such protests on the fifth of November once, at the height of the Queen Caroline Affair. It reported that in many places, the main witness against the queen, the Italian Majochi, was burned in effigy instead of Guy Fawkes.11 Based on the lack of newspaper coverage, scholars have generally assumed that the celebrations had died down before 1850 and only lived on in rural areas and small towns in the south of England where there were particularly strong local traditions. The relatively brief reports of the fifth of November, however, suggest a rather contradictory image of the celebrations. David Cressy, for instance, has already pointed out the strangely large number of reports in which newspapers and observers emphasized time and again that the Guy Fawkes Day celebrations were waning or even disappearing.12 In 1834, The Times told its readers that the day went past without much ado: just a few fireworks set off by some children were all that was left of the celebrations that had set London aglow just fifty years before. Similar reports appeared in 1838, 1843, 1850 and 1867 and almost annually from 1877 onwards. In 1884, it was noted that the day was ‘gradually dying out,’ just as fifty years before.13 However, whereas Cressy interprets the gradual disappearance of the celebrations in newspapers primarily as an indication that there was a shift in the meaning associated with the day’s festivities that went unnoticed by contemporaries, he fails to discuss the striking chronological proximity between reports of decline and detailed descriptions of the celebrations and riots associated with Guy Fawkes Day. In 1833, for example, The Times

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reported on how a parade of English workers bearing a Guy Fawkes effigy over Ratcliff Highway in London’s East End led to street brawls with Irishmen that the police had difficulty in bringing under control. Injured Irishmen and policemen were left behind on the streets in its wake.14 In 1838, similar riotous scenes took place in the working-class neighbourhoods in East London after a group of teenagers, trailed by a large crowd, carried a Guy Fawkes effigy through Irish areas. The police were able to put a quick stop to the affair, but had to concede that it was by no means an isolated incident that year. As The Times reiterated, the chief inspector reported to the magistrate that ‘He never saw as many Guys in his life as on that day’.15 In addition, there is a similar spectrum of isolated reports, vague notices about conflicts surrounding the festivities and occasionally longer descriptions of the ‘normal’ events in the local press in Bolton and Leeds. For example, the Leeds Intelligencer reported briefly in 1816 that the day of the Gunpowder Plot was celebrated as usual. For eleven years thereafter, until 1828, the newspaper did not report on the festivities at all.16 Without a doubt, the celebrations experienced a revival in 1828 in conjunction with the conflicts surrounding the emancipation of the Catholics. Yet the references to the unusually large scale of the events imply that generally speaking, the day passed as usual. Moreover, it can be inferred from such statements that celebrations took place every year, except on a smaller scale. It is therefore not surprising that the Liberals as well as the Tories fought over how the municipal authorities had reacted to the celebrations. The Leeds Mercury accused Conservative magistrates of having declared fireworks and bonfires illegal, but then neglecting to ensure that they were really prohibited.17 Furthermore, the critique of the radicals on the character of earlier celebrations, with their ‘Guy of the day’, in neighbouring Huddersfield in 1831 suggests that the fifth of November was regularly celebrated in the towns of the West Riding. The decision of the Liberal majority in the vestry of Leeds to withdraw the funds set aside for the ringing of the bells on Guy Fawkes Day a year later reconfirms this impression. The complaint aired in the vestry was that municipal money was being misused to support party interests.18 In Bolton, where no copies of the newspapers from the month of November before 1828 have survived, the radical Bolton Chronicle reported derisively on the festivities in 1830. Although the report outlined the events of the day, it noted that the day seemed ‘now almost generally forgotten’.19 After the newspaper shifted its political orientation in the early 1830s, its coverage of Guy Fawkes Day also changed. In 1835, it reported on the festivities in detail, while in 1839 it defended the celebrations against liberal critique. In other years, the day was often mentioned briefly and in the 1840s, the celebrations were reported as having taken place year after year in a similar manner.20 All together, the newspaper coverage in London, Leeds and Bolton clearly suggests that Guy Fawkes Day was regularly celebrated across England and not

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just in the strongholds in the South. The day was not important enough that the editors felt that they needed to report on the events every year, but quite apparently, it was celebrated in a similar way in all the cities and regions in question. Despite the gradual withdrawal of the local elites, symbolic forms of the once great official celebrations of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, such as the ringing of the church bells and the flags flying on public buildings, were retained. In London, salutes were also fired from the canons of the royal guard at the Tower of London and in Hyde Park.21 Additionally, vicars preached sermons from the pulpits of the Anglican Church in which they retold the story of the fifth of November, often in conjunction with sharply anti-Catholic tones that emphasized the Protestant character of the English state.22 In fact, until 1859, vicars were actually legally required to hold these services because the prayers instituted by Parliament in 1606 were still part of the Anglican liturgy.23 By the 1820s at the latest, the participation of the State and the Church in the celebrations at a local as well as a national level was contested by both Conservatives and Liberals. Conflicts over the ringing of the bells, as in Leeds, carried over to London, as the Liberal government spoke out against the festivities in 1838 and put a stop to the flags and canon salutes as well as other forms of state symbolism associated with the fifth of November.24 Given these conflicts, it is not surprising that books and pamphlets appeared time and time again that dealt with the historical roots of the celebrations and warned against the dangers of Catholicism. These publications were augmented occasionally by articles in the local as well as national papers that expressed similar sentiments.25 In the political contests associated with these celebrations, there was no doubt as to the anti-Catholic implications of the festivities and the link to conservative Church and King notions. However, it was not the official symbols, but rather the rockets and fireworks, the parades with effigies of Guy Fawkes and the great bonfires that gave the day its character. In the early nineteenth century, the day was sometimes marked by large celebrations sponsored by the town, as in Leeds in 1837 where the festivities were quite certainly coordinated centrally; life-size effigies of Wellington and Napoleon were carried along as the parade made its way to an open field outside the city to enjoy a large fireworks display.26 Nothing is known about the organizers of this celebration, but it is quite possible that the city’s Conservatives were involved and that they sought to use these festivities for their own purposes in their fight with the Liberals over the meaning of loyalism and patriotism.27 It also seems plausible that the Conservative Operative Association or other organizations with anti-Catholic and Protestant nationalist tendencies played a central role. Local newspapers in the north of England, for example, reported noticeably often about the activities of the Orange Order on Guy Fawkes’ Day.28 For the Orange Order, it was quite convenient that only a day separated the Guy Fawkes celebrations from the parades and feasts in honour of William III’s birthday on

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4 November. The remembrance of how the Crown and Parliament were saved from a Catholic plot in 1605 could so easily be directly linked to how William had ensured a Protestant victory at the end of the English Civil War. Especially in the area of Bolton, the Orange Order seems to have regularly left its mark on these celebrations as early as 1820.29 That said, it was rather more likely that the festivities took place in the poorer parts of town, away from the control of the police, the magistrates or the political parties, than that they were orchestrated by Conservative organizations. In its more harmless forms, the day was marked by children with blackened faces who paraded through the streets, begging for donations for their Guy effigy before sometimes piling up the effigies to make a bonfire with their parents.30 The celebrations took on a much more aggressive tone when they led to ritualized court trials like those in the south of England described by Robert Storch. Scenes similar to these also took place in northern England at times. In Bolton in 1828, for example, a tryst between a weaver and a young woman led to a punitive action on Guy Fawkes Day. The woman symbolically presented a child before the adulterous man was chained by his neighbours who then dragged him through the town before throwing him on a pile of manure.31 More typically, crowds assembled around dangerously large bonfires and the accompanying antics with burning Guy effigies and fireworks often got out of hand. The newspapers frequently noted that there were severe injuries or complaints about the illegal sale of explosives.32 As was the case in London, such assemblies of people easily turned into provocations against the Irish or the Catholics in which violence was involved. The Conservatives, too, were no friends of playing around with fire or using brute force, which explains the often sharp criticism of the festivities found in papers like the John Bull or the Leeds Intelligencer. Moreover, this critique coming from Conservative circles also suggests that the initiative for most of the festivities came from below the level of political organizations or official municipal and parish offices. Given the fact that there were relatively seldom reports of riots on the fifth of November, it seems that the festivities were mostly peaceful and unproblematic as a rule. But the ‘No Popes’ calls of the London youth as they paraded past the homes of their Irish neighbours in 1838, provoking a response to their shouts to ‘Pray Remember the Fifth of November’, underscore the fact that beyond the realm of the political conflicts between middle-class politicians, the day was linked to aggressive anti-Catholicism and loyalist dedication to Parliament and the Crown.33 Just how much the lower-class crowds with their love of drink and fireworks were aware of this symbolic meaning of the celebrations can be seen in the songs and rhymes associated with the day, some of which date back to the seventeenth century and are still common in England today. Children in Exeter, for example, sang: ‘Please to remember the Fifth of November / Up with the ladder, down with the rope / Please give us a penny to burn the old pope’. Other

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texts explicitly commemorate the failed assassination attempt, its Catholic origins and the salvation of Parliament as well as the king.34 Presumably, the demands of the radical Guys from Huddersfield in 1831 to stop celebrating Guy Fawkes Day as an anti-Catholic holiday were not only directed against the official symbols associated with high-ranking boroughmongers and Anglican vicars, but also the crowds on the streets with their traditional ways of celebrating the day. As the agitation for suffrage reform peaked and indignation over the rejection of the Reform Bill was widespread, the radicals could hope to meet with approval. The clear revival of the celebrations over the course of the debates over Catholic emancipation, however, also indicates that Guy Fawkes Day could clearly be seen in a conservative light by the crowds on the street, serving as an expression of their rejection of liberal reforms. Following the lines of Denis Paz’s argument, one might assume that the initiative for the more elaborate festivities in 1828 came from the higher ranks within Ultra Conservative circles, but accusations to this effect or references to costly expenditures are not to be found in either the liberal or conservative newspapers. Despite the complaints in the Leeds Mercury over the lack of enforcement of the prohibition against fireworks, the continuous firing of guns and the numerous bonfires in Leeds were relegated to the ‘back alleys’ and ‘outskirts’.35 The newspapers from both political camps in Bolton and Leeds first reflected on the great extent of the celebrations in 1828 the year after, noting with relief that the festivities were not as widespread as the year before. If there had indeed been attempts by the Tories to use the celebrations to their own purposes, there would have been a different kind of echo in the press as the papers were usually full of partisan bickering.36 Likewise, the boom in celebrations at the end of the 1830s and the riots in London in 1838 must be seen as a reaction to the political debates about the Irish issue, the position of the Anglican Church and the increasingly prominent role of Catholics in English politics. After the first Catholics joined the Cabinet and the Liberal government explicitly spoke out against the festivities on the fifth of November, for example, the reports of the conservative press about the public celebrations and rituals on the streets in 1839 may have been much the same as before. But, given the highly tense political atmosphere surrounding social conflicts during the early Chartist phase, it can hardly be assumed that the social groups from the lower classes who participated in the celebrations were unaware of the day’s symbolic meaning.37 All told, the celebrations of Guy Fawkes Day prior to 1850 must be understood as a ritual that, with only a few exceptions, was clearly associated with antiCatholicism and demonstrations of loyalty to the Anglican Church, the State and the Crown. This does not imply that for many of the participants the day was not mostly about the food, the drink and the fireworks. After all, it does not make sense to insinuate that cheering crowds around bonfires, rowdy teenagers throwing firecrackers and children with self-made guys consciously understood

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the symbolic meaning of their actions. Yet such rituals made a tradition out of a general aversion to Catholicism, even if only at a superficial level. They provided a forum for the retelling of the story of the Gunpowder Plot year after year, reviving thoughts about the danger of Catholic plots and boosting popular myths about Catholic superstitions, the power of priests and moral corruption. English children not only learned that Catholics had another confession and mostly came from Ireland, but also that they presented a threat to the State as well as the monarchy. Teenage boys strengthened their group identity in street brawls with Irish youth, reinforcing the fronts between immigrants and the local population. Furthermore, the mostly harmless celebrations created the feeling of a long-standing tradition of neighbourliness and social acceptance within society. Consequently, neighbours who did not participate, often because of political or religious reasons, could easily be seen as un-English, or potentially even worse, lacking humour. Official acts and sermons in the churches, despite taking place on different levels, were closely linked to lower-class festivities. Within the context of angry debates over the dangers of Catholicism as well as the meaning of loyalism and patriotism, the message emerging from the streets became even louder, lending even coarse rituals a certain legitimacy despite prohibitions. For this very reason, one of the leading Liberal politicians in Bolton, Robert Heywood, was up in arms in 1846 over the actions of Reverend Slade. Heywood accused Slade of doing everything he could to foster religious tensions by always preaching angry tirades against the Catholics and ringing the church bells and the like on the fifth of November.38 Heywood knew that actions like these easily bore fruit as they tapped into existing attitudes and brought portions of the lower classes closer to the Tories. Ultimately, the available sources tell little about whether the confrontation between the English population and Irish immigrants or anti-Irish racism left a mark on the celebrations beyond those aspects mentioned above. Whereas the riots in London between 1833 and 1838 attest to the fact that the tension between both groups easily broke out onto the streets on Guy Fawkes Day, which quickly brought confessional issues to the forefront of the celebrations, other impressions suggest a more cautious interpretation. Given that three-quarters of the Catholics living in England around 1850 were either Irish or had Irish ancestors, it seems quite plausible that anti-Catholic sentiments were mapped onto the Irish. After all, most Protestant English people rarely came into contact with non-Irish Catholics.39 Lewis P. Curtis in particular argues that as Irish immigration increased around the middle of the century, traditional reservations about Catholics and the Irish coalesced into a racial image of the Celts, and a sharp line was drawn to separate the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ English from the Irish Celts.40 However, Denis Paz has already shown that, for the most part, towns with high rates of Irish immigration did not have a larger anti-Catholic movement.

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Accordingly, he questions whether there was a direct link between Irish immigration and anti-Catholicism. In addition, Paz and Sheridan Gilley have demonstrated that the images of Catholics as well as the Irish in contemporary texts, especially in popular treatises and melodramatic novellas intended for a lowerclass audience, were much more nuanced than Curtis assumes. Both groups were stereotyped, and frequently presented in a negative light, but they often had romantic or positive attributes as well. Above all, Paz and Gilley maintain, antiCatholic depictions rarely overlapped with anti-Irish ones.41 The fact that there was no direct link between ‘No Popery’ arguments and negative images of the Irish in the Catholic emancipation debates of the 1820s, nor in the Operative Conservative Associations in the 1830s and 1840s, reinforces this impression. It must be said, however, that debates over the status and influence of the Catholics always took place within the context of confessional tensions in Ireland. O’Connell and his Catholics supporters were certainly depicted as enemies of the Conservatives, but they were primarily attacked as Catholics and not as Irishmen. Not surprisingly, there is no evidence suggesting that the conflicts between the English and the Irish increased within the context of the Guy Fawkes Day celebrations after the famine in Ireland sparked a massive influx of Irish immigration in the second half of the 1840s. But this does not rule out the possibility that negative perceptions of Catholics were often mixed in with the cultural stereotypes of the Irish that existed in the popular imagination. Nonetheless, it was primarily religious and loyalist motives that came into play at the forefront of the Guy Fawkes Day celebrations. After all, the Guy Fawkes effigies that had been burned since 1605 commemorated the defeat of a Catholic plot against the monarchy and the country, not an Irish one.

The ‘Papal Aggression’ and Its Consequences At the end of September in 1850, Pope Pius IX divided England into twelve bishoprics and demanded that the newly created Catholic dioceses be given the rights and privileges formerly bestowed upon the old English bishoprics. Nicholas Wiseman, vicar apostolic and one of the most important representatives of the Catholic Church in England, was named the Archbishop of Westminster in Rome and appointed to head the new Catholic hierarchy in England as its cardinal. Pius and Wiseman had been preparing for this step together and refrained from adopting the historic names of the dioceses out of respect for Protestant feelings. As a result, the territorial titles of the Catholic bishops differed from those of the Church of England. The Roman Catholic Relief Act of 1829 prohibited Catholics from the use of Anglican titles, but the Catholic bishops in Ireland had been using the titles of the Anglican Church for some time already with the silent acquiescence of the government. It was obviously a quite conscious

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decision to use other titles in England because Rome expected negative reactions to the reinstitution of Catholic structures in England. The extent of the public outcry, however, surprised both Wiseman and Pius.42 As word spread of the papal decree, the English press loudly protested. The pope’s actions were referred to as an ‘invasion’, a ‘usurpation’ or an ‘aggression’. The papal appointment of bishops was seen as an affront to English sovereignty and a direct attack on the Anglican Church. Conservative newspapers also attacked the Liberal government under Lord John Russell for tolerating Catholic territorial titles in Ireland.43 But even the Liberals themselves were up in arms over this Catholic advance. In a public letter addressed to the Bishop of Durham at the beginning of November, Russell himself accused the pope of questioning the supremacy of the English Crown and interfering with the domestic matters of a sovereign state. At the same time, he warned against the so-called Tractarians who sought to reintroduce Catholic elements such as the sign of the cross or the hearing of confessions back into the liturgy and practice of the Anglican Church in the wake of the reform movement led by the Oxford theologian Edward Pusey.44 Other critics tied this issue to the question of the position of the Anglican Church and the relationship between Church and State. Some of the Nonconformist Liberals thus rejected the use of any legal measures or demanded – often with anti-Catholic rhetoric – legal equality for all confessions.45 In early 1851, the tensions prompted Russell to propose a bill against the assumption of territorial titles that spilled over into extensive parliamentary debates over the Ecclesiastical Titles Act. However, the differing positions within his own camp as well as his political dependency on Catholic MPs from Ireland forced the prime minister to formulate the bill quite cautiously. Thus, a tight link remained between anti-Catholicism and conservatism despite Russell’s popular endeavour. The outrage over the pope’s initiative on the streets became quite apparent in November of 1850 when the Guy Fawkes Day celebrations took on new dimensions. The London newspapers described in detail how crowds on the streets, informal parades and countless bonfires all around the city accompanied the ringing bells, canon salutes and other official symbols of the day. A few thousand people had already assembled near the Catholic cathedral in Southwark on the morning of the fifth of November. As the police feared that riots would break out in this area, they concentrated their presence to the south of the Thames. At the same time, other policemen hurried to the city’s north-west where a parade with fourteen elaborate effigies and a large wagon made its way through the city, followed by a mob and greeted by a rowdy crowd of cheering onlookers. Along with effigies of Guy Fawkes, the figures of Cardinal Wiseman, other bishops and the pope were carried through the town before they were lit afire in the city centre. In the evening, large crowds assembled in Bethnal Green, Bishop Bonner’s Fields, Clapham and on Tower Hill, in part against the express prohibition issued by the mayor of London. Based on their experience with the relatively harmless

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festivities in years before, the municipal authorities were already worried about possible fire damage and unrest. But fireworks, explosives and bonfires created a state of emergency on the outskirts of the city in particular that the police and the fire brigade were unable to bring under control despite their relentless efforts. The authorities were also unable to prevent countless ‘No Popery’ messages from being smeared across buildings in the city centre.46 Similar scenes took place in Leeds and Bolton, too. The festivities proceeded as usual, but on a grander scale, and the number of bonfires, effigies and firecrackers increased dramatically. In Bolton, the celebrations went on for several days.47 The long list of newspaper reports on the celebrations from Exeter, Hereford, Richmond, Liverpool, Guildford, Dover and many other towns show that Leeds, Bolton and London were by no means exceptional.48 According to even the most cautious estimate, several million people must have participated in the festivities across the nation. What brought the people to the streets? Denis Paz explicitly situates the celebrations in November 1850 within his general interpretation of Guy Fawkes Day around the mid century. In his local studies, he tries to demonstrate that even at the height of the ‘Papal Aggression’ crisis, the day had no ideological meaning for the lower-class crowds on the streets. Rather, he asserts, the reason they took to the streets had much more to do with the political interests and financial means of Tory elites from among the local nobility and middle class. His analysis focuses on the celebrations in Northampton Town and Kettering, two towns dominated by Liberal Nonconformists in the midst of an otherwise Conservative-dominated county.49 In Northamptonshire, the fifth of November 1850 passed as it did in London, Bolton and Leeds. In the towns and villages across the county, the festivities were more elaborate than in years before, despite the fact that the municipal authorities, the police and radical groups in the larger towns sought to dampen the celebrations. As a result, the symbolism of the Gunpowder Plot fell between party lines. While Liberals and the Radicals used their control over the local political bodies to issue declarations against proposed anti-Catholic legislation, the Conservatives sought to rally public support for their sharp opposition to the ‘Papal Aggression’. In addition to collecting signatures, they also organized Guy Fawkes Day celebrations. On New Year’s Day, they also organized a large parade with ‘No Popery’ placards and bands in the town of Daventry, followed by the burning of effigies of the pope and Cardinal Wiseman. Cheers for the queen, Conservative politicians and a round of fireworks rounded out the evening for which a crowd of a few thousand had assembled. In the years that followed, the Conservatives held similar celebrations for Guy Fawkes Day, but they soon found out that they could not dictate the peacefulness and orderliness of the crowd. For Paz, this was proof that lower-class participants were never really interested in the political messages that were being conveyed. Accordingly, he implicitly indicates that the celebrations in 1850 were controlled ‘from above’. He also underscores

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his depiction of the events in Northamptonshire with references to the festivities in Greenwich in November of the following year, which were financed through donations from tradesmen and the local nobility.50 If one looks more closely at what happened on the fifth of November 1850, however, it becomes clear that Paz’s analysis cannot really explain why the crowds were so large on Guy Fawkes Day. Given the fact that the holiday fell just after the ‘Papal Aggression’ became public, it seems relatively unlikely that the events were staged ‘from above’. If The Times report is accurate, then the news of the pope’s decree reached London on 9 October, which meant that there would have only been four weeks to plan and prepare. But that would also assume that the decision to mobilize the population was made immediately and communicated across the country without delay.51 Yet in 1850 neither the Conservative camp, which had been split since 1846, nor anti-Catholic organizations like the Protestant Association had the structures at the national or local level in order to do so. Moreover, it is highly questionable whether the Conservative elite in London or in the provincial cities would have dared to take such a step just a few years after the third largest Chartist mobilization had crumbled and revolutions had broken out in Europe in 1848/49. Even if one assumes that the decisions would have been made by influential individuals locally, this still does not explain the uncontrolled and wild nature of the festivities in so many places across the country. Furthermore, there are only a few isolated bits of evidence suggesting that the events were steered ‘from above’. Especially in those areas in which the day was always celebrated in a big way, such as Exeter, evidence suggests that influential circles were involved in the events. Some newspapers also reported that there was a preponderance of anti-Catholic sermons delivered on the fifth of November, which exceeded the normal level of ‘No Popery’ sentiments in both number and intensity. Paz also notes that the festivities in Kettering were organized by vicars and many ‘respectable townspeople’, and that the elaborate parades through the City of London indicate that men of means were active behind the scenes.52 Nonetheless, this still cannot account for the great crowds, the numerous bonfires and the chaotic use of firecrackers in London; the newspapers named six large assemblies, each with crowds of several thousands, but they also explicitly stated that these gatherings were just a few of the many throughout the city. Given the general atmosphere at the time, there were most likely simpler mechanisms at play. In Westminster, for example, merely the rumour that ‘something’ was taking place near the Catholic cathedral was enough to attract a huge crowd. But such a crowd quickly dissipated when it became clear that the uproar had only come from a few anti-Catholic placards that local residents had hung outside their windows for fear of attack. Other people probably sought out places like the Tower where the day was usually celebrated, but found crowds of like-minded individuals that were much larger than before.53 Just like these gatherings, the other crowds that formed on the fifth of November 1850 across England were largely

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spontaneous reactions to the news from Rome as the widespread outrage over the pope’s actions unexpectedly breathed new life into this old anti-Catholic ritual. It was not until after these spontaneous outbreaks that Anglican vicars and local Conservatives organized larger public assemblies alongside their clerical letters of protest and parliamentary petitions. During the months of November and December, protests were organized in numerous parishes and boroughs of London whose crowds numbered between a few dozen and several thousand. Even some of the different Nonconformist parishes became involved.54 It is difficult to determine the extent to which the rather middle-class associations and religious organizations behind such meetings were able to reach the lower classes with their ‘No Popery’ rhetoric because the reports tell little about the social composition of the crowds in question. In Bolton, for example, two thousand people took part in one of the assemblies in the completely over-filled Temperance Hall, but they had to pay for their tickets.55 Other events were free, and therefore much larger. Sometimes, Chartists and Irishmen protested against the wave of antiCatholic protests, engaging in a heated battle of words with Protestant speakers. In Bradford, they demanded that the assembly be postponed until the evening so that workers could take part. The efforts of the Chartists to mobilize supporters ended in a tie in Birmingham at an assembly with a crowd of eight thousand. Radical newspapers like Reynold’s Newspaper declared the assembly a success for the ‘working classes’ in their fight for religious tolerance and the separation of Church and State.56 Whether the front between the parties in former strongholds of the Chartists really lay between middle-class anti-Catholics and enlightened workers, as so often portrayed by the greatly weakened radical movement after 1848, is really quite questionable. At the very least, the truly dramatic street demonstrations, reminiscent of the Guy Fawkes Day festivities, that took place over the course of the winter in many places around the country were well received throughout the population; parades, bonfires and the demonstrative burning of effigies of the pope and cardinals as well as fireworks brought people from all walks of life onto the streets. In the metropolis of London, as in the examples outlined by Paz, it was easy to see that the extensive rituals and costly fireworks that came into play after the fifth of November had been orchestrated and financed by local tradesmen and businessmen. Towards the end of the year, long parades in Clapham, Greenwich and Croydon made their way through the boroughs for several days before effigies were festively burned to the singing of patriotic songs. In Greenwich, between ten and twenty thousand people assembled on the streets. In nearby Woolwich at almost the same time, money was collected in order to place effigies of the pope, the devil and the new cardinals symbolically before the courthouse. After the effigies had been ‘condemned to death’, another large crowd assembled on 23 December to see justice served before the bonfire and sing the national anthem.57

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Whereas the size of the crowds who streamed to the bonfires and parades underscores the popularity of such celebrations across all social divides, the references to the fact that they were financed through middle-class businessmen and local Conservatives by no means indicate that it was only the latter who had a political interest in anti-Catholic demonstrations. After all, Protestant vicars and anti-Catholic organizations would hardly have begun to orchestrate such crowd events if they had not seen how the festivities had exploded on Guy Fawkes Day in 1850. It was not until after the fifth of November that they began to lose their fear of crowds and politicized masses from the lower classes taking to the streets. At the same time, they were forced to reorganize their efforts. In Bolton, for example, the local Protestant Association was re-established at the end of December in 1850.58 In reality, the Anglican Conservative milieu of the Protestant middle class sought to use these organizations to link up again with the movement opposed to government funding for the Catholic Maynooth College in Ireland, which had failed in 1846 and contributed to the split in the Conservative Party. Their goal was to strengthen the Protestant character of the nation through a determinedly antiCatholic stance and the popularization of their own understanding of religion, loyalism and the monarchy. As Conservative leaders relied on the symbols of Guy Fawkes Day, they took advantage of the spontaneous outpourings of indignation coming from broad portions of the public and put them to use for their own cause. The anger expressed among the lower classes over the ‘Papal Aggression’ was not orchestrated ‘from above’, but rather it was a manifestation of a widespread identity in which the nation, the Crown and Protestantism were tightly bound together and clearly distinct from Catholicism. In the protest movement that was sparked by Guy Fawkes Day in 1850, motives coming ‘from below’ meshed together with the political goals of the Conservatives. The interests of local elites in the street protests that they organized may have had something to do with the fact that anti-Catholic protests and the reactions to them could easily escalate in the tense atmosphere that reigned. At the beginning of December in 1850, unrest on the streets in Birkenhead near Liverpool had already attracted attention nationwide. After Catholic Irishmen disrupted an assembly in Liverpool on 20 November as the arch-Protestant Hugh McNeile delivered one of his famous flaming speeches against Catholics, the room was brutally emptied by the police forces present. A similar assembly was scheduled to take place in neighbouring Birkenhead a week later. As both a committee of leading Catholics led by the local priest as well as a group of Irish dockworkers sought to gain entrance, they locked fists with policemen from Liverpool and Birkenhead, resulting in an all-out fight. The assembly had to be cancelled and there were several severely injured men. A government inquiry then ensued, followed by a trial.59 Paz situates these riots within the particularly tense atmosphere in Liverpool, seeing them as conflicts perpetuating long-standing local tensions between irritated Irishmen and policemen heavily influenced by the Orange Order.60 Paz’s

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doubts as to whether these events were random mob-attacks on Protestants or anti-Catholic street fights are justified, but they do not consider the reactions of the English elite outside Liverpool. Outrage and fear over the escalation of violence spread among these circles, as seen in the investigations of the Home Office as well as in numerous commentaries in the press.61 Additionally, it was not only in Liverpool that the protests against the ‘Papal Aggression’ turned violent. In Cheltenham, for example, an angry Protestant crowd paraded through the streets at the end of November after the local magistrate had prohibited anti-Catholic demonstrations. A group assembled before the shop of the draper Hardwick who had displayed an effigy of the pope in his window. When Hardwick refused to surrender the effigy, as he had initially promised to do because of the prohibition that had been issued, the mob smashed in his window and forced him to hand over the effigy after an altercation with the police. The mob then paraded triumphantly through the streets past the Catholic Church, shattering its windows before burning the effigy of the pope.62 At almost the same time, a pub brawl in Leeds escalated into a street fight between Irishmen and Englishmen in which a passer-by was killed. The residents in the surrounding neighbourhoods went to the police in protest and demanded an increased police presence as well as a night watch because they claimed that their lives as well as their property were endangered by the increasing number of Irish immigrants living in their streets.63 In London, anti-Catholic sentiments were also directed against the Tractarians and the Anglican churches in which dangerous Catholic practices were presumably taking place under the cover of theological reforms. Large crowds disrupted the Sunday services at St Barnabas in Pimlico in November and December with cries of ‘No Pope in London’ and ‘The Queen and No Surrender’. The church was forced to close its doors for a few weeks at the end of the year.64 None of these protest actions took on proportions similar to those in Birkenhead. The Home Office, however, was so concerned about the general mood around the country that it called upon the commanders of the troops stationed in Manchester to submit reports on the situation in the North as they had done during the heyday of the Chartists. Their answer that there was nothing to report apart from the unrest in Birkenhead may have calmed the men of the Home Office in London. Yet the whole affair demonstrates how incidents of violence associated with the protests against the ‘Papal Aggression’ raised the hackles of the administrative authorities, the police and the political elite, forcing them to take measures to control protest rituals that had got out of hand.65 The strained atmosphere within government circles also had something to do with the fact that the Home Office had observed an increase in conflicts between Irish immigrants and the local population for some time already. These tensions had resulted in part from the jump in the number of Irish immigrants since 1845 following on the heels of famine in Ireland. In the midst of the initially rather reluctant, then hectic, but at any rate helpless attempts of the Liberal government

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to stabilize the situation in Ireland and help relieve the famine, shocking reports over the suffering of immigrants in English port cities, especially Liverpool, reached the capital. Home Office reports from 1849 also noted that there had been severe clashes between Irish and English workers at the train works near Wellington in Shropshire. In years before, reports of similar cases in Cumbria and near Edinburgh had also reached the government in London.66 In the capital, newspapers such as the John Bull not only deplored the ‘Papal Aggression’, but also they demanded an end to the ‘Irish Colonization in the Metropolis’; they coupled growing Irish immigration with an increase of Catholicism as well as poverty in London, noting that crowds on the street were becoming more restless and violent as a result.67 While scholarship in recent decades has assumed that the Anglo-Irish conflicts triggered around 1850 by the wave of Irish immigration were not significant, some newer local studies propose a more probable interpretation. When assessed in the context of the reports in the national press and the millions of poor Irish immigrants, the number of violent conflicts was rather small.68 The greater preponderance of ethnic conflicts on railroad tracks suggest that there were specific circumstances associated with this industry; at the same time, analyses of the economic effects of immigration for English workers have determined that there was little job competition between the Irish and the English and that wages did not decrease as a result.69 But if local conflicts are taken into account, it becomes quite clear that it was not the actual competition between these groups, but rather the fear of economic disadvantages as well as cultural and religious infiltration resulting from the influx of Irish immigrants around 1850 that led to such heightened tensions across broad swathes of the population.70 Frank Neal, for example, has not only shown how the number of conflicts between Englishmen and Irishmen in Bolton increased in the wake of Irish immigration after 1845, but also that there was a long-standing tradition involved in these kinds of conflicts.71 On St Patrick’s Day in 1828, the Bolton Chronicle reported on large pub brawls between English and Irish workers, commenting that: ‘We are sorry to say, that a disposition to irritate them [the Irish] unfortunately exists among some of our townsmen’.72 In the 1830s, too, similar fights broke out in the neighbouring towns of Wigan and Rochdale. Likewise, Sheridan Gilley has culled together a series of examples for London that also attest to an increase in Anglo-Irish tensions around 1850 and suggest a link to the earlier ethnic-religious conflicts associated with Guy Fawkes Day.73 It therefore seems misleading to dismiss local street fights between English Protestants and Irish Catholics in the 1850s as an exception to the rule. After the wave of protests following the ‘Papal Aggression’, the newspapers repeatedly reported on conflicts between the English and the Irish. The poignant example of the Stockport Riots in Lancashire, which was a county with a particularly high number of Irish immigrants, was just one of many that

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cropped up in the parliamentary elections of 1852. On a smaller scale – with the exception of Liverpool – there were reports of violence against the Irish in Wigan, Manchester and Hulme in the weeks leading up to the election in 1852. Likewise, the Home Office received reports of contained riots in Oldham, Preston and Blackburn in the early 1850s. In 1854, a major street fight took place in September in Ashton between several hundred workers, after Irish and English workers had launched attacks in each other’s neighbourhoods.74 Even in a remote location like the Isle of Sheppey, off the south-east coast in Kent, riots broke out in August 1851 with several hundred participants because local farmers brought in Irish help for the harvest, which angered the established English farm workers.75 Similar unrest among the Welsh, English and Irish dockworkers in Holyhead prompted the government to send an inspector from the London police to Wales in April to investigate the incidents that had taken place.76 In London, even after 1850, it was always Guy Fawkes Day that went hand in hand with violence and street brawls. Ever since the ‘No Popery’ year, a worker who usually clad himself as Guy told the journalist Henry Mayhew in 1856, there were often problems with the Irish on the fifth of November: they attacked the parades bearing Guy Fawkes effigies and certain areas of town had to be avoided.77 All told, although conflicts between the English and the Irish were certainly not an everyday phenomenon in the 1850s – a comprehensive quantitative analysis would be virtually impossible – they appear to have broken out at least occasionally across most of the country. The social and cultural tensions between these two groups increased as a result of the influx of Irish immigrants and were further intensified by the anti-Catholic sentiments prevalent among the English population. Consider, for example, the well-documented Stockport Riots at the end of June in 1852.78 Right before the parliamentary elections, a riot broke out that lasted three days. In the weeks leading up to the election, the Conservatives spoke in anti-Catholic tones. One of the Liberal candidates, on the other hand, had voted against the Ecclesiastical Titles Act in the year before. In Westminster, the short-term Conservative government under Lord Derby prohibited the wearing or display of Catholic robes or religious symbols in June. The official reason behind this move was to prevent outbreaks of violence around processions, but the Conservatives may well have been motivated by the hope that the measure would resonate positively among the public in light of the coming election.79 While the walls of Stockport were then smeared with anti-Catholic and anti-Irish slogans, the annual procession of the Catholic Sunday School at the end of June had to make do without flags or properly clad priests. Nonetheless, the parade did fly in the face of the local Protestants. The day after, the local Protestant Association mockingly paraded through town bearing the effigy of a priest. This move provoked a pub brawl, effectively launching the riots. The situation escalated with an Irish attack on a Protestant church the

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day after, followed by an English counter-attack on Irish neighbourhoods. On the heels of these developments, the riots spiralled out of control. Two chapels and twenty-four houses were destroyed, one Irishman died and fifty-one others suffered serious injury. It took the army troops, who were called in two days later, to quell the riots. The trials that ensued clearly demonstrated that the population and the authorities shared similar prejudices. Under those initially taken into custody, there were one hundred and eleven Irishmen, but only two Englishmen. In the end, charges were raised against ten Englishmen and ten Irishmen, but massive threats against witnesses and jurors made for rather difficult trials. All the Irishmen were found guilty, but only three Englishmen faced a sentence. Pauline Millward has argued that the behaviour of the lower-class English population was a misguided social protest that was coupled with religious and cultural stereotypes directed against Irish immigrants. Given the grave poverty of many working-class families and the tense employment situation in Stockport, she maintains, the influx of immigrants was seen as a threat; therefore, after the failure of the social protests of the 1840s, a general feeling of despair reigned that ultimately manifested itself in the form of violence. Millward further notes that without the apparent legitimation of these attacks that was coming from Conservative and Anglican circles, the situation would not have escalated the way it did.80 Regardless of the fact that she emphasizes the interests of the riotous crowds, Millward primarily sees middle-class Conservatives as responsible for these outbreaks of violence. Denis Paz goes even a step further in his analysis. He argues that economic competition between the Irish and the English could not have played a role in the riots because it was not real. The rowdiness on the streets, he claims, served ‘middle-class political interests’, and the riots followed a pattern in which anti-Catholic demonstrations were orchestrated ‘from above’.81 Millward herself, however, has already pointed out that the crowds assembled before the hustings a few weeks later clearly favoured the Liberals and that they were generally more supportive of Chartists or Liberals than Conservatives in earlier elections.82 Given the respective sizes of the assembly and the riots, a substantial number of the people at the hustings must also have taken part in the riots. Therefore, it seems rather implausible that middle-class Conservatives sought to influence the crowds directly or that the candidates and their election committees sought to orchestrate attacks. If the fist-fighters on the streets were really interested in party politics, then they would have seen to it that the Conservatives won the show of hands. Likewise, if they were acting under duress or had been paid to do so, then why had the instigators refrained from mobilizing such crowds for more important elections? Excesses of violence and mass demonstrations quickly develop their own, quite uncontrollable, dynamic. Sometimes it only takes the actions of a few

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to dissolve the apprehensions of many within a crowd who would otherwise refrain from using such uninhibited brutality. Yet the English attackers as well as the agitated Irishmen did not act indiscriminately, but rather with a certain set of criteria. For several days in a row, they targeted specific streets and, above all, the churches of the respective opposition. Accordingly, they were quite aware of the symbolic importance of these buildings and clearly wanted to provoke or humble their adversaries. Moreover, the fights often waned during the day, only to be taken up again in the evening. Presumably on the second day the attackers purposely assembled to decide upon further action, despite the fact that this could have had serious consequences given the involvement of the army in suppressing the riots. They must have had clear notions of who was a friend and who was an enemy and operated on the assumption that they were acting in accordance with their own respective interests. Neither a simple desire to be rowdy nor manipulations from ‘higher up’ can therefore really explain these riots. Social groups from the lower classes do act with intention, even if historians tend to see their actions as irrational and reprehensible. The Englishmen in Stockport who took part in the pogrom-like riots wanted to show the Irish, quite clearly, that they were superior, and demonstrate who controlled the town. They were convinced that they, as English Protestants, had certain privileges denied Irish Catholics and that they had to make this clear, especially because the Irish had reacted so indignantly to the prohibition issued by Derby’s government. A high level of unemployment and the strained economic situation locally combined with an influx of Irish immigration certainly played an important role in the outbreak of violence as well as the scale of the riots. Ultimately, anti-Catholic resentments and anti-Irish notions were the spark that lit the fire, and they existed not only in Stockport, but also among a great proportion of England’s lower classes. The Conservatives were able to play upon these resentments, but these popular notions were not simply created by manipulative propaganda. Rather, these widespread anti-Catholic notions provided an avenue through which Conservative Party politics could find support among the lower social classes, which created a bond between Conservatives across class lines. But such ties relied on organizations like the Operative Conservative Associations that fostered and cemented this kind of integration. As of 1846, however, only a few Operative Conservative Associations remained, including the one in Bolton. At the beginning of the 1850s, the still-divided party was thus unable to capitalize on the popular protests against Catholics and the influx of Irish immigrants. The Conservatives were not able to re-establish a broad basis of support for the Crown and the Church through this link between anti-Catholicism and Protestant identity until the general political situation changed following the Second Reform Act in 1867, and the first Conservative Working Men’s Associations were formed.83

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The English Orange Order and Preachers of ‘No Popery’ Around 1850, attempts to integrate social groups from the lower classes in organizations with Protestant notions of the nation, the Crown and the Church stemmed mainly from the English branch of the Irish Orange Order. Although there was no direct link between the Order, which was organized along the lines of the secret societies of the Freemasons, and the Conservative Party, its lodges were closely associated with Conservative politicians across the board. In the early nineteenth century, leading Tory Ultras dominated the English Grand Lodge. In particular, the Grand Master, the Duke of Cumberland, and his deputy, Lord Kenyon, spearheaded the opposition in the House of Lords against the Roman Catholic Relief Act in 1828. In 1836, a prohibition against the Order was debated in Parliament after the involvement of the Irish lodges in the confessional conflicts with the Catholics over the years had prompted a parliamentary inquiry. A majority was reached in favour of the prohibition primarily because the strict hierarchical organization of the Order in England subsumed a great number of military lodges within the army, which ultimately seemed to present a danger to the reliability and independence of the troops. As the organization understood itself as the bulwark of the Protestant constitution, the Grand Lodge disbanded the Order shortly before the law was passed. Nonetheless, the men of the Order blamed liberal and Catholic enemies of the constitution for bringing the matter to Parliament. At a local level, however, neither the threat of prohibition, nor the dissolution of the Order from above led to the complete disappearance of the lodges in England. As a wave of Irish immigration hit England and the ‘Papal Aggression’ unfolded, a reorganization took place.84 The English branch of the Orange Order has not attracted the same kind of attention among historians as the Irish lodges largely because it first developed into a popular organization in the late nineteenth century in conjunction with the conflicts over Irish Home Rule.85 Yet, as an organization whose members mostly came from the English lower classes, it was a factor to be reckoned with in those places where lodges existed. With Protestant celebrations and parades, the Order made a name for itself even before 1836 in many cities and towns around the kingdom, including London, Leeds and Bolton. According to the parliamentary inquiry committee, there were 288 active lodges in 1835, which were organized under the Grand Lodge in forty-seven districts. Another ninety-three lodges existed, approximately thirty of which were in the army, while the others were located in the colonies or remote towns. The inquiry was not able to determine the organization’s exact membership figures, but it did find that the estimate of 120,000 Orangemen provided in the survey was clearly too high.86 Based on the figures that the Grand Lodge provided for certain districts as requested by Parliament, there was an average of twenty-three men in each lodge, which amounts to about 6,600 members in the civilian lodges

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all together. At least another six hundred Orangemen were organized in the military lodges.87 For Leeds, the list gives an exact figure of 257 members in fourteen lodges. Based on the average calculated on the basis of the list provided, there would have been 161 men in seven organizations in Bolton and 345 Orangemen in the fourteen known lodges in London. That said, witnesses as well as MPs maintained that the numbers presented to the committee were highly unreliable. In general, these numbers tell little about the Order’s actual influence, especially locally. Hereward Senior and Frank Neal argue that the uproar surrounding the parliamentary inquiry seems to have been exaggerated given the low membership figures and that the English Order was relatively insignificant.88 However, both scholars overlook the fact that other organizations also had a relatively low number of registered members in the 1830s, but were nonetheless able to mobilize broad swathes of the population. From 1838 to 1840, for example, the Chartist’s Great Northern Union in Huddersfield counted only 250 members, although the membership figures of the associations and the parties jumped in the second half of the 1830s.89 The seventy-nine Orangemen who were already organized in five lodges in Huddersfield in 1835 were thus a substantial force within local politics. In neighbouring Leeds, the Order was certainly one of the largest political organizations in the city at the time with over 250 registered members. Another 444 Orangemen were organized in Bradford, as well as 208 more in Halifax, both of which were much smaller cities than Leeds.90 Without trying to compare the mobilizing power of the Order with that of the radical protest movement, the Orange Order certainly had quite a bit of potential in the textile cities of the West Riding, as well as in Lancashire and the regions around Manchester and Bolton in particular. The revival of the much larger Operative Conservative Associations directly after the dissolution of the Order further attests to the organization’s political potential. In early 1836, the Leeds Intelligencer commented on the dissolution of the Order, noting ‘that the lodges in this neighbourhood have been put an end to, and most of its [the Order’s] members are enrolling themselves in Conservative Societies’.91 The Operative Conservative Associations, however, vehemently refuted the Liberal accusation that they were only a front for the Orange Order. After such accusations were made in the Manchester Guardian, the association in Salford questioned its members, finding that only fourteen of its over two hundred members had belonged to the Order.92 In terms of content, the operative organizations shared the same kind of ‘No Popery’ rhetoric as well as a conservative understanding of the constitution with the Orange lodges. To some extent, the Operative Associations were also supported by the same influential families who had sponsored the Orange lodges in the 1820s.93 Although the Operative Associations were definitely not identical to the dissolved secret societies, many of the associations adopted the flags and insignia of local lodges. In doing so, they made their affinity to the lodges clear in a symbolic way.94

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Regardless of the number of members in the local lodges or related organizations, the influence of the Order can be seen in the celebrations accompanied by parades that drew the attention of non-members and propagated anti-Catholic messages. For the most part, these marches started off from where the respective lodge met, which usually meant inns and pubs in England. The members would line up, then parade through the streets waving flags and banners while bands played music. Usually they made their way to a church where either a service or just a sermon was being held. Afterwards, the men marched back and a dinner with speeches and political toasts marked the end of the day’s celebrations. Unlike in Northern Ireland, the English lodges did not establish a festive tradition around the anniversary of the Battle of the Boyne on12 July. Rather, in England, the parades and processions often took place on the anniversary of the respective lodge or in conjunction with Guy Fawkes Day festivities.95 In the 1820s, these events hardly ever attracted more than a hundred members and followers. At the zenith of the emancipation crisis, for example, Bolton’s radicals mocked the decline of this movement because only fifty-five men took part in the Order’s annual Guy Fawkes parade.96 The Manchester Courier, however, raised these figures, pointing out that two lodges had celebrated the day in Bolton. All told, these rather small parades could hardly have left behind a lasting impression.97 Despite such setbacks, the Order made an effort to show its presence on the streets in other places; the newspapers reported on larger parades hosted by several lodges together in Wigan and Leeds that marched through the streets in the autumn and winter of 1828/29.98 In Leeds, they carried flags and banners as well as swords to demonstrate their willingness to fight. They also made a statement by holding a rally before the house of the Conservative mayor Ralph Markland, whose protests against the emancipation of the Catholics had won the respect of the Orangemen. With swords drawn and a band playing, the marchers sang the national anthem and made their way to a festive banquet. A year later, the lodges in Leeds celebrated the fifth of November in a similar way and a large parade marched through the streets of Huddersfield.99 Unlike in Bolton, the mobilization of anti-Catholic support in opposition to the Roman Catholic Relief Act in the West Riding brought about a revival of the Orange Order in 1828. This occurred despite the fact that the movement’s English and Irish leaders were pushing for the establishment of Brunswick Clubs because the Order, as a secret society, was often considered illegal at the time.100 To some extent, this indicates that the members of the local lodges in England also ignored directions coming from the central or district lodges. Despite the strictly hierarchical organizational structure of the Order, it seems that local groups sought to keep their symbolic traditions as they saw fit. In Ireland, this perpetuation of traditions took on the character of a genuine ‘collective memory from below’ in the early nineteenth century.101 Thanks to this informal strategy, the Orangemen survived the defeats suffered by the Conservative Protestant

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camp as reforms were pushed through after 1830. As the London Grand Lodge sought to reorganize the Order in 1833, it sent the Grand Secretary, Colonel Fairman, on a tour of the lodges across the country. For the most part, Fairmen was met by groups consisting mainly of men from the ‘lower orders’. Most of these lodges had been founded around 1820 with the help of influential local noblemen or businessmen who sought to booster resistance against radical groups and the unions.102 In the mid 1830s, it was workers, and the miners in Wigan, who kept the lodges standing. Protestant Irish immigrants also played a key role, especially because they brought the experience that they had already gained in the confessional conflicts in their homeland with them to England.103 Given this general situation, Fairman seems to have made an effort to woo the middle and upper classes in his visits to cities like Leeds in order to improve the image of the lodges and establish a more solid bond with the Anglican Church.104 These efforts to improve the organizational structure of the Order and re-establish the lodges met with limited success, especially as the formal dissolution of the Order in 1836 partly negated these efforts. What was more important, however, was the fact that it became clear that there was an audience for anti-Catholic lectures and sermons to be found among the English lower classes. The close link between celebrations, church services, parades and ‘No Popery’ tirades that the Order maintained by means of its lodges proved to be a popular strategy; it was readily adopted by preachers associated with the Orangemen and other organizations propagating Protestant conservative values even in the 1830s. Alongside the celebrations and parades of the Orange Order, as well as the banquets and events of the Operative Conservative Associations, anti-Catholic lectures and sermons became a fixture within the political landscape of English cities. They met with a great deal of interest, and for a time they were consciously used to counter radical demonstrations. As such, they were a distinct provocation to political opponents and Catholics. At the end of October in 1838, for example, Hugh McNeile delivered a sermon on the same night that the Chartists, led by Feargus O’Connor, wanted to elect delegates for the national Chartist convention at one of their protests. The local Operative Conservative Association in Bolton took up the challenge and marched loudly past the overfilled St George’s Church with torches in hand. In the sermon that followed, they had to put up with being referred to as ‘madmen running after madmen,’ before the weaver Richard Booth attacked O’Connor as a ‘Popish Demagogue’ at the local assembly of the Orangemen on 5 November.105 The moderately liberal Free Press took advantage of this fight between Conservatives and Chartists as an opportunity to attack O’Connor as well as the Church and King ideology of the Tories.106 Typically, these anti-Catholic events also led to conflicts with Irish immigrants. In Leeds, an anti-Catholic lecture from Reverend T.D. Gregg from Sheffield ended in chaos in early 1837 as Irish Catholics expressed their outrage over the portrayal of their faith before the audience of about a thousand Protestants

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filling the seats of the hall. As the stop in Leeds was part of Gregg’s lecture tour through the cities in the area, the Leeds Intelligencer reported with a measure of relief that widespread ‘No Popery’ sentiments reigned in the West Riding.107 A year later, when the Anglican vicar J.E. White sought to outline the mistakes of the Catholic Church, consciously using plain language, just after St Patrick’s Day in Leeds, he was stormed by local Catholics.108 The connection between popular anti-Catholic sermons and violent counter measures was well-established among Protestant organizations with a lower-class profile long before travelling preachers who railed against the Catholics, such as Alessandro Gavazzi and William Murphy, became a publicized phenomenon in the decades after 1850.109 The ‘Papal Aggression’ fuelled the interest in anti-Catholic spectacles and lectures for a long time, which ultimately benefited all kinds of preachers, political activists and religious fanatics who took to the streets. Some of them, like Gavazzi, a former chaplain of the Garibaldis, and his fellow countrymen Antonio Gallenga and Piero Guicciardini, were Italian emigrants who had been forced to flee to England over the course of the struggle for Italian nationalism. Their anti-Catholic tirades, inspired by continental liberalism, made it possible for them to survive in exile as they were able to mobilize both English reformers and conservatives with their liberal intonations. Time and time again, Nonconformist liberals found themselves supporting the front against the politics of the Catholic Church, a move that almost certainly brought them closer to more traditional forms of anti-Catholicism. To ensure their continued success, however, these lecturers were forced to give up their liberal impetuses. For example, Gavazzi, who had made a name for himself in 1851 and 1852 in London as well as in the Midlands and the north of England, was initially met with scepticism because of his republican notions. In 1854, he returned from a trip to the US as a follower of the House of Savoy. Due to this change to the conservative side, he was then able to continue lecturing without difficulty.110 John Victor Teodor, a Polish nationalist in similar circumstances, and his colleague Chylinski took a more spectacular route, demonstrating the ‘pomp of the Roman mass’ alongside his lectures in London in order to illustrate the danger that Catholicism presented to the Protestant throne and British institutions.111 Other preachers, such as Giacinto Massena, William Murphy and Patrick McMenemy, were demagogues for whom ultra-Protestant and evangelical positions had escalated into full-scale, fanatical hate against Catholics.112 In his incomplete overview of travelling anti-Catholic lecturers, Denis Paz counts at least fifteen preachers who went from town to town at different points in the 1850s and 1860s to spread their message. Although Massena’s tours from 1859 to 1862 repeatedly resulted in severe attacks on Catholic churches and Irish neighbourhoods, and the lectures of William Murphy in particular regularly led to violent conflicts between English Protestants and Irish Catholics at the end of the 1860s, Paz maintains that these excesses were an exception; he claims that

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the success of these events lay in their entertainment value, as the public liked the variety and good orators.113 However, not only the uncontrollable riots that sometimes broke out following anti-Catholic lectures, but also the public uproar among different local religious groups that always accompanied such speeches attest to the fact that ‘No Popery’ events cannot be lumped in with the many other edifying and entertaining lecture series and concerts that defined the cultural life of Victorian cities. Indeed, the growing interest in anti-Catholic lectures and sermons went hand in hand with the expansion of the lodges of the Orange Order. Even before word of the ‘Papal Aggression’ spread, the revival of the local lodges was reflected in more notices on their activities in the local press. From the mid 1840s onward, the Orangemen in Leeds and the surrounding area sponsored celebrations and small parades on Guy Fawkes Day year after year.114 In 1849, over five hundred members came together for a tea party in Bradford’s Temperance Hall with the goal of reaffirming their ‘principles against popery, infidelity, radicalism, chartism, and all the “isms” of the day’.115 In June of the following year, a similarly sized large group of Orangemen festively paraded through the city to underscore their opposition to the local Chartists who had held a demonstration the week before. Additionally, the Battle of the Boyne was commemorated by numerous lodges in the West Riding on 12 July; almost simultaneously, the new Grand Lodge reported a strong growth in membership across the country at a meeting in Staffordshire.116 The slow revival of the Orange Order indicated that there was a general mobilization of the Protestant conservative milieu also taking place below the level of middle-class associations and church circles. After the pope’s presumptuous actions, this development picked up pace, leading to a series of anti-Catholic lectures that continually attracted large crowds in October 1850. The revival of the Order after 1845 was very likely one of the consequences of the wave of Irish immigration, which not only brought Catholics, but also Protestants from the north of Ireland to England. The English lodges thus gained new members from the heartland of the organization.117 In part, the now reopened, legal Orange lodges were supported by the earlier sponsors of the Operative Conservative Associations. In Pudsey, near Leeds, for example, the businessman John Farrar, the ‘brothers’ Smith and Newell and three other men who had financed the Operative Conservative Association at the end of the 1830s stood at the helm of the local lodge in 1851.118 The reinstitution of the Catholic bishops also quickened the growth of the Order across the entire country. Almost weekly, the newspapers in Leeds and Bolton reported on the establishment of new lodges, celebrations, parades or joint activities sponsored by the district and grand lodges; the national press also took note of these developments.119 With the exception of Liverpool, the Order was most active in the Manchester area as well as in Bolton and Wigan. Bradford became a centre of the Orange Order in Yorkshire, which was not surprising given that the local

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lodges had the highest membership figures even before the dissolution of the Order in 1836. The particular role of Bradford had to do with the organizational talent of Squire Auty, who became one of the most important Orangemen in the region over the course of the protests against the ‘Papal Aggression’. In many respects, his background was typical of that for the lower leadership level in Operative Conservative Associations. Born in 1812 to a relatively poor craftsman’s family, which lived from the production of rugs, he used his apprenticeship as a printer to found his own business and climb into a lower-middle-class milieu. In the 1830s, he became a friend and confident of the Tory Radical Richard Oastler and he supported the candidacy of the Tory William Busfeild in Bradford in 1837. In the same year, Auty took over the leadership of the Short Time Committee, which was part of the local movement against child labour. At the beginning of the 1840s, he was an active leader of the Operative Conservative Association and a Sunday School teacher in the Anglican Church. After the decline of the Operative Association around 1845, Auty concentrated on the reconstruction of the Orange Order in the region and printed the organization’s handbooks and song collections. From 1850 onward, he was also a member of the Bradford City Council.120 During the early 1850s, he travelled from place to place and appeared at numerous events sponsored by local lodges as a speaker or important guest.121 Members of the Operative Conservative Associations such as Auty, whose social ascent could not be separated from their politics, shaped the character of the Order. At the same time, these men defined the milieu in which travelling anti-Catholic preachers as well as local vicars found themselves when they lectured and sermonized against the pope and Catholicism. With their elaborately articulated conservative Protestant notions, they were certainly an exception to the rule. But, especially among factory workers or small craftsmen and shop owners, they were able to attract followers and organize them with the Orange lodges.122 Together with the vicars who supported the Order and other similar anti-Catholic organizations, they planned the events of the lodges and served as the local contact person for the travelling preachers who stopped in their towns and cities on tours through the country. For example, Reverend Hugh Stowell, a nationally well-known ‘No Popery’ preacher who expressly supported the Conservative as well as the Protestant Operative Associations in Salford at the end of the 1830s, chaired a lecture given by Gavazzi in Manchester in 1854.123 At the same time, local preachers and those of national fame like Gavazzi sometimes found themselves at loggerheads, as in Bolton in 1857. In November, as Gavazzi lectured in Temperance Hall on the ramifications of the two-year-old concordat between Austria and the Vatican, adding fuel to his anti-Catholic fire, Stowell read a sermon in the parish church addressed to the working classes at the same time; as a result, Gavazzi spoke before a half-empty hall.124 For the most part, however, the local organizations worked hand in hand with the travelling

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preachers, largely attracting the same audience, which may not have been members of the Order, but at least men with latent sympathy for the principles of the Orange Order. The success of these lectures did not depend on the curiosity of the locals or those looking for a good orator; rather, the Protestant and antiCatholic sentiments prevalent among much of the population made these events possible in the first place and ensured that they were well attended. A look at the character of Guy Fawkes Day celebrations before 1850 and the spontaneous outrage over the ‘Papal Aggression’ as well as the activities of the Orange Order and the popularity of anti-Catholic lectures clearly reveals that a Protestant identity, which was constructed around the Crown and the Church as well as the opposition to the Catholic Church, emerged well before 1850 rather than in the decades thereafter. Consequently, the Conservatives who drew on these sentiments in the latter half of the nineteenth century and successfully used the connection between Conservatism and Protestantism to attract workers and other groups from the lower classes to the Tory camp in the late nineteenth century could capitalize on a long-standing tradition. In so doing, they did not merely rely upon the religious elements of conservative constitutionalism, which had developed over the course of earlier political conflicts and within the Operative Conservative Associations. Rather such attempts to organize support, even in the 1830s, reflected underlying notions and convictions that were deeply anchored in a culture of popular celebrations charged with anti-Catholic sentiments and symbols that resonated throughout the lower classes. Beginning in the mid 1840s, Irish immigration, spurred on by the famine in Ireland, strengthened the anti-Irish mood in England while at the same time resulting in the growth of a group within the population that reacted sensitively to expressions of anti-Catholicism. Accordingly, conflicts between the Protestant English and the Catholic Irish became more common. This was the most significant development in terms of the tradition of popular anti-Catholicism in the nineteenth century. That said, this tradition was already imbued with anti-Irish tendencies and nothing fundamental changed around the middle of the century. After 1850, however, anti-Catholic sentiments became more apparent through the opposition to Irish immigration and, in reverse, this pre-existent anti-Catholicism made it easier to oppose the presence of these immigrants. In the second half of the nineteenth century, at least at the lowest level of conflict, these two aspects could hardly be teased apart.

Protest, Spectacles and Anti-Catholicism: St George’s-in-the-East, 1859–1860 Just how closely the most different aspects of religious conflicts became intertwined with the popular reception of theological debates, anti-Catholic notions

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and an adolescent tendency for protest in the escalation of confessional disagreements to riots and street fights can be seen in one Anglican parish in London’s East End in the 1850s. In May 1859, a conflict over ritual elements in the liturgy took on a new dimension in St George’s-in-the-East. As the rector, Bryan King, was a follower of the Tractarians, he had gradually introduced the raising of the altar, the use of the cross sign and candles, and the wearing of religious robes since taking over the church in 1842; the majority of his parish, however, rejected these changes, charging that they represented a return to Catholic ways. After the vestry elected the extremely evangelical, anti-Catholic Hugh Allen as an additional preacher in 1859, the regular Sunday church services developed into a battleground. Disruptions turned into unrest on the street, which then escalated into riots with several thousand participants from all over London that were repeated almost every week until October 1860. Alongside the crowds on the streets, the parish assembly, several local Protestant associations, the Orange Order, the Bishop of London and the government all became involved in the conflicts. The incidents not only kept the police and the courts busy, but also they attracted the attention of the Parliament in Westminster and the press around the country. Until now, scholars have largely dealt with this social unrest from the perspective of an ecclesiastical history of the conflicts surrounding the Oxford movement or the history of the police in England. Phillip Smith, for example, notes the connection between these events and widespread anti-Catholicism, but he sees these riots mostly as a dilemma for London’s police because of the legal complexities of the situation. For Smith as well as other authors, these lower-class crowds were bands of rowdy adolescents and rather insignificant agents who were seeking a bit of fun by joining in the ‘liveliest show in town’, if they were not already being paid to do so.125 Whereas Edward Norman has convincingly situated the conflicts associated with the Tractarians and ritualists in the Anglican Church within the larger context of English anti-Catholicism – albeit without taking these London riots into consideration – the portrayals of the riots by church historians are heavily influenced by the judgements of the ritualist clergymen involved who saw the crowds as a senseless mob.126 The often-overlooked local London newspapers, however, provide another perspective. In particular, the link between the rowdy crowds and the anti-Ritualists in Protestant associations and the vestry reveals how vague anti-Catholic sentiments contributed to the rejection of ritualist practices in Anglican churches and a massive mobilization of the population. The strong presence of the Ritualists in the east of London was initially related to the workers’ mission in which some of London’s supporters of the movement were involved.127 St George’s-in-the-East, in London’s docklands, was one of the city’s poorest neighbourhoods. In 1851, Charles Dickens described the area as ‘one mass of almost unredeemed poverty – a population of very many thousand souls, located upon a very few acres of ground’.128 Ten years later, the census counted over thirty-eight thousand residents in the parish, many of whom

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were unskilled dockworkers, sailors or labourers in the infamous sweatshops of London’s textile industry. The famine in Ireland had driven many Irish immigrants into the working-class neighbourhoods of the East End; their presence was particularly noticeable in St George’s as they represented 82 per cent of the population. Moreover, around 1860, the gradually increasing number of Jewish immigrants from the continent contributed to the ethnic diversity of the docklands and enlarged the Jewish community that had existed to the east of the old City since the late Middle Ages. Bryan King and his colleagues worked together in one of the slums of London and they combined the establishment of a ritualist parish with numerous social activities and the foundation of schools and charitable institutions.129 If the number of parishioners present at services is taken as a measure of their achievements, then theirs was not a story of success. Quite early on, King’s changes to the liturgy and his strict moral sermons met with resistance within the parish, which resulted in dwindling church attendance and conflicts with the vestry in the 1850s. These conflicts intensified after 1856 thanks to the establishment of a mission headed by the staunch ritualist Charles Lowder.130 King believed that the main reason behind the conflicts was that the middle-class residents, who used to be the backbone of the parish, were being pushed out of the docklands. It does indeed appear as if the vestry, which was also responsible for the local administration of the district, was increasingly dominated by lower-middle-class shopkeepers, innkeepers and ‘businessmen’ from the red-light district. The church itself was surrounded by forty inns and pubs as well as 154 brothels.131 While King and Lowder believed that they were fighting a religious fight in a heathen environment, the majority within the vestry complained about the clergymen’s increasing affinity to Catholicism. With the election of Hugh Allen, the vestry threw down the gauntlet to Bryan King. The vestry majority explicitly stated that it wished to re-establish the Protestant ascendancy in St George’s-in-the-East with the appointment of the new preacher.132 King could neither tolerate this provocation, nor a hostile preacher in his church, so he asked the Bishop of London, Archibald Tait, later the Archbishop of Canterbury, for his support. Tait, however, saw no legal grounds to justify his intervention in the situation and he simply offered to act as a mediator if both sides were in agreement and would promise to accept his decision regardless of the outcome. As the bishop had distanced himself from ritualism, King and his followers hesitated to take up the offer.133 Meanwhile, the infighting within the parish intensified. As Allen went to read his first sermon, he found himself confronted by a chaplain who physically tried to keep him from pulpit. Shortly thereafter, a court confirmed Allen’s right to use the pulpit, but it conceded that the parish vicar had precedence as well as the right to determine the times at which the services were to take place. As a result, the times for Allen’s sermons as well as the normal church services were pushed back several times. At its weekly

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meetings, the vestry issued sharp reprimands directed at King, and the letters to the editor sections in the East London Observer were cluttered with accusations going back and forth. At the same time, the admonishments from the bishop forced those involved to at least pretend that they were willing to compromise.134 The real conflict, however, played out within the framework of the services themselves. Around three thousand people came to the first sermon by Hugh Allen; only fifty or sixty people usually attended mass on Sundays. In the following weeks, Allen refrained from delivering his sermons on Sunday afternoons. Nonetheless, thousands of supporters gathered on the streets around the church and protested the ritualist liturgy of the parish with ‘No Popery’ cheers. The services at which Bryan King and his followers officiated were disrupted by demonstrative coughing, heckling, slamming doors and other distractions and therefore had to be cut short. After Allen took up his sermons again, the troubles magnified. Clergymen and parishioners who supported the parish vicar were even attacked outside the church. As the churchwardens, who were elected by the vestry, were responsible for keeping order in the church, King could not count on their help to control the situation. Consequently, his supporters arranged for a troop of bodyguards to protect him, among them the famous boxer Tom Hughes.135 Outside the church, the attacks had become so prevalent that the police had to be called in for the first time at the end of August and some of the anti-ritualist demonstrators were arrested. Despite the protests of the vestry against the involvement of the police, additional arrests and a few trials followed in the weeks thereafter. At the end of September, the bishop closed the church, but the weekly marches, demonstrations and street fights in which five thousand people regularly took part went on.136 The son of a spokesman of the vestry was one of those taken into custody by the police. Other offenders were described as confectioners, small shopkeepers and cobblers who had stood at the front of the proletarian mob. Many of those involved in the riots were also quite young. The East London Observer, which tended to side with King, also reported having seen a group of men clad in black commanding the rowdy youngsters.137 No one contested the fact that it was mostly people from the lowest classes who came from across the city to be part of these crowds. King and his friends, however, firmly believed that the riots were orchestrated centrally and financed by the Jewish-controlled red-light district. The clergymen maintained that the members of the vestry were ‘Dissenters, Jews and avowed Atheists’, and one eyewitness claimed that the Hebrew traits in the faces of the youthful hooligans could not be missed. Regardless of such antiSemitic undertones, both King and the eyewitness believed that the riots had taken on a life of their own and served to provide a bit of Sunday entertainment for the city’s riff-raff.138 Although there was quite clearly a close connection between the members of the vestry and the crowds on the street, it is wrong to assume that the riots could

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be traced back to the commercial interests of pub owners and the boredom of proletarian youngsters on Sundays. The leaders of the crowd, mostly craftsmen and shopkeepers, represented the lower-middle-class tip of the working-class milieu rather than the economic power of commercialized prostitution in the poor docklands.139 The theological debates that brought Bryan King and his supporters to sing certain prayers instead of just reciting them and to wear robes before the parish were surely just as foreign to them as the many Catholic and Jewish immigrants who had settled in the neighbourhood since 1850. With Allen, they chose a preacher who was vehemently committed to the traditional Evangelicalism of the Church of England, who kept with the forms of worship known to the parish and responded to the first conflict over the use of the pulpit with a sermon on the vested principles of the Anglican Church and the repudiation of Catholicism.140 Allen’s stance must have appealed to a parish that had distanced itself from its own vicar and wanted to strengthen its English identity amidst poverty and the influx of immigrants. It echoed, for example, in the way that ‘Rule Britannia’ was sung to disrupt the intonation of the hymns when King held mass.141 Without a doubt, the spectacle created by such protests attracted curious onlookers from all over London. But the church was also filled to the brim for Allen’s first sermons, which took place long before the news of the conflict spread and reports appeared in papers across the country. Even if the men of the vestry possessed incredible organizational skills and considerable financial means, this incredible level of mobilization in a parish in which usually only a few dozen people attended church services indicates that there was a great deal of interest in the conflicts in St George’s-in-the-East. Given the descriptions of street fights between English and Irish youth on nearby Ratcliff Highway, the celebrations of the fifth of November in the East End and the diverse incidents following the ‘Papal Aggression’, this interest is not at all surprising. Even in the 1840s, the Tower Hamlets Protestant Operative Association held its events quite near the church.142 Accordingly, it was possible for the Eastern Times, a weekly paper clearly opposed to the ritualists and Catholics, to firmly establish itself in London’s East End in December 1859. At the price of a penny, its reports of the incidents in the parish coming from the perspective of Bryan King’s opponents reached a much wider public than the only other local newspaper, the East London Observer.143 The success of this weekly also indicates that it was not a coincidence that the East End became the stage for these conflicts surrounding the Anglican Church. The escalation of the conflict in May 1859 quickly led to the establishment of diverse Protestant associations, which organized lectures and protests against the ritualists, deploring their nearness to Catholicism as un-English and unChristian. The Beaumont Philosophical Institution on the neighbouring Mile End Road functioned as the centre for these kinds of events. It played host to

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typical ‘No Popery’ meetings, but also protest meetings in response to actions undertaken by the original clergy of St George’s at which answers were formulated to Sunday sermons, for example.144 Some of the associations included the Anti-Pusey-League, which was named after the leader of the ritualist theologians, Edward Pusey, as well as the Church of England Young Men’s Society or the National Protestant Society. Despite their names, these associations were initially only local clubs in London’s East End. It was not long, however, before opponents accused them of being lodges of the Orange Order in disguise.145 These accusations were in fact justified. The incidents in the parish had brought the Irish Protestant Edward Harper to London. Harper had made a name for himself as a ‘No Popery’ preacher in the circles of the Order.146 In the conflict with King, he led the National Protestant Society and interfered in the debates by giving a series of lectures. Although it could hardly be differentiated from the Society, the Anti-Pusey-League encompassed the members of the vestry and their friends; like the other Protestant clubs in this neighbourhood, the League’s members came mostly from the lower classes. While it seemed as if the riots were dying down in the autumn of 1860, the rank and file of these two associations formed new lodges of the Orange Order in the East End.147 Street protests against ritualists and Catholics shared roots stemming from widespread ‘No Popery’ sentiments; if these almost always latent tensions escalated into a specific conflict, the establishment of staunch anti-Catholic organizations easily followed. All this evidence points to the fact that the scenes during church services and on the streets around the church did in fact stem from anti-Catholic sentiments within the parish. Nonetheless, the entertainment value of these events must be taken into consideration in order to explain why these incidents attracted onlookers who came from the other side of the city. It also seemed as if the incidents in St George’s-in-the-East were being tolerated to an extent by the authorities, as they would have led to a police crackdown and hefty sentences in other parts of London. As the battle was being waged between the vestry and the vicar, it made it difficult for the police to decide who had the authority over the church. Every time the police entered the church, sharp criticism came from one side or the other. Physical attacks and damage to property were easy for the police to handle, but in the tumult during the services, it was almost impossible to determine whose fists went flying first, especially because King’s bodyguards did not act with much restraint. Accordingly, the police reacted rather cautiously, and the courts dropped the charges against rioters more than once.148 Much like Parliament, the national press was appalled by the weekly riots; it called for an energetic police crackdown, even if this necessitated new legislation. At the same time, newspapers such as The Times and parts of the government viewed the ritualists with a good dose of scepticism. They believed that the critiques of the Catholic tendencies in the Anglican Church being voiced by the crowds on the streets were legitimate.149

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As they were indirectly ‘protected’ in this way, the riots gradually became a meeting point for spectators from around the entire city who wanted to see what was going on or join in the atmosphere of an uncontrolled lack of discipline. Especially for the youth, who usually only saw vicars in Sunday school, the possibility of seeing a reverend in a street fight might have been motivation enough to attend; for others, the nearby pubs and other amusements in the docklands may have made a trip to the East End all the more attractive. Of course, a vaguely negative idea about ritualist practices and a general mistrust of everything Catholic as well as Irish immigrants and priests also played a role. The crowds around the church acted along clearly demarcated front lines. Moreover, despite the regular fist fights, the neighbourhood did not become home to completely uncontrolled street brawls or out-of-control vandalism on the streets nearby. Even though this restraint seems to indicate that a kind of anti-Catholic ‘moral economy’ reigned within the crowd, many youngsters and ‘fight-lovers’ needed nothing more than the enjoyment of the spectacle in order to turn into anti-Catholics and take to the streets in St George’s-in-the-East. Exactly this combination of serious anti-Catholic actions and the seemingly less important general inclination towards rowdiness within a rather vague culture of protest and violence that unfolded around Protestant and anti-Catholic symbols is what lends significance to anti-Catholic phenomena such as the riots in the East End. The riots in St George’s ended in the autumn of 1860 after Hugh Allen as well as Bryan King left the parish and the vicar’s successor did away with the ritualist elements of the liturgy that had been introduced. In a certain sense, the cheering parade of the Anti-Pusey-League on the day before King’s departure marked the end of the conflict. Although the marchers carried banners bearing more than just ‘No Popery’ slogans, some of which were clearly aimed at the ritualism of the vicar, this procession resembled the parades of the Orangemen in many respects; many of the participants could be found in the lodges of the order soon thereafter.150 The legacy of the riots brought the beginnings of an arch-Protestant organization with a loyalist conservative world view to the doorsteps of a neighbourhood in London that was known for its political radicalism and its ties to democratic-leaning liberals. Just a few years later, the Conservatives successfully established Working Men’s Associations even in the East End, demonstrating that even here they were able to transform rather vague anti-Catholic sentiments, like those that appeared in the protest against Bryan King, into a political commitment to the Conservative cause.151

Notes 1. Leeds Intelligencer, 10 November 1831. The term ‘boroughmongers’ was used by liberals and radicals to refer to the defenders of the often very small constituencies that came to be known

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as ‘rotten boroughs’ because they were controlled by one or just a few influential aristocrats. The shovel hat was a typical type of hat worn by Anglican clergymen. On the discussion surrounding the Bishop of Llandaff, see The Times, 12 October 1831 and 13 October 1831. 2. Observer, 13 November 1831. 3. R.D. Storch, ‘“Please to Remember the Fifth of November”: Conflict, Solidarity and Public Order in Southern England, 1815–1900’, in R.D. Storch (ed.), Popular Culture and Custom in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Croom Helm, 1982), 71–99. See also D. Cressy, ‘The Fifth of November Remembered’, in R. Porter (ed.), Myths of the English (Oxford: Polity Press, 1992), 68–90; and E. Griffin, England’s Revelry: A History of Popular Sports and Pastimes 1660–1830 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), passim. On the early celebrations after 1605, see D. Cressy, Bonfire and Bells: National Memory and the Protestant Calendar in Elizabethan and Stuart England (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1989), ch. 4. 4. See D. Paz, ‘Bonfire Night in Mid Victorian Northants: The Politics of a Popular Rebel’, Historical Review 63 (1990), 316–28; and idem, Popular Anti-Catholicism, ch. 8. 5. See G. Morgan, ‘The Guildford Guy Riots (1842–1865)’, Surrey Archaeological Collections 76 (1985), 61–68; and J.E. Etherington, ‘The Community Origins of the Lewes Guy Fawkes Night Celebrations’, Sussex Archaeological Collections 128 (1990), 195–224. 6. See W. Arnstein, ‘The Murphy Riots: A Victorian Dilemma’, Victorian Studies 19 (1975), 51–72; Richter, Riotous Victorians, ch. 3; R.E. Swift, ‘Anti-Catholicism and Irish Disturbances: Public Order in Mid Victorian Wolverhampton’, Midland History 9 (1984), 87–108; P. Millward, ‘The Stockport Riots of 1852: A Study of Anti-Catholic and Anti-Irish Sentiment’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City (Beckenham: Croom Helm, 1985), 207–24; F. Neal, ‘English–Irish Conflict in the North West of England: Economics, Racism, Anti-Catholicism or Simple Xenophobia?’, North West Labour History Journal 16 (1991/92), 14–25; F. Wallis, Popular Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Victorian Britain, Texts and Studies in Religion 60 (Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1993); and A. Bryson, ‘Riotous Liverpool, 1815–1860’, in J. Belchem (ed.), Popular Politics, Riot and Labour: Essays in Liverpool History 1790–1840 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1992), 98–134. 7. See L.H. Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1979); P.J. Waller, Democracy and Sectarianism: A Political and Social History of Liverpool, 1868–1939 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1981); D. Fitzpatrick, ‘“A Peculiar Tramping People”: The Irish in Britain, 1801–1870’, in W.E. Vaughn (ed.), New History of Ireland: Ireland under the Union I (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989), 623–60; G. Davis, The Irish in Britain (Dublin: Gill and Macmillan, 1991); A. O’Day, ‘Varieties of Anti-Irish Behaviour in Britain, 1846–1922’, in P. Panayi (ed.), Racial Violence in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), 26–43; C.L. Scott, ‘A Comparative Re-Examination of Anglo-Irish Relations in Nineteenth-Century Manchester, Liverpool and Newcastle upon Tyne’, PhD dissertation, University of Durham, 1998; R.E. Swift, ‘Historians and the Irish: Recent Writings on the Irish in Nineteenth Century Britain’, Immigrants and Minorities 18 (1999), 14–39; and D.M. MacRaild, Irish Migrants in Modern Britain, 1750–1922 (London: St Martin’s Press, 1999). See also R.E. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City (London: Croom Helm, 1985); eidem, ‘Introduction’, in R.E. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain 1839–1939 (London: Pinter, 1989), 1–9; and eidem, The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension (London: Four Courts Press, 1999). 8. See Usherwood, ‘“No Popery” under Queen Victoria’, History Today 23 (1973), 274–79; Kirk, ‘Ethnicity’; P. Joyce, Work, ch. 7; D.M. MacRaild, Culture, Conflict and Migration: The Irish in Victorian Cumbria (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1998); idem, Faith, Fraternity and Fighting: The Orange Order and Irish Migrants in Northern England, c. 1850–1920 (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2005); and C.L. Scott, ‘Re-Examination’, ch. 2 and 3. 9. See Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, ch. 8.

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10. John Bull, 8 November 1829. 11. The Times, 14 November 1820. 12. Cressy, ‘The Fifth’, 80. 13. The Times, 6 November 1834, 6 November 1838, 5 November 1843, 6 November 1850, 7 November 1867, 6 November 1877, 6 November 1878, 6 November 1879, 6 November 1880 and 6 November 1884. 14. The Times, 6 November 1833. 15. The Times, 6 November 1838. 16. Leeds Intelligencer, 9 November 1816 and 6 November 1828. 17. Leeds Mercury, 8 November 1828. 18. Leeds Intelligencer, 29 November 1832. 19. Bolton Chronicle, 7 November 1829. 20. Bolton Chronicle, 7 November 1835, 9 November 1839, 9 November 1844, 7 November 1846, 6 November 1847 and 11 November 1848. 21. Bolton Chronicle, 7 November 1835 and 9 November 1844; Leeds Intelligencer, 11 November 1837 and 11 November 1843; The Times, 6 November 1843. 22. See, for example, The Times, 6 November 1839, 15 November 1839 and 7 November 1843; Halifax Guardian, 5 November 1842. 23. Cressy, ‘The Fifth’, 71–72. 24. The Times, 7 November 1838. 25. Bolton Chronicle, 11 November 1837 and 9 November 1839; John Bull, 4 November 1838; The Times, 6 November 1839 and 5 November 1840. 26. Leeds Intelligencer, 11 November 1837. 27. See chapter 2, section ‘The Crown and the Constitution in Election Campaigns and Celebrations’. 28. Manchester Courier about Bolton, 8 November 1828; Bolton Chronicle, 10 November 1838 and 13 November 1841; Leeds Intelligencer, 12 November 1829, 10 November 1838, 14 November 1846 and 13 November 1847. 29. Wheeler’s Manchester Chronicle, 11 November 1820 and 18 November 1820. 30. The newspapers repeatedly refer to the children’s celebrations. See Bolton Chronicle, 7 November 1829; Leeds Intelligencer, 6 November 1828; The Times, 6 November 1832, 6 November 1834 and 7 November 1844. 31. Bolton Chronicle, 8 November 1828. 32. See, for example, Leeds Intelligencer, 8 November 1832; Halifax Guardian, 12 November 1842; The Times, 11 November 1847. 33. The Times, 6 November 1838. 34. J. Cossins, Reminiscences of Exeter Fifty Years Since (Exeter: W. Pollard, 1877), 66, as quoted in Storch, ‘“Please to Remember”’. Correlative texts can be found in the descriptions of the journalist Henry Mayhew in London Labour and the London Poor, (London: George Woodfall and Son, 1851–1863), vol. 1, 237–38 and vol. 3, 69–70. In his coverage of the lower-class neighbourhoods of London, he also describes Guy Fawkes Day festivities. See also Cressy, ‘The Fifth’; and J. Turton, ‘Mayhew’s Irish: The Irish Poor in Mid-Nineteenth Century London’, in R.E. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Victorian Britain: The Local Dimension (Dublin: Four Courts Press, 1999), 122­–55. 35. Leeds Intelligencer, 6 November 1828; Leeds Mercury, 8 November 1828. 36. Bolton Chronicle, 7 November 1829; and John Bull, 8 November 1829. 37. The Times, 6 November 1839, 8 November 1839 and 15 November 1839; Bolton Chronicle, 9 November 1839. 38. See Letter from Heywood to Noah Jones, 21 December 1846, Bolton Local Studies Library, Heywood Papers ZHE 42/50.

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39. See M.A. Mullett, Catholics in Britain and Ireland, 1558–1829, Social History in Perspective Series (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 1998); R.J. Klaus, The Pope, The Protestants and The Irish: Papal Aggression and Anti-Catholicism in Mid-Nineteenth-Century England (New York: Stanford University Press, 1987); and G.I.T. Machin, Politics and the Churches in Great Britain, 1832–1868 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 212–13. 40. See L.P. Curtis Jr. and L. Percy, Anglo-Saxons and Celts: A Study of Anti-Irish Prejudice in Victorian England (Bridgeport: Conference on British Studies/New York University Press, 1968). 41. See D.G. Paz, ‘Anti-Catholicism, Anti-Irish Stereotyping and Anti-Celtic Racism in Mid-Victorian Working Class Periodicals’, Albion 18 (1986), 601–16; idem, Popular Anti-Catholicism, 49–51; S. Gilley, ‘Protestant London, No-Popery and the Irish Poor, I: 1830–1850’, Recusant History 10 (1970), 210­–30; and idem, ‘English Attitudes to the Irish in England, 1780–1900’, in C. Holmes (ed.), Immigrants and Minorities in British Society (London: Unwin Hyman, 1978), 81–110. 42. On the ‘Papal Aggression’ in general, see E.R. Norman, Anti-Catholicism in Victorian England (London: Allen and Unwin, 1968); W. Ralls, ‘The Papal Aggression of 1850: A Study in Victorian Anti-Catholicism’, Church History 43 (1974), 242–56; H. Blass, ‘Popular AntiCatholicism in England and the Ecclesiastical Titles Bill of 1851’, PhD dissertation, University of Missouri, 1981; Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism; and S. Matsumoto-Best, Britain and the Papacy in the Age of Revolution, 1846–1851 (Woodbridge: Boydell Press, 2003), ch. 6. 43. See, for example, John Bull, 12 October 1850. 44. See Russell’s letter dated 4 November 1850, printed in Douglas, Documents, vol. 12 (1), 367–69. 45. On anti-Catholicism among the Nonconformists, see Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, ch. 6; Wolffe, Protestant Crusade, passim; and Larsen, Friends, ch. 7. 46. The Times, 6 November 1850; John Bull, 9 November 1850; Reynold’s Newspaper, 10 November 1850. See also Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 3, 64–66. 47. Bolton Chronicle, 9 November 1850; Leeds Mercury, 9 November 1850. 48. See, for example, Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 10 November 1850. For a short overview, see Klaus, The Pope, 211–12. 49. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, 228–47. 50. See ibid. 51. The Times, 9 October 1850. 52. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, 233. 53. Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 10 November 1850. 54. See the development of the protests in the almost daily reports in The Times, 7 November 1850 to 31 December 1850. 55. Bolton Chronicle, 23 November 1850. 56. Reynold’s Newspaper, 15 December 1850. 57. Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 29 December 1850. The spectacle was partially financed by donations from the crowd itself, as attested to by the statements of one of the ‘professional’ Guys described by Henry Mayhew who chose to dress as Guy Fawkes and make their way through the crowd to collect pennies in a quite profitable undertaking. See Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 3, 67–66. 58. Bolton Chronicle, 28 December 1850. 59. On the Birkenhead riots, see Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 1 December 1850; Reynold’s Newspaper, 1 December 1850; and the depictions of the parties in the files of the Home Office, Registered Papers, National Archives, HO 45/3140 and HO 45/3472 J and K. See also the overviews in Neal, Sectarian Violence, 131–33; and Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, 248–52. 60. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, 252.

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61. Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 8 December 1850; The Times, 28 November 1850 and 14 December 1850. See also Memorandum from Home Secretary Grey from early 1851, Home Office Registered Papers, National Archives, HO 45/3140, 13–15; a summary of the case can also be found in HO 45/3472 J and K, 25–30. 62. The Times, 25 November 1850. Paz describes these incidents as part of his general interpretation of the violent conflicts between the English and the Irish in the nineteenth century in Popular Anti-Catholicism, 254. In doing so, he takes them out of the context of the ‘Papal Aggression’ and all too simply attributes them to manoeuvring ‘from above’. His reference to the anti-Catholic efforts of the local Anglican vicar, however, cannot explain the sudden escalation of the events. 63. Leeds Intelligencer, 23 November 1850 and 30 November 1850. 64. Reynold’s Newspaper, 24 November 1850, 8 December 1850, 15 December 1850 and 21 December 1850. The newspaper explicitly states that the participants in the protests – numbering some two thousand – came from across the social spectrum and that a great portion were ‘respectable’, although the police only interrogated craftsmen and workers; see The Times, 2 December 1850. 65. See the confidential report from Commander Earl Catheart sent to the Home Office, 4 January 1851 and 4 February 1851, Home Office Registered Papers, National Archives, HO 45/3472/1–2. 66. See the report from Sir William Warne to A. Waddington, Undersecretary in the Home Office, 4 February 1849, Home Office Registered Papers, National Archives, HO 45/2793, ff.6–9. See also A. Redford, Labour Migration in England 1800–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1967), 163; and T. Coleman, The Railway Navvies: A History of the Men who Made the Railways (London: Hutchinson, 1965), ch. 6. 67. John Bull, 19 October 1850. 68. See R.E. Swift, ‘Crime and the Irish in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in R.E. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain 1839–1939 (London: Pinter, 1989), 1–9; Paz, Popular AntiCatholicism, ch. 8; see also the titles cited in footnote 7 above. 69. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, ch. 8; and J.G. Williamson, ‘The Impact of the Irish on British Labour Markets during the Industrial Revolution’, in R.E. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in Britain 1839–1939 (London: Pinter, 1989), 134–62. 70. For a comparative interpretation of the economic competition, see Kirk, Growth, 324–34. 71. See F. Neal, ‘The Manchester Origin of the English Orange Order’, Manchester Region History Review 4 (1990/91), 12–24. 72. Bolton Chronicle, 22 March 1828. 73. See S. Gilley, ‘Protestant London, No-Popery and the Irish Poor, II: 1850–1860’, Recusant History 11 (1971), 21–46. 74. Kirk, Growth, 318–19. 75. Home Office Registered Papers, National Archives, HO 45/3472 Q–S. 76. Home Office Registered Papers, National Archives, HO 45/3472 T, U, V. 77. Mayhew, London Labour, vol. 3, 69. 78. On the riots, see Millward, ‘Stockport Riots’; Kirk, Growth, 317–18; Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, 254–56. 79. W. Arnstein, Protestant vs. Catholic in Victorian England: Mr. Newdegate and the Nuns (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1982), 48; Machin, Politics and the Churches, 238; and Paz, Popular-Anti-Catholicism, 255. 80. Millward, ‘Stockport Riots’, 219. 81. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, 256. 82. Millward, ‘Stockport Riots’, 217.

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83. On the organizational success of the Conservatives after 1867, see R.C. Greenall, ‘Popular Conservatism in Salford 1868–1886’, Northern History 9 (1978), 123–38; P. Joyce, Work; and Kirk, Change, ch. 8. 84. See Senior, Orangeism; W.R. Ward, Religion and Society in England (London: Batsford, 1972); E. McFarland, Protestants First: Orangeism in Nineteenth-Century Scotland (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990), ch. 3; Neal, Sectarian Violence; idem, ‘Manchester Origin’; and MacRaild, Faith, ch. 5. 85. On the role of the English Orange Order in the nineteenth century, see MacRaild, Faith. 86. See Parliamentary Papers, Select Committee Report on the Origin, Nature and Extent of Orange Institutions in Great Britain and the Colonies, with Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index, London 1935, xi. 87. See Parliamentary Papers, Origin, Appendix 20, 145. My calculated figures are somewhat higher than those calculated in Senior, Orangeism, 230–31, 272; and in Neal, ‘Manchester Origin’, 20. Both of these studies mix the figures on the size of the lodges from 1835 with those of 1830, citing a maximum of six thousand members. 88. Senior, Orangeism, 230–31, 272; and Neal, ‘Manchester Origin’, 20. 89. On the Great Northern Union in Huddersfield, see Hargreaves, ‘Popular Protest’. On the development of political organizations in the 1830s, see Salmon, Electoral Reform. 90. Parliamentary Papers, Origin, Appendix 20, 145. 91. Leeds Intelligencer, 3 March 1836. 92. See Manchester Courier, 12 March 1836, which reproached the Manchester Guardian with the facts. According to Walsh, ‘Working Class Political Integration’, 491, the membership books were provided to the Manchester Guardian, but there are no references to this effect in the text. 93. See Neal, ‘Manchester Origin’. 94. On the use of Orange symbols in the Conservative Associations in Bolton and surrounding areas, see, for example, Bolton Chronicle, 21 January 1837, 15 September 1838 and 6 June 1840; another example from Kidderminster is mentioned in Ten Town’s Messenger, 11 June 1841. 95. In a battle along the Irish River Boyne in 1690, the army of the Protestant William III defeated the troops of the Catholic James II, marking an important victory for William in the fight over the throne and Protestant ascendency in the kingdom. As both kings were present at this battle, it played a key role in the culture of memory of the Irish Orange Order. After the Gregorian calendar was introduced in the mid-eighteenth century, the anniversary of the battle was celebrated on 12 July. See Neuheiser, Erinnerung, 13. 96. Bolton Chronicle, 8 November1828. 97. Manchester Courier, 8 November 1828. 98. Bolton Chronicle, 20 September 1828; Leeds Intelligencer, 1 January 1829. 99. Leeds Intelligencer, 12 November 1829. 100. On the strategy of the leaders of the Order in this phase, see Senior, Orangeism, 225–34. 101. See Neuheiser, Erinnerung. 102. Parliamentary Papers, Origins: p. 33, statement by Mr Chetwoode; p. 43, statement by Mr Fairman. 103. Parliamentary Papers, Origins: p. 43, statement by Mr Fairman; p. 141, statement by Mr Innes. 104. Leeds Intelligencer, 7 February 1833. 105. Bolton Chronicle, 3 November 1838 and 10 November 1838. 106. Bolton Free Press, 10 November 1838. 107. Leeds Intelligencer, 11 February 1837. 108. Leeds Intelligencer, 24 March 1838.

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109. See also the ‘No Popery’ events sponsored by the Protestant Operative Associations in London described in chapter 3. 110. See R. Sylvain, Alessandro Gavazzi (1809–1889): Clerc, garibaldien, prédicant des deux mondes (Quebec: Centre Pédagogique, 1962); and B. Hall, ‘Alessandro Gavazzi: A Barnabite Friar and the Risorgimento’, Studies in Church History 12 (1975), 303–56. 111. See the letter from W. Doyle to the Home Office in which he complains about the coming parody of the Catholic mass by Teodor and Chylinski, 30 July 1852, Home Office Registered Papers, National Archives, HO 45/4195. 112. See Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, 26–28, 256–58; Machin, Politics and the Churches, 371–72; Richter, Riotous Victorians, ch. 3; D.M. MacRaild, ‘William Murphy, the Order and Communal Violence: The Irish in West Cumberland, 1871–1884’, in P. Panayi (ed.), Racial Violence in Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (London: Leicester University Press, 1996), 44–64; idem, ‘“Principle, Party and Protest”: The Language of Victorian Orangeism in the North of England’, in S. West (ed.), The Victorians and Race (Aldershot: Scolar Press, 1996), 128–40; and idem, ‘Abandon Hibernicisation: Priests, Ribbonmen and an Irish Street Fight in the North-East of England in 1858’, Historical Review 76 (2003), 557–73. 113. Paz, Popular Anti-Catholicism, 29. On the incidents themselves, see Arnstein, ‘The Murphy Riots’; Kirk, ‘Ethnicity’; idem, Growth; Stevenson, Popular Disturbances, 281–82; and J.F. Supple-Green, The Catholic Revival in Yorkshire 1850–1900 (Leeds: Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1990), 5–7. 114. Leeds Intelligencer, 11 November 1843, 8 November 1845, 14 November 1846, 13 November 1847 and 11 November 1848. 115 Leeds Intelligencer, 10 November 1849. 116. Leeds Intelligencer, 1 June 1850 and 20 July 1850; Bolton Chronicle 13 July 1850. 117. On the often overlooked heterogeneity of Irish immigrants, see D.M. MacRaild, ‘Wherever Orange is Worn: Orangeism and Irish Migration in the Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries’, Canadian Journal of Irish Studies 28/29 (2002/3), 98–117. 118. Leeds Intelligencer, 28 June 1851. 119. See, for example, Leeds Intelligencer, 23 November 1850, 30 November 1850, 21 December 1850, 29 March 1851 and 10 May 1851; Bolton Chronicle, 21 December 1850, 1 February 1851, 8 March 1851, 17 May 1851 and 24 May 1851; The Times, 21 November 1850 and 7 December 1850. On a similar development in Oldham, see J. Foster, Class Struggle and the Industrial Revolution (London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1974), 218–20. 120. See J.T. Ward, ‘Squire Auty’, Bradford Antiquary 42 (1964), 104­–23; S. Auty, The National Orange and Protestant Ministrel: Being a Collection of Constitutional & Protestant Songs, Hymns, Toasts, Sentiments, and Recitations, Original and Select (Bradford: S. Auty, 1852); and idem, Auty’s Orange and Protestant Melodist, Consisting of Constitutional Songs, Toasts, and Recitations, Original and Select (Bradford: S. Auty, 1863). 121. See, for example, Leeds Intelligencer, 25 January 1851, 28 June 1851, 13 September 1851, 11 November 1854 and 10 November 1855. 122. The Leeds Intelligencer noted the particular prevalence of the principles of the organization among the working classes, for example on 24 May 1851. See also MacRaild, Culture, ch. 5; and idem, Faith, ch. 4. 123. B. Hall, ‘Gavazzi’, 349. On the connection between ‘No Popery’ sermons in Salford, Stowell’s sermonizing and the riots in which the Orangemen participated, see Greenall, Making, 99. On Stowell in general, see Rev. J.B. Marsden, Memoirs of the Life and Labours of Rev. Hugh Stowell, MA, Rector of Christ Church, Salford, Hon. Canon of Chester; Chaplain to the Lord Bishop of Manchester, etc. (London: Hamilton, Adams and Co., 1868); and Rev. C.B.D. Bullock, Hugh Stowell: A Life and its Lessons (London: Home Words Publishing Office, 1881). 124. Bolton Chronicle, 14 November 1857.

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125. P.T. Smith, ‘The London Police and the Holy War: Ritualism and St George’s-in-the-East, London, 1859–1860’, Journal of Church and State 28 (1986), 113. 126. See Norman, Anti-Catholicism, 105–21. Other portrayals of the riots can be found in M. Reynolds, Martyrs of Ritualism: Father Mackonochie of St Albans, Holborn (London: Faber and Faber, 1965), ch. 4; O. Chadwick, The Victorian Church (London: Adam and Charles Black, 1966), vol. 1, 495–501; D. Bowen, The Idea of the Victorian Church: A Study of the Church of England, 1833–1889 (Montreal: McGill University Press, 1968); L.E. Ellsworth, Charles Lowder and the Ritualist Movement (London: Darnton, Longmann and Todd, 1982), 40–55; N. Yates, Anglican Ritualism in Victorian Britain, 1830–1910 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 93–95; and R. Sharp, ‘The Riots at St George-in-the-East’, Local Historian 33 (2003), 4–11. Descriptions from contemporaries have been summarized in Anon.[Alpha], The Outrages at St George’s in the East: A Letter to Sir George Cornewall Lewis (London: Joseph Masters, 1860); B. King, The St George Mission, with the St George Riots and their Results (London: n.p., 1877); R.T. Davidson and W. Benham, Life of Archibald Campbell Tait (London: Clarendon Press, 1981); and W. Crouch, Bryan King and the Riots at St George’s-in-the-East (London: Methuen and Company, 1904). On the conflicts over ritualism in Leeds, see N. Yates, ‘The Oxford Movement and the Parishes: St Saviour’s Leeds, 1839–1929’, Borthwick Paper 48 (1975), 2–16; and idem, ‘The Religious Life of Victorian Leeds’, in D. Fraser (ed.), A History of Modern Leeds (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1980), 250–69. 127. See K. Leech, ‘Anglo-Catholic Socialist Clergy in London, 1870–1970’, East London Record 12 (1989), 29–37. 128. See C. Dickens, ‘What a London Curate Can Do if He Tries’, Household Words, 16 November 1850, 172–76. 129. Chadwick, Victorian Church, 497–98; Stedman Jones, Outcast London, passim; and P.T. Smith, ‘London Police’, 111–12. 130. See Ellsworth, Charles Lowder. 131. Stedman Jones, Outcast London, 248; and P.T. Smith, ‘London Police’, 109. 132. East London Observer, 28 May 1859. 133. See the letters of the bishop in Davidson and Benham, Life, vol. 1, 237–39; and East London Observer, 1 October 1859. 134. East London Observer, 28 May 1859, 18 June 1859, 25 June 1859, 9 July 1859 and 16 July 1859. 135. Chadwick, Victorian Church, 499. 136. East London Observer, 20 August 1859 and 1 October 1859; The Times, 6 September 1859, 26 September 1859 and 12 December 1859. 137. East London Observer, 24 September 1859. 138. See the quote from King in Eastern Times, 14 April 1860; and S. Baring-Gould, The Church Revival: Thoughts Thereon and Reminiscences (London: Methuen, 1914), 234–35. Anti-Semitic undertones could also be found in the portrayal of the riots in the Saturday Review, as quoted in Eastern Times, 18 February 1860. 139. On the proletarian origins and lower-middle-class occupations of the spokesmen in the vestry, see the satirical poem addressing the accused haberdasher Rozier and his friends, the blacksmith Bayman and the weight-maker Herbert, in the East London Observer, 8 October 1859, which mocked the theological inclinations of small men. 140. East London Observer, 28 May 1859. 141. Eastern Times, 11 February 1860; The Times, 6 February 1860. 142. The Penny Protestant Operative, April 1842, 37. 143. See the editorial in the Eastern Times from 3 December 1859. 144. East London Observer, 11 June 1859, 24 September 1859 and 24 December 1859; Eastern Times, 28 April 1860.

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145. East London Observer, 17 September 1859 and 24 December 1859. 146. Wolffe, Protestant Crusade, 281, 287. Harper’s activities were also somewhat dubious, because it had already become known that he had misappropriated funds from anti-Catholic associations that he had founded himself. 147. East London Observer, 6 October 1860; Eastern Times, 6 October 1860 and 15 December 1860. 148. See P.T. Smith, ‘London Police’. 149. See, for example, the commentaries in The Times, 12 December 1859, and from the Daily Telegraph and the Standard, which were reprinted and discussed in East London Observer, 24 September 1859 and Eastern Times, 10 December 1859 and 10 March 1860. 150. Eastern Times, 28 July 1860. 151. See The Bee Hive, 16 December 1871, with a report on a meeting of the Conservative Working Men’s Association in the Beaumont Institution as well as the reports of the Metropolitan Working Men’s Conservative Association and the London and Westminster Working Men’s Constitutional Association from 1867 and 1868 in the archives at the Bishopsgate Institute, HC POL Part car. Thanks to Detlev Mares for bringing my attention to these documents.

Chapter 5

In the Name of Inequality? Tory Radicalism, Social Protest and Plebeian Ideas of Justice

?

In mid July 1849, a good two years after Parliament passed the Ten Hours Act limiting the workday of women and children between the ages of thirteen and eighteen in textile factories to ten hours, around 1,500 people assembled in Bolton’s Temperance Hall to protest how little had actually changed.1 Many factory owners had skirted around the new regulations by making women and children work in staggered shifts with long pauses. They did so in order to avoid having to curtail the working time of men to ten hours as well because the heavy work done by men in the industrial production of cotton and wool could not keep going if there were delays in the lighter work done by women and children. At the same time, they demanded that all their workers, regardless of the law, be available to work twelve or more hours. This move was an affront to the factory movement, which had been fighting for a shorter workday, better working conditions and the prohibition of child labour since the early 1830s. Most of the people in attendance at the gathering in Bolton were factory workers directly affected by these measures. The assembly was sponsored by the local Short Time Committee, which was coordinating the protests in Bolton. Local politicians as well as long-time veterans of the factory movement took to the podium to advocate their shared interests in social reforms for workers. A few Liberals such as Robert Heywood stood alongside Conservative factory owners like William Ford Hulton, a long-time supporter of the Operative Conservative Association, and the cotton weaver John Knowles. Numerous doctors and vicars from around the area were also in attendance. Other prominent visitors included the so-called Tory Radicals Richard Oastler and Joseph Rayner Stepehens, two Notes from this chapter begin on page 230.

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prominent working-class leaders who had been at the helm of the factory movement for twenty years. Both men came from well-established middle-class Tory families, but they had come to develop increasingly radical ideas over time. Whereas Stephens had become a feared speaker at Chartist assemblies from 1838 onwards, making a name for himself through public threats of violence, Oastler was more strongly chained to conservative ideas when it came to social protest. As the actual leader of the factory movement, Oastler had earned the nickname ‘Factory King’.2 The noticeable unanimity of embittered political opponents, factory owners and workers lent a certain atmosphere to this assembly in Bolton. Everyone condemned attempts to circumvent the 1847 law and demanded the enforcement of a ten-hour day in all factories; a corresponding resolution addressed to Queen Victoria and Parliament was also passed. Many of the speakers criticized local magistrates and judges who had declared that the new shift system was legal despite complaints about longer working hours. They deplored the fact that it was disenfranchised workers who had to fight to get prominent wealthy citizens to obey the law. In addition, those assembled generally refrained from bickering among themselves. The only speakers who were criticized by the audience in the hall were those who sought to win support for the reforms proposed by the Radical MP Joshua Walmsley. The local businessmen who had introduced the ten-hour day in their factories, on the other hand, were applauded loudly. A clearly aged Richard Oastler, who had embarked on a political tour of northern England’s industrial cities after years of imprisonment, illness and retreat, praised the workers for showing their support: ‘And then to hear that cheer you gave to those masters – why, it did my heart good; for while others had been fancying that I had been labouring for the last twenty years to set masters against men, and men against masters, it was my object to settle things in favour of each other’.3 Politicians and social reformers of different stripes met once more in Bolton in 1849 to campaign for a reform of factory work. A year after the revolutions of 1848 and the last revival of Chartism in England, these joint protests between factory owners and workers seemed to be an early expression of an emergent High Victorian consensus that focused on small steps to reforms rather than major political changes. Oastler, of course, had already spoken out vehemently against the politics of the Chartists at the end of the 1830s. Rather than demanding political equality and universal suffrage, he advocated a paternalistic ideal of a levelling between rich and poor in which poverty would be alleviated without tearing down social boundaries. His drastic rhetoric and enormously popular appearances alongside men like the future Chartist leader Fergus O’Connor raised questions quite early on as to what role Oastler’s romantic conservatism as well as Tory philanthropists such as Michael Sadler and Lord Ashley (later Lord Shaftesbury) played in the campaign for social reforms in the mid-nineteenth century. The still most influential

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biography of Oastler by Cecil Drivers, and John Traver Ward’s path-breaking history of the factory movement emphasize the importance of Conservative politicians in the 1830s and 1840s.4 They adopted the term Tory Radicalism that was used at the time to refer to a modernized form of paternalistic country positions among Tories in the eighteenth century and that allowed for numerous popular alliances between Conservatives and Radicals as part of the northern English response to industrialization. However, recent studies tend to situate social protests against working conditions in the factories and the New Poor Law within the early English workers’ movement. David Roberts and Karl Heinz Metz, for example, emphasize the political isolation of the Tory Radicals and other paternalistic social politicians within the Conservative Party at the time. The party majority, they note, voted against the reform of factory work in Parliament and in favour of the reform of the Poor Law so hated by workers.5 Stewart Weaver and Robert Gray see the factory movement as a direct precursor of Chartism and maintain that support for individual Conservatives rested on tactical alliances undertaken at a regional level by a working-class milieu that was clearly influenced by radicalism and new ideas of class.6 According to Weaver and Gray, the popularity of particular Tory Radicals came from their vehement commitment to social reforms and the increasingly radical tone of their rhetoric, which blurred the boundaries separating them from other leading figures of the movement. At any rate, Oastler and Stephens were associated in connection with Chartism quite early on.7 Rather recently, Eileen Groth Lyon has referred to them as so-called Christian Radicals based on the strongly religious undertones of their rhetoric. She maintains that this group represented an important strand within English radicalism that was quite distinct from the actual Conservatives.8 Correspondingly, more recent accounts of the Conservative Party paint social reformers and paternalists with Tory backgrounds prior to 1867 as merely marginal political actors. Additionally, in current scholarly debates over the New Poor Law, they play no role whatsoever.9 When considering the parliamentary arm of the Conservative Party, such an assessment of the marginalized role of proponents of the Factory Acts and opponents of the New Poor Law is undoubtedly accurate. But, away from the benches of Westminster, one can detect a discrepancy between the general emphasis within scholarship that conservative ideas were relatively insignificant when it came to mobilizing social protest on the one hand, and the incontestable popularity of politicians, clergymen and labour leaders who made no secret of their affinity to the Tories but who advocated for social reforms on the basis of Christian values as well as a conservative understanding of society on the other. In his studies on the political language of the factory movement, Robert Gray has rightly pointed out that the rhetoric of the factory reformers stemmed from quite different traditions that cannot be lumped into just one political camp; rather, conservatives, liberals and radicals alike could just as easily energetically support this movement

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as reject it entirely. The heterogeneous agitation in the early 1830s, which was shaped as much by evangelicalism and anti-industrial notions of social equity as it was by radical ideals of fair employment and patriarchal concepts of work, the family and proper gender roles, was not predestined to become politically isolated, nor to become more radical through association with Chartism.10 Indeed, as this chapter will exemplify, the language of the social protest movements in the 1830s and 1840s oscillated between conservative and radical positions. Moreover, it will demonstrate that it was exactly this constellation that fostered such a broad mobilization of support, which crossed social as well as political boundaries. In a number of ways, these protests could be reconciled with popular conservative constitutionalism, which meant that it was often easy for plebeian Tories, and not just Tory Radicals like Oastler and Stephens, to hop on board. That said, however, these protests did not lead to any kind of permanent cooperation between Tories and Radicals. When it came to local political conflicts, all the parties independently sought to win support from among the ranks of the protest movement. Many Tory politicians largely agreed with the demands of the protesters as they propagated an ideal of social justice that did not rest on radical ideals of equality. Yet for the most part these politicians, even in the north of England, did not present themselves first and foremost as Conservative social reformers. Over the course of the conflicts between Tory Radicals and Operative Conservative Associations, as well as in the debates over the Corn Laws which led to a split in the party in 1846, it became clear that conservative notions of justice were quite important for Conservatives from the lower classes, but they were not solely responsible for the party’s popular success.

Social Structures and the Political Language of Protest in the 1830s Neither the history of the factory movement nor the opposition to the Poor Law of 1834 suffers from a lack of attention within historical scholarship. These two protest movements were closely related to one another and linked by the leading figures involved, but they were reactions to two completely different problems. They emerged one after the other rather than parallel to each other. Their general contours can be quickly summarized. The first calls for a legislative regulation of factory work, and especially that of women and children, appeared early on in the industrialization process in England. As far back as 1802 and 1818, the English Parliament had passed some legal restrictions, but these were not effective – partly because there was a lack of sufficient oversight to enforce them and partly because they only pertained to a small sector within the textile industry. Despite some modifications to these laws, child labour was still quite widespread at the end of the 1820s, especially in the

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textile industry in the north and in the coal mines. It was not uncommon for children as young as six to work under horrible conditions for over seventy hours a week to earn a pitiful wage. The children often worked twelve-hour shifts with only a few breaks, and Sunday was the only real day off; in extreme cases, they worked fifteen or more hours a day.11 Alongside demands for suffrage reform and the abolition of slavery in the English colonies in the Caribbean, calls for factory laws that prohibited the employment of children under nine years of age and limited the workday of those under eighteen to ten hours (eight hours on Saturdays) grew louder around 1830. In the House of Commons, the Liberal John Hobhouse, followed by the Tory Michael Sadler, spearheaded a cross-party group of MPs in favour of such legislation; the Conservative Lord Ashley took over as the parliamentary leader of the movement in 1832. Outside of Parliament, local Short Time Committees were formed in all of the British industrial areas, above all in Yorkshire and Lancashire, which supported the fight in Parliament with numerous protests and a few large public demonstrations with up to a hundred thousand participants. The most prominent speaker of this movement against so-called ‘Yorkshire Slavery’ was Richard Oastler. While several parliamentary commissions investigated the situation in the factories, agitation outside Westminster peaked in the summer of 1833. Despite the immense pressure coming from the streets, Parliament only passed a heavily trimmed law that had little bearing on the situation in the factories. After this defeat, the movement lost momentum, and the focus of the social protests in England’s industrial areas moved in a different direction. Demands for a legislative restriction on working hours in the factories did not become louder again until the 1840s. The Ten Hours Act was finally pushed through in 1847. Additional regulations followed in the 1850s and 1860s that gradually extended the stipulations, which applied at first only to the textile industry, to other sectors. Beginning in the second half of the 1830s, the majority of those involved in the factory movement were also moved to protest the New Poor Law of 1834. The protests were directed against the new regulations shaped by liberal economic thought that the Whigs had put into place as part of their sweeping reform programme formulated after 1832. These reforms were prompted by the steadily increasing costs for poor relief caused by economic crises and industrial change as well as the growing size of the population, which often exceeded the income brought in locally by means of the so-called ‘poor rates’. Alongside the high taxes which the English government had imposed after 1815 to try to recover from the exploding national debt left over from the war, these tithes for the poor made a good dent in the pocketbooks of moderately wealthy and well-to-do residents. Not to mention, an economic downturn in 1830 affected the already tense economic situation, unleashing higher unemployment not only in the industrial areas of the north, but also among farm workers in the

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south. Consequently, the poor rates sky-rocketed just as the agitation for suffrage reform topped out.12 The New Poor Law not only emerged out of liberal demands for lower taxes and a reorganization of the country’s finances, but also economic considerations stemming from the theories of Thomas Robert Malthus and Jeremy Bentham. Malthus and Bentham saw the increase in poverty as a consequence of overpopulation and argued that it would be best countered by promoting self-help measures as well as the complete reduction of social welfare wherever possible. In principal, before 1834, those in need were legally entitled to assistance from the local parish. After the reforms, all direct aid in the form of money, clothes or food was prohibited, especially the financial subvention of farm labourers’ wages that had been widespread in times of crisis. According to the new legislation, all those able to work should be obligated to take care of themselves. Government help would only come in the form of workhouses in which the needy would have to live with their entire families when they had exhausted all their financial resources. In order to prevent the ‘lazy poor’ from establishing themselves in the workhouses, the principle of ‘less eligibility’ was put into practice to consciously keep the living standard in the workhouse below that of workers with the poorest wages. As such, the workhouses were organized like prisons: residents were forbidden to leave, they had to wear institutional clothing, men and women as well as children and parents lived apart from one another, and only the most basic food was provided. Known as the workhouse test, the voluntary choice to go into the unattractive workhouse was considered proof of true destitution. In additional, the administration of poor relief was centralized. The parishes were stripped of their role and new Poor Law Unions were formed in which locally elected chairmen oversaw the workhouses. The chairmen were supervised by a commission located in London that had been tasked with the implementation of the reforms as well as the supervision of the unions. Although Parliament passed the New Poor Law in 1834 without a hitch, the introduction of its provisions was plagued by protests. This was partly due to the fact that, for the first time, a national commission was given power to act at a local level, which effectively questioned the autonomy of the localities. Yet the opposition to the workhouses was even more pronounced. They were hated by the needy and were known as ‘English Bastilles’, in which the poor were treated like criminals. The introduction of new administrative districts in 1835 quickly met with resistance among the rural elite in southern England who had traditionally been in charge of poor relief and sought to defend their influence as well as existing forms of aid within these new administrative bodies. Moreover, farm labourers and other groups who depended on poor relief were repeatedly provoked into protest.13 In the industrial areas in the North, where the job markets were rather flexible and prone to waves of unemployment sparked by turns in market conditions, the elimination of short-term assistance propelled hefty

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conflicts. Large sectors of the factory movement actively disputed the new law. Richard Oastler once again found himself at the head of a broad alliance that boycotted, at times violently, the establishment of local administrative offices and forced the election of commissioners opposed to reform, making the New Poor Law a campaign issue in the elections of 1837 and 1841. In London, The Times led a newspaper war against the Poor Law Commission. Although opponents were ultimately unable to prevent the introduction of the new law per se, they were able to put a stop to some elements, such as the prohibition against any assistance outside of the poor houses. The prevalent interpretation of the factory movement and the resistance against the New Poor Law as a direct precursor of the Chartist movement is based largely on the participation of later Chartists in these earlier protests. Both movements attracted factory workers, weavers and craftsmen, who mainly represented the social groups most directly affected by industrialization and those that became the bearers of Chartism at the end of the 1830s. Following this line of thought, then, the later demands for universal suffrage can be read as a direct result of the failure of these protests by disenfranchised workers because they were hardly able to influence Parliament. Moreover, the spokesmen of the earlier protest movements emphasized the cross-party and cross-class character of their arguments from the very beginning, presenting the image of a compromise between middle-class politicians with a Conservative or Liberal background and Radical groups from the lower classes. Oastler himself stylized his first confrontation with the working conditions in the factories as the Christian awakening of a Conservative.14 The famous agreement, known as the Fixby Hall Compact, between Oastler and a workers’ committee from Huddersfield describes the alliance between rich and poor with melodramatic contours: the Anglican Tory Oastler, a typical representative of a rural Conservative milieu as the steward of a landed aristocrat, and ordinary factory workers from Huddersfield – all of them Nonconformist Radicals – put aside their political differences to fight a humanitarian battle against children forced to work.15 The emphasis on the ‘apolitical’ character of their activities remained a firm element of the rhetoric of factory reformers and opponents of the New Poor Law in the 1830s.16 Given this background, Chartism appeared as the politicization of a social movement as well as the emancipation of radical workers from Conservative and Liberal leaders, i.e., the necessary end to a rather unnatural coalition.17 But these movements were not made up of a radical working-class base on the one hand and a middle-class Conservative leadership on the other. A look at the members of the Short Time Committee in Bolton and the cities of the West Riding clearly exemplifies the complex relationship between political identities and socioeconomic structures among these activists. It was true that the committee from Huddersfield, which began working with Oastler in June 1831, was for the most part comprised of factory workers and lower-middle-class Radicals

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who were also campaigning for the expansion of the suffrage and even demanding universal suffrage.18 Likewise, in early 1831, small groups formed among the circles of Radical reformers independent of one another in Leeds, Bradford and Keighley to support the calls in Parliament to pass the Ten Hours Act. As the movement grew, however, it lost its clearly Radical character. Oastler quickly found his way into this plebeian or lower-middle-class circle after deploring child labour in local factories in letters to the editor in the local papers. It was not until afterwards that the local groups came into contact with each other on a more permanent basis. New committees also appeared in numerous towns around Lancashire and Yorkshire, and central committees were created in both counties. Whereas Richard Oastler held the reins of the national organizational structures, different groups were involved at the local level. In the West Riding, for example, middle-class circles contributed considerably to the growth of the organization. They met with support among workers and craftsmen outside Radical groups. A General Committee was founded for the city of Leeds in early 1832. Its board members included the head of the first committee, the radical textile worker Ralph Taylor, the local Tory leader Robert Hall, and the editors of the city’s conservative and radical newspapers, namely Robert Perring from the Leeds Intelligencer and John Foster from the Leeds Patriot.19 In neighbouring Bradford, the committed Tory George Stringer Bull, who was also a well-known parson, fostered the creation of a general committee for the town. Pupils from his Sunday school played an important role in the local organization. Matthew Balme, for example, and the previously mentioned Squire Auty, who came to the factory movement by means of Bull, were from strongly Anglican craftsmen’s families. From the mid 1830s, they took over the leadership of the committee in Bradford and began building up the local Operative Conservative Association.20 Correspondingly, Cavie Richardson, a man of simple means, was employed by the West Riding Central Committee in Leeds. At the zenith of the agitation for reform, Richardson campaigned strongly against the expansion of the suffrage and warned the workers that these new Whig measures were not in their own social interest. Rather than advocating constitutional reform, he plead for higher wages that would make it possible for workers to feed their families properly. At the same time, Richardson supported Foster’s candidacy for the Radicals, despite their many differences, and praised the alliances between Tories and reformers. Three years later, Richardson was one of the founding members of the Operative Conservative Association in Leeds.21 The cooperation between plebeian Radicals and middle-class Conservatives in the factory movement in the West Riding obviously made it possible to mobilize support even among social groups within the lower classes that were otherwise mostly immune to the push for suffrage reform. Even in places where there was no direct cooperation between middle-class activists and lower-class circles, and the Short Time Committees were dominated by factory workers, the organization was by no means a Radical bastion. In

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Bolton, the unionized cotton spinners were the backbone of the movement from 1831 well into the 1840s; above all, they were supported by weavers and other textile workers.22 Little is known about the leadership of the committee, but in union circles there was little unity when it came to political goals other than factory reform. Despite the fact that William Bolling did not speak out in favour of the Ten Hours Act in 1832 and that he had acted resolutely against the cotton spinners union during a strike in his factory two years before, a large group of spinners nonetheless supported his parliamentary candidacy for the Tories.23 Not all of these spinners were workers from his factory who might have felt pressured to join in the campaign. In 1832, Bolling had sought out meetings with the cotton spinners as well as the weavers several times in which he outlined his political goals and reiterated his support for parliamentary initiatives to improve the financial situation of factory workers.24 He refrained from openly refuting the factory laws and he also occasionally let references to Oastler be used to generate support among the workers for the Conservative Party. Ultimately, however, his social commitment only stemmed from the argument that everyone should profit from the flourishing trade and the growth of the industry that he, as a businessmen, wished to further foster.25 At the very latest after the strike, Bolling could no longer present himself as a paternalist friend of the working class. Correspondingly, the Short Time Committee refrained from officially supporting his candidacy. Furthermore, the Radicals considered him to be ‘unacceptable’ because he, alongside with the much-hated Colonel Fletcher, had defended the suppression of the Peterloo demonstration in the 1820s. Yet the support for him among the spinners and weavers was so great that the Political Union of the city, which was likewise popular among cotton spinners and weavers and dominated by supporters of the prominent radical Henry Hunt, had to defend itself against accusations that it, as the representative of the people and the lowers orders, was campaigning for a parliamentary seat for Bolling.26 As it was virtually impossible that the factory reformers had supported Bolling for tactical reasons, there must have been another reason why he enjoyed such support from the circles surrounding the Short Time Committee in Bolton. Although the committee in Bolton had a solidly lower-class support base, a substantial number of those involved in the factory movement in Bolton were already prepared to support a conservative programme and join with the Tories as early as 1832. Conservative convictions among unionists associated with the factory movement in Bolton became even more prominent in the years that followed. In the 1830s, substantial disagreements broke out between the Tories, Liberals and Radicals among the weavers. Richard Needham and Philip Halliwell, two weavers who openly declared themselves as Tories, served as spokesmen in the conflicts over better economic situations for hand weavers working in their own homes. As calls to prohibit the export of yarn and legally regulate wages led to a parliamentary inquiry into the situation of the weavers in 1833 and 1834, they sought to

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ensure that only they and their supporters would be sent to London as delegates. This met with opposition from other weavers with Liberal and Radical leanings, many of whom deplored the Tory ‘junta’ and protested the activities of this ‘selfelected few’. But in the end, Conservative weavers made up at least half of the delegation that left for London. Despite hefty debates, a public assembly in 1834 actually sent a delegation made up only of Tories to the capital.27 It was therefore not surprising that Halliwell and Needham supported the establishment of the Operative Conservative Association in Bolton just a year later, although they paid little attention to the social demands of the association. Halliwell’s speeches before the operatives, in particular, praised the constitution as well as the Church, making them a good example of the loyalist Protestant rhetoric attached to the conservative variant of popular constitutionalism.28 Even just these examples from Bolton and the West Riding clearly illustrate that the social groups from the lower classes that participated in the protests of the factory movement can hardly be described as politically homogeneous. Demands for legislative regulation of factory work did not necessarily go hand in hand with radical political ideas, even among the plebeian activists of the factory movement. This is not to say, however, that Radical factory workers did not play a significant role in the movement, nor that local committees could not be dominated by lower-class Radicals after early 1831. In Huddersfield, for example, Radical workers dominated the Short Time Committee for many years. And in many ways Huddersfield was the place where the factory movement got its start, as well as a shining example for alliances between Tories and Radicals as seen in Oastler’s parliamentary campaign in 1837. The committee’s cooperation with the Tory Oastler repeatedly met with sharp critique, and it was continually justified by purely tactical considerations.29 All told, however, the political orientations of the activists within the factory movement were decidedly more complex than scholars usually maintain. To describe the movement as a radical base of support from among the lower classes spear-headed by a middle-class leadership comprised of prominent Conservatives is just not accurate.30 The internal paradoxes and diverse rhetorical strands within the language of the factory movement and the opposition to the New Poor Law can only be explained if this complexity is taken into account. Robert Gray, for example, constantly detects ‘distinct radical implications’ among the myriad voices in the discourse of the factory movement and radical overtones in the polemic rhetoric of Oastler and Sadler.31 However, the conservative aspects of this agitation, especially given the more than negligible number of plebeian Tories among the movement’s activists, merit greater attention. Likewise, Stewart Weaver’s claim that the Tory Radicals were talented platform speakers who were nonetheless dependent on the support of Radical workers’ organizations before and after such demonstrations is quite arguable.32 At the same time, however, it is important to refrain from hastily labelling the defence of traditional social structures and the common

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interests of the rich and the poor as a kind of ‘paternalist traditionalism’. Many elements of the protests could just as easily be understood in a conservative light as well as within the context of radical visions for a democratic future. It was exactly the openness of this rhetoric that made it possible to successfully mobilize a large mass movement that emerged parallel to the liberal and radical agitation for the expansion of the suffrage. As the fight for parliamentary reform ended after the victory achieved in 1832, the factory movement in the north of England could still appeal to all those who saw the suffering of children working in factories as a symbol of a deep social crisis. Across all levels of society, there were groups that saw this crisis as the result of a break with traditional structures or hoped for even more fundamental reforms. The rather ambiguous language of the movement, with its heavy emphasis on the presumably apolitical – and therefore non-partisan – character of factory reform was thus a decisive factor; rather than opening a class-based divide between the support base and the leadership, it offered a way to move beyond political contradictions at all levels. The strongly religious (evangelical) tone of the factory movement as well as the protests against the New Poor Law are a good example of this ambiguity. A reappearing motif in the speeches of the Anglican Tory Radicals like Sadler, Oastler or Bull was the condemnation of the factory system as un-Christian and merciless. For Oastler, the factory reform was not a political question, but rather a Christian one; it was about whether ‘the principles of the God of Heaven … or those of the demon below’ were to reign in England.33 Although seemingly apolitical, the references to God and the Bible were linked to a notion of the constitution that emphasized how tightly woven the State and the Church were in England. From this point of view, the legitimacy of the Crown, the law and property were tied to the preservation of Christian principles as well as a just balance between the interests of the rich and the poor. Accordingly, child labour in textile factories seemed to be a major offence against Christianity, and the New Poor Law, which questioned the right to state welfare, marked a fundamental deviation from the constitution. Ideas such as these can be found at all levels of the protest movement and not just in the speeches of a few of the main leaders. They could be summarized briefly, as in Oastler’s motto ‘The Throne, the Altar and the Cottage’, or implied through verses of the Bible printed on banners and placards. Sometimes, these ideas were explained in detail in widely dispersed flyers or in speeches with references to political theorists such as Locke, Pale, Haley and Blackstone.34 Despite such efforts at clarification, the meaning of this language, which was often delivered in sharply polemic tones, remained ambiguous. On the one hand, the biblical dimensions and the notion of an attack on basic social values lent moral significance to the protests, making it all the easier for its demands to become more radical. For instance, if the factory system and the New Poor Law could undermine the entire social fabric, then revolutionary violence might seem to be a legitimate answer. In September 1836, Oastler held

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his infamous needle speech in which he threatened to teach all working children how to destroy textile machinery using simple needles; he spoke out of outrage over offences against the Factory Acts of 1834, which the factory movement had already declared to be insufficient.35 Early in 1839, the Methodist Stephens went a step further, fundamentally calling into question whether a godless society now reigned in which workers were left stranded in their time of need. According to Stephens, any form of opposition was legitimate as long as it kept with God’s word and the Christian message – a chosen people must free itself from its devilish persecutors with God’s help.36 Stephens’s religious zeal intensified as the protests went on, but his voice remained quite singular among the Tory Radicals as well as the Chartists, with whom he began to cooperate at the end of the 1830s. Nevertheless, his political sermons attracted numerous enthusiastic audiences in London as well as the north of England. Although his fundamental defence of traditional constitutional institutions could hardly be deciphered at this point, he still clearly rejected the political demands for universal suffrage put forth by radicals as well as Chartists.37 On the other hand, Tory Radicals were not the only popular speakers who used Christian arguments. Confessional and religious conflicts shaped political conflicts on all levels and even found their way into the debates over the expansion of the suffrage and other liberal reform programmes. That said, however, explicitly Christian justifications for reforms coming from the Liberal or Radical camps were the exception rather than the rule at the beginning of the 1830s.38 Within the framework of the struggle for factory reform and the repeal of the New Poor Law, however, some radicals, like the linen weaver Joseph Crabtree from Barnsley, brought biblically motivated demands for universal suffrage into the mix.39 In general, the evangelical reawakening that emerged in the early nineteenth century, which was separate from the debates surrounding the social role of Nonconformists and Catholics, lent religious undertones to political debates. This religious element was particularly prominent, for example, in the abolitionist movement to eliminate slavery from the English colonies because it was heavily influenced by evangelical leaders from Nonconformist circles. After the passing of the Anti-Slavery Act in 1833, the Quaker Joseph Sturge led the abolitionist struggle to combat the practice in which former slaves were still bound to their previous owners as unpaid apprentices. Based on his Christian convictions, Sturge developed a kind of ‘moral radicalism’ that combined biblical rhetoric against slavery with demands for a secret ballot, annual elections and the expansion of the suffrage. These positions later brought him close to those Chartists who linked Christianity with radical political demands.40 The fact that many of the Liberal industrialists who backed the abolitionists still employed children in their own factories who were often treated worse than slaves raised doubts in the minds of many within the more strongly plebeian factory movement. Despite this apparent distrust, however, the two movements

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were indeed complimentary. Long before getting involved in the struggle against child labour, Oastler had demanded the elimination of slavery. His critique of ‘Yorkshire Slavery’, for instance, also drew on the rhetoric used by abolitionists. Moreover, the factory reformers also adopted many elements of the language of this older movement as they often outlined comparisons between ‘black’ and ‘white’ slavery.41 They also often justified factory legislation using a biblical framework and the notion that the principle of equality under Christianity should be applied to social relationships within society. Furthermore, when speakers such as Oastler, Bull and Stephens used divine law and natural law equivalently, it was easy for their audiences to tie in this Christian language with enlightened ideas of natural law usually espoused by English radicals demanding democratic reforms.42 Whereas scholarship over the last twenty years has tended to strongly emphasize the radical undertones in the Christian language of the factory reformers as well as in the Poor Law protests, the conservative implications of such arguments have often been cursorily dismissed.43 But the conservative elements within this rhetoric are just as pronounced as their liberal counterparts. Moreover, they are by no means limited to simple references to the political background of the Tory Radicals. The Christian-based campaign for factory reforms and the repeal of the New Poor Law can easily be read within the context of a conservative rejection of social transformations that primarily sought to defend the constitution against liberal and radical attacks. That said, however, with the acceptance of the emancipation of the Catholics, the Tory party leadership had increasingly distanced itself from the defensive infighting of the Tory Ultras in Parliament. Even earlier, as associated with Robert Peel, a kind of Conservative reform position developed that was sometimes referred to as ‘liberal conservatism’. Yet the experiences during the reform crises, in which different Tory groups in Parliament sometimes accepted suffrage reform as a necessary evil or fought against it as the ultimate downfall of the constitution or even welcomed it as the saving grace against Catholic infiltration, let the inner-party differences in Westminster fade into to the background. In party circles outside the capital, these differences were less prominent on the whole and the conservative press by and large raged against the liberal reform programme.44 After all, it was not by accident that the Operative Conservative Associations chose Oastler’s motto, ‘The Throne, the Altar and the Cottage’, as their campaign slogan. The derivation of social entitlements for workers and the poor based on the institutions of the constitution fit within a world view that attributed the loss of social security primarily to the collapse of traditional structures of English society. Oastler and especially Sadler appeared as vehement opponents of the legal emancipation of the Catholics long before becoming involved in the fight against child labour. Both men had taken part in the local conflicts in Leeds over Catholic emancipation since the 1820s. Oastler, for example, adopted sharp ‘No Popery’ tones in a series of letters addressed to the Leeds Intelligencer.45 Their tirades

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could hardly have been forgotten by the public in the 1830s, not the least because Liberal critics repeatedly referenced their earlier speeches and Oastler soon sought out contact with the newly founded Operative Conservative Associations with their strongly anti-Catholic tendencies.46 Like Oastler, the Reverend Bull also stood at the forefront of the vestry debates in the mid 1830s – not surprising as he was an Anglican clergyman – and emphasized the social nature of the Anglican Church as the church of the poor in a way similar to the Operative Conservative Associations.47 In addition, numerous other clergymen, such as the particularly prominent vicars Reverend Hook from Leeds as well as James Franks and Josiah Bateman from Huddersfield, coupled their commitment to factory reform with the fight to retain the church rates.48 Consequently, such notions were always swimming about in the Christian rhetoric of the factory movement and the protests against the New Poor Law. Although the non-partisan as well as non-confessional nature of these campaigns was constantly emphasized, these Anglican conservative convictions could hardly be hidden behind much of the biblical language that was used. The Christian dimension of the language of the factory movement and the protests against the New Poor Law was also closely linked with expressly patriotic and nationalistic views. This corresponded to the strongly ‘English’ and ‘British’ outlook of both movements. For example, Richard Oglesby, a vicar in Woodhouse near Huddersfield and one of the first clergymen to take up with the factory reform movement, deplored child labour as a stain on John Bull’s waistcoat. The English, he claimed, were known throughout the world for their humanity and could therefore not allow for the British reputation to suffer.49 Similar notions shaped both these movements at all different levels. At a small demonstration in Haworth in the West Riding in 1837, for instance, the vicar Patrick Brontë argued that the workers, as ‘Englishmen’, had to protest the New Poor Law and demand the natural rights to which they were entitled; at the same assembly, Reverend William Hodgson described the Poor Law Bill as ‘degrading to the nature of Englishmen’.50 In his first public letters from early 1831, published under the keyword ‘England Beware’, Oastler had also criticized the conditions in the factories, appealing to the reader to refuse to tolerate the situation any longer as ‘a Christian, a Briton, a Father’. As such, it was not simply workers who were supposed to fight to end child labour, but rather ‘English Labourers’ who loved their children.51 Numerous other pamphlets disseminated like-minded ‘English’ messages.52 Accordingly, the opponents of the New Poor Law were outraged over the workhouses, especially because they saw them as prisons in which people were haphazardly incarcerated along French lines – these ‘English Bastilles’ had to be fought against with fervour because they were an offence against English liberty.53 Of course, such remarks reflected the language of the ‘free-born Englishmen’ and the tradition of the ‘English Liberty Tree’ whose significance for English

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radicalism was already pointed out decades ago by E.P. Thompson.54 Just how easily such patriotic ideals and the constant semantic coupling of England with freedom and loyalism could be integrated into popular conservative notions of the constitution and the nation in the nineteenth century was already touched on in chapter 2. Especially within the factory movement and the anti-Poor Law protests, the combination of religious and patriotic elements lent the arguments against child labour, the Poor Laws and mass unemployment a decidedly conservative tone. After all, regardless of the actual standpoint of the respective speaker, these attacks were directed against the governing Whig-Liberals and intended to question their no-less-patriotic rhetoric of reform. In terms of its general pattern, the Whig-Liberal rhetoric differed only incrementally from radical notions of ‘English’ freedom and ‘English’ liberties. Radicals and Liberals often accused each other of treason at the local level in these conflicts, either because the Liberals deprived ‘the people’ of the fruits of suffrage reform or because the Radicals boycotted a joint reform programme by cooperating with the Tories. Conservatives, on the other hand, could easily reconcile their demands for factory laws as well as their rejection of the New Poor Law with their notions of patriotism, Christianity and the constitution as well as their fundamental opposition to Liberal ideas of reform.55 As Conservative and Radical leaders often stood side by side atop the podiums of the factory movement and the anti-Poor Law protests, however, the differences between the basic principles of both sides became somewhat blurry. Ultimately, the coupling of Christianity, ‘English’ values and anti-liberal rhetoric made it easy for the language of the factory movement to move in the direction of Protestant nationalism or a loyalist faith in the traditional structures of English society accompanied by popular anti-Catholic attitudes. Apart from the shared demands for a ten-hour day and the elimination of the workhouses, the language of both movements always had a constitutional dimension that went beyond the immediate goals at hand. Contrary to Weaver’s argument, this constitutional dimension was by no means simply the legacy of Cobbett and Paine or a kind of radicalism that sought to establish certain democratic liberties based on a specific interpretation of the English constitution.56 Rather, it reflected the ongoing debate over the proper understanding of the constitution that ultimately shaped all the political contests of the nineteenth century, ranging from the fights in the vestries across the country to the debates on the floor of Parliament. For this reason, above all, it is wrong to simply lump the factory movement and the protests against the New Poor Law into a radical context. The semantic framework for the language of social protest in the early nineteenth century stretched across the entire spectrum of debate in terms of popular constitutionalism. The popularity of conservative constitutionalism in these conflicts was exemplified by the fact that implicitly conservative ideas were just as prominent as radical ones in the factory movement as well as the protests against the New Poor

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Law. Neither of these movements made clear demands in the name of the ‘Rights of Man’ or calls for the People’s Charter, even though they criticized the politics of the government as a break with the constitution. The lack of these references was quite apparent at the largest demonstration in the 1830s, namely the ‘Great Yorkshire Meeting’ on the New Poor Law. Held on 16 May 1837, it attracted 150,000 to 200,000 people to Hartshead Moor near Huddersfield. All the oppositional groups mobilized their supporters – the Tories, Short Time Committees and unions as well as the Radical unions, the friends of Robert Owens and early socialist groups. The Leeds Mercury referred to the meeting as an assembly of the ‘most violent, perverse and wrong-headed men that could be collected together in England’.57 Yet, as well-known Radical speakers such as James Bronterre O’Brien or Feargus O’Connor vehemently pleaded for universal suffrage and questioned whether the repeal of the New Poor Law would benefit the working classes in any way, they were put down by John Fielden and Captain Joseph Woods. Although Fielden and Woods were also proponents of democratic elections, they feared that the provocative words of the Radicals threatened the bonds that held the assembly together. Stephens and Oastler, in contrast, were allowed to outline why they believed the New Poor Law contradicted all the fundamental principles of the English constitution. Their references to the Magna Carta, the Bill of Rights of 1689, the constitutional obligations of the monarch to ensure for the welfare of his people, and especially their emphasis on the inseparability of Christianity and the law as well as the balance between the Crown, the House of Lords and the House of Commons in Parliament as the foundation for a stable social order, summarized the major elements of the typical Tory interpretation of the English constitution. Reform-oriented notions of the constitution certainly shared certain aspects of this interpretation. That said, however, rather than attributing the collapse of the constitution to ‘Old Corruption’, as liberals and radicals had argued for a long time, Oastler and Stephens attacked the Whigs and their politics of reform as a grievous danger to the constitution. Of course, their accusations were also coupled with quite blatant threats of violence and warnings against the anarchy and chaos that would follow on the heels of the implementation of the law in its current form. In his usually dramatic way, Stephens proclaimed that blood would be shed in the fight to regain lost liberties and he solemnly called for England’s restoration. In the end, however, both Stephens and Oastler outlined a conservative understanding of the constitution as the foundation of the movement, which was applauded loudly by the assembly, without being criticized as partisan or refuted in any way. Whereas Feargus O’Connor and Bronterre O’Brien were only able to pass their resolutions in favour of universal suffrage after the assembly with only a small number of participants, the positions presented by the Tory Radicals stood at the heart of the protest. Moreover, they also appeared to be uncontroversial.58

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This does not rule out the fact that many people might have already left the assembly after hours and hours of speeches who might have sympathized with calls for universal suffrage or who did not see any contradictions between Oastler’s and Stephens’s arguments and those of other speakers. Yet the fact that the notions of the constitution put forth by Tory Radicals seemed to be apolitical within the context of these protests indicated a kind of silent victory. In his speech, Stephens coupled the defence of the traditions of the English constitution with a tirade against the stipulations of the New Poor Law, which foresaw the separation of married couples as well as children and parents in the workhouses. As almost always, no other aspect of the New Poor Law met with more resistance than this point; the interference of the state in the family demonstrated just how perverse this legislation was in the eyes of its opponents.59 Similarly, in the earlier agitation for factory reform, the dissolution of the ‘natural order’ of family life through the employment of women and children played a key role in the protests. At the same time, melodramatic descriptions of the fate of working children, especially girls who were very possibly subject to sexual harassment or had to work half-naked because of the heat in the factories and the mines, were given a prominent place within the writings and the speeches of the factory reformers.60 Constitutional considerations within the framework of such social protests were therefore always tightly connected to fundamental oppositions, such as ‘natural’ and ‘unnatural’ or ‘just’ and ‘unjust’, that fed on the memories of pre-industrial or rural ways of life; first and foremost, politics and the constitution were expected to uphold these social norms. The Tory Radicals understood how to link these ideals to traditional structures of the English constitution and to highlight the destruction caused by liberal reforms. They did not refrain from courting radicalization in the form of threats of violence, but within this constellation, conservative interpretations of the English constitution seemed purely ‘normal’. This close connection between ideas of the constitution on the one hand and notions of the family, gender roles and work, which were heavily overlaid with concepts of order and nature, on the other hand, has not gone completely unnoticed in scholarship on the language of the protests movements in the 1830s. In particular Robert Gray and Patrick Joyce have emphasized how much patriarchal values, which revolved around the protection of the weak and especially women and girls, shaped the contours of the movement and led to the melodramatic sexualization of many motifs associated with the protests.61 These were also coupled with paternalistic ideals about the relationship between the rich and the poor, between factory owner and factory worker, and between father and family. Ideas to this effect had dominated the moral economy of the eighteenth century, and remained in place for most plebeian craftsmen. Only rarely did competing notions such as proto-socialist economics come to replace them, even in an industrial context.62 Protest speeches and pamphlets hardly ever questioned the

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property ownership and social status of factory owners; they were dominated by demands for fair wages that could keep a family, fair employers, and a fair exchange between work and capital. From this point of view, the task of state and society was not to achieve political – and not to mention social – equality as expressed in the language of radicalism from Paine to the Chartists; rather, a balance had to be ensured between the different interests and functions at all levels of society as well as the acceptance of the moral relationship between ‘Master and Man’. The proximity of such ideas to the programme of the Tory Radicals is quite apparent and they are also reflected in the speeches of radicals like John Doherty or Feargus O’Connor.63 Nevertheless, Gray and Joyce unquestionably assume that the majority of those involved in the movement drew other conclusions from the language of ‘Industrial Paternalism’ (Gray) than Oastler, Stephens or Bull.64 Gray in particular emphasizes the dominance of radical overtones among participants from the lower classes; he contends that there is a clearly recognizable ‘Operative Voice’ in the choir of the protest movement.65 However, his references to John Doherty’s Poor Man’s Advocate, Joseph Crabtree’s speeches, and the testimony of witnesses from the lower classes before the parliamentary commission dealing with Sadler’s draft legislation on the Ten Hours Bill in 1831 are unconvincing. The operatives who had travelled to London from the industrial North had been carefully selected and coached. They did not speak in the ‘voice of the people’, but rather their speeches reflected tactical considerations of the Short Time Committee and close cooperation with the advocates of the law in Parliament.66 Doherty and Crabtree were radicals who became publicists and functionaries through their political involvement. They may be considered plebeian actors, but it is somewhat problematic to assume that their positions represent a more direct embodiment of the language of the workers or the people than is the case for Conservative plebeian activists such as Phillip Halliwell, Cavie Richardson or Matthew Balme. The protests of the factory movement may have led Doherty to sharply deplore factory owners as monopolizing tyrants and to criticize the dependency of the workers; they might have also brought anonymous members of the Huddersfield Political Union to formulate interpretations of natural law along the lines of Thomas Paine.67 Yet little speaks in favour of the idea that Oastler spoke above the heads of his audience as he outlined his rejection of universal suffrage and political reform before a crowd of ten thousand in 1832 with the words: ‘There is a great mistake about you Radicals in the country. People think you want to pull down the institutions of the state. All that you want is that you may go out in the morning, work all day and return in the evening with a good day’s wages’.68 The Tory Radicals hit the nerve of the movement and expressed the opinions of most of their audiences. For this reason, the announcement of their appearances drew thousands of people to the streets who were willing to walk for hours in order

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to listen to their speeches, enthusiastically celebrate their words or support them in conflict situations. It is therefore impossible to separate their messages or the language of the protest movements on the whole into tactical and uncontroversial conservative bits on the one side and vehemently advocated radical implications on the other. The rhetoric of factory reform, like that of the protest against the New Poor Law, was very much a ‘language of negotiation’ in a broader sense than Gray suggests.69 All those who participated in the demonstrations sought to fundamentally redefine the relationships between different social groups in a time of upheaval. Child labour, factory structures or the new poor relief regulations resulted from economic and social processes generally perceived as crises, which necessitated a general social and political reorientation. Over the course of the 1830s, however, the room to manoeuvre available to agents was much larger than Gray’s argument suggests. This was not merely the story of the almost inevitable canalization of public protests into radical analyses of society and Chartism. Even for plebeian activists and demonstrators, the defence of traditional structures and the insistence on traditional notions of social justice and the exchange between rich and poor was as viable an answer to this crisis as the threat of violence, utopian social ideals or calls for radical reform. The close coexistence of these ideas on political tribunes and in the writings of these movements suggests that they did not necessarily appear to be contradictory. Indeed, it was not seldom that radical as well as conservative speakers tapped into the same rhetorical repertoire. The very nature of a ‘language of negotiation’ suggests that its motifs are both multi-faceted and ambiguous; they could be bent to fit one kind of argument or another. As a consequence, contradictory positions were often linked to one another for a long time. Therefore, individual actors did not have to choose one side or the other. This flexibility was what made the movements so successful and enabled them to mobilize the support of the masses. Similarly, this ambiguity also made it easier for the protests against the New Poor Law to blend seamlessly into the Chartist movement over the course of 1838. The resistance against the workhouses could be easily radicalized at this point in time because the Liberal government in London as well as the Poor Law commissioners had widely ignored the demands of the movement. Additionally, the tense economic situation was exacerbated by the beginning of a depression from 1838 to 1842, which led to mass unemployment, widespread short-time work and wage cuts that dramatically worsened the serious social hardships suffered by factory workers, especially in the North.70 Despite its focus on suffrage and close connections to the traditional language of radicalism, the ambivalent language of these earlier protests was largely adopted by the Chartist movement. To a great extent, this context explains the continued existence of some of the most discussed aspects of Chartist agitation, including the nostalgia for a golden past, the strong link to the Crown, the perpetuation of Christian motifs and the adherence to paternalistic economic

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ideals.71 Accordingly, these protests could always be read in a radicalized as well as a conservative way. Over the short term, this explains the involvement of Tory politicians and, over the long run, the close ties between some within the movements and the Conservative party.

Local Alliances between Tories and Radicals The ‘language of negotiation’ at protests was initially a cross-regional phenomenon; demonstrations in Lancashire or Yorkshire differed only minimally, and the frequent tours of prominent leaders ensured for close ties between localities. When protests were directed against Parliament in particular or the mobilization of a great crowd was the goal, local power struggles hardly played a role. However, apart from such large assemblies, compromises and unresolved contradictions within the rhetoric of social reformers led to conflicts at a local level over parliamentary seats and influence in municipal bodies. From the perspective of the protest movements, it was logical to want to support candidates willing to advocate for them in local elections. In order to keep the movement unified, however, the positions of the candidates could not deviate too far from the ambivalent language of the demonstrations. Clearly partisan messages or objections to individual points had the potential to alienate followers at any time. Moreover, there were often conflicts to overcome between the protest movements and individual candidates, some of which stemmed from confessional differences or personal animosities or simply the fact that some within the political camp of the respective candidate disagreed with the protests. These issues cropped up even in the campaigns of prominent spokesmen such as Michael Sadler. In aiding his candidacy, factory reformers were supporting a Tory MP who had been a vocal proponent of the abolition of child labour in Parliament for some time and who was considered to be the parliamentary leader of the movement, despite the fact that his sharp rejection of the Reform Act likely ruffled the feathers of radicals among the factory reformers. His clever combination of classic Tory tendencies and sympathies for workers’ representation in Parliament has already been outlined above. Together with a loud voice in opposition to child labour, this position allowed for a broad alliance between Tories and Radicals as well as voters and non-voters, even at the zenith of the conflicts over electoral reform.72 In December 1832, however, Sadler lost out to two Liberal opponents. But, just a year later, as he campaigned in a by-election in Huddersfield, the alliance among the factory reformers could not be revived. In fact, his candidacy divided the local factory movement because Sadler’s strong anti-Catholic views drove Catholic Radicals to nominate their own candidate. Thus, during the election, Tories and Radicals with competing non-voter committees assembled from among the factory reformers were pitted against one

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another, thereby securing victory for the Liberal John Blackburne who spoke out against the Factory Acts.73 Vehement demands for the prohibition of child labour or attacks against the much-hated workhouses were not enough to build powerful alliances in the fight for parliamentary seats. A fate similar to that of Sadler also met Joseph Rayner Stephens as he campaigned in 1837 in Ashton-under-Lyne with a great deal of support among non-voters. His polemic rhetoric saddled between conservatism and revolutionary protest delighted the crowds before the hustings. However, it also made him an outsider with little chance of victory because he was running as an independent against two opponents who could count on support from among the social reformers. The actual candidate of the Tories, the Methodist James Wood, was not unpopular as he also opposed the New Poor Law. Charles Hindley, a local cotton-factory owner and a moderate Radical in Parliament since 1835, had also gained support within the ranks of the non-voters. For years, he had stood at the head of the factory movement in Lancashire. Shortly before the election, however, Hindley was fined for violating the protective measures against child labour that had been on the books since 1833. Additionally, he had recently proposed a compromise regarding a factory law in Parliament that had so riled the leaders of the factory movement that Oastler and many others decided to stop cooperating with him. Stephens was primarily campaigning against him, but his candidacy also weakened the local Tories and in effect facilitated Hindley’s re-election.74 Consequently, Stephens’ candidacy demonstrates that a successful electoral campaign could not be fought on the basis of the protest movements alone because local particularities could often easily create a divide between candidates and supporters. The only thing that could protect against such disasters were formal alliances between Conservatives and Radicals to support prominent candidates, as seen in the electoral campaigns of Richard Oastler in Huddersfield in May and July of 1837. The cooperation at a local level rested to some extent on Oastler’s charismatic leadership role within the factory movement and his opposition to the New Poor Law, which had allowed him to form personal friendships with leading local Radicals that made it easier to overcome the hefty opposition to such an alliance with the Tories.75 At the same time, this cooperation was made possible by the fact that, following the unexpected death of the local MP in early 1837, neither party had a candidate at hand who was willing to campaign in the by-election, despite the low number of registered voters in the constituency and the considerable influence exerted by Sir John Ramsden, a large landowner with close ties to the Whigs. Oastler acquiesced to a seemingly hopeless fight against the Liberal candidate Edward Ellice, and his campaign turned into an impressive demonstration of his popularity. More clearly than ever before, he declared his adherence to Tory principles, which were closely linked to conservative constitutionalism with its

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defence of the constitution, the Crown and the Church. In conjunction with his condemnation of the Reform Act of 1832, Oastler explicitly refuted all radical calls for universal suffrage, secret ballots and annual parliamentary elections; he defined the new alliance between Tories and Radicals as part of an ideal of a just social balance. Under the motto ‘A place for everything and everything in its place’, he defended mutual obligations up and down the social ladder, ranging from the monarch to the nobility and from factory owners to shop owners and workers. He claimed that everyone should be happy in their circumstances and live respectably – and that this was the meaning of Toryism, radicalism and patriotism.76 Together, the Radicals and the Tories ensured for a great spectacle, even for the otherwise tumultuous English elections, with public parades, numerous speeches by Oastler, boycotts against Liberal voters and a flood of campaign materials that repeatedly attacked the governing Whigs and their reform of the Poor Law as well as Jews, Irish politicians like Daniel O’Connell and Catholics.77 Despite these efforts, Oastler lost out to his Liberal competitor in May 1837 and still failed to gain a seat in the general election that followed shortly after in July as the new monarch came to power. Although Oastler’s campaigns have often been cited by scholars as typical examples of the widespread cooperation between Tories and Radicals in northern England during the 1830s, such formal election alliances for parliamentary elections and the explicit support of both party milieus for a single candidate were extremely rare.78 The particular circumstances of the election in Huddersfield in 1837 could hardly be transferred to other constituencies. They even met with a lack of understanding in neighbouring Leeds, where the Radical Political Union decisively opposed the cooperation of its party colleagues with the Tory Oastler.79 Likewise, in nearby Bradford, Oastler’s friend William Busfeild Ferrand, the well-known Tory factory reformer and Poor Law activist, could not win over the local Radicals.80 The only other example for the elections in July 1837 was the candidacy of William Garnett in Salford whose programme was dominated by ‘No Popery’ sentiments and a clear rejection of the New Poor Law. The Operative Conservative Association, which had grown remarkably under the influence of Reverend Hugh Stowell in Salford, worked hand in hand with the local Radicals to oppose Joseph Brotherton, who had been the MP for this city near Manchester since 1832. As a moderate Radical, Brotherton had always sided with the factory reformers and voted against the New Poor Law, but, as a supporter of the Liberal government, he kept his distance from the social protest movements. In the harshly anti-Catholic election atmosphere, English miners and masons found themselves in heavy street fights with the Irishmen whom Brotherton had hired for support. Despite having the non-voters clearly on his side, Garnett, like Oastler, lost the election.81 Whereas the local alliances between Tories and Radicals in Huddersfield and Salford did not hold, John Hardy won the mandate in 1841 in Bradford as a Tory

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candidate with the explicit support of the Chartists. Hardy had been an activist in the factory movement for a long time. After he campaigned for the Liberals in 1832, he moved closer to the Tories and put his focus on the fight against the New Poor Law. The Chartists nominated their own candidate, William Martin, but he withdrew his hopeless candidacy after holding a speech in favour of the People’s Charter, and advocated Hardy’s election.82 Hardy’s electoral victory in Bradford, however, remained one of only two such victories that rested on this unusual alliance. Only John Walter, another Tory activist within the movement, managed to gain a seat in Parliament for Nottingham with the support of the Chartists. As the editor of The Times, Walter led the newspaper’s war against the New Poor Law, but when he campaigned again just a year later in a by-election, the local Chartists supported the Radical Joseph Sturge and even attacked Joseph Rayner Stephens for advocating Walter’s re-election.83 All told, the election defeats suffered by Garnett and other prominent leaders of the protest movements in 1841 – regardless of how different the local circumstances were for the candidacies of Sadler, Stephens and Oastler – did not bode well for any attempts at such campaign alliances in other places. The Chartists considered working with the Tories temporarily in order to push out the Liberal government, but suggestions to this effect made by Feargus O’Connor met with outraged opposition.84 The direct cooperation between Tories and Radicals on the basis of social demands presented serious difficulties for both sides. Election campaigns that emerged out of the social protest movements thus remained isolated exceptions.85 Rather than fostering somewhat unusual political alliances, the protest movements created a tense atmosphere in which local political groups of all stripes sought to find effective answers to political challenges by negotiating the ambivalent language of mass demonstrations. Neither local Conservatives nor their political opponents could present themselves clearly as the direct representatives of the movement. Only a few individual Radical MPs, such as John Fielden from Oldham, maintained that the long-held campaign for universal suffrage was the logical extension of the protests against child labour and the New Poor Law that they had supported since the early 1830s.86 For such Radicals, alliances with the Chartists were possible because the Chartists had become involved in local politics and kept the suffrage issue at the forefront of their programme despite their close links to the social protest movements.87 Even candidates who by and large supported the government sought to win support among disenfranchised social groups who were demanding improvements in their social situations at the end of the 1830s. Liberal candidates, for example, increasingly campaigned with a clear commitment to free trade and tried to steer the debates over social reforms towards the question of the corn tariffs.88 With the battle cry ‘Cheap Bread’, they touched upon the misery and poverty of the lower classes as a result of protectionist policies. The solution to social problems, they promised voters in urban and industrial constituencies, was

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the repeal of the Corn Laws. This followed along the lines of the extra-parliamentary mobilization of the Anti-Corn Law League, founded by Richard Cobden in 1838 in Manchester, that took place almost simultaneously with the Chartist movement. The operative associations attached to the Anti-Corn Law league attracted relatively few factory workers and craftsmen, and they often had to fend off Chartists attacks. Regardless of their general rejection of the Anti-Corn Law League platform, which was mostly supported by Liberal factory owners, many workers and Chartists nonetheless agreed with the call to repeal the Corn Laws. As a result, Liberal candidates met with a degree of success among the lower classes, especially in the 1840s.89 Beyond the boundaries of Tory–Radical alliances, Conservative candidates primarily emphasized the social aspects of their understanding of the constitution, if they dealt with economic questions or the protest movements at all. After all, the element that connected different Tory candidates at the many hustings across the country was first and foremost a commitment to the protection of the constitution in State and Church as well as its justification by means of a specific kind of loyalism and patriotism. Even if the political platforms presented by Conservative parliamentary candidates between 1832 and 1845 are examined more closely in terms of their opinions regarding the demands of the social movements of the 1830s, the degree to which the Tories hesitated in using the Factory Acts and the opposition to the New Poor Law offensively in their fight against the Whigs remains striking. In terms of the constituencies examined here, the only election in which Conservative candidates clearly campaigned with their objections to the New Poor Law was in 1841, at the peak of the economic crises of the ‘hungry 1830s and 1840s’. This was particularly prevalent in London, which was less effected by the mass movements of the North. There was also a certain significance attached to the election of 1841 in the capital because, for the first time, Conservatives entered into the race in all of the constituencies apart from Southwark and Lambeth. As The Times noted, a small wonder had occurred because a Tory candidate could walk undisturbed through the streets of Westminster and Tower Hamlets, the traditional radical strongholds in the capital, sometimes even garnering spontaneous applause thanks to the sociopolitical message of his campaign.90 Such campaigns were seldom seen in the North. Unlike in Knaresborough, where a pronounced anti-Poor Law campaign brought William Busfeild Ferrand into the House of Commons, direct references to child labour and the effects of the New Poor Law of 1834 played only a marginal role in the election campaigns of Conservative candidates in the counties of Yorkshire and Lancashire as well as in the urban constituencies in northern England.91 Despite this noticeable reticence, the candidates for the Tories in Leeds, Bolton and London formulated a social ideal as they invoked the constitution in their campaigns that touched on specific elements of the ‘language of negotiation’

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stemming from the protest movements. In particular, this applied to the paternalistic idea of a social exchange between rich and poor that would guarantee social security and prosperity for all without equal rights and explicit social claims. Such attitudes were only seldom so offensively laid out by candidates as in the case of Captain Rous, who explicitly accused his Radical opponents at the husting in Westminster in 1841 of filling the heads of the workers with false notions of their rights as well as their position in society, thereby destroying the ‘natural bond of union between the wealthy and the laborious classes’.92 Nonetheless, these attitudes were present in most constituencies, if only on the margins of typical conservative defences of the constitution or in abbreviated form on placards and banners. The conservative understanding of patriotism and loyalism could be easily combined with the self-image of the party as representative of the entire country and all social classes. Little stood in the way of this claim made by the Tories, not even a clear rejection of certain demands voiced by the protest movements. For example, despite his well-known opposition to factory reform, William Bolling presented himself as a guarantor of employment and good wages in Bolton in 1837, citing the way in which his understanding of the constitution touched upon economic issues in which the interests of the country as well as the Church were linked to those of the workers.93 At the same time in Leeds, Tory placards that could not be overlooked promised factory workers and owners alike that they would bring an economic upswing accompanied by employment and prosperity. These placards, however, generally stood in the shadow of the omnipresent loyalist slogans pertaining the constitution that otherwise dominated Sir John Beckett’s candidacy. In fact, as MP, Beckett had not voted in favour of a draft of a factory law in 1836.94 Both Beckett and Bolling, however, had signalled their opposition to the New Poor Law, which brought them closer to the demands voiced in social protests and demonstrations since 1836. But what was more important was that Tory speeches and campaign slogans, like the language of the protest movements, fundamentally questioned most of the Liberals’ reform programme of the 1830s. The lack of a clear improvement in the economic situation after 1832 dashed the hopes that had been raised with the advent of suffrage reform and the change of government in London. Irrespective of the complex majorities within Parliament, broad swathes of the protest movements identified the governing Liberal party with the much-hated reform of the poor laws as well as the refusal to pass a factory act. Oastler’s strongest counterpart in northern England, for example, was the Liberal MP and editor of the Leeds Mercury, Edward Baines, who was often attacked at protests or on flyers as the ‘Great Liar of the North’ or the personification of the ‘treason’ the Liberals had committed against their supporters from among the lower classes.95 As in Leeds, where Beckett campaigned against Baines in 1837, the Conservative candidates almost always stood against Liberal candidates at the end of the

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1830s who were viewed in a rather sceptical light by the local protest movements. Consequently, although not specifically stated, the Conservatives’ paternalistic economic ideas were tied to the goals of the protest movements in that they expressed disappointment over Liberal reforms and rejected a Liberal perspective on society. Moreover, cautious statements about the social dimensions of the constitution brought Tory rhetoric closer to the ‘language of negotiation’ emerging from the protest movements. Correspondingly, the speeches and campaign slogans of the Conservative candidates could lag behind the more dramatic polemics of the protest movements against child labour and the new workhouses without making it too apparent that their perspectives differed from those of the protesters. It was not seldom that their loyalist commitment to the constitution clashed with the threats of violence that were barely hidden within the ‘language of negotiation’, but the conservative understanding of the Crown and the Church, of Parliament and the role of social elites could easily be accepted by many of the protesters as ‘normal’ or apolitical. As a result, Tory candidates could use these ideas to craft a moral justification of their own demands. Indeed, the way in which vague social promises were mixed with an acceptance of social inequality in principle, but also a strong emphasis on the social obligation of the leading classes, made the conservative constitutional discourse a powerful weapon. It bridged the political battlefields that called crowds to the streets in the different constituencies in the 1830s and defined the parameters of local elections. The language of the social protests echoed in the speeches of the candidates just as much as the conflicts over the understanding of the Crown, or the confessional battles between Anglicans and Nonconformists on the one hand and Protestants and Catholics on the other. Staunch radicals among the factory reformers and the opponents of the New Poor Law, however, were not led into tactical alliances with these kinds of Tories, despite the social messages expressed in their campaigns. Even Feargus O’Connor, who was not fundamentally opposed to cooperating with the Tories for strategic reasons, spouted only derisive commentaries about the local Tories and their operatives in Bolton just six months after Bolling’s electoral victory; in reference to the working-class men who supported the Tories, he claimed that ‘poor men may be ignorant enough to oppose the very measures which would raise them from their present miserable and degraded position’.96 Quite obviously, however, O’Connor felt it necessary to attack the Conservatives in Bolton in this way because candidates like Bolling or Beckett offered a perspective that appealed to those groups among the lower classes who could identify with the loyalist Protestant views of the Tories, but who also hoped for an improvement in their social situations; it was these groups that could be mobilized to support the advent of a Conservative government. Given these kinds of confrontations, it is not surprising that activists within the social protest movements who came from different political camps found it

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difficult to work together even below the level of parliamentary election campaigns. This applied even to cases in which an alliance with the local Tories seemed entirely plausible because of a shared interest in the ultimate outcome. For example, when it came to appointing the new local board of guardians for the new Poor Law districts, the general negative opinion of the new law among Tories as well as those in the protest movement provided a potential basis for cooperation. With the introduction of the new law in northern England in early 1837, the election of the guardians stood on the agenda of the newly created Poor Law Unions. This process was accompanied by hefty protests by those opposed to the law, which temporarily fuelled cooperative efforts between the Tories and the Radicals, who both wanted to prevent the election of Liberals who supported the new system. In some cases, these opponents of the new law took measures that clearly crossed legal boundaries. The assistant of the London commission, Alfred Power, who was responsible for the implementation of the New Poor Law in south Lancashire and the West Riding of Yorkshire, had to flee more than once from riotous demonstrators and even had to fear for his life for a while when he visited the new districts in northern England. The very persistent and unruly opposition to the new law in Huddersfield, which was led by a Tory Radical alliance that had also carried the parliamentary candidacy of Richard Oastler in 1837, as well as the longer lasting, more violent protests that took place in Bradford, Dewsbury and Todmorden, have been well researched.97 In most districts, the conflicts revolved around demonstrations, which sent petitions to Parliament, as well as the election of the guardians and the way in which they went about implementing the stipulations of the law locally. Those opposed to the New Poor Law found themselves faced with the fundamental decision of whether to participate in the elections or to boycott them as an act of protest aimed at preventing the introduction of the new law. Boycotts were attempted in several cities, including Bolton; however, elections were only successfully prevented over the long term in Oldham, where threats and boycotts spearheaded by John Fielden and Richard Oastler put enough pressure on the proponents of the new law that no one was willing to campaign for these administrative offices.98 The success of the movement in Oldham rested on the dominance and strong organizational skills of the local Radicals. Although Oastler’s involvement lent a Tory air to the local movement, the general weakness of the Tories in the town made it easier to form a unified oppositional group.99 Whereas the Radical opponents of the New Poor Law favoured a complete boycott in most places, the Tories tended to plead for participating in the elections. However, local partisan power struggles often made it difficult to agree on the proper tactic. In many cases, the election of local administrative bodies in the 1830s was heavily influenced by the kind of conflicts outlined in the third chapter in which middle-class as well as plebeian Radicals and Liberals sought to shake the long-standing bastions of power associated with an Anglican Tory milieu.100

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Regardless of these issues, the sheer size of the individual poor law districts made it difficult to organise a boycott. The new Poor Law Unions covered a relatively large territory surrounding the main town and were sometimes comprised of numerous out-townships that were not easily kept completely under control. Limited boycotts, however, did not prevent the guardians from taking up with their tasks. Moreover, they often weakened the influence that opponents of the New Poor Law could exercise over the respective unions. At times, the anti-Poor Law camp was not only divided along party lines, but also within them. In Bolton, where the Operative Conservative Association was an important pillar of the movement and collected around 8,400 signatures against the 1834 law in 1837, the issues of the Poor Law elections led to a rather rare disagreement between the operatives and influential Tories from the local establishment. Whereas the Operative Conservative Association wanted to join the Radicals in boycotting the election, the party leadership sought to achieve an anti-Poor Law majority among the guardians in order to secure the traditional Tory influence over poor relief in the city. The conflict could not be resolved. As a result, the Operative Conservative Association boycotted the election, but the relationship between the middle-class and plebeian Tories seems not to have suffered in the long run. There were no apparent signs that the association became radicalized, nor that wealthy Conservatives withdrew their support. Despite all the outrage over the New Poor Law, the link between the operatives and the party was obviously strong enough that differences in opinion about tactics used in relation to social issues did not lead to a fundamental break. These kinds of disagreements, however, did affect the course of local elections. In Bolton, the boycott of the operatives in the centre of the district, the actual city of Great and Little Bolton, contributed to the electoral victory of the middleclass proponents of the New Poor Law from the Liberal and moderate Radical camps. In the outer constituencies, wealthy Tories emerged triumphant and were even able to achieve a slight anti-Poor Law majority under the guardians.101 A similarly incomplete boycott of the elections in Bury, however, ended in a clear majority for the proponents of the law. Nonetheless, the chaos that accompanied the elections resulted in a delay in the implementation of the new regulations that stretched over two years.102 In Leeds, the Tories were able to force the annulment of the elections after a similar chaos of protests, irregularities and violent attacks, and they were ultimately able to block new elections for a further seven years, which meant that the stipulations of the old Poor Law continued to apply.103 All told, from the perspective of those against the New Poor Law, the elections were not unsuccessful. Irrespective of the conflicts over participation in the elections, the anti-Poor Law camp achieved a majority in many local unions in northern English cities in 1837 and 1838.104 Yet the debates surrounding the elections illustrate that a cooperative effort between Radicals and Tories was not unproblematic, even when it came to

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questions on which both sides agreed. After the elections, it was not easy to keep these alliances alive. Even when the opponents of the law had a clear majority in the administrative bodies, they faced the problem that there was little room to manoeuvre within the stipulations of the law and the London-based supervisory authority claimed the right to contest local decisions and to pressure the local guardians. Ultimately, the newly elected anti-Poor Law guardians were either forced to implement the new regulations or to openly break the law. Moreover, the commissioners in London had reacted to the vehement opposition to the reforms in northern England by allowing for deviations from certain regulations, especially in the interim period in which suitable workhouses did not exist in many places. In some cases, for example, those in need of assistance could receive support outside the workhouses and the separation of married couples or parents and children was not strictly reinforced.105 At first, the New Poor Law appeared to mark less of a dramatic caesura in practice than many of its opponents had feared. In addition, it was difficult for the government to risk a crippling conflict over poor relief given the tense social situation associated with the economic crisis and the many people in need who required immediate support. As a result, the local guardians found themselves faced with decisions at the weekly board meetings that they could hardly get around, but which also served to foster the introduction of the new law. In turn, this raised questions in the minds of anti-Poor Law activists on the streets as to whether these elected guardians were still opposed to the new measures. The Tory Radical alliance in Salford formed during the parliamentary election in 1837, for example, fell apart in early 1839 for these very reasons.106 In Bolton, on the other hand, the Tories were able to keep face in 1837 after they ensured the election of a committed anti-Poor Law guardian as chairman of the local union despite the protests of the Liberals.107 They were also able to delay the implementation of certain aspects of the New Poor Law. A year later, however, they had to give up their oppositional stance and fell into conflicts over the implementation of the law in which party lines became rather blurred. As a typical representative of a family of Tory industrialists, Thomas Ridgway, from Horwich, praised the opposition of the out-townships to the new law in December 1838. The conservative Bolton Chronicle also ranted that, once again, only a few Whigs would support the introduction of the new law in the city.108 At the same time, shifting majorities among the guardians fought over issues such as whether or not it was necessary to build a workhouse, as they had been granted special permission to assist the needy outside of poor houses. The Conservative William Hulton, for example, maintained that the construction of the new house was unavoidable, while Liberals threatened to withdraw from the board because they believed that this special permission would never be revoked. Alongside such discussions over practicalities, the guardians also debated the fundamental purpose of the reformed Poor Law across party lines in which Liberals as well as

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Conservatives found themselves on the same side at times.109 Within a year and a half, the New Poor Law had sunk so far into the chaos of local administration and partisan conflicts that it was no longer possible for the parties to form a united opposition on the basis of the protests from the year before. Generally speaking, however, the Tories in Bolton and Leeds were able to maintain a majority fundamentally opposed to the New Poor Law in the 1840s. They were also able to use their influence in the administrative bodies to ensure that the new law was not implemented according to its initial intention as in the other northern English Poor Law Unions.110 Their position was somewhat weakened in 1841, however, as it became clear that the new Conservative government under Robert Peel would not reverse the main stipulations of the 1834 law and that it was unwilling to change course and meet the demands of those opposed to it. Despite this shift, the Tories in Bolton were able to retain their majority among the Poor Law guardians in Bolton after 1840. Nonetheless, they found themselves facing sharp criticism coming from the Chartists in 1844.111 The broad movement against the New Poor Law had largely disintegrated by the end of 1838 after the fundamental opposition to the introduction of the law had failed and the debates over the implementation of the law had shifted into local administrative bodies, while the suffrage issue was brought to the forefront by the rise of the Chartist movement. As in Leeds, where the guardians almost all came from the Tory camp and this dominance lasted until 1853, the Poor Law issue became just one of the many other partisan disagreements being fought over at the municipal level.112

Oastler’s Friends? The Operative Conservative Associations after 1842 Leeds and Bolton were not exceptions to the rule. All the alliances that had been formed between Tories and Radicals over the issue of poor relief on a local level at the end of the 1830s soon disbanded. Only in Manchester, where Tories and Radicals had joined to together in opposition to the municipal reforms introduced by the Municipal Corporations Act of 1835 to blockade the formation of the new administrative structures, was it still possible for the two parties to work together occasionally after 1841. That said, however, the Chartists often played the Whigs and Tories against each other without forming any kind of permanent alliances.113 The difficulties faced by the social protest movements in transferring the broad alliances found in their demonstrations over to local political conflicts had different consequences for local conservative groups in the 1840s. The question of factory reform as well as the New Poor Law also became increasingly embroiled in the fight over the Corn Laws, which eventually split the party in 1846. The Tories in Bolton, for example, could still count on considerable

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support from social groups among the lower classes in the 1840s.114 In 1841, for example, the Operative Conservative Association played a key role in winning a majority within the city council. It also continued to support the positions of the Tories despite the great mobilization of support for the Chartists and the wave of strikes in 1842 that negatively affected the association as well as the relationship between the Tories and the city’s textile workers. In Leeds, the split in the party had more of an effect because it made it impossible for the Conservatives to break the Liberal dominance over the city’s administrative bodies. As in many other cities, the Operative Conservative Association also disbanded as a result of the conflicts. In both cities, the ‘language of negotiation’ from the protest movements lost its influence over the positions of the Conservatives in local political conflicts as of 1842. Yet it is doubtful that this was what brought about the end of the Operative Associations. The decisive impulses for the infighting within the party came from London. Almost all the proponents of social reforms among the ranks of the Conservative MPs found themselves siding with the protectionists who supported the Corn Laws. William Busfeild Ferrand, one of the famous spokesmen of the protest movements, became one of the heftiest Tory critics of Peel’s government. Many saw Ferrand as a Tory Radical, although he never let himself be pushed to threats of violence. Additionally, as a well-to-do noble landowner with a family seat near Bradford, he was more firmly anchored in the traditional Tory milieu than Oastler or Stephens. In Westminster, Ferrand exchanged fiery words with the leaders of the Anti-Corn Law League, but also with the Conservative Home Secretary Sir James Graham and Prime Minister Peel. Ferrand also stepped up his criticism of Peel, whom he accused of breaking promises and even betrayal. At first, the focal point of his attacks against Peel was the prime minister’s free trade politics. Ferrand’s notion of protectionism went well beyond safeguarding the country’s agriculture; it also included comprehensive state-sponsored measures to protect workers and the poor as well as the continued status of the Anglican Church as the Established Church. He also demanded the re-formation of the political parties in 1846 along the lines of the conflict between free-trade proponents and protectionists after Peel had publicly endorsed the repeal of the Corn Laws.115 His ruthless attacks on friends as well as enemies were enthusiastically greeted by the party’s backbenchers and most of the conservative press, which largely viewed Peel’s politics with a measure of distrust. Locally, however, these attacks met with a mixed response, as reflected in the reactions of the Operative Conservative Associations. In the cities of the West Riding, for example, Ferrand’s words were welcomed by the operatives. The clubs in Leeds, Pudsey, Birstal and Bradford debated the Corn Laws in early 1843 before voting to thank Ferrand officially for his engagement in the interests of the ‘labouring classes’ in April.116 Ferrand found even more devout followers among conservative workers in Manchester. Although the operative associations in the city had collapsed as a result

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of the great Chartist mobilization in 1842 and the large wave of strikes in the summer of the same year, they began to reappear in March 1845. Some of the first official statements of these clubs spoke of their disappointment with Peel’s politics and expressed support for Ferrand’s principles.117 It was by no means clear that Conservative operatives would always support such a combative stance when it came to social reforms or the defence of the Corn Laws. The association in Leeds, for example, did not stand unconditionally on the side of popular working-class leaders. Richard Oastler had already quit working with the Conservative operatives in his home town in May 1836 out of anger over a conflict with the local organization following his hefty critique of the local Tory MP John Beckett for his rejection of a draft factory reform law. The Operative Conservative Association refused to distance itself from Beckett despite Oastler’s calls to do so, and it explicitly pointed out that the association’s support for politicians like Beckett did not rest on his support of the factory laws alone, but rather on firm Conservative principles.118 It may be possible that this dismissal of Oastler’s demands had more to do with the close links between the operatives and local MPs and especially the association’s reliance on the financial means provided by the local party leadership. Nonetheless, however, this conflict indicated that demands for reforms did not necessarily outweigh other ties that bound these associations to the Conservative party at a local level. Little changed in this regard in the years that followed. Just how uncertain the social reformers within the party were as to whether they could count on the associations for support became apparent once again as opponents of the New Poor Law sought to gather the unified support of the conservatives across the country in 1840. In the end, their efforts met with resistance among party leaders. At the end of the year, The Times published a long series of letters to the editor addressed to the Operative Conservative Associations in which John Bowen, a close ally of Oastler, sought to win their support in the fight against the New Poor Law while at the same time warning the associations against blindly following Peel and Wellington. In doing so, Bowen tapped into accusations that the operatives usually heard from Chartists and radicals. That said, although his disappointment over the efforts of the Conservative operatives was more than clear, his angry tirades against the law and its proponents still bore an element of hope that pressure ‘from below’ would ultimately bring victory.119 Accordingly, however, the Corn Law issue could not be used to mobilize the support of the Operative Conservative Associations in opposition to the liberal conservatism of the party leadership. In the operative associations, the protective agricultural laws were sometimes discussed in meetings alongside other economic issues, but they were seldom a real focal point. For broad portions of the Tory milieu, on the other hand, the defence of the Corn Laws against liberal attacks had been a firm political pillar since the 1830s. Time and time again, the protectionists within the party emphasized that the defence of the constitution as well

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as the social bonds within society demanded an economic balance between the interests of industry and agriculture. This balance, they maintained, was manifest in the Corn Laws, which meant that these laws had constitutional significance. They also doubted the promises of free-trade advocates that the repeal of the corn tariffs would bring lower prices and a general economic upswing. The discussion of the Corn Laws was also a segue into a debate over the fundamental advantages and disadvantages of liberal monetary policy.120 Perspectives such as these can also be detected in the rather sparse references to economic debates among Conservative operatives. The members in Leeds, for example, attended a lecture on the ‘currency question’ in February 1841, while at the same time flyers defending the Corn Laws circulated that sought to explain in detail why the repeal of the corn tariffs would not only significantly decrease prices, but also working wages.121 Perhaps more significant, however, was the slogan ‘Cheap Bread Means Low Wages’, which was often used by speakers addressing the operative groups. This was the Conservative response to the call for cheap bread in the propaganda of the Anti-Corn Law League, and it was often accompanied by warnings against the dubious methods employed by the Liberals as well as Whig ‘clap-traps’.122 Slogans such as these may have been a way to draw battle lines in political fights, but they by no means indicated that the Operative Conservative Associations were unified in their support of the economic policy of the party in Parliament. References to the Corn Law were by no means an indispensable element of the rhetoric of the assemblies. Without exception, every event sponsored by the operatives was accompanied by extensive statements on the English constitution and the loyalism and Protestantism of the Conservatives, but operatives who met in Leeds and Pudsey even in the 1840s did not always discuss the Corn Laws.123 In the Operative Conservative Associations in Bolton and surrounding towns, no references indicate that any kind of discussion about the corn tariffs was taking place in the 1840s. Consequently, the escalation of the conflict over the policies of the government among the Tories in Parliament did not result in a storm of outrage among the operatives. The statements of solidarity addressed to Ferrand in the West Riding remained isolated exceptions in early 1843. Accordingly, the quiet collapse of the Operative Conservative Associations was not caused by the withdrawal of members who were disappointed over the lack of support for their social demands within the Conservative Party. Rather, it seems as if the operative associations fell victim to the same problems that plagued the broader Conservative Associations. These associations were part of a national party, but they were not integrated in a nationwide organizational structure. Neither the party as a whole nor the local associations had organs in which differences of opinion could be discussed and decided upon by majority rule. The schism between the reform-minded supporters of Peel and the protectionist MPs in Parliament resulted in a loss of orientation within the party and long-lasting power struggles along broad front lines. A party which continually emphasized its

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trust in the political leadership qualities of high-ranking politicians such as Peel and Wellington without discussing the issues at hand was ill-equipped to react to a fundamental change of course at the helm. Given these circumstances, the Operative Conservative Associations fell apart without much of a political bang. At the same time, the Tory Radicals found little support among the circles of former operative association members. Therefore, as of the mid 1840s, they became increasingly isolated from mainstream politics. Moreover, the most important Tory Radical spokesmen had also suffered personal setbacks. At the end of the 1830s, Oastler lost his job as the estate agent of Thomas Thornhill due to political differences and found himself in debtors’ prison for several years. Stephens, on the other hand, was arrested for inciting violence in 1839 and sentenced to a long prison term. Both suffered from serious health problems when they left prison and were not able to continue their political campaigns with the same vivacity as before.124 Oastler had published the so-called Fleet Papers from prison every month and continued to fight for the factory laws as well as the repeal of the Poor Laws, but the introduction of the Ten Hours Act in 1847 had more to do with the efforts of philanthropic politicians in Parliament than the mobilization of support on the streets under his leadership. Ironically, the success of the factory movement came after the polarising mass demonstrations filled with fiery rhetoric had died down, and the question of children’s and women’s work in the factories was cast in the shadow of the debates over the Corn Laws. After the Conservative Party split, the factory reformers took sides with the protectionists and made an effort at the beginning of the 1850s to mobilize working-class support by advocating a combination of paternalistic social ideals and demands for social measures. Busfeild Ferrand, for example, founded the short-lived Labour League in 1851, which attracted many activists from Oastler’s circles.125 However, neither these efforts, nor Oastler’s attempt to create a new conservative movement among workers with his magazine The Home were successful over the long run. The economic upswing that came in 1850 made the free-trade politics of the Liberals and the Anti-Corn Law League even more popular. The Great Exhibition in London in 1851 reflected these developments particularly poignantly, especially because the plebeian public attended this world’s fair in droves.126 Likewise, Robert Peel’s death a year before sparked a wave of initiatives to erect monuments in his honour and to celebrate his freetrade politics. In numerous cities, workers’ initiatives and unions helped collect donations for these memorials.127 Even when new Conservative workers’ associations were founded in the 1860s, they did not draw on the legacy of the Tory Radicals, but rather they almost completely ignored the earlier internal conflicts over social policy within the party. Around 1870, Conservative politicians propagated the myth of the social Tories who had paved the way for the Factory Acts as well as worker-friendly free-trade policies. It was not until the turn of the century that protectionism and nationalist positions combined with tariff reform became

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popular once again under a completely different set of circumstances.128 At no point in time, however, was the success of Conservative politicians among plebeian followers in a strict sense dependent on Tory Radicalism.

Notes 1. The Ten Hours Act passed in June 1847 prohibited the employment of children under eight years of age and restricted the working hours of eight to thirteen year old children to six and a half hours per day; the restrictions of the workday for women and children under eighteen went into effect on 1 May 1848. See 10 & 11 Vict. c. 29. 2. Bolton Chronicle, 21 July 1849. On Oastler and Stephens, see C. Driver, Tory Radical; and M.S. Edwards, To Purge this Realm: A Life of Joseph Rayner Stephens (London: Epworth Press, 1994). 3. Bolton Chronicle, 21 July 1849. 4. See C. Driver, Tory Radical; and J.T. Ward, Factory Movement; in comparison, see also Hill, Toryism. 5. See D. Roberts, ‘Tory Paternalism and Social Reform in Early Victorian England’, American Historical Review 63 (1958), 323–37; idem, Paternalism in Early Victorian England (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1979); K.H. Metz, ‘The Social Chain of Respect: Zum Topos des sozialen Konservatismus und zur Entstehung des Gedankens der sozialen Verantwortung im Großbritannien der Industriellen Revolution’, Archiv für Kulturgeschichte 68 (1986), 151–84; idem, Industrialisierung und Sozialpolitik: Das Problem der sozialen Sicherheit in Großbritannien, 1795–1911 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1988); and idem, ‘Religion, Gesellschaft und Katholizismus im England der Industrialisierungsepoche’, Historisches Jahrbuch 116 (1996), 50–71. On intellectual tendencies within English conservatism that brought many Tories to vote for the New Poor Law, see P. Mandler, ‘Tories and Paupers: Christian Political Economy and the Making of the New Poor Law’, Historical Journal 23 (1990), 81–103. 6. S.A. Weaver, ‘The Political Ideology of Short-Time’, in G. Cross (ed.), Worktime and Industrialization: An International History (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988), 77–103; and R.Q. Gray, The Factory Question and Industrial England, 1830–1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). In comparison, see Edsall, Anti-Poor Law Movement; Sykes, ‘Popular Politics’; idem, ‘Early Chartism and Trade Unionism in South-East Lancashire’, in J. Epstein and D. Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–1860 (London: Macmillan, 1982), 152–93; and Chase, Trade Unionism, 136–37. 7. See, for example, M. Hovell, The Chartist Movement (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1918). G.D.H. Cole includes Oastler and Stephens in his Chartist Portraits (London: Macmillan, 1941). 8. E.G. Lyon, Politicians in the Pulpit: Chartist Radicalism in Britain from the Fall of the Bastille to the Disintegration of Chartism (Aldershot: Ashgate, 1999), 143–45. However, Lyon does not make a clear-cut distinction between Christian and Tory Radicals as she introduces Oastler and Sadler as Tory Radicals by at first describing them as typical Christian Radicals. 9. See B. Coleman, Conservatism; and Ramsden, Appetite; on the debates over the Poor Laws, see D. Eastwood, ‘Debate: The Making of the New Poor Law Revivus’, Past and Present 127 (1990), 184–94; idem, ‘Rethinking the Debates on the Poor Laws in Early NineteenthCentury England’, Utilitas 6 (1994), 97–116; and P. Mandler, ‘The New Poor Law (Review Article)’, Modern History Review 5 (1993), 9–11.

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10. See R.Q. Gray, ‘The Languages of Factory Reform in Britain, c. 1830–1860’, in P. Joyce (ed.), The Historical Meanings of Work (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987); and idem, Factory Question, ch. 1–3. 11. See C. Driver, Tory Radical; J.T. Ward, Factory Movement; idem, ‘The Factory Reform Movement in Scotland’, Scottish Historical Review 41 (1962), 100­–24; and Gray, Factory Question. See also the first account of the movement in S. [Alfred] Kydd, The History of the Factory Movement: From the Year 1802, to the Enactment of the Ten Hours Bill in 1847 (London: Simpkin, Marshall and Co., 1857), as well as J.L. and B. Hammond, Lord Shaftesbury (London: Constable, 1923). On child labour in Great Britain, see P. Kirby, Child Labour in Britain, 1750–1870 (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003); and K. Honeyman, Child Workers in England, 1780–1820: Parish Apprentices and the Making of the Early Industrial Labour Force, Studies in Labour History (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006). 12. See M.E. Rose, ‘The Anti-Poor Law Movement in the North of England’, Northern History 1 (1966), 70–91; eadem, ‘The Anti-Poor Law Agitation’, in J.T. Ward (ed.), Popular Movements, c. 1830–1850 (London: Macmillan, 1970), 78–94; Edsall, Anti-Poor Law; A. Brundage, The Making of the New Poor Law: The Politics of Inquiry, Enactment and Implementation, 1832–1839 (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1978); idem, The English Poor Laws 1700–1930, Social History in Perspective (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2002); J. Knott, Popular Opposition to the 1834 Poor Law (London: Croom Helm, 1986); P. Wood, Poverty and the Workhouse in Britain (Stroud: Sutton, 1991); P. Harling, ‘The Power of Persuasion: Central Authority, Local Bureaucracy and the New Poor Law’, English Historical Review 107 (1992), 30–53; L.H. Lees, The Solidarity of Strangers: The English Poor Laws and the People, 1700–1948 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); and A. Kidd, State, Society and the Poor in Nineteenth-Century England (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). A must-read on the subject of the New Poor Laws is still S. and B. Webb, English Local Government, vol. 8, ch. 1 and 2. 13. On the resistance against the New Poor Law in the rural south that is so often neglected in scholarship, see A. Randall and E. Newman, ‘Protest’; R. Wells, ‘Resistance’; and eadem, ‘Crime and Protest’. 14. Oastler described these experiences several times throughout his life. See C. Driver, Tory Radical, 39–41; J.T. Ward, Factory Movement, 33–34; and idem, ‘Richard Oastler on Politics and Factory Reform’, Northern History 24 (1988), 124–45. The earliest portrayals can be found in Oastler’s pamphlet Facts and Plain Words (Leeds, 1833), Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic History, Richard Oastler Collection, vol. 2, pamphlet 11. 15. For descriptions from the 1830s, see C. Driver, Tory Radical, 86–88. Oastler later summarized his accounts in The Home, 6 March 1852 and 13 March 1852. 16. See, for example, the pamphlet of C. Richardson, Address to the Working Classes of Leeds and the West Riding (Leeds: G. Cranshaw, 1831), 6; see also the letters and speeches from factory reformers in the Leeds Intelligencer, 1 December 1831 and 12 July 1832. 17. In reverse, the role of conservative working-class leaders in the 1830s and 1840s made it possible to see, in a very simplified way, all the protests at this time – including Chartism – as a conservative movement; see R.N. Soffer, ‘Attitudes and Allegiances in the Unskilled North’, International Review of Social History 10 (1965), 429–54. 18. Of the seventeen original members of the committee, twelve worked in wool and cotton factories while five were shop owners and dealers, including John Leech (general dealer) and James Brook (furniture dealer), who were the chairman and secretary, respectively. J.T. Ward, Factory Movement, 41. 19. Ibid., 52. 20. See the papers in the Matthew Balme Collection, Bradford Archive, Deed Box 4, case 9, and Deed Box 27; see also J.C. Gill, The Ten Hours Parson: Christian Social Action in the

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Eighteen-Thirties (London: S.P.C.K., 1959); idem, Parson Bull of Byerley (London: S.P.C.K., 1963); J.T. Ward, ‘Matthew Balme’, Bradford Antiquary 40 (1960), 217–28; idem, ‘Bradford and Factory Reform’, Bradford Textile Society Journal (1961), 41–52; and idem, ‘Squire Auty’. 21. C. Richardson, Address. On Richardson’s social background, see chapter 2, fn. 35 in this book. 22. P. Taylor, Popular Politics, 120. 23. Bolton Chronicle, 8 December 1832. 24. Bolton Chronicle, 14 July 1832 and 1 September 1832. 25. See Bolton Chronicle, 17 November 1832 (anonymous letter to the editor by a ‘weaver’); and Bolling’s campaign poster from 1832, Bolton Local Studies Library, Miscellaneous Collection of Handbills, ZZ 130/1/1–10, 12, 19). During his campaign, Bolling did not explicitly speak out against the factory laws; it was not until after his election, in early 1833, that he made it clear to a deputation from almost all the factories in the city that he would not support this campaign; see Bolton Chronicle, 13 April 1833. 26. Bolton Chronicle, 17 November 1832. On the generally lower-middle-class and plebeian character of the Political Union in Bolton, see P. Taylor, Popular Politics, 41–43. 27. Bolton Chronicle, 13 July 1833, 3 August 1833, 5 July 1834, 12 July 1834 and 19 July 1834. P. Taylor downplays the significance of these conflicts, citing the fact that the Tories never managed to win a clear majority among the weavers; see P. Taylor, Popular Politics, 123–24. In the late 1830s, the Liberals were clearly dominant. Beginning in the early 1830s, there were indeed power struggles among the weavers that followed party lines. In 1835, Tory weavers complained after being defeated in a vote that an unrepresentative Liberal clique had the nerve to claim to speak for all weavers. As a result of these power struggles, some events for the weavers were held under the motto ‘no party politics’. But a decidedly Tory fraction still existed even though the Liberal view that the Corn Laws were responsible for all their woes had emerged as triumphant; see Bolton Chronicle, 15 August 1835, 22 May 1835, 20 May 1837 and 3 June 1837. 28. Bolton Chronicle, 7 November 1835, 4 June 1836, 14 January 1837 and 15 July 1837. 29. See C. Driver, Tory Radicalism. At the end of the 1830s, the fundamental political differences that existed on the level of plebeian political organisations became quite clear with the establishment of an Operative Conservative Association. 30. The later transition towards protests against the New Poor Law did not affect the situation – as a rule, the committees only changed their names, but otherwise they kept going with the same people involved. 31. Gray, ‘Languages’, 145–47, quotation from 145. 32. Weaver, ‘Political Ideology’, 86. 33. Leeds Intelligencer, 12 January 1832. The analysis of the language within the factory movement and the opposition to the New Poor Law is based on an assessment of numerous speeches and pamphlets for the constituencies in question. Citations are only provided for direct quotes. For a detailed examination of Bible references and allusions, see Lyon, Politicians, ch. 4 and 5. 34. Leeds Intelligencer, 30 December 1837 (speech by Oastler); see also the pamphlet from G.S. Bull: ‘The New Poor Law shewn to be unconstitutional, anti-monarchical, opposed to the common law, contrary to Christianity, in a Petition to the House of Lords’ (London, 1838), Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic History, Richard Oastler Collection, vol. 12, no. 15. On banners of Bible verses with inscriptions such as ‘Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy’ at demonstrations; see, for example, Leeds Intelligencer, 12 January 1832 and 20 May 1837. 35. Kydd, History, vol. 2, 108–9; and C. Driver, Tory Radical, 326–27. 36. See J.R. Stephens, Sermons and Trial, The Political Pulpit (London: W. Dugdale, 1839). As an example of his sermons in early 1839, see the one held in Stalybridge on 10 February 1839. On Stephens’s language, see also T.M. Kemnitz and F. Jacques, ‘J.R. Stephens and the Chartist

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Movement’, International Review of Social History 19 (1974), 211–27; J.A. Epstein, ‘Some Organisational and Culture Aspects of the Chartist Movement in Nottingham’, in J.A. Epstein and D. Thompson (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-Class Radicalism and Culture, 1830–1860 (1982), 249–51; P. Joyce, Visions, 33–34; and Lyon, Politicians, ch. 4 and 5. 37. On Stephens’s successful open-air sermons in London in May 1839, see Edwards, To Purge this Realm, 61–63. 38. Lyon, Politicians, ch. 2, esp. 124. 39. On Crabtree’s position, see, for example, Leeds Intelligencer, 20 May 1837; on his background, see Knott, Popular Opposition, 120. 40. See D. Turley, The Culture of English Anti-Slavery, 1780–1860 (London; Routledge, 1991), esp. ch. 2; S. Drescher, Capitalism and Antislavery: British Mobilization in Comparative Perspective (New York: Oxford University Press, 1987), esp. ch. 6; and A. Tyrrell, Joseph Sturge and the Moral Radical Party in Early Victorian Britain (London: Croom Helm, 1987). 41. See J. Walvin, ‘The Rise of British Popular Sentiment for Abolition 1787–1832’, in C. Bolt and S. Drescher (eds), Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey (Folkestone: W. Dawson, 1980), 149–61; P. Hollis, ‘Anti-Slavery and British Working-Class Radicalism in the Years of Reform’, in C. Bolt and S. Drescher (eds), Anti-Slavery, Religion and Reform: Essays in Memory of Roger Anstey (Folkestone: W. Dawson, 1980), 294–315; S. Drescher, ‘Cart-Whip and Billy Roller: Anti-Slavery and Reform Symbolism in Industrializing Britain’, Journal of Social History 15 (1981/82), 3–24; Tyrell, Joseph Sturge, ch. 6; and Gray, Factory Question, ch. 1. On the role of Christian ideas in Chartism, see Lyon, Politicians, ch. 6; and E. Yeo, ‘Christianity in Chartist Struggle 1838–1842’, Past and Present 91 (1981), 109–39. 42. On the dissemination of such ideas, see Lyon, Politicians, passim; and P. Joyce, Visions, 100– 102 and passim. For some examples of such speakers with Tory leanings, see Leeds Intelligencer, 11 March 1837 (Thompson) and the sources listed in footnote 34. 43. See, above all, Gray, ‘Languages’; idem, Factory Question; Weaver, ‘Political Ideology’; and Lyon, Politicians. A more ambiguous perspective can be found in P. Joyce, Visions. 44. See Gash, Secretary Peel; idem, Sir Robert Peel; Mandler, Aristocratic Government, 5–6; Sack, Jacobite to Conservative, ch. 6; Ramsden, Appetite, ch. 1; and Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous, 314–28. 45. Leeds Intelligencer, 8 January 1829. Sadler began his political career with anti-Catholic speeches; see, for example, M.T. Sadler, Speech of M.T. Sadler Esq. at the Meeting held at the Parish Church, Leeds, Friday, February 22nd 1813, on the Catholic Question. (Leeds: n. p., n. d.). 46. See, for example, the accusations against Sadler in The Tables Turned. A Reply to a Non-Elector Signing Himself Common Sense (Leeds 1832), Thoresby Society Library, Election Materials 22 C 1. On Oastler’s difficult relationship with the Operative Conservative Association in Leeds from 1836 onward, see section ‘Oastler’s Friends? The Operative Conservative Associations after 1842’ below. On the political consequences of his anti-Catholicism, see C. Driver, Tory Radical, 359. 47. See Gill, Ten Hours Parson; idem, Parson Bull; and D.G. Wright, ‘A Radical Borough: Parliamentary Politics in Bradford 1832–1841’, Northern History 4 (1969), 132–66. 48. J.T. Ward, Factory Movement, 423–25, counts over twenty-eight parish vicars in the north of England, not including Anglican bishops, with links to the Tories, who took part in the activities of the factory movement. 49. Leeds Intelligencer, 29 December 1831. 50. Leeds Intelligencer, 25 February 1837. Patrick Brontë was the father of the literary Brontë siblings who grew up in Haworth. 51. Leeds Intelligencer, 24 March 1831. 52. A pamphlet most likely written by Cavie Richardson employs such ‘English’ motifs in a particularly dramatic way: The Day-Dream, or a Letter to King Richard, containing a Vision of the

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Trial of Mr. Factory Longhours, at York Castle (Leeds, 1832), Goldsmiths’ Library of Economic History, Richard Oastler Collection, vol. 5, no. 5. In the text, Britannia accompanied by Mr John Bull and his daughters Miss Yorkshire and Miss Lancashire oppose a factory owner who employs children. Other publications with decidedly ‘English’ overtones include the flyer entitled ‘England Rebuked by Germany’, Oastler Collection, vol. 3, no. 9, or the pamphlet by Richard Oastler, A Serious Address to the Millowners, Manufacturers, and Cloth-Dressers of Leeds, Who Have Organized Themselves into a Trades’ Union (Huddersfield, 1834), Oastler Collection, vol. 3, no. 29. 53. On patriotism in the language of protest and its Tory implications, see C. Driver, Tory Radical, 283–84 and 302 as well as P. Joyce, Visions, 104–6. 54. See E.P. Thompson, Making. 55. On the conflicts between Liberals and Radicals related to the debates on factory work and the Poor Laws, see, for example, D. Fraser, ‘Poor Law Politics in Leeds 1833–1855’, Publications of the Thoresby Society Miscellany 15 (1971), 23–49. 56. Weaver, ‘Political Ideology’, 87. 57. On the events of the demonstration, see The Times, 18 May 1837, as well as the comments in the Leeds Intelligencer and Leeds Mercury (including the quote above) from 20 May 1837. For a detailed description, see Knott, Popular Opposition, 113–22. 58. Interestingly, the assembly which had been originally proposed by all the radicals – even those who had criticized O’Connor and O’Brien at the demonstration – with demands for universal suffrage did not take place until a year later in October 1838 and on a much smaller scale. Even the largest demonstration of the Chartists in Yorkshire in May 1839 was not nearly as well attended as the Anti-Poor Law meeting in 1837, despite O’Connor’s protests to the contrary; see Leeds Intelligencer, 20 October 1838; The Times, 24 May 1839; Northern Star, 20 October 1838 and 25 May 1839. 59. The Oastler Collection contains numerous pamphlets with corresponding examples. See also Knott, Popular Opposition, 237–39, on the debate over the Markus pamphlets in which rumours were spread about the planned killing of poor children in 1838. 60. See Gray, ‘Languages’, 150–51; idem, Factory Question, ch. 1; C. Malone, ‘Gendered Discourse and the Making of Protective Labor Legislation in England 1830–1914’, Journal of British Studies 37 (1998), 166–91; and E. Dzelzainis, ‘Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna, Pre-Millenarianism and the Formation of Gender Ideology in the Ten Hours Campaign’, Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003), 181–91. 61. See Gray, ‘Languages’; idem, Factory Question; P. Joyce, Visions, 98–100; S. Alexander, ‘Women, Class and Sexual Difference in the 1830s and 1860s: Some Reflections on the Writing of Feminist History’, History Workshop Journal 17 (1984), 125–49; and A. Clark, The Struggle for the Breeches: Gender and the Making of the British Working Class (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), ch. 10 and 11. 62. On ‘moral economy’ as well as the mentality of craftsmen, see also E.P. Thompson, Making; and Prothero, Artisans. According to Smail, the beginnings of a new language of industrial opposition that moved away from traditional paternalistic notions could be traced back to the conflicts in 1806, see J. Smail, ‘New Languages of Labour and Capital: The Transformation of Discourse in the Early Years of the Industrial Revolution’, Social History 12 (1987), 52–71; however, it developed much more slowly than he suggests. 63. Epstein, Lion, ch. 6; and P. Joyce, Visions, 100. 64. Gray, ‘Languages’, passim and esp. 152; idem, Factory Question, 54; and P. Joyce, Visions, 100. 65. Gray, ‘Languages’, esp. 148–50. 66. On the statements made before the parliamentary commission, see C. Driver, Tory Radical, 169–71; J.T. Ward, Factory Movement, 60–62; and Lawes, Paternalism, ch. 6. Gray himself later describes the careful selection and coaching of the witnesses (Factory Question, 65);

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nonetheless, he describes the workers who appeared before the commission as ‘recognised, and in some cases elected, representatives of their trades and communities’. Yet he does not provide any evidence to back up this claim. 67. Gray, ‘Languages’, 148–49. 68. Leeds Intelligencer, 12 July 1832. 69. Gray, ‘Languages’, 152. 70. For a good overview of the economic constellations in the second quarter of the nineteenth century and the worsening of the situation at the end of the 1830s, see Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous, ch. 9, esp. 573–88 and 616. 71. Overviews of the debates on the multi-faceted language of Chartism can be found in A. Messner, ‘Communication, Land, Leadership, Culture and Emigration: Some Problems in Chartist Historiography’, Historical Journal 42 (1999), 1093–1109; and J. Belchem, ‘Radical Language, Meaning and Identity in the Age of the Chartists’, Journal of Victorian Culture 10 (2005), 1–14. On the Chartists’ views on history, see R.G. Hall, ‘Creating a People’s History: Political Identity and History in Chartism, 1832–1848’, in O. Ashton et al. (eds), The Chartist Legacy (Woodbridge: Merlin Press, 1999), 232–64; on Christianity, see Yeo, ‘Christianity’ and Lyon, Politicians; on the monarchy, see Pickering, ‘Hearts of the Millions’; and on the economy, see Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’. 72. See chapter 2, section ‘The Crown and the Constitution in Election Campaigns and Celebrations’. 73. J.T. Ward, ‘Leeds and the Factory Reform Movement’, Publications of the Thoresby Society 46 (1961), 87–118; idem, ‘Bradford’; and idem, Factory Movement, 116–17. 74. J.T. Ward, Factory Movement, 181; and Edwards, Purge, 46–47. 75. C. Driver, Tory Radical, 344–46, 357–59; J.T. Ward, Factory Movement, 178–80; F. Driver, ‘Tory Radicalism? Ideology, Strategy and Locality in Popular Politics During the EighteenThirties’, Northern History 27 (1991), 120–38; V. Hemingway, ‘Urban Politics and Popular Protest Movements in the Age of Reform: Huddersfield c. 1832–1852’, PhD dissertation, University of Huddersfield, 1992; and eadem, ‘Parliamentary Politics in Huddersfield, c. 1832–1853’, in E.A.H. Haigh (ed.), Huddersfield – A Most Handsome Town: Aspects of the History and Culture of a West Yorkshire Town (Huddersfield: Kirklees Cultural Services, 1992), 481–500. 76. See the editions on 6 May 1837 of the Halifax Express, the Leeds Intelligencer and the Leeds Mercury. 77. See the editions on 6 May 1837 of the Halifax Express, the Leeds Intelligencer and the Leeds Mercury. O’Connell had broken with the factory movement in May 1837, which made him an easy target for Oastler. Oastler’s attacks, however, bore clearly anti-Irish sentiments. On O’Connell’s views on factory reform, see Chase, Trade Unionism, 183. 78. On the criticism of the description of Tory Radicalism as a universal phenomenon, see F. Driver, ‘Tory Radicalism’. 79. J.T. Ward, Factory Movement, 178–79; and Edsall, Anti-Poor Law, 180. 80. J.T. Ward, W.B. Ferrand: ‘The Working Man’s Friend’, 1809–1889 (East Linton: Tuckwell Press, 2002), 18–20. 81. Greenall, Making, 42–43; Walsh, ‘Working Class Political Integration’, passim; and Fraser, Urban Politics, 63–65. 82. J.T. Ward, ‘Bradfordians’; D.G. Wright, ‘Radical Borough’; T. Koditschek, Class Formation and Urban Industrial Society: Bradford 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 337; and G. Firth, Bradford and the Industrial Revolution: An Economic History, 1760– 1840 (Halifax: Ryburn, 1990). 83. Fraser, Urban Politics, 77; and Epstein, ‘Organisational and Cultural Aspects’. 84. Stedman Jones, ‘Rethinking Chartism’, 150.

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85. A detailed analysis of all the elections in the northern English core of the social protest movements was beyond the scope of this book; to the extent that the twenty-seven constituencies in Lancashire and Yorkshire have been covered by other local studies, there were no other examples of direct cooperation between Tories and Radicals. 86. In 1841, the general support for the Radicals in their stronghold of Oldham meant that Fielden and his party colleague Johnston ran unopposed; see J. Foster, Class Struggle, 52–54; D. Gadian, ‘Class Consciousness in Oldham and Other North-West Industrial Towns 1830– 1850’, Historical Journal 21 (1978), 161–72; Vernon, Politics, passim; and M. Winstanley, ‘Oldham Radicalism and the Origins of Popular Liberalism, 1830–1852’, Historical Journal 36 (1993), 619–43. 87. See Fraser, Urban Politics, passim; Edsall, Anti-Poor Law, ch. 8; and Knott, Popular Opposition, ch. 6. 88. See Mandler, Aristocratic Government, passim; and Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous, 502–504 and passim. 89. See P. Pickering and A. Tyrrell, The People’s Bread: A History of the Anti-Corn Law League (London: Leicester University Press, 2000), ch. 7. 90. The Times, 29 June 1841 to 1 July 1841. 91. Leeds Intelligencer, 10 January 1835, 29 July 1837, 5 August 1837, 12 August 1837, 3 July 1841 and 10 July 1841; Bolton Chronicle, 8 January 1835, 29 July 1837, 19 August 1837, 3 July 1841 and 25 May 1844. J.T. Ward overestimates the role of the Poor Law issue in the elections in Leeds and the West Riding in 1841, see J.T. Ward, Ferrand, 26–27; unlike in remote Knaresborough, the Corn Laws were the primary issue at stake in the elections in northern England. 92. The Times, 30 June 1841. 93. Bolton Chronicle, 29 July 1837. 94. Leeds Intelligencer, 29 July 1837. 95. See Fraser, ‘Life of Edward Baines’. 96. Bolton Free Press, 24 February 1838. 97. See Edsall, Anti-Poor Law, ch. 4 and 7; and Knott, Popular Opposition, ch. 5. 98. Poor Law guardians were not elected in Oldham until 1847 in accordance with the new law, which had already been amended at that point; see Knott, Popular Opposition, 148–49. 99. On Oldham, see J. Foster, Class Struggle; Gadian, ‘Class Consciousness’; idem, ‘Radicalism and Liberalism in Oldham: A Study of Conflict, Continuity and Change in Popular Politics, 1830–1852’, Social History 21 (1996), 265–80; R.A. Sykes, ‘Some Aspects of Working Class Consciousness in Oldham, 1830–1842’, Historical Journal 23 (1980), 167–79; and Winstanley, ‘Oldham Radicalism’. 100. See chapter 3, section ‘Contesting the Cities: Confessional Conflicts in Local Power Struggles’. 101. Bolton Chronicle, 28 January 1837 and 10 February 1837. 102. Edsall, Anti-Poor Law, 81–82, 142, 190; and Knott, Popular Opposition, 148. 103. Fraser, ‘Poor Law Politics’ and Knott, Popular Opposition, 147. 104. Edsall, Anti-Poor Law, 89. In Yorkshire, however, the Liberals were relatively successful and won majorities in Bradford, Halifax, Dewsbury and Wakefield. 105. Edsall, Anti-Poor Law, ch. 5. 106. Fraser, Urban Politics, 65–66; and P. Pickering, Chartism and the Chartists in Manchester and Salford (New York: Macmillan, 1995), 81–82. 107. Bolton Chronicle, 8 April 1837. 108. Bolton Chronicle, 15 December 1838. 109. Bolton Chronicle, 22 December 1838 and 29 December 1838; Northern Star, 10 February 1839; Bolton Free Press, 10 February 1839, 9 March 1839 and 27 April 1839. P. Taylor misreads the majorities involved in these conflicts and portrays the conflicts as a reversal of the

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fronts between Liberals and Tories in his Popular Politics, 122–23. In fact, however, the parties did not act in unison; the Liberals by no means dominated the local resistance to the New Poor Law in Bolton; see B.D.A. Lewis, ‘Bourgeois Ideology’, ch. 4. 110. See Edsall, Anti-Poor Law, ch. 10–12; and Knott, Popular Opposition, ch. 9. 111. See B.D.A. Lewis, ‘Bourgeois Ideology’, ch. 4. 112. Fraser, ‘Poor Law Politics’; and idem, Urban Politics, 55–91. 113. On Manchester, see Fraser, Urban Politics, 41–43; and Pickering, Chartism, 73–81. 114. See also chapter 2. 115. J.T. Ward, Ferrand, esp. ch. 4 and 5. 116. Leeds Intelligencer, 1 April 1843 and 15 April 1843; J.T. Ward, Ferrand, 47. 117. The Times, 28 March 1845. 118. Leeds Patriot, 14 May 1836 and 28 May 1836; Leeds Intelligencer, 21 May 1836. Oastler officially broke with the local association in Leeds over this issue. 119. The Times, 13 October 1840, 21 October 1840, 11 November 1840, 24 November 1840, 5 December 1840, 16 December 1840, 23 December 1840, 30 December 1840 and 5 January 1841. 120. See A. Gambles, ‘Rethinking the Politics of Protection: Conservatism and the Corn Laws, 1830–1852’, English Historical Review 113 (1998), 928–52; and eadem, Protection and Politics: Conservative Economic Discourse, 1815–1852 (Woodbridge: St Edmundsbury Press, 1999). For a description of the beginnings of the debates prior to 1830, see Hilton, Corn. 121. Leeds Intelligencer, 20 February 1841; see also Quin, Corn Laws. 122. See the reports of the assemblies of local associations in Bolton Chronicle, 15 November 1839 and 6 June 1840; Ten Towns’ Messenger, 28 May 1841; The Times, 14 June 1841; Leeds Intelligencer, 21 August 1841 (quote). 123. Leeds Intelligencer, 23 October 1841 and 16 April 1842. 124. See C. Driver, Tory Radical, 378–424; Edwards, Purge, 87–107. 125. F.E. Gillespie, Labour and Politics in England, 1800–1867 (Durham: Duke University Press, 1927), 40–41; J.T. Ward, Factory Movement, 398; and idem, Ferrand, 112. 126. See J.A. Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of 1851: A Nation on Display (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 128–92; J.A. Davis, The Great Exhibition (Stroud: Sutton, 1999), 121–81; and B. Taylor, ‘“Quelle fatigue … quelle barbarie!”: The Visitor’s Torment’, in F. Bosbach and J.R. Davis (eds), Die Weltausstellung von 1851 und ihre Folgen (Munich: Saur, 2002). 127. For examples of these efforts and the dedication of Peel monuments in London, Bury, Salford, Preston, Leeds, Huddersfield and Bradford, see John Bull, 1 February 1851, 15 February 1851 and 18 April 1852; The Times, 11 May 1852; Lloyd’s Weekly London Newspaper, 30 May 1852; Leeds Intelligencer, 20 July 1850, 26 October 1850 and 10 November 1855. In Bolton, free-trade advocates tried to establish a Peel Park, but they were unsuccessful, despite major support from Robert Heywood and considerable donations from the working class; see Bolton Chronicle, 12 October 1850, 16 November 1850, 30 November 1850 and 7 June 1850. See also Heywood’s letter addressed to Walmsley, 25 February 1851 and to the Bolton Chronicle, 29 March 1855, in Bolton Local Studies Library, Heywood Papers, ZHE 47/30 and ZHE 51/11. 128. On the critique of the self-fashioning of the Conservatives from the late nineteenth century, see D. Roberts, ‘Tory Paternalism’; and Gray, Factory Question, Introduction and passim; on the debate over the protective tariffs around 1900, see E.H.H. Green, ‘Radical Conservatism’; and idem, Crisis.

Chapter 6

‘Beer and Britannia’ or ‘Moral Reform’? Paternalistic Populism, Self-Improvement and Gender

?

In mid July 1838, the southern English town of Uckfield in Sussex played host to some tumultuous scenes that piqued the interest of the readers of the conservative weekly John Bull. On a given Thursday evening, the local Temperance Society had called a meeting on a field outside the town. Speakers from London and neighbouring Lewes had come to Uckfield for the occasion. As in many other localities, the society sought to warn the people of Uckfield against the dangers of alcohol consumption. Beginning in Bradford and other industrial cities in northern England in 1830, similar temperance associations had been established across much of the country. These societies called for abstinence when it came to intoxicating drink, based on religious and sociomoralistic notions of reform, and members pledged to refrain from drinking alcohol themselves.1 Just as the speakers stood up to begin their speeches, they were disturbed by a band playing loud music, which marched onto the field ahead of a parade of local brewers, maltsters and innkeepers followed by about two thousand drunken town residents. They demonstratively carried beer barrels and other alcoholic drinks in their hands and loudly made it quite clear that they disagreed with the sober messages of the Temperance Society. While the teetotallers were forced to leave the field defeated, the assembled crowd partied well into the night. The John Bull referred to the festivities as a celebration of the victory of common sense over hypocrisy: ‘This triumph of common sense over absurdity is very satisfactory to us, who believe, despite the new school, that an Englishman has a right to do as he likes’.2 In many respects, this little episode can be seen as an early example of the combination of populist strategies and socially conservative attitudes found within local Conservative Party milieus that recent scholarship suggests was the key to the electoral success of the Tories in late Victorian England. Studies on political Notes from this chapter begin on page 255.

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culture in the late nineteenth century in London, Bolton, Leeds and other cities around the country have called attention to the close ties between Tory politicians and local innkeepers, brewers and distillers.3 In particular Jon Lawrence, in his study on election campaigns in Wolverhampton, emphasizes the conscious construction of a popular Conservative ideology in his interpretation of urban English Conservatism around 1900. This popular Conservatism, according to Lawrence, was characterized by a patriotic commitment to the nation, a vague connection to the sociopolitical tradition of the Tory Radicals and most especially a defence of the daily ways of life and traditions of ordinary Englishmen.4 From Lawrence’s perspective, the interests of the ‘honest worker’ and ‘his right to drink beer’ dominated the rhetoric of the Tories. This language then made it possible for the Tories to differentiate themselves from Liberal circles, which were increasingly dominated by Nonconformists who touted words such as ‘moral reform’, ‘respectability’ and ‘improvement’ as they advocated a strict moral upbringing for the entire population along the lines of evangelical ideals of self-improvement.5 In the pages of the John Bull, however, all these elements of late Victorian Toryism can be detected long before the wave of Conservative electoral victories that came after 1870. The links between the Conservatives and those in the brewery business (including innkeepers and the like), the defence of the traditional culture of celebration and ways of life in the name of the people and common sense as well as the rejection of the Liberal-leaning ‘New School’ of moral reform that advocated abstinence from alcohol and decorous behaviour can be easily found in the commentaries of the conservative weekly. Furthermore, a stalwart defence of personal interests and praise for the solid, down-to-earth and self-determined Englishman constructed an ideal of conservative masculinity that, as Lawrence notes, played a considerable role in the mobilization strategies of the Conservatives in the late nineteenth century. Lawrence’s interpretation of the reasons why voters from the lower classes supported the Tories follows the same logic as Patrick Joyce’s argument that the Conservative electoral victories stemmed from a new kind of factory culture that had developed in the industrial cities of the North after 1850. Joyce emphasizes that paternalist practices in the factories made it possible for workers to form a bond with ‘their factory’ and ‘their factory owner’. Ranging from social benefits in terms of housing and healthcare to cultural initiatives such as regular factory celebrations and day trips or leisure activities sponsored by factory sport groups, bands and choirs, to educational offerings in special schools and libraries, these measures fostered a stronger sense of belonging and loyalty among workers.6 In combination with the recruitment of workers from nearby neighbourhoods or the purposeful establishment of workers’ housing in certain streets, these bonds between employer and employee not only ensured for a more harmonious atmosphere and a better relationship with the unions, they also made it possible for factory owners to exercise political influence over the workers in their own

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factories as well as in the area surrounding their factories. Such strategies were not invented by Conservative employers; rather, they were also effectively employed by Liberal industrialists, whose work ethics were often more strongly evangelical in tone. Nonetheless, as Joyce maintains, it was the Tories who capitalized most on the new structures of industrial production in the second half of the nineteenth century.7 Following the expansion of the suffrage in 1867, the growing spheres of influence enjoyed by prominent businessmen were often reflected in the almost unanimous voting behaviour of their workers. Joyce has also pointed out the role played by the close relationship between many local Tory politicians and innkeepers as well as the Tory attempts to distance themselves from the strict morality associated with Nonconformist Liberals by campaigning for ‘Beer and Britannia’.8 In conjunction with the studies of Jon Lawrence, this perspective offers a way to explain the success of the Conservatives among lower-class voters by taking into account the complex mixture of ideological and populist strategies adopted by the Tories, but above all by emphasizing the ability of the Conservatives to integrate traditional elements of the English way of life as well as longheld notions of masculinity into their political programme. The example of Uckfield suggests that the roots of this late Victorian Tory strategy went back much further than the 1850s. Indeed, inspired by the work of Patrick Joyce, recent studies on paternalist factory structures have documented a series of examples that attest to the beginnings of a ‘new factory culture’ in industrial work in the first half of the nineteenth century. Peter Taylor, for example, found no evidence supporting the idea that there was a fundamental transformation in the relationship between employer and employee around 1850 in his assessment of industrial work in Bolton between 1815 and 1860. Rather, he notes that many manufacturers were able to establish close relationships with their employees in the 1830s and 1840s and that they exercised a great deal of influence over the political behaviour of their workers despite the hefty labour conflicts that sometimes ensued.9 Could it then be said that it was not the long tradition of a loyalist patriotic interpretation of the constitution and widespread anti-Catholic Protestantism, but rather the clever combination of free beer, English nationalism and paternalism fostered by local Tory elites that accounted for the ability of the Conservatives to generate support among the lower classes? The members of the Operative Conservative Associations would hardly have agreed with this assessment. They vehemently defended themselves against accusations that they were immoral drunkards who blindly marched to the tune of their employers. But this was exactly what their opponents maintained. The Liberal politician Robert Heywood, for example, counted the number of barrels of beer and porter at the last annual meeting of the Conservative operatives in a letter to the editor in the Bolton Free Press in June 1836. Only twenty of the 450 or so men in attendance, Heywood claimed, had paid for their food and drink, so that the rest of those in attendance had enjoyed themselves at the cost of

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Conservative factory owners. As this meant that they owed a debt of sorts, some men truly regretted having attended the meeting.10 In response to such attacks, the Conservative operatives often emphasized their respectability and argued that trust and honesty as well as sobriety and orderliness were Conservative principles which could also be found at their assemblies. But they did so using the moral language of the English reformers.11 The question remains, however, as to how these demands for propriety could be reconciled with the defence of the traditional culture of celebration and leisure activities within the Conservative milieu. An examination of the situations in Bolton and the towns of the West Riding in Yorkshire in particular reveals that the popularity of Conservative politicians before 1870 was not only based on a onesided masculine mentality of ‘Beer and Britannia’. Rather, alongside the language of conservative constitutionalism, Conservative rhetoric also expressed a commitment to a kind of stout manliness in which explicit calls for abstinence, respectability and an orderly household as demanded by the dictates of propriety were quite useful in attracting support among the lower classes and especially among women. These seemingly contradictory strategies allowed for an especially broad mobilization of support within plebeian circles at the local level, where public and private morality were just as heavily contested as they were in national discourse.

Early Paternalism and Calls for Moral Reform Is there a detectable link between Conservative manufacturers and paternalist factory structures in the first half of the nineteenth century as well? Even if Peter Taylor does not explicitly discuss this point in his portrayal of middle-class efforts in this respect, his account of Bolton before 1850 alludes to the particular role that conservative attitudes played in the city because almost all the paternalist factory owners that he mentioned stemmed from the local Tory milieu. Lord Francis Egerton, for example, was the Conservative candidate in the county elections in South Lancashire in 1835 and the head of the most prominent Tory family in Bolton. As the owner of a coal mine, he set up model villages for his workers with houses, churches and schools, and he also sponsored social welfare measures such as pension funds, savings societies and sick clubs. Similarly, in response to a strike, William Hulton, who was one of the magistrates responsible for sending in the cavalry at Peterloo in 1819, established a miners’ association under his leadership that offered assistance to the workers in his mines in the event of illness, accident or death at the beginning of the 1830s. The long-time sponsor of the local Operative Conservative Association, Joseph Ridgway, also provided financial assistance for schools, building societies and the care of the ill in the villages in which he owned bleacheries. Similar paternalist measures sponsored by Conservative manufacturers could also be found quite early on in Bolton in the cotton factories of

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the Knowles family, the textile machinery factory of the Dobsons, and the iron foundries and cotton mills in the hands of John Musgrave and his son. That said, however, prominent Liberal textile manufacturers such as Peter Rothwell Arrowsmith and the Ashworth family also counted among those manufacturers who introduced their own schools or donated considerable sums to support libraries and reading rooms designed to foster the education of their workers. They were also known for taking particular care to establish bonds between their employees and local parish and church organizations.12 At first glance, these paternalistic measures appear to reflect a predominantly middle-class Liberal idea of educating the masses in a religious-moralistic sense defined by abstinence and renunciation. When examined more closely, however, the differences between Conservative and Liberal paternalism evaporate. Arrowsmith, for example, did not seem to be particularly close to the teetotallers; after the Liberal victory in the parliamentary elections in 1852, for example, he treated his eight hundred workers to plum cake and sandwiches as well as a generous amount of ‘barley bree’, which was a Scotch whisky.13 Press reports from other constituencies confirm this impression, as there were quite often cursory references to paternalistic practices sponsored by Liberal employers. What is more striking than the prominence of Conservatives or Liberals when it came to paternalist initiatives is the relatively early spread of industrial forms of paternalism on the whole because it has been generally assumed that this trend was characteristic of the late nineteenth century. In the area around Leeds, for example, there are examples of larger company celebrations held for miners, for example at Christmas, as early as 1820 or so. Moreover, employees were often invited to join in festivities hosted by mine or factory owners in honour of weddings and births or when company heirs reached their majority. This seems to have also been the case in Bolton as well as in the industrial towns of the West Riding, where such festivities were not unusual before 1850.14 The political significance of these occasions was not dictated by the party or milieu to which a given businessman belonged, but rather it was the biased political interpretations of these festivities in competing newspapers that lent them importance. In 1820, for example, the lack of any evidence of radical sentiments among the miners as well as the miners’ toasts to the king during a peak phase of radical mobilization prompted the Leeds Intelligencer to cover the Christmas celebrations in the local mines. The Leeds Mercury responded to reports in the Leeds Intelligencer of the particularly patriotic tone of a celebration of farm labourers near Leeds in August 1820 with its own article on a company celebration at which the Liberal MP Earl Fitzwilliam was given a valuable plate by his employees as a thank-you gesture for his commitment to parliamentary reform and the repeal of the Corn Laws.15 Accordingly, the press also tended to highlight charitable measures for workers when they could be integrated within the political profile of the respective paper. For example, a report on financial donations for the poor in conjunction with the

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festivities celebrating the proclamation of George IV in early 1820 reinforced the loyalist image of the Leeds Intelligencer; the John Bull, on the other hand, commented on monetary aid for poor weavers in the London borough of Spitalfields that was connected to an initiative sponsored by the royal family.16 Reports such as these from Bolton, London and the West Riding reflect the early emergence and gradual spread of paternalistic practices, especially in the textile and mining industries. The development of these measures, however, had more to do with the financial success of the respective businessman rather than political interests or a fundamental change in the relationship between employer and employees around 1850. Sudden changes such as the quite noticeable increase in company excursions in the second half of the 1840s, for example, were directly related to a general fascination for train travel.17 It would be misleading to interpret these events as part of a new strategy to overcome class differences.18 The industrialists within the Tory milieu, moreover, do not seem to have been particularly influenced by conservative ideals of paternalism. Conservative sentiments played a more prominent role when it came to rural forms of paternalism. Charitable initiatives sponsored by noble families and the celebrations that most aristocratic landowners shared with their tenants and workers appear to have been a precedent for the establishment of similar practices among middle-class industrialists. Especially in the 1820s and the 1830s, there were often reports on festivities attended by farm labourers in honour of the weddings of local estate owners, village festivals sponsored by the gentry or tributes paid to exemplary servants. Conservative papers like the John Bull also liked to mention socially minded nobles associated with the Tory party who were willing to lower rents, drop prices for agricultural products or increase the wages of their labourers in times of economic crisis.19 However, these classic examples of rural paternalism between land owners and tenants or labourers do not necessarily reflect a clear political strategy. A clearer indication of the connection between rural paternalism and specifically Conservative political leanings was the wave of Agricultural Societies that were formed in the 1830s. Societies like these had been established in many English regions at the county level since the late eighteenth century; numerous local societies, often (if not always) dominated by Conservative landowners, also branched off from the county organizations.20 Initially founded as non-political associations, these societies sought to spread agricultural knowledge and new crop methods as well as the stabilization of local hierarchies and solidarity within rural communities. Typically, they also awarded annual prizes for agricultural products or livestock at markets and fairs in the local villages. They also sponsored contests in which farm labourers demonstrated their ploughing or harvesting skills before cheering crowds. Interestingly, they also awarded prizes for exceptional moral behaviour. For example, premiums were given to farm labourers who had raised large families in a respectable way without relying on any assistance from

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the parish or who stayed on a particular farm for a long time. Other individuals were provided with excellent references for good behaviour, often with explicit reference to the patriotic significance of their acts.21 Especially in more remote regions, events such as these often became the highlight of the agricultural year as well as forums in which the ‘Beer and Britannia’ message of the Conservatives clearly gained a foothold. After the agricultural societies experienced a marked decline following the end of the Napoleonic Wars, they were consciously revived by Conservatives in the 1830s under the leadership of the Marquis of Chandos as a way to combat the Liberal majority in Parliament by formally organizing the movement in opposition to the New Poor Law and against the repeal of the Corn Laws.22 Especially within the context of the extensive Captain Swing riots in south-east England at the beginning of the decade, these new societies seemed to put a great deal of emphasis on encouraging the entire rural population to attend their celebrations and fairs.23 Whereas the great majority of the direct political mobilizations for the Corn Laws usually took place at more exclusive dinners held in conjunction with agricultural fairs, the influence of such popular events among the rural lower classes should not be underestimated. It was not without reason, for example, that W.A.H. Arrundel invited not only the local gentry, landowners and tenants in the region, but also the farm labourers and their families to a large banquet to thank those present for supporting the Conservative candidates in the parliamentary elections in Devon in 1837.24 Although the Whigs and Liberals had won 102 of the 144 English county seats in 1832, the Conservatives acquired more and more seats over the course of the next decade, achieving a clear majority in the rural constituencies with 124 county seats in 1841.25 Especially in the countryside, Tory politicians seem to have been able to use paternalistic gestures to establish a close bond between local colour and popular celebrations, Conservative values and staunch interest politics long before 1850. Yet it would be wrong to overemphasize the influence of a ‘Beer and Britannia’ mentality in the spread of conservative attitudes among the English lower classes. After all, in the 1830s it was often popular Conservative speakers like the ‘No Popery’ preacher Hugh Stowell from Salford who not only played a key role in the establishment of Operative Conservative Associations and the dissemination of anti-Catholic views, but also vehemently supported the foundation and growth of temperance societies.26 Although Brian Harrison has already pointed out that early efforts to reduce the consumption of alcohol among the English population did not reflect the relatively close link between temperance and Liberalism that later emerged, the role of Conservative politicians in the establishment of local associational structures within the temperance movement has been largely underestimated.27 For instance, the so-called Tory Ultras had fought against the government’s plans to reduce the taxes on beer and other alcoholic beverages as early as the 1820s and had even tried to generate a broad public movement in

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opposition to these measures similar to the one against Catholic emancipation.28 One of the first English temperance societies was established in Leeds as part of a rather unusual cooperative effort between Liberal and Conservative circles.29 Edward Baines initiated the idea, but it was Hugh Stowell who was also invited to speak at the major demonstrations and activities of the society for some years alongside Baines. As the evangelical preacher Stowell was a dedicated proponent of the complete avoidance of alcohol, some Conservatives even sided with the teetotallers in conflicts between those advocating moderate consumption and those who preached radical abstinence that often broke out within the society.30 The conservative Leeds Intelligencer, however, spoke out against complete abstinence, but it nevertheless continued to support the temperance movement as a whole.31 In neighbouring Bradford, as in Leeds, a Conservative employer named John Rand played a key role in the establishment of the local temperance society. Rand, who was a worsted yarn manufacturer, also functioned as the first president of the society for a few years after 1830.32 In Bolton, too, prominent Conservatives as well as Liberals appeared at the foundation of the local society in 1831. Referred to at first as the ‘Moderation Society’, the association in Bolton got its start in Anglican circles, and the staunch Conservative Vicar Slade was one of the initial spokesmen of the group.33 Over the course of the 1830s, the conflict between the moderates and radical teetotallers was solved by the establishment of the New Temperance Society in 1833, in which members were given the choice of committing to complete abstinence or moderate alcohol consumption. As this issue was being resolved, the Conservative Anglican circles who originally stood behind the Moderation Society withdrew from the local campaign against alcohol abuse. However, it was not only Liberal Nonconformists who then took over, but also Methodist manufacturers and civil servants with close connections to the Tory milieu.34 Liberal and Conservative sponsors of the society worked together quite successfully in encouraging more people to join. For example, in the 1840s and 1850s, up to nine thousand followers took part in different social activities such as annual parades, excursions and tea parties. The different local societies in Bolton also had a total of around seven thousand registered members in 1859.35 Yet, as the Conservative borough coroner John Taylor determined in 1846, the societies were unable to fundamentally change the leisure habits of the majority of the population, which still largely circled around pubs and inns. Taylor stood at the head of a group that sought to reduce the number of beverage licenses issued. Thanks to a Tory majority among the magistrates, this group celebrated a true victory in the 1870s as they were able to prevent an increase in the number of licensed pubs.36 Indeed, there is no evidence pointing to any kind of early alliance between Tory politicians and the local innkeepers and brewers in keeping with a ‘Beer and Britannia’ mentality at the local level in Bolton and the West Riding in Yorkshire. Rather, middle-class Conservatives took part in different kinds of ‘moral reform’ efforts and, like their Liberal and Radical opponents, they contributed to the

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dissemination of a culture of respectability as well as a sense of self-improvement and self-awareness among the lower classes. For example, they sponsored educational offerings for craftsmen, employees and factory workers. Many of them also founded their own schools for the children of their employees. When it came to genuinely paternalist measures, the Mechanics’ Institutes that were founded in English industrial cities along the lines of their Scottish predecessors provided a channel through which wealthy sponsors could make a commitment to adult education. For the most part, educational institutes such as these, with their libraries and praxis-oriented courses on technical, mathematic or scientific topics, were established by industrialists and politicians who wanted to provide workers and employees who were willing to educate themselves with a means by which they could better their positions. That said, there were also many institutes organized by craftsmen and workers themselves. After the first English institutes were created in 1824, many more followed in short succession; by 1849, some 204 institutes had been founded. Although doubts emerged quickly as to whether the course attendees really stemmed from the English lower classes, which was the intention of the institutes, these craftsmen’s schools remained the most important avenue for vocational education among plebeian groups well into the 1860s.37 The classic scholarly interpretation of these institutes sees them as a generally unsuccessful attempt to integrate ‘uncontrollable’ social groups into society by means of education and to steer them away from protests and radical political leanings. At the same time, most historians acknowledge that there was a close connection between the schools and the Liberal camp comprised of Whigs, Nonconformists and general proponents of reform within the middle class. Apart from a few exceptions, they argue, Tories and Anglicans were rather critical of the Mechanics’ Institutes at the local level, if they were not outright opposed to them. Much of this older scholarship also claims that the Tories tended to argue against the creation of schools for workers and other lower-class groups.38 A series of local studies, however, has found evidence of a broad base of support for these schools among Conservative employers and politicians.39 A look at the relatively well-researched institutes in Leeds and Bolton clearly reveals that local Conservative groups did anything but oppose the notion that self-improvement and individual advancement could come through education at schools such as these. Initially, the Mechanics’ School of Art in Leeds was sponsored first and foremost by Edward Baines. But, from the very beginning, it was also strongly influenced by the wool manufacturer Benjamin Gott, a central figure in the local Tory milieu, who became the first president of the school in December 1824.40 Although the sponsors of the school, which was soon renamed the Mechanics’ Institute, came primarily from among the ranks of the Liberals, whose influence grew over time, Conservative supporters still played a significant role for a long time. With Gott, they counted among the school’s largest donors. Likewise, Dr Adam Hunter, a long-time member of the school’s board and an

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active teacher, also belonged to the city’s Conservative milieu. Moreover, the Leeds Intelligencer as well as the liberal Leeds Mercury also supported the establishment of the craftsmen’s school. At the end of the 1820s, the conservative paper distanced itself from the institute for a few years after a conflict with the Baines family. However, this move did not end Conservative support for the school altogether.41 Beginning in the 1840s, the Leeds Intelligencer once again reportedly regularly on the Mechanics’ Institute in Leeds and similar schools in neighbouring towns with good intentions.42 Unlike in Leeds, the Mechanics’ Institute in Bolton, founded in 1825, quickly came to be dominated by Liberals and Radicals at the end of the 1820s. As a result, most local Conservatives boycotted the school. In 1825, however, many wealthy Tory families had made generous donations to the school. As demands for suffrage reform circled around the institute, they then withdrew their financial support. A few Conservatives did remain active on the board into the 1840s, which ensured for partisan neutrality on paper.43 The Conservative boycott of the school for several years, moreover, did not reflect a fundamental rejection of education for the lower classes. As money was collected for a new school building in 1846, both Conservative manufacturers as well as the employees in their factories made substantial contributions. As the planning phase continued, the Conservatives also sought to gain influence over the programme of courses and the management of the school. The Tories, for instance, advocated against the establishment of a school for children within the Mechanics’ Institute because they fundamentally disagreed with the idea of non-confessional schools. Moreover, they wanted to prevent the schools that had been run by employers from turning into an association open to the public that would be broadly funded by the fees paid for other courses. The conflict was resolved through a suggestion made by Reverend Slade to found a comparable Church Institute that was tied to the Anglican Church. After a crisis within the cotton industry at the end of the 1840s made it impossible to generate the necessary funding for such plans, the Church Institute was opened in 1855 with the help of Conservative donors. Liberal Nonconformists, on the other hand, were able to fund an annex building for the Mechanics’ Institute that same year.44 The Conservative elites in Bolton and Leeds did not want to prohibit the expansion of schools and other educational opportunities, but rather to ensure their continued influence over these institutions in order to prevent their money from being used to support the interests of Radicals or Liberals. Whether or not they were able to find a compromise with their Liberal opponents within the existing Mechanics’ Institutes or whether they built competing educational institutions is of secondary importance. The main point is that middle-class Tories, just like their Liberal counterparts, wanted to foster the educational ambitions of workers and employees; by and large, they also sought to do so using the same means.45 But because the Mechanics’ Institutes and other adult education

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initiatives could only reach a small proportion of the English lower classes, the strong Conservative commitment to the public propagation of education and religion as well as self-improvement and personal initiative must have widened the gap between local Tories and plebeian groups with their interest in more popular forms of traditional customs and leisure activities. Consequently, from the perspective of much of the population, most of the Conservatives were not seen as defenders of a coarse ‘Beer and Britannia’ mentality, but rather as defenders of middle-class morality who preached moral reform, respectable ways of living and the avoidance of drink as the way to improve an individual’s social situation. Therefore, the battle lines in the debates over the respectability and moral reform of the English lower classes were not drawn between a puritanical Liberal camp on the one hand and a licentious Conservative political camp on the other. This perspective makes it easier to understand why the Operative Conservative Associations so vehemently emphasized the connection between conservative convictions and unquestionably moral behaviour at their banquets and other events. The Liberal portrayal of the operatives as thankless drunkards and easily bought toadeaters was supposed to make the Conservative mobilization of groups within the lower classes look like a grievous affront against the values otherwise propagated by the municipal elite regardless of their individual party preferences. As a result, these accusations had to be countered with the moral language of respectability and not with an aggressive ‘Beer and Britannia’ strategy. Accordingly, the speeches held by Conservative leaders before the operative associations in which they advocated patriotism and the defence of the constitution were always full of references to the respectability, morality and decency of their positions. Even the link between public morality, personal integrity and independence usually associated with the Nonconformist/Liberal camp was not missing from this Conservative rhetoric. In Leeds, for example, William Paul noted at the first assembly of the operative association that for him, as an ordinary man, Conservatism was a source of personal strength and self-assertion.46 Conservative workers, explained a speaker in Barnsley in 1838, could finally express their convictions independently and without fear thanks to the operative associations.47 Similarly, Edward Milnes explained to his audience in Pudsey shortly thereafter that it was really the Conservatives who made it possible for craftsmen to ‘live respectable and respected’. He had also explained earlier on that an operative Conservative constantly wanted to better himself as well as his own situation and that of his neighbour and the whole country. The operatives, he maintained, did not worship the ‘God’ of a full belly as their Whig-Radical opponents claimed.48 Accordingly, speeches delivered before operative audiences almost always noted that those in attendance, as well as Conservatives on the whole, were ‘men of respectability’ and that the operative association was a ‘respectable body’.49 Admittedly, the language of the speeches alone could not disarm the accusations of the Liberals completely. It would have been entirely plausible that the

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assemblies of the association, regardless of the speeches that were generally given by local Conservatives from higher circles and not by the rank-and-file membership, appealed to the plebeian public first and foremost because of the free food and generous amount of drink provided. As noted in other chapters, the meetings of the Operative Conservative Associations often ended with music and dancing, taking on a festive tone.50 At the beginning of the club’s anniversary dinner in Leeds in 1837, William Paul asserted that not one drunkard or licentious member was present, but he also had to admit that sometimes festive events like the night’s dinner could get a little out of hand. Consequently, when he reminded his audience that morality, moderation and sobriety were Conservative ideals, his words were probably not merely an expression of conviction, but also a much-needed appeal for a civilized celebration.51 Given that the reports on the meetings only generally covered the applause for the speeches as well as the jovial and harmonious atmosphere, however, little can be said about the actual behaviour of those present. This does not mean that the sweeping accusations made by political opponents should not be taken with a grain of salt. It seems highly improbable that these lengthy meetings, at which vicars, MPs, employers and civil servants as well as the occasional worker proclaimed the importance of the constitution and religion as well as morality and respectability, would be full of excess. After all, rowdy drinking and other festive rituals would have completely undermined the message that the association was trying to convey. Remarks such as those made by William Paul seem to indicate that the calls for abstinence, moderation and moral reform were not always as favourably received by the audience for which they were intended as Conservative appeals in the name of patriotism. It was not a popular ‘Beer and Britannia’ campaign that drew men to join the clubs; rather, despite the not-so appealing moralistic tone of the local elites, the rank-and-file membership of the associations identified first and foremost with the political goals of the association. At the very least, these events sponsored by the operative associations did not suggest that prominent local Tories, who otherwise pleaded for moderation, abstinence and respectability, like their Liberal colleagues, changed their tune to one of celebration and the ritual of drink as well as the right of an Englishman to his beer just to attract lower class support. The only detectable change in tone among the Conservative elites appears in relation to studies on police intervention in public celebrations and the traditional, if not rather coarse, amusements of popular culture. It seems as if middleclass Tories were more influenced than their political opponents by the idea that a fundamental change in the character of the masses could only be achieved by understanding the need for traditional plebeian cultures of every-day life and celebration. Accordingly, Tory-dominated councils and Conservative magistrates were generally more reluctant to take decisive measures to ensure order and safety when it came to events such as the uncontrolled fireworks on Guy Fawkes Day or

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deplored practices such as bull baiting and cockfighting.52 This does not indicate, however, that there was any kind of fundamental dissonance between Liberal and Conservative circles when dealing with the English lower classes in the conflict over public morality. Likewise, it does not imply that the Conservative elites pursued an entirely different tactic in order to increase their appeal among workers. To the contrary, well into the second half of the nineteenth century, the Conservatives did not directly foster a ‘Beer and Britannia’ mentality.

The Family, Domesticity and the Political Mobilization of Women Regardless of the involvement of Conservative elites in the ‘moral reform’ of the English, the ‘Englishman’ and his customs were a key element within the widespread conservative variant of popular constitutionalism. As already pointed out in chapter 2, Tory politicians increasingly incorporated the ‘nation’ into their rhetoric in order to emphasize the particular loyalty associated with conservative ideas as opposed to radical forms of patriotism. But to what extent was there a specifically conservative idea of gender relations embedded in this image of the nation? Was the Tory ‘Englishman’ first and foremost an English man? Existing scholarship on the importance of gender in the conservative mobilization of social groups among the lower classes seems to suggest that answer is ‘yes’. In his study on the late nineteenth century, Jon Lawrence has detected a fundamental shift in the dominant male image within Conservative electoral propaganda around 1906.53 At this time, he maintains, the ‘honest labourer who had earned the right to a quiet pint’ was first replaced by the ‘honest family man who had earned the right to a quiet home life’.54 Until this point, Lawrence argues that the language of a patriotic, loyal, but also rustic, drink-loving Englishman stood at the heart of Tory rhetoric. Given the lack of a clear ‘Beer and Britannia’ strategy in the early nineteenth century, however, the question remains as to whether this impression also holds true for the period up to 1870. Kathryn Gleadle has shown, at least for the middle class, that Conservative propaganda in the first half of the century was also imbued with evangelical notions of domesticity, with the conscious intention of attracting female support. Moreover, she notes, women themselves were also quite involved in the propagation of these ideas.55 Whereas the great significance of traditional patriarchal notions of the family in conjunction with protests against the New Poor Law in 1834 has already been touched upon, the rather indiscriminate reports in the available sources on the crowds and plebeian activists involved in local political conflicts made it largely impossible to touch upon the specific role of women. That said, however, women definitely left their mark on the many activities discussed in earlier chapters – from the celebrations of the monarchy to the confessional conflicts, the political

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activities of the operative associations, the Orange lodges or the social protest movements, women were always present in one way or another. Conservative organizations, newspapers and politicians were also highly aware of this fact over the entire time period in question. As early as the conflicts surrounding the Queen Caroline Affair at the beginning of the 1820s, crowds of women among the plebeian radicals were mobilized in women’s associations, fuelled by the outrage over the degrading treatment of the first woman of the state by her husband. Conservative counter-strategies propagated a domestic ideal of the family that appealed to women in particular and sought to bind women actively to the Tory cause despite the fact that they relegated women to a merely passive role in politics.56 Initially, pamphlets and newspapers emphasized the purely private nature of the conflict over George IV’s attempts to divorce his wife while also questioning Caroline’s reputation by hinting that her supposedly scandalous sex life was an offence against her wifely duty to remain true to her husband. Simultaneously, the conservatives spoke of modesty, reticence and moral decency as specifically female traits that were indispensable for the preservation of political order and the continued existence of the family as an institution. Accordingly, from a conservative perspective, Caroline’s unconditional fight for recognition as the legitimate queen and her rights as a woman undermined this interpretation of the role of women in society and it threatened the influential position of women within the family. Conservative reactions to the liberal and radical support for the queen thus drew upon this understanding of clearly defined gender roles in which women were to stay within the domestic sphere. Over the last twenty years or so, studies on the role of women in the social protest movements and radical workers’ organizations have shown that the notion of ‘separate spheres’ resonated among much of the Liberal and Radical camp as well. Similarly, scholars have noted that these ideas were also borne by women in unions or Chartist circles. In many cases, the interests of working-class women were not as compatible with the struggle for fundamental legal equality for women as they were with demands for prohibitions on women’s work outside the home alongside fair wages for men. Indeed, the popularity of such notions in the years after the Queen Caroline Affair contributed significantly to the dampening of women’s active political participation in reformist circles.57 Conservative publications and Tory politicians who argued with positive portrayals of the domestic role of women appealed to women in a way similar to that of the reformers. For example, in political conflicts such as the fight for the Factory Acts, all those involved coupled their political demands with the promise of better living conditions for social groups among the lower classes, which generated a broad base of support from plebeian women in turn. Consequently, conservative newspapers and Tory politicians appealed to women during election campaigns and other political conflicts to use their influence over their husbands, sons or brothers in order to sway them to support Tory

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candidates or Conservative interests. The contradiction created between this widespread ideal of domestic motherhood accompanied by women’s political reticence and such calls for women to use their political influence in the interests of the Conservatives was not easily overlooked, but this did not stop this message from appearing on placards and in pamphlets. Many men within Conservative circles were convinced that women could strongly influence the political attitudes of their menfolk, whether voters or non-voters. As Charles Wilkins explained before the Bolton Operative Conservative Association in June 1836, ‘the best way to a man’s brain was through his stomach, and the best way to his heart was through his wife’.58 The Operative Conservative Associations – which only allowed male members at first – thus made a conscious effort to make the events they sponsored attractive to women. They often invited ‘ladies and sweethearts’ to attend assemblies with their plebeian men and many of these meetings ended with music and dancing.59 As their understanding of women’s roles did not differ fundamentally from the ideal of domesticity espoused by Liberals and Radicals, most Conservative spokesmen sought to counter the strategies of their opponents by charging that liberal policies and radical attacks on constitutional institutions were an indirect assault on family life, the domestic sphere and women’s interests. Typical arguments along these lines can be found in the pages of newspapers like the John Bull. At the zenith of the reform crisis in 1832, for example, it printed large excerpts from pamphlets in which an ‘Englishwoman’ appealed to the ‘females of Great Britain’ using dramatic language full of warnings against the threat that radical agitation presented to the Church and a woman’s role as the defender of the family.60 The pamphlet also noted that women, because of their particular vulnerability and their natural inclination to take care of the household, the family and their marriages without regard for their own needs, needed the support and advocacy provided by religion and the Church more than men. The reform movements, it further claimed, presented a greater threat to these institutions than anything else. Likewise, the pamphlet noted that the downfall of religion brought a host of far-reaching dangers, including the loss of religious support at key turning points in life, such as baptisms, weddings, and funerals as well as the dissolution of family values, including those that kept men faithful to their wives.61 Thus, from a conservative point of view, radical reform efforts undermined domesticity and endangered traditional female ways of life, despite the fact that these reformers did not directly call for the redefinition of women’s place in society. For conservative authors, it was clear that most women accepted traditional gender roles without question. Admittedly, these kinds of explicit and detailed descriptions of conservative views on the role of women and the family usually appeared in longer pamphlets, newspapers and magazines intended for a more educated female audience, which mostly likely only trickled down to plebeian women in exceptional cases.62 More

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significant channels of communication for lower-class women were campaign placards or the speeches held by Conservative politicians before assemblies of the Operative Conservative Associations in which the dangers of Whig Liberalism for women, for example, were at least implicitly mentioned. Likewise, these mediums often drew direct connections between women and Conservative politics. In the mid 1830s, for example, Conservative speakers spread the notion among operatives that the much-hated Irish Catholic leader and Liberal politician Daniel O’Connell had supposedly lumped English women in with prostitutes in a speech he held in Cork. Even in 1841, similar accusations appeared on a campaign placard in Bradford addressed explicitly to women that warned that the election of Whigs and Radicals presented a grave danger to women.63 Conservative operatives also heard speeches that emphasized the positive role of women in marriage and the family as well as the beneficial influence of the female gender for men as well as society as a whole. Naturally, statements like these were consciously linked to demonstrations of women’s affinity to the Conservative cause such as the dedication of flags or other insignia in the name of the local ‘ladies’.64 Conservative values were depicted as a family matter, passed from mothers to children and from wives to husbands. In Leeds in 1838, for example, Richard White thanked the many mothers who had been a blessing for their unlucky sons with radical fathers as they had made a great effort to imbue these sons with conservative values and rescued them for the ‘holy cause’.65 Whereas remarks like these were intended to win those men present over to the Tory cause as knights protecting women, the implicit message for the ladies in attendance, sitting separately, was that they were inherently conservative in nature and that their interests were thus best protected by a Conservative victory. In some cities, the local Conservatives went to even greater lengths to gain support among women by forming women’s groups within the Operative Conservative Associations. At a meeting of the operatives in Bolton, for example, the establishment of women’s groups across the board was already suggested in 1836; donations to support the creation of a local women’s group were collected at the same time.66 Whether a women’s Operative Conservative Association was actually established in Bolton cannot be determined with certainty. Two years later, as part of a general critique of the Conservative operatives, the liberal Bolton Free Press implied that the women who had joined the newly created Grand Protestant Federation Female Society in Chowbent were nothing less than members of the Orange Order.67 A women’s lodge within the Orange Order would nevertheless indicate that women’s organizations with links to the Conservative milieu were being established and that they mostly appealed to women from lower social classes. Such seemingly minor references suggest that the Conservatives made an effort to create local women’s associations, even if these women’s groups were not that important in the city’s political conflicts and therefore not worthy of much mention in the local press. In nearby Rochdale, for example, several small

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Female Conservative Sick and Burial Associations existed in the 1840s. Similarly, for Bolton and other towns in Lancashire, references appear in the 1850s that indicate that there were relatively large, explicitly Conservative women’s associations that offered help in times of need, but also took part in demonstrations and parades carrying banners and party flags. At least in terms of social welfare, which was an integral part of associational life for workers and other plebeian groups in Conservative clubs, the initiatives to establish women’s organizations seem to have borne fruit.68 Just how successful these endeavours were and what kind of contribution plebeian women made to the Conservative cause is difficult to assess. Regardless of what the rhetoric of gender roles may have done for the Tory cause, the fact remains that traditional notions of the family, coupled with express appeals to women and the ideal of domestic respectability, were definitely a part of the conservative rhetoric used at all levels of political conflict in the first half of the nineteenth century. In contrast, the world of the ‘honest worker with his right to enjoyments’ played a mostly insignificant role well into the 1860s. These ideas were largely relegated to the sidelines as references to religious duties and family values as well as the constant participation of local Conservative elites in efforts at individual and collective moral reform took centre stage. But they did not completely disappear from the scene. Despite the rhetoric of moral improvement, domesticity and respectability, there were always conservative voices like that of the John Bull for whom temperance and excessively puritan morality bordered on treason against Britannia. Even William Paul’s careful admonishments to exercise restraint at the assemblies of the Operative Conservative Association in Leeds reveal that drink played a role in the meetings of the clubs, which often spilled over into rather jovial evenings. The reports of wild excesses of drink among Conservative workers propagated by Liberals and Radicals, however, were surely exaggerated. Conservative elites were more restrained when it came to sending out a message of middle-class morality and puritan respectability in their appeals to the broad masses of the population. Likewise, they knew how to use the organization of festive agricultural fairs to their own ends, especially in the countryside. This ambivalence between calls for moral reform in keeping with Victorian ideals of social improvement on the one hand, and a general tolerance of folk celebrations and other popular traditions on the other, was useful in attracting the rank and file of religious groups such as the Methodists, with their stern moral principles for the Conservative cause, without scaring away rather coarse factory workers who enjoyed a pint or two at the end of the day. Quite certainly, the Conservatives did not adopt a one-sided masculine ‘Beer and Britannia’ strategy when it came to winning support among the English lower classes. Barrels of beer and patriotic slogans alone did not woo workers, both male and female, to take up with the Conservative cause.

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Notes 1. See B. Harrison, Drink and the Victorians: The Temperance Question in England 1815–1872 (London: Faber and Faber, 1971); L.L. Shiman, Crusade Against Drink in Victorian England (New York: Macmillan, 1988); and J. Greenaway, Drink and British Politics since 1830: A Study in Policy-Making (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003). 2. John Bull, 22 July 1838. 3. See R. Poole, Popular Leisure; Windscheffel, ‘Villa Toryism’; M. Roberts, ‘Popular Conservatism’; and idem, ‘Constructing’. 4. See Lawrence, ‘Class and Gender’. 5. For a general overview, see M.J.D. Roberts, Making English Morals: Voluntary Association and Moral Reform in England, 1787–1886 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004); on the centrality of the term ‘respectability’ in terms of identity construction in late Victorian society, see also Laqueur, Religion; P. Bailey, ‘“Will the Real Bill Banks Please Stand Up?” A Role Analysis of Victorian Working Class Respectability’, Journal of Social History 12 (1979), 336–53; F.M.L. Thompson, The Rise of Respectable Society: A Social History of Britain, 1830–1900 (London: Fontana, 1988); S. Cordery, ‘Friendly Societies and the Discourse of Respectability in Britain, 1825–1875’, Journal of British Studies 34 (1995), 35–58; and M.J. Huggins, ‘More Sinful Pleasures? Leisure, Respectability and the Male Middle Class in Victorian England’, Journal of Social History 33 (2000), 585–600. 6. See P. Joyce, Popular Toryism; idem, ‘Factory Politics’; and idem, Work, Society and Politics. 7. The most prominent example of a paternalist manufacturer was the Liberal Titus Salt who built an extensive model village for his textile factory workers near Bradford; see J. Reynolds, The Great Paternalists: Titus Salt and the Growth of Nineteenth-Century Bradford (London: M. Temple Smith, 1983). 8. See P. Joyce, Work, esp. ch. 8. 9. See P. Taylor, Popular Politics, ch. 6. On the debate over the significance of paternalism in England in the nineteenth century, see D. Roberts, Paternalism; H.I. Dutton and J.E. King, ‘The Limits of Paternalism: The Cotton Tyrants of North Lancashire, 1836–1854’, Social History 7 (1982), 59–74; H. Hubermann, ‘The Economic Origins of Paternalism: Lancashire Cotton Spinning in the First Half of the Nineteenth Century’, Social History 12 (1987), 177–92; idem, ‘The Economic Origins of Paternalism: Reply to Rose, Taylor and Winstanley’, Social History 14 (1989), 99–103; M. Rose et al., ‘The Economic Origins of Paternalism: Some Objections’, Social History 14 (1989), 89–98; and Randall and Newman, ‘ Protest’. 10. Letter from Heywood to the Bolton Free Press, 6 June 1836, Bolton Local Studies Library, Heywood Papers, ZHE 26/3, no. 125. See also the report on the annual meeting in the Bolton Chronicle, 4 June 1836. 11. See, for example, Bolton Chronicle, 14 January 1837 (speech by John Roby, chairman) and 15 July 1837 (speech by Hulton). 12. P. Taylor, Popular Politics, 186–87. On Egerton, see also D. Roberts, Paternalism, 219–20; on the Ashworths, see R. Boyson, The Ashworth Cotton Enterprise: The Rise and Fall of a Family Firm 1818–1880 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970). 13. Bolton Chronicle, 7 August 1852. 14. See, for example, Leeds Intelligencer, 3 January 1820 (Christmas celebration of miners) and 24 February 1838 (celebration in Huddersfield in honour of John Armitage reaching his majority); Halifax Guardian, 30 April 1842 (the retirement of a ‘manager’ of the Bowling Iron Works). 15. Leeds Intelligencer, 7 August 1820; Leeds Mercury, 12 August 1820. 16. Leeds Intelligencer, 6 March 1820; John Bull, 4 June 1837. 17. B.D.A. Lewis, ‘Bourgeois Ideology’, 292–94; see also F.M.L. Thompson, Rise, 212–13.

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18. This was the initial interpretation of such phenomena suggested by proponents of the labouraristocracy thesis; see the introduction. For a detailed overview of the historiography on this subject, see Kirk, Change, ch. 5 19. See, for example, John Bull, 15 October 1821 (celebration at Walmer’s Court), 1 November 1829 (Lord Elden’s call to lower rents), 21 October 1832 (celebration of the majority of Lord Boscawen), 21 October 1838 (celebration for the farm labourers of Lord Barham), 18 November 1838 (Lord Braybooke’s call for higher wages for farm labourers in Essex), and 17 December 1838 (calls for higher wages from Cowfold, Sussex). See also Leeds Intelligencer, 23 July 1829 (fair in Bramley). 20. N. Goddard, ‘Agricultural Literature and Societies’, in G.E. Mingay (ed.), The Agrarian History of England and Wales, 1750–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 370–72. 21. See, for example, the honorary addresses of the East Surrey Agricultural Association in John Bull, 14 October 1838. 22. P. Horn, The Rural World 1780–1850: Social Change in the English Countryside (New York: Hutchinson, 1980), 213. The list of newly founded organizations under Conservative leadership as well as the Conservative ‘take over’ of existing societies provided by Horn can easily be extended. John Bull, for example, reported on new agricultural societies in Middlesex and Hinckford (14 October 1838), Devon (28 October 1838), Cheshire, Suffolk and the Isle of Sheppey (11 November 1838). The Sussex Agricultural Express also noted the establishment of associations in Sussex (19 June 1841) and Surrey (30 October 1841). In Yorkshire, the Leeds Intelligencer, for instance on 7 September 1838, reported on the activities of agricultural societies; at the beginning of the 1850s, similar organizations also appeared in Lancashire (Bolton Chronicle, 12 October 1850). 23. See Horn, Rural World, 213; for a general overview of the Swing riots, see E. Hobsbawm and G. Rudé, Captain Swing (London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1969). 24. John Bull, 1 October 1837. 25. Horn, Rural World, 213. 26. On Stowell’s efforts on behalf of the temperance movement, see Marsden, Memoirs; and Bullock, Stowell. 27. B. Harrison, Drink, 280–82; and Shiman, Crusade, 218. 28. B. Harrison, Drink, 75–80. 29. Yates, ‘Religious Life’, 265; and B. Harrison, Drink, 105. 30. Leeds Intelligencer, 8 December 1831, 5 July 1832 and 15 November 1834; Leeds Mercury, 17 December 1831 and 7 July 1832. 31. Leeds Intelligencer, 19 October 1850. 32. B. Harrison, Drink, 95 and 105. 33. Bolton Chronicle, 17 December 1831. 34. P. Taylor, Popular Politics, 200-202. Although Taylor notes in detail the great influence of the Conservative circles within the societies, he still sees the temperance movement in general as an element that contributed to the establishment of a ‘liberal consensus’ among plebeian and middle-class reformers; however, he fails to provide convincing evidence for his argument in this respect. 35. For examples of the activities of the society, see, for example, Bolton Chronicle, 5 August 1837, 4 August 1838, 2 August 1851, 17 July 1858 and 13 July 1861. See also P. Taylor, Popular Politics, 202–3. 36. See Taylor, Popular Politics, 202–3; and R. Poole, Popular Leisure, 41. It must be noted, however, that until 1869, the city authorities had no way to control the increasing number of beer halls because the halls did not need a special licence like the public houses. 37. See E. Royle, ‘Mechanics’ Institutes and the Working Classes, 1840–1860’, Historical Journal 14 (1971), 305–21; J.F.C. Harrison, Living and Learning, 1790–1960: A Study in the History

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of the English Adult Education Movement (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961); M. Tylecote, The Mechanics’ Institutes of Lancashire and Yorkshire before 1851 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1957); and A. Firth, ‘Culture and Wealth Creation: Mechanics’ Institutes and the Emergence of Political Economy in Early Nineteenth-Century Britain’, History of Intellectual Culture 5 (2005), 1–14. 38. For a recent account, see A. Firth, ‘Culture’, 7 and 11. See also G. Wright, ‘Discussions of the Characteristics of Mechanics’ Institutes in the Second Half of the Nineteenth Century: The Bradford Example’, Journal of Educational Administration and History 33 (2001), 14; T. Kelly, A History of Adult Education in Great Britain (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1970), 123; and Tylecote, Mechanics’ Institutes, 63. 39. On Halifax, see L. Parr, ‘The Library of the Halifax Mechanics’ Institution’, Library History 7 (1987), 177–86; and T. Iwama, ‘Voluntary Societies and the Urban Local Community: A Case Study of the Halifax Mechanics’ Institution’, Family and Community History 11 (2008), 17–25. Even Tylecote mentions significant Tory support for the Mechanics’ Institutes in her examination of Liverpool in Mechanics’ Institutes, 19–21. 40. See A.D. Garner and E.W. Jenkins, ‘The English Mechanics’ Institutes: The Case of Leeds, 1824–1842’, History of Education 13 (1984), 139–52. 41. Ibid., 145. 42. Leeds Intelligencer, 22 February 1845, 25 October 1845, 21 December 1850, 25 January 1851, 5 June 1851 and 5 June 1852. 43. P. Taylor, Popular Politics, 194–96; and Tylecote, Mechanics’ Institutes, 63–64. 44. P. Taylor, Popular Politics, 194–96. 45. The Christian missionary societies should also be noted in this regard because although they were less successful, they definitely had more Conservative support for their activities in working-class neighbourhoods; see D.M. Lewis, Lighten Their Darkness: The Evangelical Mission to Working-Class London, 1828–1860 (New York: Greenwood Press, 1986); and Wolffe, Protestant Crusade, ch. 5. 46. Leeds Intelligencer, 28 November 1835. 47. Leeds Intelligencer, 8 December 1838 (speech by Smith). 48. Leeds Intelligencer, 4 May 1839. 49. Leeds Intelligencer, 20 May 1837 (speech by Rev. Furbank: ‘Conservatives are men of principle, men of integrity, men of character, and men of respectability however humble their condition in life may be’); see also the speeches of William Paul in Leeds (18 April 1838) and Mr Potts in Pudsey (5 May 1838). 50. See chapter 2. 51. Leeds Intelligencer, 1 April 1837. 52. On the conflicts over the tradition of popular sports, see R.W. Malcolmson, Popular Recreations in English Society 1700–1850 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973); P. Bailey, Leisure and Class in Victorian England: Rational Recreation and the Contest for Control, 1830–1885 (London: University of Toronto Press, 1978); and Griffin, England’s Revelry. 53. See Lawrence, ‘Class and Gender’. 54. Ibid., 650. 55. K. Gleadle, ‘Charlotte Elizabeth Tonna and the Mobilization of Tory Women in Early Victorian England’, Historical Journal 50 (2007), 97–117; see also S. Richardson, ‘Independence and Deference: A Study of the Electorate of the West Riding of Yorkshire, 1832–1841’, PhD dissertation, University of Leeds, 1995, ch. 4; and eadem, ‘The Role of Women in Electoral Politics in the West Riding of Yorkshire in the 1830s’, Northern History 32 (1996), 133–51. 56. See especially Fulcher, ‘Loyalist Response’; see also T. Hunt, ‘Morality and Monarchy in the Queen Caroline Affair’, Albion 23 (1991), 697–722; and A. Clark, Scandal.

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57. On the problems associated with ‘domesticity’ and women’s roles, especially within the radical reform movements, see the path-breaking studies of S. Alexander, ‘Women’s Work in Nineteenth-Century London, 1820s–1860s’, in J. Mitchell and A. Oakley (eds), The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 59–111; and D. Thompson, ‘Women and Nineteenth-Century Radical Politics: A Lost Dimension’, in J. Mitchell and A. Oakley (eds), The Rights and Wrongs of Women (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976), 112–38. These have been followed by numerous other studies; see especially J. Wolff, ‘The Culture of Separate Spheres: The Role of Culture in Nineteenth-Century Public and Private Life’, in J. Seed and J. Wolff (eds), The Culture of Capital: Art, Power and Nineteenth-Century Middle Class (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1988), 117–34; A. Clark, ‘The Rhetoric of Chartist Domesticity: Gender, Language and Class in the 1830s and 1840s’, Journal of British Studies 31 (1992), 62–88; eadem, Struggle; S.O. Rose, Limited Livelihoods: Gender and Class in Nineteenth-Century England (London: Routledge, 1992); and D. Wahrman, ‘“Middle Class” Domesticity Goes Public: Gender, Class and Politics from Queen Caroline to Queen Victoria’, Journal of British Studies 32 (1993), 396–432. See also Fulcher, ‘Gender’; C. Hall, White, Male and Middle Class: Explorations in Feminism and History (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1992); K. Ittmann, Work, Gender and Family in Victorian England (Basingstoke: New York University Press, 1995); H. Rogers, ‘From “Monster Meetings” to “Fire-Side Virtues”: Radical Women and the “People” in the 1840s’, Journal of Victorian Culture 4 (1999), 52–75; S.K. Kent, Gender and Power in Britain, 1640–1990 (London: Routledge, 1999); and C.M. Parrat, ‘More than Mere Amusement’: Working-Class Women’s Leisure in England, 1750–1914 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2001). 58. Bolton Chronicle, 4 June 1836. The importance that local party managers, regardless of their political orientation, attributed to the wives of voters as well as non-voters when it came to the ballot and the results of the elections has been pointed out by M. Cragoe, ‘“Jenny Rules the Roost”: Women and Electoral Politics, 1832–1868’, in K. Gleadle and S. Richardson (eds), Women in British Politics 1760–1860: The Power of the Petticoat (Basingstoke: St Martin’s Press, 2000), 153–68. 59. See, for example, Leeds Intelligencer, 5 May 1838, 4 August 1838 and 4 May 1839; Bolton Chronicle, 12 November 1836, 15 July 1837, 15 September 1838 and 10 August 1861. 60. John Bull, 22 April 1832, 4 November 1832 and 2 December 1832. 61. John Bull, 22 April 1832. 62. The second pamphlet addressed to the ‘Females of Great Britain’, for example, referred to the role of the lady of the house in educating children as well as those employed in the house, including the maids; as such, it was quite obviously intended for upper-middle-class readers and not working-class women. See also John Bull, 4 November 1832. 63. See, for example, Bolton Chronicle, 4 June 1836 (speech by Charles Rothwell) and campaign placard ‘To the Women of Great Britain’, Bradford Archive, Election Material, Deed Box 13, case 36, no. 9. 64. See, for example, Leeds Intelligencer, 5 May 1838 and 4 August 1838; The Times, 14 November 1836. 65. Leeds Intelligencer, 4 August 1838. 66. Bolton Chronicle, 4 June 1836. 67. Bolton Free Press, 25 August 1838. On the occasional establishment of particularly female lodges within the Orange Order, see MacRaild, Faith. 68. Bolton Chronicle, 9 November 1844, 8 November 1845, 6 June 1846, 1 February 1851 and 26 July 1851.

Conclusion

When Edmund Burke warned against the rule of the ‘swinish multitude’ in his Reflections on the Revolution in France, published in 1790, he was confronted with angry protests written by radical and Jacobite authors outraged over his disrespect for the people who invoked the rage of the offended ‘swine’ against their selfrighteous rulers.1 Presumably, Burke had not expected such a massive reaction to his choice of words. Nor did the flood of pamphlets in response do much to change his dismissive opinion of the ideas of the French Revolution and demands for broader public participation in politics. Well into the late nineteenth century, moreover, the great majority of leading Conservative politicians in Parliament shared Burke’s fears that any step toward the democratization of the English constitution would not only bring an end to English society, with all its traditional structures, but also spell the death knell for the English Conservatives in politics. Regardless of the attempts made at the end of the nineteenth century to portray the Tories as the natural party of the people dedicated to protecting social justice and the bonds between the old elites and the majority of the population along the lines of a ‘Tory democracy’, nineteenth-century Conservative leaders saw themselves as a bulwark against reforms and watched the political awakening of ordinary Englishmen with great trepidation. Even the Conservative Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli who took his famous ‘leap in the dark’ with the Second Reform Act in 1867 adopted a rather defensive strategy against further reforms that was largely shaped by tactical considerations. The fear that the era of the voting masses marked the end of the Conservative Party was most prevalent within the House of Lords. The Earl of Northumberland wrote: ‘Lord Derby and Disraeli … have let in the mob on us’.2 But these reservations among the parliamentary elite of the party appear to be quite unfounded well before 1867, if the political conflicts between Conservatives and Liberals as well as Radicals below the parliamentary level are taken into account. Their fears were largely based on old stereotypes about newly enfranchised voters from the lower middle class and the working classes. Especially as the split in the party in 1846 brought an end to the initial efforts to foster a broad organizational bond between Conservatives and social groups from the lower classes in the form of Operative Conservative Associations, it was not easy Notes from this chapter begin on page 265.

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to dissuade the parliamentary elite of their prejudices against plebeians. Correspondingly, the idea of a Conservative mobilization of a broad base of popular support did not play any role as the party deliberated reforms in 1867, despite the fact that individual Conservative politicians like Lord Stanley had recognized the potential for such a step in the 1850s and 1860s.3 In 1867, the party leaders saw themselves with no alternative but to introduce reforms, especially because they did not want to leave any decisions up to their political opponents. The local studies from Bolton and Leeds as well as London and numerous other English cities and towns, however, have repeatedly demonstrated the significance of conservative views at the level of popular politics. The celebrations of the monarchy and local elections as well as local political conflicts attest to the great popularity of a conservative understanding of the constitution. Moreover, the defence of the constitution was a decisive weapon in the battle to win a political majority at the local level and attract support from among the population at large. Conservative positions revolved around loyalty to the monarchy and trust in the country’s institutions on the one hand and the belief in the greatness of the English nation and its Protestant character on the other. Likewise, they encompassed a notion of social justice between rich and poor as well as the adherence to traditional structures in the realms of work, celebration and daily life. Yet there was hardly ever a closed ideological programme attached to popular conservatism despite such discursive threads. These main points were most clearly articulated within social spaces in which the English lower classes were integrated relatively early on within the Conservative camp, and local political conflicts such as on the hustings and in organizations like the Operative Conservative Associations or the lodges of the Orange Order. But these conservative attitudes appeared much more often in an indirect form, reflected in phenomena such as aggressive protests against Catholics, Guy Fawkes Day festivities on the fifth of November or outbreaks of violence between English workers and Irish immigrants. At the same time, plebeian actors within the Conservative camp often advocated or supported contradictory positions, such as those indicated by the fact that a large number of Tories supported the temperance movement despite the close ties between local public houses and Conservative politicians. Elements of conservative thought often blended with notions otherwise associated with radical or liberal tendencies that flowed into protests or demands for social reforms, making it difficult to draw the lines between political camps. Regardless of these nuances, however, there is no doubt that a popular tradition of conservatism existed in the nineteenth century that, alongside the long tradition of English radicalism so strongly emphasized by scholarship in recent decades, contributed significantly to the formation of political identities within the English lower classes. This tradition can be detected in different social

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practices and discourses that emerged between the conflicts over reforms following the French Revolution in the late eighteenth century and the Conservative electoral victories that came at end of the nineteenth century. To the surprise of many contemporaries, the Conservative Party was able to attract a majority of support among the voters newly enfranchised from 1867 onwards. The lines of this tradition were likely most clear in terms of political language and the Tory rhetoric that propagated a specifically conservative idea of loyalism and patriotism through recurring arguments and figures. Indeed, between the millions of copies of Hannah More’s writings that circulated in the 1790s or the Reeves Associations and the speeches of Conservative politicians before the Operative Conservative Associations or the calls for military volunteer associations around 1860, little changed within the language of popular conservatism. It can also be found in the songs, symbols and rituals that perpetuated the eighteenth-century slogan ‘Church and King’ well into the nineteenth century, in close association with anti-Catholic forms of ‘No Popery’ agitation. Lastly, it was linked to the different organizational attempts to bring plebeians into the ranks of the Conservatives through membership in associations with political links to the party. It was not a coincidence, for example, that the wave of newly founded Conservative Working Men’s Associations in the 1860s and 1870s was strongest in places were the first Operative Conservative Associations had prospered in the 1830s. After the split in the Conservative Party, the Orange Lodges and similar anti-Catholic organisations took the place of the decaying early workers’ associations, often thanks to overlapping membership circles. Additionally, political activities generated informal networks that could be activated at different times over the decades to mobilize support and to bring together similar groups time and time again. However, these facts have all too often been overlooked by historians. References to the unpopularity of the English monarchy for decades after the death of George III still abound in scholarly literature alongside arguments that antiCatholic sentiments were insignificant for the great majority of the English lower classes. In contrast to these statements, the tremendous potential for mobilization inherent within a conservative interpretation of the Crown and society as well as the repeated revival of warnings against Catholics cannot be underestimated. Likewise, it is important to note that positions such as these were enthusiastically welcomed by a great number of plebeians in England willing to support them with zeal after 1815, but long before 1860. The wave of loyalism sparked in the 1790s did not collapse around 1815 despite the emergence of a massive radical protest movement, nor were the Conservative electoral victories after 1867 merely the result of changing social and political structures at the end of the nineteenth century.4 Contrary to the assumptions of many historians as well as contemporary critics of the nineteenth-century Conservatives, the ‘conservative working man’ was never ‘the strangest creature imaginable’.5

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Furthermore, the support of social groups from the lower classes for Conservative politicians neither resulted from pragmatic or tactical decisions, nor socially manipulative influences coming ‘from above’ that led plebeian groups into the Conservative camp with ideological propaganda. Likewise, the prevalent argument that radical workers’ groups basically supported those Tories in the 1830s and 1840s who advocated in favour of the factory movement and the opposition to the New Poor Law never really captures the complexity of the social protest movements and the heterogeneous nature of the political world of the plebeians involved in them. Moreover, middle-class and aristocratic politicians from within the Conservative camp often reacted to changing moods among their plebeian supporters, especially, for example, when Conservative and Liberal speakers wrangled over who was closer to the Crown, and sought to match the mood in their constituencies or among assembled crowds on holidays to their interpretations of the monarchy. Sometimes political campaigns such as the protests against the Papal Aggression of 1851, which were massively supported by middle-class Conservative circles, followed spontaneous initiatives ‘from below’ that drew on established forms of anti-Catholic rituals and forced a response among local elites. Plebeian initiatives directed against local leaders and intensive internal conflicts also emerged within the organizations associated with the Conservative Party that in no way seem to indicate that the members of these associations were passive, manipulated or even forced into cooperation. Mechanisms of cooperation, negotiation and mobilization functioned in a variety of ways between social elites and plebeian activists. In many respects, these kinds of exchange processes bore a resemblance to something akin to a ‘conservatism from below’. The emphasis on such aspects and the promulgation of conservative ideas among the English lower classes, however, by no means seeks to argue the ascendancy of a long tradition of popular conservatism in England over that of more reform-oriented political trends. In political conflicts, conservative views always attracted a noteworthy minority of support among the lower classes. In addition, Conservative politicians and their followers were sometimes able to achieve individual victories thanks to a broad base of support across all social classes. Yet for the most part, plebeian conservatives stood against a clear majority of reformers, radicals, Chartists and unionists in partisan conflicts in which they sought to define the proper understanding of English society and its traditional structures. Despite its emphasis on popular conservative aspects of political culture at the level of popular politics, this book does not suggest that the English lower classes were conservative nor that conservatism was inherent within the English character. Rather, it stresses that there were many layers within the processes in which the political identities of plebeian actors were formed. Interestingly, the analysis of social and political conflicts within the context of popular conservatism has revealed that it was rather unusual for individuals to have a clearly defined and consistent political outlook. Of course, there were

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always some plebeian actors who stayed within one political camp or the other for a long time; consequently, they could articulate and represent the interests of their respective camps in a programmatic way. On the whole, however, such ‘activists’ were a minority within the Conservative as well as the Liberal-Radical camps as they were drawn from the leading circles of relatively small political associations.6 At the same time, evidence points to the fact that plebeian actors who took part in political conflicts, demonstrations or celebrations and expressed their opinions in favour of certain political positions, candidates or parties often vacillated between conservative and radical notions. Accordingly, many of them could easily switch their political affiliation.7 Despite the inconsistency of their political behaviour, plebeian actors, with their rather heterogeneous political identities, often determined the outcome of a specific political confrontation. At the same time, they often provoked commentaries from contemporaries over the ways in which moods could be changed or victories achieved by recruiting supposed political opponents. Plebeian identities were influenced by many different factors, some of which were seemingly contradictory. Local patriotism and a particular religious denomination, a certain kind of vocational ethic or the sense of community fostered by a shared place of work or a special employer, ethnic differences and family traditions that still reflected remnants of rural ways of life even in the growing cities – these and many other aspects contributed to the building of political identities among groups as well as individuals. Often, the choice to become actively involved in a political conflict was made quickly and on a situational basis. Accordingly, socioeconomic parameters have to be taken into account in order to explain the competition between different political positions or changing waves of mobilization in favour of or against certain reforms or governmental decisions. Yet these kinds of developments can only be understood fully if the heterogeneous languages and rituals and symbols that surrounded plebeian agents are taken into account when looking at their political behaviour. This attests to the relative autonomy of political communication that was stressed at the forefront of this analysis. Such communication allowed for the temporary emergence and renegotiation of alliances between seemingly contradictory identities and interests in order to mobilize political support and allow for collective action across social, religious and regional boundaries. First and foremost, however, conservative elements cannot be forgotten in any analysis of conflicts taking place at the level of popular politics. In a sense, the popular tradition of conservatism and the long lines of tradition within English radicalism form the poles of a broad spectrum of possible political opinions. Plebeian agents moved within the political space between these two extremes, but they were not statically attached to their positions. Not the least for this reason is it impossible to quantify support for conservative or radical ideas in any kind of satisfactory way.

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The extraordinary multi-dimensionality of the political realm in England is perhaps the most important hint towards an explanation of the striking stability of English society within a European comparison.8 Popular conservatism in and of itself cannot explain how England avoided a revolution. After all, broad support for loyalist religious views among great portions of the population have been documented for other European countries long before 1870, although up to the last decades of the nineteenth century such support only led to rather temporary counter-revolutionary movements. A classic example of such a movement can be found in the rebellion in the Vendée in France in 1793. Likewise, Louis Napoleon Bonaparte’s victory in the post-revolutionary presidential election in December 1848 can be read as ‘vote of no confidence’ against the Republic and the revolution coming from farmers, tenant farmers and portions of the working class.9 Loyalist religious movements also opposed revolutionary aspirations in Germany. Plebeian uprisings ‘from below’ in the name of ‘Crown and Altar’ were not insignificant when it came to suppressing the Revolution of 1848 in Prussia. Moreover, counter-revolutionary measures undertaken by conservatives combined with these popular efforts led to the foundation of numerous patriotic conservative associations which were able to mobilize members of the lowest classes for anti-revolutionary causes.10 A thorough analysis of such phenomena as well as what brought them about in a European comparison, especially with respect to the question of whether there was a ‘long tradition’ of conservative mobilization, is a subject for further research. Yet the configuration of the English political realm seems to have been particularly favourable for the development of a long conservative tradition of popular politics. Conservatives as well as radicals accepted the central role of Parliament and allotted the general public a decisive role in political conflicts. In the debates over the constitution, for example, the introduction of new institutions or principles was not on the table; rather the parties contested the arrangement of existing elements or the proper interpretation of the structures of English society accepted by all political camps. In the battles over the meaning of patriotism and liberty, monarchy and Protestantism or social justice and moral respectability, conservative and radicals all too often fought over who was defending the constitution or who was threatening to destroy it. The vocabulary in which they made their arguments sounded quite similar, making it easy to switch from one side to the other. At the same time, this shared constitutional rhetoric made it virtually impossible to exclude certain social groups from this political communication on principle. In the end, the early development of pluralistic structures made it difficult for the different political camps to maintain a steady level of mobilization. Above all, it made it quite impossible to radicalize a great number of social agents unilaterally over the long run. An appreciation for the heterogeneity and plurality of political identities among the lower classes thus opens a new perspective on English political culture in the nineteenth century.

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Notes 1. E. Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), ed. L.G. Mitchell (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 79; and D. Howard, ‘Necessary Fictions: The “Swinish Multitude” and the Rights of Man’, Studies in Romanticism 47 (2008), 161–78. 2. Quoted in Stewart, Foundation, 367. For an assessment of ideas of ‘Tory Democracy’ as well as the stances of Disraeli and leading Tory politicians on reforms, see ibid., 352–54. See also the more recent perspectives in B. Coleman, Conservatism, ch. 5, esp. 131–33; Ramsden, Appetite for Power, ch. 4 and 5; and Rödder, Radikale Herausforderung, ch. 6. 3. Stewart, Foundation, 359–60; and B. Coleman, Conservatism, 134. 4. This applies with one important exception: the patriotic national discourse of popular conservatism dealt hardly at all with colonial aspects or the empire prior to 1867, but after 1870, England’s role as a colonial power became one of the central elements of conservative rhetoric; see Cunningham, ‘Jingoism’; idem, ‘Language’; idem, ‘Conservative Party’; J. MacKenzie, Propaganda and Empire: The Manipulation of British Public Opinion, 1880–1960 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1984); R.H. MacDonald, The Language of Empire: Myths and Metaphors of Popular Imperialism, 1880–1918 (New York: Manchester University Press, 1994); and Shannon, Salisbury. In a certain sense, the lack of colonial references in the early nineteenth century and even the 1850s was one of the greatest surprises that emerged over the course of the research for this study. 5. Kirk, Change, 97. 6. For similar observations in relation to the Chartists, see R.G. Hall, ‘A United People? Leaders and Followers in a Chartist Locality, 1838–1848’, Journal of Social History 38 (2004), 179–203. 7. These kinds of identity conflicts or changes in political orientation have hardly been discussed; an exception is R. Allen, ‘The Battle for the Common: Politics and Populism in Mid-Victorian Kentish London’, Social History 22 (1997), 61–77. 8. Wirsching comes to a similar conclusion regarding the particular role of the political public for the ‘singular ability to integrate and reform’ within the political system in England, see Parlament, 12. 9. For a brief overview of the uprising in the Vendée, see R. Reichardt, Das Blut der Freiheit: Französische Revolution und demokratische Kultur Europäische Geschichte (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1999), 45. For an assessment of the elections of December 1848 and initial thoughts on the European dimensions of the conservative reaction of 1848, see W. Schwentker, ‘Der europäische Konservatismus in den Revolutionen von 1848/49’, in H. Fischer (ed.), Die ungarische Revolution von 1848/49: Vergleichende Aspekte der Revolutionen in Ungarn und Deutschland, Beiträge zur deutschen und europäischen Geschichte (Hamburg: Krämer, 1999), 119–30. 10. See, above all, M. Gailus, Straße und Brot: Sozialer Protest in den deutschen Staaten unter besonderer Berücksichtigung Preußens, 1847–1849, Veröffentlichungen des Max-Planck-Instituts für Geschichte 96 (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht, 1990), 129–30 and ch. 6; idem, ‘Die Revolution von 1848 als “Politik der Straße”’, in D. Dowe et al. (eds), Europa 1848: Revolution und Reform, Politik- und Gesellschaftsgeschichte 48 (Bonn: Dietz, 1998), 1039; and R. Hachtmann, Berlin 1848: Eine Politik- und Gesellschaftsgeschichte der Revolution, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Sozialgeschichte Braunschweig/Bonn (Bonn: Dietz, 1997), 691–93; on the foundation of Prussian associations, see W. Schwendtker, Konservative Vereine und Revolution in Preußen 1848/49: Die Konstituierung des Konservatismus als Partei, Beiträge zur Geschichte des Parlamentarismus und der politischen Parteien 85 (Düsseldorf: Droste, 1988); and M. Wettengel, ‘Parteibildung in Deutschland: Das politische Vereinswesen in der Revolution

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von 1848’, in D. Dowe et al. (eds), Europa 1848: Revolution und Reform, Politik- und Gesellschaftsgeschichte 48 (Bonn: Dietz, 1998), 715. For further examples from Bavaria and Baden in relation to the revolution of 1848, see J. Harris, ‘Rethinking the Categories of the German Revolution of 1848: The Emergence of Popular Conservatism in Bavaria’, Central European History 25 (1992), 123–48; and L. Gall, Der Liberalismus als regierende Partei: Das Großherzogtum Baden zwischen Restauration und Reichsgründung, Veröffentlichungen des Instituts für Europäische Geschichte Mainz 47 (Wiesbaden: Steiner 1968), ch. 3.

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Index

Please note: Since Bolton, Leeds and London are frequently mentioned throughout the text, general references to these cities have not been indexed. References to specific parts of these cities are listed under the cities’ names. Similarly, Lancashire and Yorkshire have not been indexed, including the West Riding of Yorkshire. Also, frequently used key terms like ‘conservatism, conservative’, ‘loyalism, loyalist’, ‘liberalism, liberal’, ‘radicalism, radical’ and ‘patriotism, patriotic’ have not been included. Bold page numbers refer to whole chapters or sections of the book. Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen (Queen), 77, 112n158 agricultural societies, 243–44 Allen, Hugh, 182–85, 187 Anti-Corn Law League, 93–94, 218–19, 225–30 Arrowsmith, Peter Rothwell, 242 Arrundel, W.A.H., 244 Ascot, 55–56, 65n73 Ashley Cooper, Anthony (Lord Ashley, Earl of Shaftesbury), 197, 200 Ashton under Lyne, 102n21, 171, 216 Ashworth (family), 242, 255n12 Austria, 180 Auty, Squire, 180, 203 Baines, Edward (senior), 46, 77, 88, 105n68, 130, 135, 151n101, 220, 245–47 Baines, Matthew Talbot, 95 Balme, Matthew, 203, 213 Barnsley, 102n21, 207, 248 Bateman, Josiah (Reverend), 209 Beckett, John (journalist), 103n35 Beckett, John (Sir, MP), 73, 82, 85, 103n36, 108nn103–105, 220–21, 227 Beckett, William (member of Leeds Operative Conservative Association), 103n35 Beckett, William (MP), 82, 94

Bedchamber Crisis (1839), 66–67, 88, 91, 99n2, 110n130 Beecroft, George Skirrow, 95, 111n150, 112n152 Belchem, John, 9–10, 28n27, 29n36 Bentham, Jeremy, 201 Bethall, Richard, 125–26 Birkenhead Riots (1850), 168–69 Birmingham, 18, 71, 134, 167 Blackburn, 101n14, 102n21, 102n25, 106n75, 171 Blackrod, 102n21 Bligh, Edward (Lord Darnley), 115 Bolling, William, 82–84, 94, 142, 204, 220–21, 232n25 Bolton Atherton, 102n21, 111n141, 111n148 Horwich, 72, 102n21, 106n75, 111n141, 224 Bonaparte, Louis-Napoléon (Emperor Napoleon III), 264 Bonham, Francis R., 69, 102n25 Booth, Alan, 6, 25n17 Booth, Richard, 152n138, 177 Bourdieu, Pierre, 15–16, 34n66 Bowen, John, 227 Bradford, 18, 43, 68, 82, 101n19, 102n21, 103n28, 109n107, 167, 175, 179–80, 203, 217–18, 222, 226, 236n104, 237n127, 238, 245, 253, 255n7

304 | Index

Brayshaw (Mr.), 46 Bridgeman (family), 148n58 Brighton, 59n2 Bristol, 38, 44, 50, 62nn22–23, 62n29, 121, 130 Brontë, Patrick, 209, 233n50 Brook, James, 231n18 Brown, Callum G., 11 bull baiting, 249–50 Bull, George Stringer (Reverend), 203, 206, 208–9, 213 Burdett, Francis (Sir), 77, 93, 111n140, 121 Burke, Edmund, 14, 259 Bury, 102n21, 223, 237n127 Busfeild, William (later Busfeild Ferrand), 82, 180, 217, 219, 226, 229 Calvert, Charles, 126 Cambridge, 155 Canetti, Elias, 58 Cannadine, David, 40–41, 61nn19–20, 110n125 Canning, George, 120, 147n27 Captain Swing Riots (1830–31), 244 Caroline of Brunswick (Queen), 41–42, 44–47, 51–54, 61n17, 63n45, 64n60, 65n70, 122–24, 157, 251 Catholicism anti-Catholicism, 11, 43–44, 48–49, 114–31, 139–45, 154–95, 208–10, 215–17, 240–41, 244, 252–53, 260–62 (see also loyalist and anti–Catholic associations) Catholic Association, 115–17 (see also O’Connell, Daniel) Catholic Emancipation, 11, 22, 43, 48–49, 51, 54–55, 94, 114–53, 157–73, 176, 208–9, 244–45 restoration of a Roman Catholic hierarchy of dioceses (“Papal Aggression”, 1850), 22, 156, 163–73, 174, 178–81, 185, 262 Chadderton, 102n21 Chartism, 2–5, 8, 16, 18, 41–42, 67, 70– 72, 86, 90, 92–93, 96, 108n107, 138–41, 144–45, 161, 166–67, 169, 172, 175, 177, 179, 196–237, 251, 262 Cheltenham Riots (1850), 169

Cheshire, 256n22 child labour, 22, 83, 85, 136, 180, 196– 215, 216–19, 221, 229 Chorley, 102n21, 106n75, 139 Chylinski (Mr.), 178, 193n111 Clark, J.C.D., 118 Cobbett, William, 115–17 Cobden, Richard, 219 Colley, Linda, 26n19, 40–41, 58, 60n16, 117–19, 128, 141 conflicts in municipal politics, 132–41, 142 about the city council, 88–89, 132–33, 136, 138–39, 225 about church rates, 132–41, 144, 154, 209 about the election of church wardens, 132–41, 184 about the vestry, 132–141, 158, 181–87, 209–10 municipal elections, 88–89, 94, 136, 138–39 Conservative Party Carlton Club, 69, 92, 110n135 Conservative Associations, 69–72, 92, 228–29 Conservative Women’s Associations, 250–54 Conservative Working Men’s Associations, 90–91, 95, 99, 173, 187, 261 Operative Conservative Associations, 8, 22, 67–68, 69–78, 78–82, 84–85, 87–88, 90–99, 127, 135–44, 159, 163, 173, 175, 177, 179–81, 196, 199, 203, 205, 208–9, 213, 217, 219, 223, 225– 30, 240–41, 248–49, 252–54, 259–61 party leadership, 7, 69, 71, 92, 139, 143, 223, 227, 229, 260 Primrose League, 7–8 Tory Ultras, 13, 44, 47, 114–18, 121–22, 131, 161, 174, 208, 244 Copleston, Edward (Bishop of Llandaff), 154, 188n1 Cork, 102n23, 253 Corn Laws and protectionism, 78, 84, 93– 94, 199, 205, 218–19, 225–30, 242, 244 Cornwall, 108n103, 121 Crabtree, Joseph, 207, 213

Index | 305

Cressy, David, 157 Crimean War (1853–57), 95–98 Cumbria, 170 Curtis, Lewis P., 162–63 Darwen, 192n21 Daventry, 165 Devon, 17, 91, 244, 256n22 Dewsbury, 222, 236n104 Dickens, Charles, 80, 182 Dickinson, Harry, 5 Dinwiddy, John, 6 Disraeli, Benjamin (later Earl of Beaconsfield), 7, 13, 259 Dobson (family), 242 Doherty, John, 213 Dover, 165 Driver, Cecil, 198 Duncombe, William, 125 Durkheim, Émile, 40 Eastwood, David, 6 Ecclesiastical Titles Act (1851), 164, 171 Edinburgh, 170 Edwards, Henry, 84 Egerton (family), 148n58 Egerton, Francis (Lord Egerton, later Earl Ellesmere), 241 electoral reforms and conflicts about them 1832 (Great Reform Act, Representation of the People Act), 14, 17, 42, 50, 56, 67, 69–70, 74, 77, 81–85, 87, 89, 92, 94, 119, 144–45, 154, 161, 199–225, 252 1867 (Second Reform Act, Representation of the People Act), 7, 13, 18, 95, 98, 173, 240, 259–61 Ellice, Edward, 216 Engels, Friedrich, 7 Entwistle, John, 84, 111n146 Epstein, James, 9–10, 29n37 Ernest Augustus (Duke of Cumberland, later King of Hanover), 115, 174 Exeter, 17, 130, 157, 160, 165, 166 factory reform movement, 8, 21, 67–68, 83, 85, 196–237, 251, 262 Short Time Committees, 73, 180,

196–200, 202–6, 211, 213 Ten Hours Act (1847), 196–215, 229 See also Oastler, Richard Fairman, W. B. (Colonel), 177 family values, 12, 198–99, 212, 243–44, 250–54, 263. See also gender roles Fielden, John, 211, 218, 222, 236n86 Finch-Hatton, George (Earl of Winchelsea), 115, 128, 149n70 Fitzroy, Henry, 91 Fletcher, Ralph, 43, 62n24, 62n28, 127, 204 Foster, John, 203 Franks, James (Reverend), 209 Fraser, Derek, 109n113, 133–34, 151n116, 151n118 free trade, 7–8, 218–19, 226, 228–30 Freemasons, 174 French Revolutionary Wars and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1815), 1, 3, 6–7, 12, 19, 37, 41, 49–50, 118, 120, 123–24, 200, 244, 264 Galland, T. (Reverend), 136 Gallenga, Antonio, 178 Garibaldi, Guiseppe, 178 Garrnett, William, 217–18 Gavazzi, Allessandro, 178, 180 Geertz, Clifford, 16, 40 gender roles, 2, 7–8, 12, 14, 22, 199, 212, 238–58. See also family values George III (King), 37, 40–42, 45–46, 58, 62n22, 120, 261 George IV (King), 37–38, 41–58, 61n17, 61n20, 121–23, 128–29, 243, 251 Giles (Reverend), 137 Gilley, Sheridan, 163, 170 Glasgow, 102n23, 156 Gleadle, Kathryn, 250 Gordon Riots (1780), 118 Gott, Benjamin, 246 Graham, James (Sir), 226 Gray, Robert, 198, 205, 212–14 Great Yorkshire Meeting (1837), 211 Gregg, T.D. (Reverend), 177–78 Grey, Charles (Lord Grey), 50, 154 Guicciardini, Piero, 178

306 | Index

Guildford, 155, 157, 165 Guy Fawkes Day (Gunpowder Plot Day, 5th of November), 22, 154, 157–63, 176, 179, 181, 249–50, 260

Ireland, 17, 71, 77, 114–16, 119–24, 143, 148n25, 162–64, 168–70, 176, 179, 181–83 Isle of Sheppey, 17, 171, 256n22

Halifax, 18, 45, 50, 64n46, 84, 96, 108n106, 109n107, 236n104, 175, 237n127 Hall, Henry, 125, 129–30, 132, 137 Hall, Robert, 95, 104n36, 111n150, 112n152, 203 Halliwell, Philip, 204–5, 213 Hardwick (Mr.), 169 Hardy, John, 217–18 Harling, Philip, 5 Harper, Edward, 186, 195n146 Harrison, Brian, 244 Harrison, Mark, 38–40, 42, 45–51, 57, 59nn6–7, 62n22, 62n29, 63n31 Hastings, 157 Haworth, 209 Hay, William, 47, 63n45 Hellmuth, Eckhard, 5 Hereford, 165 Hernaman, John, 151n101 Heywood, Robert, 103n27, 162, 196, 237n127, 240 Hinckford, 256n22 Hirst, George, 137 Hobhouse, John, 200 Hodgson, William (Reverend), 209 Holyhead, 171 Hook, Walter Farquhar (Reverend), 138, 209 Huddersfield, 18, 45, 63n37, 64n46, 82, 87, 93, 102n21, 103n28, 103n34, 107n79, 109n107, 138, 154–55, 157–58, 161, 175–76, 192n89, 202, 205, 209, 211, 213, 215–17, 222, 255n14 Hughes, Tom, 184 Hulme, 171 Hulton, William Ford, 196, 224, 241 Hunt, Henry, 115–16, 124, 147n38, 204 Hunter, Adam (Dr.), 246

Jenkinson, Robert (Lord Liverpool), 37, 120 Jocelyn, Robert (Lord Jocelyn), 82 Joyce, Patrick, 9–10, 16, 28n28, 29n37, 29n40, 72, 212–13, 239–40

industrialisation, 1, 4, 12–13, 18, 19, 196, 198–200, 202

Keighley, 203 Kent County Meeting (1828), 114–15, 117, 129–30 Kent, 114–17, 121, 127, 129–30, 145n1, 171 Kenyon, George (Lord Kenyon), 115, 129, 174 Kenyon, Henry (junior), 101n14 Kettering, 165–66 Kidderminster, 72, 102n19, 103n27, 192n94 King, Brian (Reverend), 182–87 Kirk, Neville, 4, 142 Knaresborough, 219 Knatchbull, Edward (Sir), 115 Knowles (family), 242 Knowles, John, 196 Labour League, 229 Lamb, William (Lord Melbourne), 66, 137 Laqueur, Walter, 53 Lawrence, Jon, 7, 239–40, 250 Leader, J. Temple, 86 Le Bon, Gustav, 39 Leech, John, 231n18 Leeds Kirkstall, 79, 135, 151n100 Pudsey, 74, 76, 103n34, 104n45, 179, 226, 228, 248 Lees, 102n21 Lewes, 91, 155, 157, 238 Lewis, Brian, 103n29, 133 Limerick, 102n23 Liverpool, 17, 37–38, 44, 46, 50, 59n2, 62n22, 62n23, 69, 93, 102n21, 120, 129, 134, 139–40, 142, 152n136, 156, 165, 168–71, 179

Index | 307

London Chelsea, 152n129 City of London, 34n73, 52, 84, 90, 92, 126, 148n55, 166 Clapham, 164, 167 Croydon, 167 East End, 158, 182–83, 185–87 Finsbury, 34n73, 84, 109n110, 152n129 Greenwich, 34n73, 166–67 Lambeth, 34n73, 109n110, 152n129, 219 Marylebone, 34n73, 152n129, 152n145 Pimlico, 169 Southwark, 34n73, 110n130, 126, 140, 147n38, 164, 219 Spitalfields, 243 Tower Hamlets, 34n73, 84, 106n76, 112n160, 140, 185, 219 Westminster, 34n73, 52, 54, 84, 86, 92–93, 109n110, 111n140, 115, 122, 127, 163, 166, 171, 182, 195n151, 198, 200, 208, 219–20, 226 Woolwich, 112n158, 167 Lowder, Charles, 183 loyalist and anti-Catholic associations and clubs Church and King-Club (Bolton), 127–28 Brunswick Clubs/Associations, 115, 127, 129, 131, 176 Orange Order, 43–45, 48, 56, 114–15, 120, 127, 156–60, 168, 174–81, 186–87, 251, 253, 260–61 Pitt Clubs, 43, 122 Protestant Association, 139, 143, 166, 168, 171, 182, 185 Protestant Operative Association, 139–41, 143–44, 180, 185 Reeves Association, 5–6, 98, 119, 261 See also Anti-Catholicism Luddism, 2, 18, 43, 45 Lyon, Eileen Groth, 198, 230n8 Maidstone, 114–15 Majochi, Theodore, 157 Malthus, Thomas Robert, 201 Manchester, 17–18, 37–38, 45–46, 52, 59n4, 59n7, 62n22, 62n23, 64n62, 69,

93, 101n18, 102n21, 102n25, 129, 134, 169, 171, 175–80, 217, 219, 225–26 Mann (Mr.), 46 Markland, Ralph, 176 Martin, William, 218 Marx, Karl, 7 Mason (Mr.), 46 Massena, Giacinto, 178 Mayhew, Henry, 171, 189n34, 190n57 Maynooth question (1845), 141, 144, 168 Maynooth, 141, 144, 168 McMenemy, Patrick, 178 McNeile, Hugh, 139, 168, 177 Mechanics’ Institutes, 246–47 Mergel, Thomas, 17 Methodism and Methodist clergy, 10, 73, 124, 135–36, 207, 216, 245, 254 Metz, Karl Heinz, 198 Middlesex, 34n73, 256n22 Middleton, 102n21 Midlands, 71, 178 Mills, John Remington, 95, 112n152 Millward, Pauline, 172 Milnes, Edward, 248 Moore, Kevin, 142 More, Hannah, 99, 261 Mulgrave, John, 136 Municipal Corporation Act (1835), 74, 87–88, 133, 136, 225 Murphy, William, 178 Musgrave, John, 242 Neal, Frank, 170, 175 Needham, Richard, 204–5 New Poor Law (1834), 67–68, 197–201, 206, 209, 217, 219, 222–25 conflicts among Poor Law guardians, 221–26 opposition against, 21, 67–68, 73, 198, 199–227, 229, 244, 250, 262 Poor Law Unions, 201, 221–25 Newark, 83, 135 Nonconformists (Dissenters), 2, 11, 18, 44, 114, 124, 127, 132–39, 143, 164–65, 167, 178, 184, 202, 207, 221, 223–24, 239–40, 245–48 Norman, Edward, 182

308 | Index

Northampton Town, 165 Northamptonshire, 17, 155, 165–66 Norwich, 38, 62n22, 62n23 O’Brien, James Bronterre, 211–12, 234n58 O’Connell, Daniel, 77, 115, 143, 150n80, 163, 217, 235n77, 253 O’Connor, Feargus, 177, 197, 211–14, 218, 221, 234n58 O’Gorman, Frank, 57, 100n11 O’Sullivan, Mortimer, 139 Oastler, Richard, 21, 82, 87, 104n35, 136, 138, 141, 180, 196–237 Oglesby, Richard, 209 Oldham, 102n21, 139, 171, 218, 222, 236n86, 236n98 Paine burnings, 6, 57. See also Paine, Thomas Paine, Thomas, 8, 57, 210, 213 paternalism, 7–8, 13–14, 72, 197–99, 204, 206, 212–14, 219–21, 229, 238–50 Paul, William, 74, 78, 98, 103n35, 248–49, 254 Paz, Denis, 142, 155–56, 161–68, 172, 178–79 Peel, Robert (Sir), 13, 66, 69, 77, 81, 84, 93–95, 99n2, 102n25, 107n84, 110n130, 115, 129, 143–44, 208, 225–29 Percy, Algernon (Earl of Northumberland), 259 Perring, Robert, 103n35, 135–37, 151n101, 151n112, 203 Peterloo (1819), 37, 43–45, 52, 67–68, 124, 204, 241 Phillips, Paul, 133 Philp, Mark, 6, 123 Pilkington, 102n21 Pitt, William (the Younger), 120, 122 Pius IX (Pope), 163–64 Plumtree (Mr.), 117 Polhill (Mr.), 126 political unions, 72, 83, 92, 204, 213, 217 popular constitutionalism conservative, 1–2, 4, 7–10, 13, 39, 48, 51, 52, 53, 66–113, 116–17, 120–21, 128–30, 131–32, 144–45, 181, 199–

215, 216–17, 218–21, 228, 240–41, 249–50, 259–64 protestant, 2, 44, 118–31, 138, 140–41, 142–43, 144–45, 205, 206–7, 210 radical, 9–10, 15, 45–46, 51–52, 54, 67–68, 73, 81, 128, 210 Power, Alfred, 222 Pratt, John Jeffreys (Lord Camden), 115 Preston, 102n21, 171, 237n127 Prussia, 264 Pusey, Edward, 164, 186–87 Queen Caroline Affair (1820–21), 41, 42–51, 51–53, 122–24, 157, 251 Rand, John, 245 respectability, 3, 239, 241, 245–46, 248–51, 254, 264 Richardson, Cavie, 102n25, 103n35, 136, 203, 213 Richmond, 165 Ridgway, Joseph, 72, 111n141, 241 Ridgway, Thomas, 224 Ripon, 102n21 ritualism (Tractarians), 164, 169, 181–87. See also King, Bryan and Pusey, Edward Roberts, David, 198 Roby, John, 142 Rochdale, 102n21, 170, 253 Rogers, Nicholas, 57 Rohe, Karl, 16, 34n67 Rome, 75, 163–64, 167 Rous, Henry John (Captain), 220 Rudé, George, 39–40 Russell, John (Lord Russell), 77, 164 Sadler, Michael, 83, 135, 197, 200, 205–8, 213, 215–18, 218, 230n8, 233n45 Salford, 38, 93, 102n21, 106n74, 129, 139, 140, 175, 180, 217, 224, 244 Salt, Titus, 255n7 Scotland, 17, 24n12, 62n22, 71, 97 Senior, Hereward, 175 Shea (Mr.), 115 Sheffield, 18, 102n21, 177 Sheil, Richard Lalor, 115–16 Shropshire, 170

Index | 309

Slade, James (Reverend), 43, 62n24, 62n28, 66–67, 139, 162, 245, 247 slavery/abolitionism, 136, 199–200, 207 Smith, Phillip, 182 Smith-Stanley, Edward (Lord Stanley, later Earl of Derby), 94, 111n150, 171, 173, 259–60 Sowler, R. S., 71 St. Helens, 102n21 St. Patrick’s Day, 170, 178 Staffordshire, 129, 179 Stanleys (family), 148n58 Stedman Jones, Gareth, 8, 16, 34n70 Stephens, Joseph Raynor, 197–99, 207–8, 211–13, 216, 218, 226, 229 Stevenson, John, 53 Stockport Riots (1852), 156, 170–73 Stockport, 93, 102n21, 170–73 Storch, Robert, 155, 160 Stowell, Hugh, 139, 180, 217, 244–45 Sturge, Joseph, 207, 218 Suffolk, 256 Surrey, 256 Sussex, 91, 238, 256n19, 256n22 Tait, Archibald Campbell (Bishop of London, later Archbishop of Canterbury), 183 Tamworth, 107n84 Taylor, John, 245 Taylor, Peter, 133–34, 232n27, 236n109, 240–41, 256n34 Taylor, Ralph, 203 temperance movement, 238–41, 244–45, 254, 260 Tempest (Colonel), 81–82 Temple, Henry John (Lord Palmerston), 95, 98, 111n150 Temple-Grenville, Richard (Marquess of Chandos), 244 Teodor, John Victor, 178, 193n111 Thompson, Edward, 3, 8, 25n16, 29n34, 29n36, 29n40, 39, 21 Thornhill, Thomas, 229 Todmorden, 222 Torrens, Robert (Colonel), 86 Tory Democracy, 7, 259

Tory Radicalism, 8, 10, 13, 83, 140–41, 196–237, 239 trade unions, 3, 45–46, 50, 56, 70, 72, 177, 204, 229, 239–40, 251, 262 Uckfield, 238, 240 USA, 178 Vernon, James, 9–10, 16, 29n37, 30n41, 59n6, 62n22, 81, 106n76, 152n137 Victoria (Queen), 41, 66–67, 78–79, 82, 86–90, 96, 99n2, 108n103, 197 volunteer movement military reviews, 47, 55, 95–97, 174–75 volunteers before 1815, 6 volunteers 1815–1860, 47–48, 67 volunteers after 1860, 96–98, 261 Wakefield, 102n21, 109n109, 236n104 Wales, 97, 171 Walsh, David, 68, 99n7, 101n14, 102n19, 102n25, 142, 192n92 Walter, John, 218 Ward, John Traver, 198, 236n91 Warrington, 102n21, 106n72 Weaver, Stuart, 198, 205, 210 Wellesley, Arthur (Duke of Wellington), 50, 77, 115, 118, 127–31, 143, 148n62, 159, 170, 227, 229 Wentworth-Fitzwilliam, Charles (Earl of Fitzwilliam), 242 Wesley, John, 151n102 White, J. E. (Reverend), 178 White, Richard, 253 Wigan, 101n18, 102n21, 106n75, 139, 170–71, 176–79 Wilkins, Charles, 102n24, 252 William III (King), 159, 192n95 William IV (King), 41, 49–50, 55–56, 77, 79, 87–89, 106n73, 112n158 Wilson, Richard Fountayne, 125 Wiseman, Nicholas (Cardinal, Bishop of Westminster), 163–65 Wolffe, John, 118, 139, 141 Wolverhampton, 239 women’s work, 196, 199, 212, 229, 250–54 Wood, James, 216

310 | Index

Woods, Joseph (Captain), 211 Worcester, 17 work house (poor house), 201–2, 209–11, 214, 216, 221, 223–24

Wortley, James Stuart, 84, 125, 148n52 York, 17, 112n161, 125–26, 234n52