The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820

By Murray Armstrong

Three Scottish weavers, James Wilson, Andrew Hardie and John Baird, were hanged and beheaded for high treason in the summer of 1820. Nineteen more men were transported to the penal colony of Botany Bay. Their crime? To have taken up arms against a corrupt and nepotistic parliament, and the aristocratic government that refused to reform it.

This 'Radical War' was the culmination of five years of unsuccessful mass petitioning of Westminster by working people in Scotland and England. The contempt and intransigence of the Tory government forced an escalation in tactics, and on Easter Monday of 1820, the call for a general strike was answered throughout the western counties of Scotland. Their demands were threefold: the vote for all men, annual parliaments and equal constituencies. Coupled with an armed rebellion, the strike was met by the full military might of the British state; hundreds were arrested and imprisoned without trial, while hundreds more fled the country.

This Scottish general strike and insurrection is a little-known chapter of British history and yet remains an immensely important one in the long fight for democracy. In The Fight for Scottish Democracy, Murray Armstrong brings these events dramatically to life.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pluto Press
• Release date: Apr 20, 2020
• ISBN: 9781786806574

Murray Armstrong

Murray Armstrong is former associate editor at the Guardian, where he worked for over twenty years. He is the author of The Liberty Tree: The Stirring Story of Thomas Muir and Scotland's First Fight for Democracy (2014).

Book preview

Illustration

The Fight for Scottish Democracy

The Fight for

Scottish Democracy

Rebellion and Reform in 1820

Murray Armstrong

Illustration

First published 2020 by Pluto Press

345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA

www.plutobooks.com

Copyright © Murray Armstrong 2020

The right of Murray Armstrong to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN 978 0 7453 4132 3 Hardback

ISBN 978 0 7453 4133 0 Paperback

ISBN 978 1 7868 0656 7 PDF eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0658 1 Kindle eBook

ISBN 978 1 7868 0657 4 EPUB eBook

Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England

For Cath

Contents

Acknowledgements

Map

  1 1820: Death on the Green

  2 1812: Overture

  3 1815: A Disputed Peace

  4 1816–17: Alarm

  5 1817: Repression

  6 1818–19: Fever

  7 1819: Peterloo

  8 1819: Radicals vs Loyalists 109

  9 1820: Underground

10 1820: Address to the Inhabitants 156

11 1820: Hostilities

12 1820: Purge

13 1820: Retribution

14 Retreat

Postscript

References

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

This book owes a great deal to the helpful professionalism of the staff at the National Archives in Kew, the National Records of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland, both in Edinburgh, the British Library in London and the London Library. The combined resources of these institutions, on their shelves and online, are formidable research tools. My thanks also goes to Mary Dunne of Airdrie Public Library and Karen Gallacher of the North Lanarkshire Archives in Motherwell for assembling so many valuable local documents for me to read.

A special thanks is due to Anne Beech, commissioning editor for Pluto Press, who had faith in this story and stuck with it for many months, as well as Jeanne Brady, who did such a speedy and accomplished edit of my manuscript.

Illustration

(© John Houston)

1

1820: Death on the Green

The two women left their hiding place and crossed the burial ground to the newly dug grave. In the clear light of a waning August moon, they struggled to shovel away the loose sods and soil until they were waist deep. The blade of a spade struck the coffin. They hesitated before scraping the earth from the rough wooden box and forced open the lid as silently as they could. The bloodstained handkerchief covering the decapitated head was all the identification needed. It was the hanky James Wilson had dropped earlier that day to signal to the hangman he was ready to meet his end. After the hanging, a masked and cloaked axeman severed the head from the lifeless body, held it up to the thousands watching, and called out ‘This is the head of a traitor!’

‘Murder! Murder!’ they roared, ‘He has died for his country!’

Lillian Walters grabbed a handle on her father’s coffin while her cousin, Mrs Ritchie, and two helpers who had arrived with a horse and cart, took the others. They hauled the heavy casket from the ground and manhandled it to the wall, where they lifted it over and placed it on the waiting cart. They left the ‘paupers’ ground’, under the walls of the ancient cathedral and, shortly after midnight, drove down Glasgow’s deserted High Street towards their home town of Strathaven. They passed the high clock steeple of the town hall at the cross and their silence seemed to intensify as they continued south on Saltmarket and neared the new courthouse and jail at the entrance to Glasgow Green. This was where, at 3 o’clock that afternoon, the 63-year-old Wilson, dressed in white prison clothes, was executed for treason in front of 20,000 onlookers. The authorities were anxious on account of public sympathy shown for the old radical and had the scaffold and surrounding streets protected by a regiment of infantry with loaded muskets, reinforced by mounted and heavily armed dragoon guards.

Wilson had requested that his body be taken home and buried in the churchyard behind his cottage, and his daughter and niece had come to Glasgow in mourning clothes that day to witness his end and to supervise the transport of his body home. This was common practice after an execution, but in Wilson’s case the authorities insisted he be buried without ceremony somewhere in the city. Some understanding official had, however, passed a hint to the family that the coffin would not be too difficult to recover, so friends in Strathaven organised a farmer’s cart and the two women hid in the shadows of the cemetery before it was closed and locked. It was 4 o’clock in the morning before Lillian Walters, Mrs Ritchie, and their two friends reached the outskirts of Strathaven, where a large number of townsfolk, with their heads uncovered, accompanied them to the churchyard behind the Wilsons’ cottage and laid him in an unofficial grave, which remained unmarked for more than two decades because of opposition from local ministers.

Wilson had been condemned for taking part in a rising called by a ‘provisional government’. On 1 April 1820, posters appeared on the streets of towns and villages across the west of Scotland appealing to ‘the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland’ to ‘take up arms for the redress of our common grievances’ and some 60,000 people in the five counties surrounding Glasgow downed tools in a general strike in support of the demand.

Petition after petition asking for an extension of the vote and reform of outdated constituencies and ‘rotten boroughs’ had been rejected by parliament since the first popular movement for universal male suffrage in 1792. Wilson had been a member of the Scottish Friends of the People at the time and had attended a radical convention in Edinburgh in 1793 where he represented the reformers of Strathaven who were mostly, like him, weavers. That organisation was crushed and its national leaders prosecuted for sedition and transported to the new penal colony of Sydney Cove in Australia. Wilson was instrumental in keeping democratic ideas alive through more than twenty years of war with France, when political liberties were restricted and national organisations banned. At the end of the war in 1815, he campaigned against the newly introduced Corn Laws, which kept the price of bread high for the benefit of landowners, and he joined the renewed movement petitioning for parliamentary reform.

On the day after his death, the Glasgow Chronicle, which dismissed the 1820 radicals as ‘A handful of poor, ignorant, presumptuous mechanics, without principles, without abilities, without funds or leaders, or a digested scheme of operations’, nevertheless credited Wilson with being ‘a good neighbour and a useful obliging man; and though a wag, and possessed of a fund of humour … he conducted his drollery so as seldom to offend.’ He was ‘a free thinker on religious subjects’ who sometimes went to church, but was more attached to Tom Paine’s criticism of organised religion, The Age of Reason. The Tory Glasgow Herald was more circumspect. On Friday, 1 September, it declared, ‘By one set of people he is said to have been an easy-tempered man, led away by others, and it is with equal confidence asserted on the other hand that he was a man of bad morals, and of the worst principles in respect both of religion and of politics.’ His warmth was remembered by a friend, Margaret Hunter. ‘I kent Jeems Wilson lang afore he was a prominent Radical,’ she recalled in 1887 at the age of 96. ‘He was a noble weever, and mony a time made stockings and drawers for my guidman. He was often in oor hoose in Kilbride, and had dinner with us twenty times. He was highly respeckit a’ roun’ the kintra side.’

The Political Union societies set up after the Napoleonic Wars, which advocated radical reform, were designed for education and discussion, and Wilson was ‘class leader’ in Strathaven, most meetings taking place under his roof. By 1819, the gatherings in his house were discussing the English radical press, such as the Manchester Observer, William Cobbett’s weekly Political Register, or Thomas Wooler’s Black Dwarf, Scotland having at that time no popular radical newspapers of its own. According to one of his fellow rebels who fled the country after the debacle, Wilson was by 1820 ‘revered as the father of reform and looked up to with respect and esteem by all those who were warmed with zeal for the liberty of their country’.

There had been political unrest in the country for more than a decade, with machine-breaking in England’s North and Midlands to protect jobs, and attempted political risings in Lancashire and Yorkshire; with conspirators in London planning to blow up the whole Cabinet, and with monster reform meetings throughout the land. But the government was intransigent. There would be no reform, even after the sacrifice of thousands of lives in the unpopular European war. The demobilisation of 350,000 soldiers and sailors in 1815 brought about a predictable, devastating economic slump, trailing misery and starvation in its wake. A peaceful reform gathering of 60,000 men, women and children at St Peter’s Field in Manchester in August 1819 was attacked by yeomanry cavalry on the orders of local magistrates and seventeen people were killed and more than 650 injured. It was quickly styled the ‘Peterloo massacre’, an ironic reference to the final battle of the war at Waterloo in Belgium. Protest meetings across the country made their anger plain. The stubborn, aristocratic Tory government of Lord Liverpool, with his Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth, and Foreign Secretary Lord Castlereagh, sat on a powder keg.

The general strike of April 1820 in the west of Scotland, along with its associated, bungled rising, should have been expected, but it wasn’t. The authorities, local and national, were complacent and dismissive of ordinary people’s needs and desires. When crisis came, the military and civil power of the state was swiftly and ruthlessly deployed. Glasgow and its surrounding towns became armed camps. The fifteen or so hapless rebels who marched from Strathaven to join a supposed rebel army had no chance. Another small party marched north from Glasgow to take the ironworks at Carron, which made armaments for the army and navy, but they were overpowered at Bonnymuir. Ten days after Wilson was executed, two young men who had led the Carron expedition were put to death in Stirling. Andrew Hardie and John Baird were, like Wilson, weavers. A total of ninety-eight men had been indicted for high treason; twenty-four of them were convicted and sentenced to death. Only three were hanged and beheaded, the others being transported to the penal colony at Sydney Cove. Twenty-two men were acquitted for lack of evidence, while fifty-two escaped and fled. ‘Those who absconded,’ said Scotland’s Lord Advocate, ‘were the chief leaders and instigators.’ For weeks after the ‘rising’, the army swept the five western counties – Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire, Dunbartonshire, Stirlingshire and Ayrshire – looking for radicals. Hundreds were temporarily imprisoned and hundreds more left the country.

James Wilson was a well-known advocate for reform in a small township, but he was not the leader on the day of the rising. The Strathaven radicals had controlled the town from the night of Wednesday 5 April until the early hours of the following morning. They had raided houses and shops for guns and gunpowder and Wilson’s home had been the centre of operations. They expected around 200 to follow them to the gathering of the rebel army on Cathkin Braes, south of Glasgow, but in the morning only fifteen turned out. Nevertheless, they trudged the sixteen miles to the braes, but Wilson, sensing either betrayal or realising they were too weak, turned around at the village of Kilbride, just seven miles from Strathaven, and went home. The others found themselves alone on Cathkin Braes, where they waited until a messenger brought the news that the army was in control of Glasgow and the rising was off. Some returned home and others, wisely, made themselves scarce.

At Wilson’s trial on Monday 24 July in Glasgow, twenty-nine prosecution witnesses established that his cottage was where arms had been collected and pikes made. Some pointed out his less than enthusiastic demeanour as the party marched out of town. One said he ‘looked very downward, thinking shame of it’, while another described him as ‘very down-cast-like’. Wilson called at the house of Margaret Hunter, who recalled:

On the morning o’ the ‘rising’ Wilson on reaching Kilbride cam to the hoose. I never remember sic a mornin’ o’ thunder, lichtening, and rain. He was fair drookit, and his claes were dreepin’ wi’ wat … Wilson looked as if he was clean demented, and stood at the fire shiverin’, and his teeth chattering. I speered at him where he was goin’ and he said, ‘Didna ye hear, we’re goin’ to overturn the government.’ O ye idiots, I said, ye may as weel try to overturn God almighty. If ye go to the Cathkin Braes the sodgers’ll blaw ye up like the peelins o’ onions.

After he left Hunter, Wilson visited his friend Jock Thompson and there took a pipe of tobacco and some tea. Already he was constructing his defence in case of arrest, when he bid farewell to Thompson with the words, ‘If you should be called to an account, you can witness I was here on business.’ On his way home, he met an acquaintance who said in the witness box, ‘He said to me first he had been suffering with the radicals, and I asked him if he knew anything about them, and he said he did not. I asked him whether he did not go away with them that morning and he said, No they came into me this morning, and bought an old sword of me, and I was going down to Kilbride this morning, and so I was convoyed that length.’ He swore that Wilson claimed to have advised the rebels to return home. This became the essence of the defence case, that Wilson was forced to join the radicals against his will. His sister, Margaret Barr, who lived next door, gave evidence in court that bordered on the incomprehensible. She maintained a guard had been placed around the cottage all night, that her brother, ‘a silly man’, had been threatened with death and warned that his home would be burned down if he did not accompany the rebels in the morning. Her credibility, and that of another defence witness who told a similar story, was undermined by the prosecution and the feeble defence strategy crumbled. The defence lawyer explained to the court that there were so few witnesses to support his case because they had mostly fled.

The jury took two hours to come to a verdict of guilty on one of the four counts on the indictment, that of ‘compassing to levy war against the king in order to compel him to change his measures’. He was found not guilty of seeking the death of the king, or conspiring to depose him, or of actually levying war, and so the jury asked for clemency. Before passing sentence, the chief judge, the Lord President Charles Hope, invited Wilson to speak. Wilson dropped the pretence of forced involvement saying:

My lords and gentlemen, I will not attempt the mockery of a defence. You are about to condemn me for attempting to overthrow the oppressors of my country. You do not know, neither can you appreciate my motives. I commit my sacred cause, which is that of freedom, to the vindication of posterity … If I have appeared as a pioneer in the van of freedom’s battles – if I have attempted to free my country from political degradation – my conscience tells me I have only done my duty. Your brief authority will soon cease but the vindictive proceedings of this day shall be recorded in history … When my countrymen will have exalted their voices in bold proclamation of the rights and dignity of humanity, and enforced their claim by the extermination of their oppressors, then, and not till then, will some future historian do my memory justice – then will my name and sufferings be recorded in the Scottish story – then will my motives be understood and appreciated; and with the confidence of an honest man, I appeal to posterity for that justice which has, in all ages and in all countries, been awarded to those who have suffered martyrdom in the glorious cause of truth and liberty.

Lord President Hope stated that the bench had no discretion in crown clemency but could only pronounce sentence, which was death by hanging, beheading and quartering on Wednesday 30 August. Wilson replied, ‘I am not deceived … You want a victim; I will not shrink from the sacrifice. I neither expected justice nor mercy here. I have done my duty to my country. I have grappled with her oppressors for the last forty years, and having no desire to live in slavery, I am ready to lay down my life in support of these principles, which must ultimately triumph.’

Ten people from Strathaven had been indicted for treason. Seven had absconded and were declared outlaws. John Walters, Wilson’s son-in-law, although indicted was never brought to court, not even to be acquitted. William McIntyre, who had marched with the rebels to Cathkin Braes, was brought into the dock after Wilson, when the Lord Advocate announced, ‘It is not my intention to offer any evidence in support of the charges against this individual.’ Wilson was the only one from Strathaven convicted of treason and despite a hastily assembled campaign for clemency put together by several clergymen and other ‘respectable’ individuals, the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, dismissed the appeal. Wilson was not ‘a fit object of the royal mercy’. The Lord Provost of Glasgow, Henry Monteith, who was also member of parliament for Selkirk, refused to present a petition for clemency to the House of Commons. Wilson appeared to be a victim of the government’s desire for a sacrifice, chosen because he had been a prominent but peaceful reformer for more than thirty years.

On the evening before his execution, Wilson was allowed a short and distressing visit from his wife Nelly, his daughter Lillian, and his grandchildren. On the following day, he was subjected to an hour of moralising sermon, prayer and hymn-singing in the courtroom. Just before 3 o’clock, he emerged at the south side of the jail, closest to the River Clyde and placed in a black hurdle drawn by a horse. The axeman emerged dressed in a long black cape, fur hat and with a black crepe mask covering his face. He sat facing Wilson in the rear seat and held his large axe with a curved blade in one hand and a knife in the other. The hurdle was dragged to the scaffold, where Wilson was handed to the hangman. Wilson knew him and remarked in a casual and friendly fashion, ‘Did you ever see sic a crowd, Tammas?’ As the old man ascended the steps, he was first cheered and then the cry of ‘Murder! Murder!’ was raised. In a few minutes, Wilson dropped a white hanky as a signal to the executioner and he died ‘with difficulty’, according to some reports.

As he dropped to his death, someone in the centre of the nervous crowd warned, ‘The dragoons! The dragoons are coming!’ Panic spread quickly and people ran into the Green or nearby streets for shelter. Some scrambled over the wooden footbridge to Hutchesontown. The Glasgow Chronicle reported, ‘the tumbling and trampling over one another, the beseeching of the women, and screams of the children were truly appalling, and it struck the mind of the spectator, what a scene Petersfields must have exhibited at the onset of the Manchester Yeomanry.’ It was a false alarm: people gathered around the scaffold again when they saw the dragoons were still in formation and presented no threat. Wilson’s body was taken from the drop and placed face down on supports across a coffin, when the masked axeman, to hisses and yells from the onlookers, separated the head from the body with one blow. His cry – ‘This is the head of a traitor!’ – was drowned by shouts of horror and disgust as Wilson’s grey-haired and partly bald head, still streaming with blood, was hoisted high for all to see. More cries of ‘Murder!’ and ‘He’s died for his country!’ rang out. Quartering of the corpse was not carried out. Whether this was abandoned in the face of a tense and edgy crowd or whether it was a trifling act of mercy is unclear. In a short while, the crowd dispersed peacefully, but later that evening posters appeared on city walls with the angry words, ‘May the ghost of butchered Wilson haunt the pillows of his relentless jurors – Murder! Murder! Murder!’

Wilson’s friend, Margaret Hunter, had travelled from Strathaven to Glasgow on the day of his death. ‘I grat sair when I saw him brocht roun’ to the scaffold on the hurdle,’ she recalled. ‘His dochter tried to shake hands wi’ him, but she fairly broke doon.’ The Glasgow Chronicle was less sentimental: ‘In a word, James Wilson and a few of his caste never ceased since 1793 from some political hustle or other, upon one pretence after another, till the Radical bubble burst in April last, and brought him to the hurdle, the gibbet and the block.’

So, if the bubble was now burst, who inflated it, how, and when?

2

1812: Overture

Alexander Richmond was a handloom weaver who lived in the Renfrewshire town of Pollokshaws with his wife, Katherine, and their five-year-old daughter, Helen. Like most weaver families, their home would have been a simple two-roomed cottage with a weaving shed in one room, or built out in the yard. A spinning wheel would have stood in the living space, mainly used for working flax into coarse fabrics for home wear. Great water-driven mills had overtaken hand-spinning and even they were being slowly replaced by the immense power of steam. But cloth was still woven by hand and it was a family affair, with an adult sitting at the loom while shuttles were filled with thread by other family members or by hired help. Embroidery was the other main domestic employment and almost every house had a tambour frame on which the needles of young women and girls created sought-after, expensive shawls and soft furnishings.

Textile manufacture was the major industry of both Scotland and England. There were 60,000 family looms in Scotland, more than half of them in the west. In earlier, more prosperous days, the Richmond family might have breakfasted on bread and butter with ham, and around the Martinmas in November each year may have bought a little cow, which would be slaughtered and salted for winter provision. But by 1812, times were hard, and breakfast would now be no more than porridge and buttermilk, and dinner some cheap herring and potatoes.

Richmond was one of the young leaders of the weavers’ associations, formed three years before, and stretching all the way from Aberdeen to Carlisle. The price paid by merchants for finished cloth had slumped and the decline in wages was especially steep after Napoleon’s 1806 trade embargo, decreed in reply to the British blockade of continental ports. Poor harvests in 1811 and 1812 drove up the cost of food even more.

While food riots and machine-breaking were engulfing the northern counties of England, the Scottish weavers relied on the courts to bring them justice. In January 1812, Richmond and the weavers’ committee, headed by Willie McKimmie, prepared a petition to the Lord Provost and councillors of Glasgow, which complained of ‘grievous sufferings and privations’ caused by their employers’ ‘erroneous policies’, and asked that the old law to set fair wages be applied. ‘The scenes of individual and domestic wretchedness … are painful in contemplation,’ their petition explained. Wage reductions had been imposed by ‘collusion or combination’ of the employers.

Their petition to Glasgow council was a test case for the whole of Scotland following a string of unsuccessful applications to parliament to regulate trade. One petition in 1811, signed by 30,000 Scottish weavers, explained that great numbers had been thrown out of employment and in Paisley alone more than 1,200 families were in such distress that they were begging. The wages of those still in work had been reduced by two-thirds and the policy of banning trade with Europe and America was blamed. Half of the 30,000 looms that had been working in the west a year before were idle, and people’s suffering exceeded ‘anything of the kind ever known’. A third of the entire workforce of the west of Scotland was ‘entirely destitute of work’. They asked for emergency aid, to alleviate ‘want and penury’. A special committee of parliament declared that ‘no interference of the legislature with the freedom of trade … can take place without violating the general principle of first importance to the prosperity and happiness of the community’, adding that ‘pecuniary aid [to the distressed and starving population] … would be utterly inefficacious … most objectionable … and most likely to destroy the equilibrium of labour and employment.’ The needs of the people were dismissed in favour of the new laissez-faire ideology.

Kirkman Finlay was the leading manufacturer in Scotland, employing more than 3,000 workers in three cotton mills in Ayrshire, Stirlingshire and Perthshire. Having taken over his father’s textile firm at the age of 18 in 1790, he built an empire trading in cotton goods to Europe and the Americas. He bought cotton in America through his offices in Charleston, New York and the Bahamas, and marketed and distributed finished fine muslins and mill-spun yarns. He was a committed free trader and an acolyte of the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith, who argued that the crown monopolies of commerce and trade restricted the greater distribution of wealth. Appearing before a House of Commons committee in May 1812, Finlay claimed that in the west of Scotland, ‘There is no person who cannot get employment’, although ‘the condition of the people was very bad, and their wages were low.’ In cross-examination he was asked, ‘When you say the workmen at present have employment, do you mean that a great many have either gone into