A History of Riots

A History of Riots
A History of Riots
Edited by
Keith Flett
A History of Riots
Edited by Keith Flett
This book first published 2015
Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Lady Stephenson Library, Newcastle upon Tyne, NE6 2PA, UK
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
Copyright 2015 by Keith Flett and contributors
All rights for this book reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without
the prior permission of the copyright owner.
ISBN (10): 1-4438-7081-1
ISBN (13): 978-1-4438-7081-8
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Preface ....................................................................................................... vii

Introduction ................................................................................................. 1
Keith Flett
Chapter One ............................................................................................... 11
From Revolution to New Unionism: The Impact of Bloody Sunday
on the Development of John Burns Politics
Sean Creighton
Chapter Two ............................................................................................. .39
Imagined Violence: Some Riots in Fiction
Ian Birchall
Chapter Three ............................................................................................ 59
The Memorial Day Massacre: Violence, Repression and the US Labour
Movement
John Newsinger
Chapter Four .............................................................................................. 77
The Scottish Pre-Industrial Urban Crowd and the Riots against the Treaty
of Union 1705-1707
Neil Davidson
Chapter Five ............................................................................................ 121
I Love the Sound of Breaking Glass: The London Crowd 1760-2011
Keith Flett
Conclusion ............................................................................................... 141
Bibliographic and Historiographic Commentary ..................................... 151
Index ........................................................................................................ 157
PREFACE
An alternative word for a riot is an emeute and that is perhaps a better

way of describing many of the events considered in this book. Emeute
does not draw such a hard and fast distinction between a riot, an uprising
and a rebellion as the English language does, perhaps recognising that one
thing may lead to another, or it may not.
While the riots considered here are, appropriately, of an historical
nature it is clear that the riot remains very much a feature of the modern
world across the globe. A week does not go by without reports of a
significant riot, with the familiar features described below, taking place
somewhere.
Marx himself described a London riot in Hyde Park in June 1855.
The issue was a Beer Bill and a Sunday Trading Bill that restricted the
ability of ordinary people to enjoy a drink and shop for essential items on
that day when it was the only one in the week when they were not
working.
Hyde Park was targeted because it was where wealthy Londoners
enjoyed riding on a Sunday, their pastime which was not threatened by the
Bills.
A crowd, Marx estimates at 200,000 partly organised by the Chartists
gathered but was dispersed by forty truncheon swinging constables who
claimed Hyde Park was private property.
However a substantial crowd remained and the well to do taking
recreation in the park had to run a gauntlet of what Marx describes as a
babel of jeering, taunting and discordant noises in which no language is as
rich as the English. He describes a cacophony of grunting, hissing,
whistling, squawking, snarling, growling, croaking, yelling, groaning,
rattling, shrieking, gnashing sounds
For the range of riots considered below, from Scotland around the Act
of Union to London in the 1840s and 1880s and the US in the 1930s, the
parameters set by Marx are key. It is the interchange between the
authorities and those who have discontents and grievances that creates the
potential for a riot. But the riot in most cases will not lead directly to
violence but will display a range of expressions of discontent. These may
appear and sometimes be designed to be intimidating but the aim is to
make a point and seek a remedy short of an actual riot.
INTRODUCTION
KEITH FLETT
1. The 1831 Bristol Riots and a British tradition

A couple of weeks before Easter 2013 I was in Bristol. I thought Id
take a look at Queen Square.
A large Georgian space in the centre of Bristol, it was the scene of a
riot in October 1831a precursor to the 1832 Reform Act. The riot was
one of the biggest in UK history, lasting several days. E. P. Thompson
suggests it had similarities with the 1780 Gordon Riots in the sense that
backward looking patterns of behaviour could be identified amongst
some of the rioters.1
Yet, a visitor walking around the square todaystill substantially as it
was in 1831could be forgiven for missing the history around it.
True, on one corner of the square an information board does explain
something of the riot, including the role that Isambard Kingdom Brunel,
arriving in the city to start work on the Clifton suspension bridge, played
in it as a special constable.
On another corner a further board complains that the events of October
1831 ruined the architectural unity of the square, as several buildings were
destroyed.
Yet, this light-touch approach to British history, particularly the bits
which are a little inconvenient to modern eyes (do we really want to recall
that a central part of the road to parliamentary democracy involved a
massive riot?) appears to be reflected in how history is taught in our
schools.
The study of riots flourished in a periodthe 1950s to the 1970sin
which there were very few in the UK, and then went out of fashion.
Perhaps the signal was the abolition of the Riot Act itself in 1973.
However, by the 1980s riots were back, but their historical study was not.
The historiographical framework laid down by George Rud, E. P.
Thompson and Eric Hobsbawm remains very much the guideline within
which any modern study of the history of riots needs to start.
Introduction
The secondary literature on the history of riots is confined to this post1945 historical period. It starts with George Ruds analysis of the Gordon
Riots published in 1955 and extends to the later 1970s when it more or
less abruptly stops. Perhaps Ruds Marxism Today piece on riots,2 which
argues that they are not a legitimate contemporary political activity, was
designed to a draw a line under the wider research interest.
However, the more-than twenty years worth of material on the history
of riots does provide a rich store of conceptual and methodological tools
for the current historian.
There is an important corrective. All three historians made their
assessments of what the riot was as if it was a matter of purely historical
interest. We now know that this is not the case.
In reality, riots continue to occur as a form of protest around the world.
A key question is to ask whether the riots of the early years of the twentyfirst century are in fact the same or similar to those of the late eighteenth
and early nineteenth centuries, or whether there are fundamental
differences.
As riots around the world in the first years of the twenty-first century
appear to have a close correlation to rises in food prices, one conclusion
might be that the motivating factors of riots have in many cases not
changed a great deal since the situation analysed in E. P. Thompsons
work on eighteenth-century food riots.3
The riot stands as an act of resistance to authority, or at least an aspect
of it, as much now as it did then. There is some modern commentary on
riots that argues that, in effect, riots are not what they were, and these days
comprise just criminals and looters out for themselves, rather than
representing a form of wider political statement. Yet, when we look at the
work of George Rud on Paris and London in the late eighteenth century
we find him taking up and debunking comments of a very similar kind:
what also dies hard is the legend of the crowd as riffraff or canaille or as
a 'mob,' 'foreigners,' lay abouts or simply the inhabitants of the
dangerous districts.4
The format of a riot is strikingly similar in 2013 to how it would have
been, for example, in Bristol in 1831. Crowds gather, things get smashed
and sometimes burnt, the authorities appear, arrests are made and, in due
course, the rioters disperse, rarely to return to that specific location and
context.
A History of Riots
2. Historiographies of the Riot

The resurgence of the riot as a form of protest in Western societies in
recent years has provided a new literature, albeit one that does not deal in
any detail with the earlier literature, in the main.
At the same time, some studies, in particular Reading the Riots
sponsored by The Guardian and the LSE5 which looks in considerable
detail at the UK riots of summer 2011, provide a large amount of empirical
detail, such as interviews and social media analysis, which can be
compared with the evidence we have from the nineteenth century.
One key indicator of comparison is the mechanisms by which riots
spread, and who spreads them and how. There are differencesTwitter
did not exist in the early nineteenth centurybut some significant
similarities as well.
A basic similarity is how those in authority and the pressnow the
mediadescribe those involved in riots.
One of the first thing George Rud addresses, and a point he returns to,
is what to call those who riot. He prefers the term crowd, but also notes
usage of the terms the people, sans culottes, swinish multitude,
rabble, mob and canaille on a broadly left to right spectrum.
Rud made his position clear
I have never felt in any way inclined to share the view of those to
whom riot & rebellion have appeared as an abnormal and distasteful
deviation.6
Perhaps it was this partisan standpoint that led to Ruds approach to
riots receiving considerable criticism, not all from the right by any means.
Rud himself, recognizing the strength of argument from some of his
critics, reflected on understanding not just the act of rioting, but the mind
of rioters themselves and how historical accounts of them could be
improved.
Eric Hobsbawm, reviewing Wilkes and Liberty in the New Statesman
on February 16, 1962, queried why the Wilkites had appeared at that
moment and not another. Richard Cobb, writing in The Times Literary
Supplement on December 30, 1965, wondered how rioters were
characterized, noting that: a man who describes himself as a wine
merchant when caught in a riot may, at other times of day, be a clerk, a
brothel keeper, or riverside worker.
The point was that it is just as important to understand why riots do not
happen as why they do. Cobb used the term Rudfication to describe a
process of finding historical patterns in riots where he felt there were often
none. Ruds view7 was that there was a need to try and understand the
Introduction
intellectual outlook of the crowd better. He argued8 for a requirement to

grasp the collective actions, moods and motives of the crowd and to
look through the telescope at both ends. He went on to suggest that,
using Marxs phrase,9 it was important to grasp the ideas that grip the
masses that play so important a part in both the peaks and troughs of
the popular movement.10 Ruds idea was, in short, to try and put the
mind back into history.11
3. Carnival and the language of riots

With the Notting Hill Carnival has come a renewed commentary on
riots, what they are and the language used to describe them.
Professor Vincent Brown, writing in The Guardian,12 has challenged
whether the use of the term riot in connection to carnival is right.
Browns point is that to label black revolt as a riot with the implications
of inchoate behaviour and criminality that this can have in the official
mind is to completely miss the political motivations behind such actions.
Writing in the Morning Star,13 Peter Frost recalled the 1958 Notting
Hill race riots, but if we look at these through the perspective suggested
by Professor Brown a rather different angle emerges.
Riot there certainly was in Notting Hill in 1958. It was started by
fascists organised by Oswald Mosley, and to some extent facilitated by
police. Right-wing riots are not a new feature of British society. The
Gordon Riots in 1780which were anti-Catholic, at least initiallywere
certainly that. When the Afro-Caribbean community of Notting Hill fought
back against the fascists this was hardly a riotit was an essential means
of self-defence to protect their homes and families.
What people who take part in street protests are called or labelled by
authority has long been an issue.
Again, George Rud was clear on the matter. Writing in Marxism
Today in October 1981 he noted that to reactionaries and conservatives
riots are all basically the same. Rud notes that typical ways of describing
those who take part in riots are criminal elements or social riff-raff.
The formulations go back to the French Revolution where Edmund
Burke warned of the mob.
Gustave Lebon, an early crowd, psychologist followed on, describing
rioters as mobs and dregs from the gutter.
There are two problems with this approach. Firstly. as Professor Brown
notes in his Guardian piece, it overlooks the actual reasons, often political
or social, why people are drawn to rioting. If you cant understand
something, your chances of dealing with it sensibly are limited.
A History of Riots
Secondly, it is entirely wrong on the question of who actually

participates in riots. Ruds study of those who rioted in the French
Revolution14 and David Goodways analysis of those arrested for rioting in
London during the Chartist period show the same thing15they were, for
the most part, not dregs or riff-raff, but skilled workers and tradesmen.
Of course, pondering what language we use to describe rioters (and
Im with Rud in preferring the term the crowd) doesnt indicate
approval of rioting as an effective means of protest.
Moreover, the crowd, as the Notting Hill Carnival demonstrates, can
be something that gathers together to celebrate and enjoy. To those in
authority, however, the crowd is always a concern, a potential for
collective activity that might challenge the status quo in some way.
Riots are a sign of issues that explode onto the streets because they
have not been effectively picked up by whatever political processes exist
in a particular society. As I explained at length to a Daily Mail journalist
in August 2013 questioning me about the Tottenham riot of August 2011,
as a trade union activist I would hardly use the riot as a way of changing
the world. But sometimes we dont get to choose and, as Harold
Macmillan possibly did not say, events, events, dear boy just happen
anyway
4. Petitions, Tumults and Riots

The dividing line between what was regarded as peaceful and lawful
protest and what was seen as its opposite was finely drawn and fixed not
by an absolute legal definition but by the context and circumstances of a
particular moment.
The framework is the Tumultuous Petitioning Act of 1661 which
forbade the presentation of petitions accompanied by demonstrations. The
Act itself simply repeated the clauses of a 1649 Ordinance which
recognised the right to petition but restricted its presentation to Parliament
to twenty people in a peaceful and orderly manner, noting that petitions
had previously been presented in an riotous manner.
A Royal Proclamation in 1679 banned petitions raised for specious
reasons as tending to raise sedition and rebellion. However, the 1688
Revolution and the Bill of Rights specifically recognised the right to
petition. Indeed, it was King James refusal to recognise the right to
petition the King that led to his removal and replacement in 1689 by
William and Mary of Orange.
Introduction
It was reinforced by the Six Acts in 1819 which limited the right to
organised assembly in public without permission and was still in use in the
1960s. It was replaced by the 1986 Public Order Act.
Historians make little reference to the Act but it was something in the
minds of organisers of protests over several hundred years. If the
government decided a potential protest might transgress the terms of the
Act they could restrict or ban it and deploy police and the army to enforce
the ban. That is what happened to the Chartists in London on April 10,
1848 [meeting permitted, demonstration banned] and June 12, 1848
[meeting banned].
The legal reality was that any meeting not called for the purpose of
petitioning Parliament was of doubtful provenance, yet the process of
petitioning itself might also fall into the same area.
The initial question was what dictated the passage of the 1661 Act
associated with the restoration of the Royal Family after the
Commonwealth period, which could well be seen as an attempt by
Parliament to control and limit dissent. It is also suggested that it was
needed to contain the large number of petitions being presented to
Parliament at this point, making its day-to-day activity difficult if not
unworkable. Brian Mannings study of the end of the Commonwealth and
the Restoration in 165960 underlines that the issue of petitions did not
simply come from the quarter of those unhappy with this development.
Many were about claims for land taken during the Parliamentary period
and that it was restored to its pre-1649 ownership.
The Act survived but was arguably not of particular significance until
the arrival, or re-arrival, of mass political activity in the late eighteenth
century. It may be recalled that a revolutionary aspect of the London
Corresponding Society was that it allowed members unlimited.
5. The City and Riots

Eric Hobsbawms essay Cities and Insurrections is one of the few by
a historian in the classical Marxist tradition to acknowledge that riots do
occur, as he puts it, even in the affluent megalopolis of the late twentiethcentury industrial world. Hobsbawm reviews the ways in which the
structures of a city, including the modern city, can help or hinder a riot. He
finds that buses have played little part compared to trams which, if
stopped, can block roads, and underground railways none at all.
Hobsbawm tries to model the ideal city for riot and insurrection,
arguing that ideally it should still be possible to traverse it on foot, a
criterion that rules out many modern cities, though certainly not mid-
A History of Riots
nineteenth century London. He also allows that cities where motor

transport predominates might avoid this point.
He also argues that there must be some basic unity amongst the
population of the poor in the cities and underlines that the familiar
historical terms of le menu people or the mob point to the reality that
this has been the case.
While Hobsbawm is doubtful about the impact of suburbs, whatever
their composition, on the potential for riots he is clear that in the ideal
insurrectionary city the authorities will be as intermingled with the
central concentration of the poor as possible.
6. Glaziers, Riots and smashing glass

I have been researching the history of the modern riot (i.e. since 1760)
for several years. There remains much work to be done, in particular in
examining how the riot, mostly held by historians to belong to pre and
early industrial times, is still very much with us in 2012. It is a form of
protest and social dislocation that does not appear to want to be consigned
to the history books.
A sideline of this research has led me to look at the issue of glass and
windows.
Reading (or more accurately digitally searching the text, as you can
now do) the Chartist paper the Northern Star for 1848, the year of
revolutions, it is clear that one key determinant of whether a street protest
or demonstration had any of the characteristics of a riot was whether or not
any windows happened to be broken during the process.
The same criteria are used to determine the modern riot, although arson
plays a greater role here in the assessment of whether a riot has taken
place.
It would seem that glass and glaziers have an important if little
remarked-on role in riots. Indeed, there is even a parable about the general
question.
As a recent study16 has underlined, glass and glass manufacture was a
major factor of Victorian capitalism. One need only think of the Crystal
Palace of 1851, constructed largely of glass, to understand that it came to
symbolise a dynamic market society.
Through plate glass windows one could gaze but not touch objects.
The glass provided a barrier between perhaps well-to-do customers and
those perhaps less well to do who passed by outside. So the smashing of
panes of glass was symbolic of shattering the power and influence of
Introduction
capitalism to display itselfa practical way of demonstrating that not all

were partaking of the profits that the glass protected.
Certainly the smashing of gas lampsprotected by glass or
windowswas taken to be one of the key symbols of the Victorian riot,
and arguably remains so today.
Yet, a search of the Northern Star for the 1840s shows that the large
Chartist demonstrations of the period were very careful to emphasise that
they did not partake in or allow the breaking of glass. That all windows
and lamps remained intact was the sign of the organised and orderly
Chartist procession. Where breakages took place, by contrast the point was
that less reliable and controlled forces were at work.
Strangely, David Goodways book on London Chartismthe classic
study of the large Chartist protests of the 1840shardly touches on the
issue of glass and its smashing as a key determinant of the character of a
demonstration. Goodways book is now the best part of thirty years old
and its research may have come from a period when the riot was not as
much of a preoccupation as it has become again in more recent times.
If one searches the Northern Star for references to glass the vast
majority of mentions of the word relate to beer and wine glasses. Glass
was a very familiar part of the urban environment in mid-Victorian times,
as now. There are some references to the skills involved in glass making.
In terms of protest reports, the paper is careful to underline that in
Chartist-organized demonstrations glass did not get smashed. Smashing
glass was a dividing line between the political crowd and the nobility, at
least as the Northern Star saw it. Yet, the plate glass windows of central
London shops were surely a provocation to those who could not afford the
items displayed.
7. Simon Jenkins,17 Egypt and the moba continuing

tradition of history and historical research
In February 2012 the London Socialist Historians Group organised a
conference on the History of Riots at the Institute of Historical Research in
London.
One of the themes of the conference was that while riots have a long
history they are still very much with us, as are debates and arguments
about how to understand them.
Simon Jenkins article in The Guardian on July 5, 2013 about recent
events in Egypt makes the point well. While he is clear about the British
imperial impulse to intervene in the Muslim world, stretching back over a
A History of Riots
century, he is more or less equally unenthusiastic about those who seek to

build an Arab world free of imperial influence.
Jenkins writes:
In almost every case, British public opinion has backed the insurgent
mob against the regime, as if sated on Les Misrables. By the time of the
Syrian uprising, it assumed that Arab mobs were always in the right and
always won. This applied even when, as in Bahrain, this proved not to be
the case, or it required some ethical gymnastics, as in Egypt. But then
mobs make fickle friends. As Kipling warned, every mob "whose head has
grown too large / Ends by destroying its own job/ And earns its own
discharge."
In the final paragraph of the article he does relent and refer to
protesters rather than the mob, but nowhere does he use George Ruds
term the crowd.
As noted, Rud has made the point that, following Lebon, the first to
write about crowd psychology, conservative historians have used terms
like the mob, riff raff or dregs from the gutter to characterise rioters
and revolutionaries, often making little or no distinction between them.
What was seen in Egypt in late June was a second Arab Spring, a
revolutionary movement, intent on forcing President Mohamed Morsi
from office and replacing him with, at the very least, a less authoritarian
regime. The army was not that, so protests have remained a work in
progress.
Jenkins arguments about the mob amount to the point that it is an
unpredictable and indeed unreliable ally. But this simply points to the
perspective of the conservative wary of popular mobilisations because of
where they might lead.
The reason why Rud was concerned with using the term crowd
rather than mob was because his historical research into riots in France
and England in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
demonstrated that, far from being an inchoate mass of un-rooted people,
most of those involved in riots were those in workcraftsmen and the
like. We know this particularly from the profiles of those arrested.
So, while criminals may well have used the disorder of a riot for their
own ends, the vast majority were politically organised and motivated.
This is what concerns Jenkins the most. He dislikes the idea of
Western intervention in the Arab world but is also concerned that, left to
its own devices, the mob seems to install, not liberal secular democracies,
but conservative autocracies.
That is, as can be seen across several countries, a possibility. But those
who were on the streets in Egypt in June were protesting about a
10
Introduction
conservative autocracy, and few were demanding that the army sort
matters out for them.
In short, while outcomes are never certain, trusting the democratic
impulses of the crowd is better than fearing the possible reactionary
consequences of the mob.
Notes
1
E. P Thompson noted of the 1831 Bristol Riots in The Making of the English
Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1963) that the democratic sentiments
informing the rioters should not mislead us into mistaking the Bristol riots for a
politically conscious revolutionary action. Bristol in 1831 exemplifies the
persistence of older, backward-looking patterns of behaviour.
2
George Rud, The Riots in History, Marxism Today (October 1981).
3
E. P. Thompson, Customs in Common, Chapter IV The Moral Economy of the
Crowd in the Eighteenth Century (London: Merlin Press,1991).
4
George Rude, Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century, Studies in Popular
Protest (London: Collins,, 1970), 28.
5
The Guardian/LSE, Reading the Riots project. Civil Unrest, Rioting in Our Cities
(London, 2011).
6
George Rud, The Changing Face of the Crowd, in Harvey J. Kaye The Face of
the Crowd (New Jersey: Harvester 1988).
7
George Rud, The Changing Face of the Crowd, in L. P. Curtis jnr (ed.), The
Historians Workshop (London: Garland, 1985), 200.
8
Ibid., 201.
9
Ibid., 203.
10
Ibid.
11
Ibid.,
12
The Guardian, August 24, 2013.
13
The Morning Star, August 24, 2013.
14
Rud, Paris and London In The Eighteenth Century, 96.
15
David Goodway, London Chartism 183848 (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982).
16
Isobel Armstrong, Glass Culture and the Imagination, 18301880 (Oxford:
Oxford University Press, 2008).
17
Simon Jenkins, The Guardian July 4, 2013.
CHAPTER ONE
FROM REVOLUTION TO NEW UNIONISM:
THE IMPACT OF BLOODY SUNDAY
ON THE DEVELOPMENT
OF JOHN BURNS POLITICS
SEAN CREIGHTON
Introduction
According to the Central News, the new Conspiracy Bill which is to be
brought forward will empower magistrates to deal with the case of
conspiracy symbolised in Ireland by the Plan of Campaign, and will have
the effect of modifying the more elaborate and slowly moving machinery
of the Irish executive. It will touch every kind of conspiracy, not excluding
the agitation identified with the crofters movement, and the organisations
for Socialist purposes, Boycotting and similar forms of intimidation for
social and political ends will be promptly and effectively dealt with by
means of summary arrest and conviction.
So reported The National Reformer in January 1887.1 The opposition

to the handling of popular unrest in Ireland by the British Government
increasingly found its support in England linked with issues around free
speech. They came together explosively on Bloody Sunday, November
13, 1887.
In support of the cause of Irish freedom the Metropolitan Radical
Federation planned to demonstrate against the imprisonment of some Irish
Nationalists on Sunday November 13, 1887. The demonstration was banned
as part of a general attempt by the government, the police, the local shop
keepers, and the west end clubs to stop the continual use of the square as an
unemployed camp, and for political agitation against unemployment and
other issues. The ban was seen by radicals, socialists and some liberals as an
attack on free speech and the right of assembly. They defied the ban and the
12
Chapter One
police backed up by army units attacked the demonstrators to impose the ban
and disperse the estimated 100,000 who took part. The demonstrators
defended themselves as best they could, and most fled, understandably. It
was officially defined as a riot, and continues to be so.2 A week later a
further confrontation in the square led to the death of Albert Linnell.
While technically within the legal definition of riot, the events of
Bloody Sunday were a violent assault by the government on its citizens.
There are many accounts of what happened on that day in books including
those about John Burns, Tom Mann, William Morris and Eleanor Marx.3
There does not appear to be a comprehensive study which looks at it from
every perspective. This chapter is not designed to do so, as that would require
a book.
Instead, because the Battersea socialist firebrand John Burns was arrested,
tried and imprisoned for his role on the day, this essay examines his political
development up to and alongside other important events which contributed to
Bloody Sunday. It appears to have helped him to rethink how economic,
political and social change could be achieved, moving him into electoral
politics and trade union organisations. While the effect of Bloody Sunday
was important, there seems to be a significant aspect of the wider story,
which is the degree to which the issue of free speech and the use of the police
helped shape a common outlook shared by socialists, radicals and many
liberals, helping lead to the New Unionism movement from 18891892.
John Burns
Born in 1858 John Burns trained as an engineer, and in 1884 he joined the
Democratic Federation, which shortly added the word Social. In early 1885
he gave a talk to the Battersea Secular Society entitled Poverty, Its Cause
and Cure. This had a profound effect on many in the audience. His speech
provided a breakthrough in social analysis which many working class
radicals were seeking. It led to the formation of the Battersea branch of the
Social Democratic Federation (SDF) in May 1885. In a few short years, the
work of the branch transformed working-class politics in Battersea. It gave
Burns and others a base which also became a training ground for many other
activists who went on the strengthen the local, London and national socialist
and trade union movements, including Tom Mann, John Ward and later
Stephen Sanders.4
From Revolution to New Unionism
13
Tom Mann
Tom Mann is important in gaining an understanding of Burns. Born in
Warwickshire in 1856, he started work at the age of 9, and later became an
engineer, involving himself in co-operative and teetotal activity. He moved to
London in October 1877. During one of several temporary jobs he became
influenced by Sam Mainwaring, a unionist and radical/socialist. Mann
married and joined the Amalgamated Society of Engineers, became a cooperator, he was attracted to Malthusianism and the economic analyses of
Henry George, Thorold Rogers and John Ruskin. He moved to Battersea and
worked at Brotherhoods in Belvedere Rd, Lambeth, joining Battersea SDF
shortly after its formation. He later recalled that Burns had already won
renown as a public advocate of the new movement. The SDF provided Mann
with the answers he had been looking for: I found Socialism a more
complete satisfaction than I had ever before experienced.5
The Work of the SDF

SDF activity was dominated by public meetings, in Burnss case at
Battersea Park particularly. With the starting of the SDF in Battersea John
Burns gave most of his Sundays to open-air meetings at the south-west gates
of Battersea Park, recalled Lee, the national SDF's historian. The meetings
were large, and the sales of Justice and Socialist literature exceedingly
good.6
Mann recalls that the branch 'was a rapidly growing body.' In addition to
the Battersea Park meetings, there were Sunday evening meetings at its
meeting place at Sydney Hall, and various meetings during the week. Mann
has left this description of Burns:
He had a splendid voice and a very effective and business-like way of putting
a case. He looked well on a platform. He always wore a serge suit, a white
shirt, a black tie, and a bowler hat. He looked the engineer all over, and was
easily recognised. Surprisingly fluent, with a voice that could fill every part of
the largest hall or theatre, and if the wind was favourable, could reach a
twenty-thousand audience in the parks, he was undoubtedly the most
remarkable propagandist speaker in the country.7
They became close friends and good comrades. When Burns stood as a
Parliamentary candidate in West Nottingham in 1885, Mann was Treasurer of
Burns' Election Fund. He stepped in and took up the work of the Battersea
branch as chief advocate.8 He acted as election agent for the SDF
candidates in Hampstead and Kennington in the November 1885
14
Chapter One
Parliamentary election. In the internal split that followed SDF leader

Hyndman's acceptance of Tory gold to finance the SDF's candidates, Mann
stayed loyal to the executive and did not join the Socialist Union split-off.
The branch developed social service provision, providing free breakfasts
to the children of the unemployed. At one breakfast in February 1887
catering for 270 children, Burns gave a short address and there was vocal and
instrumental music. As the children left, each was presented with a packet of
sweets and a cake of chocolate.9
Trade Unionism and the Eight Hour Day

Like the SDF as a whole, the branch membership was divided in its
attitude to practical palliative reform activities, particularly in the trade union
sphere. Burns and Mann differed over what was best in tactics. Both were
members of the Amalgamated Society of Engineers. Mann considered that it
was part of his Socialist duty to try and shake-up the Union which had
become very respectable and deadly dull. Because his Union branch
meeting did not allow for enough general educational matters to be
considered, he founded the Battersea Progressive League or Society. It held
its meetings in the weeks alternating between the fortnightly ones of the
Battersea ASE, but was open to all trade unionists, not just members of the
ASE. Mann re-called that the League served as a feeder to the open-air
propagandist efforts of the SDF at park gates and elsewhere.10
I made it my special task to urge the necessity for a reduction in hours, on the
ground that, owing to the many improvements in machinery from the time the
nine-hour day was established, this was a right step to take, irrespective of
whether Socialism was approved or not. As the unemployed agitation was
general at the time, I argued that a reduction in hours would be the most
practical method of coping with the evil. But I declared no less emphatically
that shorter hours would not cure unemployment, and that no restriction of the
working class, however rigid, would meet the case. It was to be looked on
merely as a palliative, pending the realization of Socialism.11
Unlike the majority SDF leadership, which criticised the unions, Mann
had hope in their ability to change. The eight-hour day was a key to this. The
eight-hour day was a socialist demand in the early 1880s, but was not
considered important enough to take political action on. Dona Torr, one of
Mann's biographers, suggests that he was the first British worker to see the
legal eight-hour day as part of the battle for Socialism, and the first to
organise agitation for it in London.12
15
At a crowded Battersea SDF meeting Mann argued the case for action,
urging the desirability of dealing specifically with the eight-hour question,
as whatever else might be done, this would prove of permanent as well as
immediate value. He stated that it was the practice of the SDF to make
incremental reference to the reduction in hours, complained that no definite
steps were taken to force the matter onto the frontand more on similar
lines.
Mann records Burns' opposition.
He at once expressed entire disapproval of what I proposed. He declared
the time had passed for such trivial reforms as the eight-hour day,
notwithstanding the fact that it was included among the palliative proposals
of the SDF. Amid loud cheers he declared that the capitalist system was on
its last legs, and that it was our duty to prepare at once to seize the whole
of the means of production and wipe out the capitalists altogether.
John Ward supported Burns, but was if possible more revolutionary. He

was ready to take action for a physical force overthrow, certainly was not
prepared to spend time over anything so paltry as an eight-hour day. When
the vote was taken, the attitude of Burns and Ward was endorsed by an
overwhelming majority.13
Eight Hours League

Despite this divergence of views within the branch, and despite the strong
personalities involved, Mann and his pro eight-hour day supporters were able
to act independently without causing a split within the branch.
In April, after three hours of vigorous discussion at the General Moore
public house in Stewarts Rd, the Battersea Progressive Society voted in
favour of an eight hour agitation and formed a committee of fifteen to take
the matter up vigorously and influence those who are at present
indifferent.14 The committee was the Eight-Hours League. In June, Mann
published a highly influential pamphlet called What a Compulsory EightHour Day Means to the Workers.15
Unemployment
By now, Burns's outdoor oratory had earned him the nicknames The
Man with the Red Flag and The Orator of Tower Hill. He became a
bogeyman to the middle classes.
A major focus for SDF activity was the issue of unemployment which
rose to over 10% in 1886. On February 8, 1886 the London United Workers
16
Chapter One
Committee, which argued that unemployment was caused by free trade and
unfair foreign competition, planned a demonstration in Trafalgar Square. The
Commissioner of Police agreed it could go ahead. Having heard that the
committee feared an attack on the demonstration by the SDF, which regarded
the Committee as Tory, the police prepared for a disturbance. Burns and
other SDFers did exploit the gathering to make the case of socialism. He had
an audience of about 13,000 people. After approaches by the police, he,
Hyndman and Champion agreed to lead the demonstrators to Hyde Park.
They were jeered at by Charlton Club members. In the retaliation that
followed the SDF lost control. Windows were smashed and shops were
looted in Pall Mall, St. James's, Piccadilly and Oxford St, people were
assaulted, and carriages overturned. There were not enough police to take
control. The Times said: the West End was for a couple of hours in the
hands of the Mob.16
Queen Victoria was incandescent and wanted meetings in the Square
made illegal. Under an 1844 Act of Parliament the square was owned by the
crown, and responsibility for control and management lay with the
Commissioners of Works. The government decided to prosecute the SDF
leaders. In March, Burns, Hyndman and two others were arrested and
charged with seditious conspiracy. Burns enjoyed his arrest. He saw an
inspector en-route to his home on Lavender Hill to arrest him. He stopped
him and introduced himself: if you are going to Lavender Hill to arrest John
Burns I thought I might spare you the trouble. I am John Burns and you had
better take me now.17
The Times talked about [t]he vagabondage of London, apparently
associated by some mysterious sympathy, marched up Pall Mall, and that
the crowd continued under concealed leaders. A repeat of the day was
expected the next day and West End shops were shut. Nothing happened.
Similar panic occurred on February 10 with banks closing and precautions
taken to prevent attacks on government buildings. Morris thought this was
the first skirmish of the Revolution, but Engels and others did not think the
situation was revolutionary.18
On February 21 the SDF held a meeting in Hyde Park. With 2,360
officers, troops and a magistrate on standby, Tom Mann chaired one of the
platforms.
Parliamentary enquiry
A Committee of Enquiry into the events of February 6 was held,
comprising five MPs. They were amazed that the Commissioner of Police
had been present on the day in plain clothes but did not issue any commands.
17
The Enquiry recommended reforms of the police to remedy the following

defects: insufficient numbers of officers of superior rank and education, lack
of an efficient telegraphic system, absence of an adequate force of mounted
police, a defective chain of responsibility among the superior officers, want
of published police regulations for dealing with large meetings, the position
and duty of officers in charge of meetings, and absence of a proper system of
communication with the Home Office in the event of emergency.19
Ironically, this was the period of Gladstone's third Ministry and the Under
Secretary for Home Affairs was the trade union leader and MP Henry
Broadhurst. His first job was the revenge of law and order upon the
rioters of Trafalgar Square, by no means a pleasant initiation for me into
official life.20
Burns' trial took place at the Old Bailey from April 710, 1886. Joseph
Chamberlain, the President of the Local Government Board, was
subpoenaed as an expert in agitation. It was alleged that in his speech
Burns had said We must have bread, or they must have lead. He was
able to prove he had not used those words. The judge summed up against
the prosecution and the jury found Burns not guilty of conspiracy, but
guilty of uttering seditious and inflammatory language. The trial and
outcome boosted his reputation. His speech from the dock, which included
explaining socialism, was printed as an SDF pamphlet.
Following a split the Liberal government fell in the general election of
July 1886, and in came the Conservatives supported by the Liberal Unionists.
Agitation in Battersea
The agitation continued in the districts into 1887. In Battersea, at least a
pre-revolutionary air seems to have been generated. John Ward became a
regular drill sergeant, preparing the comrades for possible physical-force
eventualities.21 Burns himself stated that he would rather take up a musket
on behalf of his fellow workers if they thought they could win than see
workmen having to walk the streets directly their hair showed the slightest
sign of turning grey. If the local authorities in Battersea did not undertake
local relief works, he was prepared to lead the people and sack the bakers'
shops and send the bill to the local authorities.22
One of the methods used to highlight unemployment in early 1887 was
revival of the Chartist tradition of demonstrations of the unemployed on
Sundays to the principal London churches, inviting the incumbents to preach
sermons about the effects of unemployment, and hold meetings of their own
outside the churches. Burns organised one in Batterseas parish church St
Marys Old Church in January 1887. Although there were disturbances at
18
Chapter One
such events, the SDF did not encourage them. In the church loud and
prolonged hissing" greeted the names of the Queen and the Prince of
Wales.23 But it was not just the working-class congregation agitating in
church. For a while in 1887, Dennis Hird, the St Marys curate, later
Principal of Ruskin College in Oxford, preached socialism from the pulpit.
Sir Charles Warren

In the wake of the furore Police Chief Commissioner Henderson resigned.
He was replaced by Sir Charles Warren, a former solider in the Empire, with
military ideas of discipline and public order, and a Gladstonian Liberal. The
frequent use of Trafalgar Square for protest meetings put a strain on police
resources. There was also a build-up in the numbers of the unemployed
sleeping in the square. The SDF began to organise among them under the
banner Not Charity, But Work. Warren asked the Home Secretary to ban
all meetings in the square. While the Home Secretary delayed, Warren posted
up to 2,000 policemen around the square of weekends to ensure public
order. On October 14, the police dispersed a procession to the Lord Mayor,
but a meeting in the square to protest against the sentence on the Chicago
anarchists was allowed. On October 16, the unemployed were at Westminster
Abbey. On October 17, Warren ordered the clearance of the unemployed
from, and the temporary closure of, the square, which was done on that and
the next two days, but which proved ineffective. Most days between October
21 and November 3 saw Socialist and unemployed meetings in the square.
Warren was also under increasing pressure from those who wanted meetings
to be stopped because of fears about the mob. On November 3 a
shopkeepers meeting protested against the use of Trafalgar Square by the
unemployed. The next day Warren authorised the square to be cleared
again.24
By now he had the Home Secretary's support. After consulting the Home
and War Offices and the Office of Works, he issued an order prohibiting
meetings or gatherings in the square. The debate about the law and the use of
Trafalgar Square prompted The Law Journal to state that the 1872 law
allowing the use of Hyde Park and some other open spaces in London did not
apply to the square. Because of this, the common law remedy of dispersing
the crowd is alone practicable as trespassers as the Crown had never
dedicated Trafalgar Square to the public.25
The SDF had planned to have a march of the unemployed behind the
Lord Mayor's procession on November 9. Perceiving Warrens decision to be
unlawful and provocative, they called instead for a mass meeting for the
Square at 3pm.
19
By 2pm the square and the surrounding streets were patrolled by at least
6,000 police, with the Life Guards on standby. Fleet Street shops put up their
shutters. Leading their contingent John Ward and George Bateman broke
through the police cordon. Ward was arrested. In the scuffle that followed,
Bateman and Tom Mann got to the plinth of Nelson's Column to start
speaking. Mann was to modestly re-call that from the plinth he reviewed the
situation, telling why such action was taken, and dealt with the SDF
proposals for the relief of unemployment.26 After discussing the economic
situation he recited some verses from Shelley. Reporting at the time,
Reynolds News said that Mann, who appeared to be great favourite with a
large number of persons in the crowd, and who was loudly cheered,
addressed his hearers as 'fellow citizens'. He in bitter but excellent language
pointed out that, although their meeting had been prohibited, yet they were
holding it, and at the moment they were masters of the situation. The cause of
all the turmoil ... was that the Social Democrats had had the nerve to fight the
battle of the unemployed.27
Symbolically, the Shelley poem he recited was from Men of England,
written after the military attack on the peaceful demonstration at Peterloo in
Manchester in 1819. His bitter language was, according to another paper, that
poverty was caused by the robber band they had just seen and others like
them and advising them to break up the robber band and to organise to
make every man and woman in England really free.28 Mann's speech ended
with the arrival of the cavalry.
Bloody Sunday
Issued on November 8, the Home Secretarys and Police Commissioner
Charles Warren's ban on meetings in Trafalgar Square was the culmination of
months of perceived problems with the unemployed camping in the square,
and a continual series of demonstrations, creating concern about disorder,
actual disorder and straining police resources.28
In relation to the ban, W. T. Stead, the campaigning editor of the Pall
Mall Gazette, wrote: We have reached a crisis in the political history of the
metropolis when something must be done, and that at once, to defend the
legal liberties of London from the insolent usurpations of Scotland Yard
There is no means of defending popular liberties as efficacious as that of
resisting at first ever their exercise.29
William Saunders, of the English Land Restoration League, had already
been arrested after notifying the commissioner of his intention. A journalist
and Liberal, he had started The Western Morning News in 1859, then set up
the Central News agency in 1862, The Democrat, in 1884, and had been MP
Chapter One
20
for East Hull in 18856.30 He was prosecuted for his attempt to hold the
meeting but was discharged by the Bow St magistrate.31
The Metropolitan Radical Federation, whose secretary was Battersea's
James Tims, supported by the Law and Liberty League, which Stead had
helped to set up, and the Social Democratic Federation, decided to use the
demonstration to protest against the ban. Feeder processions were organised
from several parts of London.
In preparation, the government took control of the bridges to prevent the
processions from South London getting across. A cordon of 2,500 police
closed thirty streets to all but buses and cars within a mile of the square,
wherein 1,500 policemen were placed.
Before setting off from Clerkenwell Green the demonstrators were
addressed by Annie Besant, Edward Aveling and William Morris. Morris
talked about the duty to resist by every means in their power any invasion
of the rights of free speech. But he was concerned about the likely response
of the police when they arrived at the square. Before they reached the square
they were charged from the side streets by mounted police wielding staves,
followed by police on foot, as was the case with the contingent from Notting
Hill and Paddington.
The South London processions joined together at Westminster Bridge.
They crossed over and were charged by mounted police. Those who fought
their way through into the square faced the police there. A group of between
200 and 400 led by the radical MP Cunninghame Graham and John Burns
broke through the police into the square. In the subsequent fight they were
both arrested. Two hundred Light Guards were sent up Whitehall with a
magistrate to read the Riot Act. Grenadier Guards were sent in with rifles
with fixed bayonets and live ammunition. Over 200 people were treated in
local hospitals. Three were to die.32
The police had their supporters watching from surrounding buildings.
Graham later wrote:
The tops of the houses and hotels were crowded with well-dressed women
who clapped their hands and cheered with delight when some miserable and
half-starved working man was knocked down and trodden under foot. This I
saw as I stood on almost the identical spot where a few weeks ago the
Government unveiled the statue of Gordon We are so completely
accustomed to bow the knee before wealth and riches, to treat it ourselves we
are a free nation, that in the end we have got to believe it.33
Morris commented:
It was all over in a few minutes: our comrades fought valiantly, but they had
not learned how to stand and turn their column into a line or to march on to
21
the front The police struck right and left like what they were, soldiers
attacking an enemy The band instruments were captured, the banners and
flags destroyed, there was no rallying point and no possibility of rallying and
all that the people composing our one strong column could do was to struggle
into the Square as helpless units. I could see that numbers were to no avail
unless led by a band of men acting in concert and each knowing his own part
Sir Charles Warren has given us a lesson in street-fighting.34
Eleanor Marx wrote:

I have never seen anything like the brutality of the police; the Germans and
Austrians, who know what police brutality can be, have said the same to
me I was in the thick of the fight at Parliament Street, and afterwards in
Northumberland Avenue I got pretty roughly used myself. My cloak and
hat are torn to shreds; I have had a bad blow across the arm from a
policeman's baton, and a blow on the head knocked me downbut for a
sturdy old Irishman whose face was streaming with blood, I must have
been trampled on by the mounted police. But this is nothing to what I saw
done to others.35
Bloody Sunday: The Aftermath

Given the long period of dispute about demonstrations in the square,
Bloody Sunday on November 13, 1887 should be seen not as an isolated
incidence of a demonstration descending into riot or a states attack on its
citizens, but as a convergence of a complex set of events, issues and
personalities.
Nor did Bloody Sunday end the fight over the freedom to use Trafalgar
Square. The Law and Liberty League provided legal aid and looked after the
homes and families of the victims. Annie Besant reported on fund-raising for
the defence fund in the columns of The National Reformer.
There was debate about the legality of the ban. The Friday after Bloody
Sunday the Pall Mall Gazette published a piece on the law of meetings in
the square. Charles Bradlaugh reproduced it in the National Reformer with
the comment that he was astonished to see that the Home Secretary states
that the use of Trafalgar Square can be interfered with by the personal
and direct veto of the Queen. The Gazette had noted that Mr. Plunket in
the previous Parliamentary Session, no doubt speaking under legal
advice, declared publicly in the House that he had no authority to interfere
with the assembly in Trafalgar Square on even vagrant persons.36
The prosecution of William Saunders was dropped by the Government
and was advised that he was entitled to sue the constables that arrested
him.37
22
Chapter One
The Death of Albert Linnell

The moral panic continued. Thousands of special constables were sworn
in, 5,000 of whom were mobilised on Sunday November 20. That day Hyde
Park was the venue of demonstration, but many people went to the square to
see what was happening, given that police were posted there in case of a
further attempt to defy the ban. The police attacked the assembled spectators
and one of them, Alfred Linnell, who had not been at the Hyde Park
demonstration, was so badly injured that he died on December 3.
Commenting on his death, The Times said: The mounted police were on the
spot in the execution of their duties, while LINNELL, to put the matter on the
lowest ground, was not.38
As well as writing in The National Reformer, Annie Besant used her
own journal Our Corner to write about the Trafalgar Square meetings. In
the latter she accused the authorities of unsuccessfully trying to hush up
the cause of death of Alfred Linnell whose thigh was broken in a charge of
the mounted police on November 20th. Commenting on the plan for a
public funeral for Linnell, she wrote:
Many a public funeral has been given to statesmen and to generals, but
London has not seen in our generation a public funeral given to a poor man
killed by violence of the police. And the lesson of this funeral to each who
sees it will be that Alfred Linnells fate may be his or her own, unless the
police terror is put an end to. For Linnell was not an agitator, he was not
a politician, he was not a Socialist, he was not moved to go to Trafalgar
Square by any sense of public duty or desire to vindicate free speech; he
was merely a harmless, indifferent, curious spectator, and he has been slain
by the new tyranny. The lesson will not be lost of the thousands who will
read it on Sunday next.40
Warren banned the use of the Square as the starting point for Linnell's
funeral procession on December 18. An estimated 120,000 people went from
Great Windmill Street, via King Street and Covent Garden and the Strand to
Bow Cemetery. Three flags were on the funeral car: the green of Ireland, the
yellow and green of the Radicals, and the red of Socialists. Morris's Death
Song, composed for the occasion, was sung.
In his funeral oration, Morris talked about the ruling class making this
great town of London nothing more than a prison If the police knock us
about and treat us ill, it is to a certain extent our own fault, but we have given
the management of our affairs to other people. The marchers must now
organise for a holy war.41
23
Burns Imprisonment
Having been arrested on Bloody Sunday, Burns and Graham were
committed for trial at the Central Criminal Court.42 The trial took place on
January 1618, 1888. Among the charges were riotous assembly, being
armed and assaulting the police. Burns argued against the legality of the ban
and derided the charge of being armed and causing a riot when his only arms
were a pocket handkerchief and a tram ticket. He wanted to win the police
over to the principles as fellow workers. The causes that made them sell their
physical ability were the same that drove others into the army and that filled
the streets with unemployed workmen. He advocated Socialism. He blamed
the police commissioner who sought to militarise what should be a civic
force. He had decided to challenge the illegal conduct of the police in
closing the Square. If riot there is, (it) was caused by the police attacking
people before we reached the Square. He and Graham were found guilty of
unlawful assembly, and found not guilty on the other charges. They were
sentenced to imprisonment for six weeks.42
The Impact of Bloody Sunday

Accounts of Bloody Sunday and its aftermath have not given enough
attention to the public debate and the importance of the issues in Liberal,
Radical and Socialist circles, giving them common cause and helping to weld
local co-operation on which Burns was later able to capitalise.
The role of the police in events before Bloody Sunday was a matter
of much public debate, as is evidenced by newspapers serving South
London and Croydon. For example, at the November meeting of the
Battersea Parliament in response to the Trafalgar Square events T. H.
Moreis proposed That the time had arrived when the police force should
be put under the direction of those whose interests they served, namely the
ratepayers. Mr Gilbert supported the police, while Mr Turnot said he
was not surprised at the action of the agitators and he feared there was
great danger of their becoming police-ridden. The Conservative members
defended Sir Charles Warren. In relation to the recent enfranchisement of
the police, a Liberal said that he did not care how the police voted, so
long as they did not use their truncheons.43
Battersea Liberal and Radical Association meetings on Wednesday
November 9 and on Friday 11 met to protest against the policy of the
Government on Ireland and discuss the legality of the ban on the use of the
square.44
24
Chapter One
On Saturday November 12 the Liberal Club in Park Street Croydon

discussed the events of the week. It was considered that Warrens ban
would lead to a disturbance the next day. Several members considered that
the unemployed had abused the right of public meeting.45
On the evening of Bloody Sunday, Henry Hyndman was at the North
Camberwell Radical Club where he:
remarked that he really thought that what had occurred that afternoon
ought to show Radicals that they had nothing to expect but brutality and
cowardice from both the organized parties. Where were their liberal
leaders that day? He had seen many sad sights in his time. He had been in
wars; he had been in savage countries; he had been in some of the roughest
parts of the United States, but he declared that of all the scenes of
deliberate brutality at the expense of men, women, and children, he had
seen nothing more dastardly than the cowardly attach made by horsepolicemen that day.
The Club passed a resolution protesting against the infamous tyranny

of the Tory Government, and the cowardly attack made by the police and
the military, acting under the orders, upon crowds of unarmed
Englishmen, and resolving never to desist from agitation.46
Haviland de Sausmarez of the Middle Temple addressed the Peckham
Beaconsfield Club on The Executive and Party Government, criticising
a letter in which Gladstone had defended the Government and police.48
The Grange Habitation Primrose League expressed confidence in the
Governments Irish policy.47
Unlike the South London Press, which was owned by J. Henderson, a
Liberal, the Croydon Advertiser supported the Tories. It ran a weekly
column allegedly By a County Member from the National Liberal
Club. The writer blamed the Pall Mall Gazette for Bloody Sunday.
This widely read paper, in a series of absolutely wicked leaders, urged on
the Socialists, the Anarchists and the vagrants of the Metropolis to defy
the authorities, and succeeded in gulling the more ignorant members of
Workmens Clubs into taking part in the encounter. The writer said he
was there and can testify to the splendid manner in which the police did
their work.
While supporting Warrens action the Advertisers editor did not
think the soldiers ought to have been brought out. It does not look well in
a free country, and with the thousands of police already in the Square, the
forces of law and order were overwhelming. After a discussion he
reminded his readers [b]ut let the sober-minded citizen consider this. That
25
Englishmen have no liberties except those which are allowed them by their
laws.48
The Croydon Guardian editor also took a pro-Warren and anti Pall
Mall Gazette line.49 The Croydon Times editor said that Bloody Sunday
formed the principal topic of conversation amongst the Croydon public
this week. He stressed that the meeting had been called by a properly
constituted political society, for a political purpose and therefore could
not be unlawful. He would have preferred that following the ban the
organisers had switched to Hyde Park. He assumed that the conduct of
the police will be made the subject of a full and careful investigation .
The Croydon branch of the National League passed a resolution in support
of OBrien.50 The editorial on November 19 also discussed the matter,
summarising the earlier one and discussing the Gladstone letter.51
The Home Rule Union published a pamphlet The Law of the Public
Meeting by Sir Horace Davey, QC, based on a talk he had given on
November 3.52
The issue of free speech and assembly was not just confined to
Trafalgar Square. A few days after Bloody Sunday, William Culwick,
well known as one of the leaders of the Socialist party, was charged with
using threatening and abusive words when he addressed a public meeting
in New Cut, and assaulting a detective. The police evidence alleged that he
told the crowd: Why didnt you force for way in when you went to the
Square on Sunday? Why should you care for the police? You d--- fools, go
next Sunday with revolvers, or anything else you can get hold of. Go
armed, all of you, and fight your way in, and dont be made fools of any
longer. Some in the crowd of 5,000 pelted him with eggs and other
things. Culwick said the whole thing was trumped up.53
The imprisonment of W. Arter, a member of the South London
Parliament, who had been watching the events, was discussed at one of its
meetings. It was agreed to condemn the action of the Executive in the
arrest of a member of this House and other loyal citizens availing
themselves of the right of public meeting.54
The supporters of Warren in control of Paddington Vestry passed a
resolution of support for him and copied it to other Vestries. The Vestry of
St George the Martyr in Southwark condemned the Paddington Vestry and
considered that Warren deserved censure. An attempt was made to oppose
a resolution to decline to levy or collect the police rate as a protest.55
On Sunday November 20 the North Camberwell Radical Club and
Institute held a lecture by J. A. Giles called The Trafalgar Massacre.56
In December Edward Wallace, Henry Quelch and Benjamin Bushell
were in front the magistrates for obstructing the highway in Bermondsey
26
Chapter One
with a meeting involving about 150 people. Quelch claimed the police
action was an attempt to curtail liberty of speech and the right of
public meeting. He claimed that originally they were hounded out by the
roughs of the Primrose League under the sanction of the police. They
then hired a room which was later cancelled. Then they hired a beer ship
but the landlord claimed to have been threatened by the police that if he let
the meeting proceed he would imperil his license. Further attempts to
hold indoor meetings were frustrated by the police. The three were fined
10s plus costs for obstruction, but were reminded of their right of appeal.57
On Friday December 9 the Clapham Liberal Association passed a
resolution protesting the government action and calling on the leaders of
the Liberal party and the Liberal members for the metropolis to take,
without delay, all necessary steps for securing for the citizens, without let
or hindrance for the future, such reasonable use of the square for public
meetings as they have long enjoyed.58
Two days later at the Kennington Liberal and Radical Club A. F. Wilks
lectured on How and Why I was Arrested. After discussing his
experience he went on to argue the case of a municipal government for
London, and deplored the disgrace of poverty in the City.59
An attempt was made to prosecute four constables for assault, and was
rejected at Bow Street. One of those involved in the attempt, Feargus
OConnor, a member of the South London Parliament, had observed police
assaulting people in Northumberland Avenue and had been batoned for
taking officers numbers.60
On Sunday January 1, 1888 a meeting of the unemployed was held at
the Mill Pond Bridge in Rotherhithe for the purpose of urging the
Government the necessity of alleviating the distress which exists in the
metropolis. Organised by the SDF branches with a large force of police
present, there was no serious disturbance. Several thousand people
attended. It was chaired by Henry Quelch, who criticised Warren. Another
speaker, J. Sweeney, warned of an approaching grave social crisis; it
was in the hands of the unemployed to settle the question in 48 hours.
They did not want to see revolution effected by sheer force, providing that
the same thing could be accomplished by social and political means,
neither did they want to enter into conflict with the authorities and have
recourse to firearms if they could gain their object without, and by peaceful
and constitutional means. But let them be careful to remember that if they
could not do this thing by constitutional means, they then must do
something else.
27
He pictured the setting on fire of 70 or 80m places in the West End, a

huge conflagration of the warehouses from London Wall to Deptford, the
burring of all shops in dockyards and on the Thames, A third speaker said
he defied the metropolitan police and the special constables with their
cocuswood batons. They could arrest him if they liked, but he would
give expression to this opinion.61
On Saturday January 21, John Burgas, a warehouseman, had behaved
in a violent manner and been ejected from the Washington Music Hall in
Battersea. The constables who arrested him were followed to the station
by a very large crowd shouting Trafalgar-square! Stones and mud were
thrown. Burgas was fined 60s or one months imprisonment, while one of
those in the crowd, Edward Rednor, a plumber, was fined 20s or 14 days
in prison for striking a constable and attempting to rescue Burgas from
custody.62
It was the continued debate and campaigning over free speech and Ireland
that ensured that when Burns was released from prison on February 20 the
Land & Liberty League organised a welcome meeting, and a few days later a
splendid and crowded reception took place at Batterseas Lammas Hall,
chaired by Rev. J. Cunningham with several speakers. Burns made a long
and able speech in defence of the right of public meeting.63
As part of the continuing free speech campaign Liberal MPs were
lobbied. In March 1888 the Liberals proposed in the House of Commons that
a Parliamentary Inquiry be set up into the holding of meetings in the
Metropolis.64 This was followed by two unsuccessful private members bills.
When the Liberals won the General Election in August 1892, H. H. Asquith,
who had defended Graham, became Home Secretary. Williams Saunders,
now the Radical MP for Streatham, quickly raised the issue of the ban on
meetings in Trafalgar Square. The first of the Trafalgar Square Regulations
were brought in with tight controls over future public meetings. Although
conceding less than many wanted, the Metropolitan Radical Federation
decided to celebrate with a demonstration to mark the fifth anniversary of
Bloody Sunday.65
The Nature of the Unrest 18861887

Robert Rhodes James suggests that the cause of the unrest before and
after Bloody Sunday:
cannot be easily categorised. The slump of the seventies, the agricultural
distress that drove farmworkers to the over-crowded cities, the growth of
production and the consequent further weakening of the worker-master
relationship, which encouraged both unskilled workers and disgruntled
28
Chapter One
artisans to combine to protect themselves, were undoubtedly important
contributing factors. But it is necessary to differentiate between blind inchoate
striking-out of the under-privileged against exploitation and poverty, and
organised labour movements. For it was in the latter that the destiny of
labour really lay.66
Bloody Sunday does appear to have been a catalyst for a change in

approach to strategy and tactics for social change. At first, Burns seemed
optimistic about Bloody Sunday. In December he wrote that a
revolutionary epoch has commenced the middleclass, with their
characteristic greed and ignorance, will not yield till force, the only arbiter,
makes them.67
William Morris sought to turn a mythological version of Bloody
Sunday into the first episode of the struggle which had done away with
capitalism in his News from Nowhere. As Grahams biographers stress:
The reality was rather different; however much the Battle of Trafalgar
Square was a St. Crispins day for the British left, the occasion of
honourable scares to be exhibited at moments of remembrance, it happened
to have been, by any practical criterion, a defeat.
It was certainly a defeat because the troops and the army won the day.
It was a salutary lesson in the reality of street revolution. As Graham said
on his and Burns release on February 18, 1888 after four and a half
weeks, he was:
not one of those who would urge revolutionknowing that it must needs
be unsuccessful in knowing that in a country kept down by a mercenary
police, by a military force, and with an army of the capitalist class in the
volunteers, it could not be successful. But a revolution as sweeping, as
complete, as searching, would be effected at the ballot-box.68
Burns was also pessimistic. At the Law and Liberty meeting on

February 20, Burns said that:
He was ashamed and disgusted with his own class. They were not educated
as they ought to be, and a great deal of that was owing to their own apathy
and indifference Both he and Mr Graham pledged themselves to get into
Trafalgar Square and speak or suffer the consequences and had 10,000
other men followed their example they would have gone through the
cordon of police like a dose of slats, and with precisely the same result
They wanted a rallying cry as they wanted in Paris a hundred years ago
They chose the Bastille in which some of their fellow creatures were
suffering for daring to oppose the executive government. And they whom
29
he now addressed could make Trafalgar Square their revolutionary square,

and let their Bastille be Pentonville Prison, and when they had captured
Trafalgar Squareand he intended to be one of those to do itlet the
celebration of the capture of their open-air town hall, their Trafalgar
Square revolution, be the demolition of their Bastille, that curse prison at
Pentonville which represented all the vices and the embodiment of all that
was bad in the worst possible forms of government and the system of
society.69
Manns biographer Dona Torr argued that Bloody Sunday and its
relatively easy suppression ended, for Burns (among others), the illusion
that the revolution was just around the corner the futility of playing at
insurrection (was) accepted Burns had desired seriously organised
physical force.70
Burns biographer Kenneth Brown has argued that: Torrs statement
must not be taken to mean that the riot changed John Burns from an
advocate of violence to a disciple of peaceful parliamentary action. His
views were never so clear cut Socialism for him meant the ending of all
monopoly power and privilege and the granting to the people of their share
of the wealth they helped to create. There can be no doubt that, in
Burnss political thought, revolutionary and constitutional action coexisted as means to bring about the desired transformation of society.
Bloody Sunday resolved once and for all the ambivalence in his
understanding of how change could be secured. In the months that
followed he began to emphasise self help and to supporting workers
organising themselves for social change.71
However, Burns had already been emphasising organisation a year
before Bloody Sunday.
The enthusiasm that the workers have displayed at all the meetings of the
unemployed during the past few months proves that they at least perceive the
causes which now enslave them and they are determined to support those men
who, striving for years against many obstacles, including the apathy of the
workers themselves, have persistently urged that no change for the better can
possibly take place till the wealth-producers, in organised manner, master
those conditions which now master them.72
At his trial he had outlined some of the measures in his social reform
programme: useful relief work organised through the local authorities,
building artisans dwellings, the eight-hour day, and an eight-hour bill for
railway, tramway and omnibus workers. I am anxious to preserve for the
people their open air town halls and forums I dont want the poor to adopt
in England the continental method of removing grievances.
30
Chapter One
Manns biographer Tsuzuki suggests that Burns change was linked to the
growing disillusionment with the SDF because of Bloody Sunday and its
aftermath. He had himself indulged in the free use of revolutionary rhetoric,
but he sobered down when he saw his own bragging image reflected in the
sectarian announcements by the SDF extremists of their revolutionary
intentions.73
The Continuing Importance of Free Assembly

Public meetings continued to play an important role within this shift of
emphasis. Graham and others did not push the issue of free speech and
assembly to the side. He and others set up the Open-Air Meetings
Committee. He chaired a meeting in November 1888 at the National
Liberal Club, which decided: to issue a statement of the public rights
involved in the contest between the Government and the people, in
particular the right of open-air meetings in every part of the kingdom. A
resolution was also adopted relative to the illegal violence of the police in
connection with the recent meeting on Clerkenwell green. On November
18 the last of a series of meetings in celebration of the Trafalgar square
and Chicago events of a year ago was held in Victoria-park. The trouble
that was anticipated through the refusal of the Metropolitan Board of
Works to allow the vans intended for platforms to enter the part was
avoided by the submission of the Board at the last moment. Graham and
Morris were among the speakers.74
The Committee continued its existence. Its plans to hold a meeting on
Clerkenwell Green and then march to Hyde Park in July 1890 and hold a
public meeting with a view to the assertion of the right of public
procession and public meeting in London in the interests of the public
were raised in the House of Commons. Cavendish Bentinck, the MP for
Whitehaven, asked the Home Secretary what steps would be taken to
prevent wanton and unnecessary proceedings and obstruction in the public
thoroughfares which are absolutely contrary to the wishes of the
inhabitants of the Metropolis, and which materially interfere with their
ordinary occupations and business.75
Burns Election to the LCC

Increasingly, Burns and Mann came into policy and tactical conflict with
the national SDF leadership. Although he left the SDF in 1888, Burns
continued to work with Battersea SDFers. They decided to run him for the
newly created London County Council. This caused consternation within the
31
Liberal/Radical alliance, some groups not feeling able to back him. The
influential Battersea Liberal & Radical Association supported both Burns and
James Tims. There were four other candidates from different strands of
liberal and radical thinking. Battersea was the only division in London not to
have open Liberal, Conservative or Liberal Unionist candidates.
Because of differences of opinion among the many liberal and radical
organisations, they ran separate campaigns. Burns' campaign started with an
open-air meeting at Battersea Park Gates,76 based on leafleting and his
oratory at meetings.
In his election address, Burns was explicit that he was a workman and a
social democrat. He would make the demands of the people known, and to
have their social condition improved. He would work for the Council to
adapt to the requirements of our municipal life, and through their extension
raise the social, moral and physical well-being of the whole community. He
wanted to work to make London healthy, democratic, and free, and that will
enable her municipality to be the pioneer of changes that are necessary in the
interests of her industrious citizens. He was standing as the enemy of the
jobber and sinecurist, the seater and the jerry-builder, and as the advocate of
healthy homes, shorter hours and living rates of wages.
His key policies were the extension of the powers of the council to cover
the city with all its funds and endowments, to organise industry and
distribution, and to take over the private gas, water, electric lighting,
tramways, omnibuses and markets. The council should establish free baths
and wash-houses, libraries, gymnasiums and recreation grounds, and open up
all the enclosed squares. It should establish free hospitals and control those
which already existed, construct artisans' dwellings, provide playgrounds for
children, and undertake sanitary inspection of dwellings and workshops. He
wanted a progressive land value rating system, and an end to the pollution of
London's waterways. He wanted it to organise unemployed labour on useful
work at fair rates of wages, and pay its own workforce at the trade union rate
of wages in all trades with equal pay for women, and an eight hour day/48
hour week. The council should use its own direct labour force instead of
private contractors.77 This is the foundation of what became the municipal
socialist agenda.
In light of Bloody Sunday and the campaign for free assembly in
Trafalgar Square, perhaps the most interesting proposal Burns made was
[t]hat the police of the city and of Greater London be put under the control of
the County Council.'
Initially sceptical about Burns and Tims as extreme men,78 The South
London Press decided to endorse Burns.
32
Chapter One
Battersea cannot do better than make him one of its representatives. This need
not be held to mean that Battersea exactly agrees with all Mr Burns' opinions
and principles. It is enough that it should see and acknowledge that all classes
on the community should be represented in the London County Council, and
that John Burns is a most suitable man to represent the class to which he
belongs. And this he certainly is. For general ability, for acquaintance with
many of the subjects with which the Council will have to deal, for
incorruptible integrity, and for moral courage, Mr. Burns will certainly bear a
favourable comparison with any or all of his co-candidates.79
Burns topped the poll with 3,071 votes, Tims coming second with
2,307.80 The election placed on the LCC a powerful advocate not only for
Battersea and London, but for the responsibilities the municipal authority
should have towards working people.
The Burns Wages Fund

One of the unique features of John Burns' election was the establishment
of a wages fund. According to Sanders, this originally arose as an SDF
initiative, and then widened out. The Battersea Workmen's Representation
Association was formed, paying Burns 2 a week. In April 1889, 150 people
were contributing a minimum of 6d each per week. There were also
donations from elsewhere in London. The fund provided some financial
security for Burns, leaving him free to concentrate on his LCC
responsibilities and on new unionist organisation.81
Assessment of Burns
The road Burns travelled from a physical force revolutionary to seeking
change through organised trade union activity, and the ballot box and election
to the London County Council and then parliament has been much debated.
Assessing the candidature nineteen years later in his biography of Burns,
Arthur Grubb argued that: [c]ivic patriotism is the greatest driving force in
his composition, coupled with a passionate love for London. It:
may be imagined that the creation of the London County Council in 1889
meant a loud and imperious call to a task after his own heart. John Burns had
never sought office in the local bodies of Battersea; he had preferred to play
the role of the stage manager behind the scenes, directing policy and inspiring
the workers. Now, however, the time had come to take a more prominent
position. The establishment of the County Council gave him the opportunity
to put into practice some of the theories he had long advocated in Battersea
33
Park and on Clapham Common. He had the chance to become a practical

administrator.82
This assessment seems valid as a reflection of the stage to which Burns'

views had developed by the end of 1888. The accusation that he had a driving
ambition, as argued by Joseph Burgess in his biography of Burns, is not an
adequate explanation.83 Ambition does not in itself achieve realisation. To be
elected to the LCC and later parliament required the development of political
support and organisation, and that in turn depended on supporters and
activists sharing a common political view of how social change could be
influenced. Without support, organisation and a common political view,
Burns would not have got anywhere.
In Battersea the SDF had been showing that pressure on the Vestry could
be undertaken to change the system. It therefore seems logical for Burns to
seek to use the new opportunities provided by a proven electoral base in
Battersea, his personal standing, and the creation of the London County
Council to change the system through being an elected representative.
The New Unionist wave

The continued forging of a Progressive Alliance in Battersea led to
Burns being elected as MP in 1892. Conscious of the need to ensure that
the labour movement would dominate the Alliance and that the local
branches of the old and new unions should work together, he proposed the
setting up of the Battersea Trades & Labour Council in 1894. This became
a key organisation in the alliance. The alliance took control of the Vestry
in 1894 and began to implement elements of the municipal socialist
agenda sweeping into control of Battersea Vestry, like increasing direct
labour, fair wages and improving recreational provision. Then, in 1900, it
won control of the newly formed Battersea Metropolitan Borough Council
in 1900 until divisions within it meant a loss of control from 1909 to
1912.3, 84
Ireland
The Bloody Sunday demonstration had been intended as a protest about
Ireland. Irish political issues were an important concern, particularly in
Battersea, where James Tims of the Metropolitan Federation was a member
of the local branch of the Irish National League (INL). In 1887 he travelled
several hundred miles in Ireland, visiting and speaking at various meetings.85
He presided at the Battersea ILN concert and soiree in aid of the Parnell
34
Chapter One
Indemnity Fund at Sidney Hall on March 18. At the end of June 1889, he
organised the Hyde Park demonstration against the imprisonment of Mr
Conybeare, the English MP victim of Balfour's Coercion Act. John Burns
spoke, asking why Conybeare was being sent to prison. "Not because he gave
bread to the starving. Not because he cheered the Plan of Campaign; but
because his presence in Ireland and his sympathy with its poor and oppressed
people was evidence of international solidarity. But revenge was coming.
He was quite prepared to remind people of his more militant past activities.
He referred to himself as having been an ex-convict. Clearly, this was enough
to remind his audience of his role in Bloody Sunday.86 The poster for
Burns' open air meeting in Battersea Park in the Parliamentary election in
1892 included, among the listed supporters, John Murphy of the Irish
National League.
Conclusion
Having changed from rabble rouser to revolutionary, and having
been a political prisoner eighteen years previously for his role in
Bloody Sunday, his standing as an independent socialist who refused to
join the Labour Representation Committee when it was formed in 1900
was high enough for him to be invited to join the Liberal cabinet at the end
of 1905, and then the new cabinet following the general election that
December. His appointment was welcomed by the TUC and many sections
of the Labour movement. He was criticised in the socialist movement for
wearing the formal clothing needed to meet the King. I wonder whether
Edward VII saw the irony in having as a minister one of the men involved
in the events of February 8, 1886 which his mother has been outraged
about, and which had contributed to the events that led to Bloody
Sunday. Sixty years after the event there was a commemoration in the
square on November 16, 1947.87
Notes
1
The National Reformer, 23 January 1887, 55.

Metropolitan Police Service (MPS) website's history pages in 2012 stated: This riot
in Trafalgar Square on 13 November 1887 caused many injuries and some alleged loss
of life, and led to a sustained media campaign against the Commissioner. Taken off
site by August 5 2014.
3
The Bloody Sunday story is summarised in Clive Bloom, Violent London. 2000
Years of Riots. Rebels and Revolts (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003).
4
See Sean Creighton, From Exclusion to Political Control. Radical and Working
Class Organisation in Battersea 1830s1918 (London: History & Social Action
Publications, 2009).
2

5
35
Tom Mann, Memoirs (London: McGibbon & Kee, 1967); Dona Torr, Tom Mann
and his Times. Vol 1. 18561890 (London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1956); Chushichi
Tsuzuki, Tom Mann 18561941, The Challenge of Labour (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1991).
6
H.W. Lee & E. Archbold, Social Democracy in Britain (London: Social Democratic
F
ederation, 1935), 98.
7
Mann, Memoirs, 26.
8
Ibid., 33.
9
South London Press, February 19, 1887, 7.
10
Mann, Memoirs, 39.
11
Ibid., 34.
12
Torr, Tom Mann, 211.
13
Mann, Memoirs, 434.
14
Justice, April 17, 1886.
15
Modern Press, June 1886.
16
Rodney Mace, Trafalgar Square. Emblem of Empire (London: Lawrence &
Wishart, 1976), 1656.
17
Arthur Page Grubb, From Candle Factory to British Cabinet. The Life Story of the
Right Hon. John Burns (London, 1908), 69.
18
Mace, Trafalgar Square, 1625.
19
Ibid., 168.
20
21
Mann. Memoirs, 46.
22
South London Press, January 8, 1887.
23
South London Press, January 27, 1887.
24
Mace, Trafalgar Square, 1707.
25
South London Press, November 11, 1887, 6.
26
Mann, Memoirs, 45.
27
Reynoldss News, November 14, 1886, quoted Torr, Tom Mann, 236.
28
Commonweal, November 13, 1886.
29
Quoted Mace, Trafalgar Square, 179.
30
Biographical sketch, South London Press, March 3, 1888, 1.
31
The Times, November 18, 1887.
32
Detailed accounts are given in The Times, November 14, 1887, 6; South London
Press, November 19, 1887, 13.
33
W. Cunninghame Graham, Commonweal, November 10, 8887, 354. Reprinted as
Bloody Sunday in Cedric Watts. Ed., Selected Writings of W. Cunnighame Graham
(Madison, New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. 1981), 43ff.
34
London in a State of Siege, Commonweal, November 19, 1887. For a discussion of
Morriss views afterwards see Michael Fellman, Bloody Sunday and News from
Nowhere, www.morrissociety.org/publications/JWMS/SP90.8.4.Fellman.pdf
(accessed August 5, 2014).
35
Quoted in Yvonne Kapp, Eleanor Marx. Vol II. The Crowded Years 18841898
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1976), 2289.
36
Quoted The National Reformer, November 20, 1887, 3212.
37
The National Reformer, November 27, 337.
36
38
Chapter One
The Times, November 21, 1887, 13.

The National Reformer, December 4, 1887, 372.
40
The National Reformer, December 18, 1887, 391.
41
Commonweal, December 24, 1887, quoted in E. P. Thompson, William Morris:
Romantic to Revolutionary (Rendlesham: Merlin Press, 1996).
42
William Kent, John Burns. Labour's Lost Leader (London: Williams & Norgate,
1950), 312; Tsuzuki, Tom Mann, 24.
42
South London Press, December 3, 1887, 1.
43
Wandsworth Borough News, November 12, 1887, 3.
44
45
Croydon Advertiser, November 19, 1887, 3.
46
47
48
49
Croydon Guardian, November 19, 1887, 5.
50
Croydon Times, November 16, 1887, 5.
51
Croydon Times, November 19, 1887, 5.
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
South London Press, December 12, 1887, 13, & December 19, 1887, 4.
61
South London Press, January 7, 1888, 13.
62
63
South London Press, March 3, 1888, 7; & Kent, John Burns, 323.
64
Northern Advocate, March 10, 1888, 3.
65
Engraving, Mace, Trafalgar Square, 198.
66
Robert Rhodes James, The British Revolution. British Politics 18801939 (London:
Methuen & Co, 1978), 127.
67
Justice, December 3, 1887, quoted Kenneth D. Brown, John Burns (London:
Royal Historical Society, 1977), 31.
68
Cedric Watts & Laurence Davies, Cunninghame Graham. A Critical Biography
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979), 69.
69
Quoted William Kent, John Burns, 323.
70
71
Brown, John Burns, 3235.
72
John Burns, Our Position, Justice, November 13, 1886.
73
Tsuzuki, Tom Mann, 25.
74
The Star, November 19, 1888.
www.casebook.org/press_reports/star/s881119.html?printer=true (accessed August
5, 2014.
75
House of Commons Debate, 1 July 1890 (Hansard, vol. 346 cc 4623),
39
37
http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1890/jul/01/processions-to-hydepark (accessed August 5, 2014).

76
77
Grubb, From Candle Factory, 1059.
78
79
80
81
South London Press, April 27, 1889, 7.
82
Grubb, From Candle Factory, 102 and 104.
83
Joseph Burgess, John Burns: The Rise and Fall of a Right Honourable (Glasgow:
Reformers Bookstall, 1911).
84
Sean Creighton, Battersea and New Unionism, South London Record 4, 1989.
85
South London Press, March 23, 1889, 7.
86
South London Press, July 6, 1889, 14. Conybeare had stood for Clapham and
Lewisham in the LCC election. In the short biographical note of him prior to the
election the South London Press commented His activity in connection with the
prohibition of public meetings in Trafalgar Square is well known. January 12, 1889,
4.
87
Thomas Lloyd Humberstone, The Battle of Trafalgar Square (London: Ridghill
Trout, 1948).
CHAPTER TWO
IMAGINED VIOLENCE:
SOME RIOTS IN FICTION
IAN BIRCHALL
Some Riots in Fiction

Politics amidst matters of the imagination, according to Stendhal,
are a pistol shot during a concert.1 Something similar might be said of
riots in the novel. A riot scene is an attractive prospect to a novelist, and
offers a dramatic climax, an opportunity for vivid, even lurid, description.
At the same time it can represent a microcosm of the violent tensions at
the heart of the social order, especially at times when that order is being
called into question.
Yet riots threaten to undermine the very nature of the novel. If we
disregard the wilder fringes of the avant-garde, novels have two basic
components: characters and plot. A novel is structured around a finite
number of named individuals; their motivations are studied and their
interaction is the dynamic that drives the action. But a riot involves
hundreds, maybe thousands of nameless individuals whose motivations
and interactions are too complex to grasp.
Likewise, a novel is constructed around a series of events. Their
logical and causal connections are sometimes obscured, and revealed only
in the dnouement. But those connections are essential to the readers
experience. Riots, on the other hand, are spontaneous and unpredictable,
spilling out beyond the logic of any plot.
Yet fictional riots are not merely the concern of the literary theorist.
There is no clear line of demarcation between the presentation of riots in
novels, and in, for example, the press. Narrative is one of the means we
use to make sense of the world around us, and images derived from fiction
may seem to illuminate the realities of society. Georges Pompidou, French
prime minister at the time of the 1968 student riots that led to the biggest
40
Chapter Two
general strike in human history, wrote to Franois Mauriac stressing the

affinity between the events and Dostoevskys novel The Possessed.2
What follows is a brief survey of some selected fictional riots from the
early nineteenth century to the present. There is no attempt to be
comprehensive; I have simply chosen a number of examples which
seemed to me to cast some light on the problem of understanding riots. I
have made no distinction between great literature on the one hand and
pulp fiction on the other; often, representations are remarkably similar,
whatever the differences in literary merit.
Of course, this lays me open to the charge that I am treating works of
literature as though they were political pamphlets. In a sense this is true
all the works considered here have multiple dimensions, and I have
focussed on a single aspect. Yet I would also argue that literature is one
form in which ideology is transmitted, and that works of imagination
should not be immune from interrogation about their political
assumptions.
I
In his 1845 novel Sybil, Disraeli presents a group of upper-class
gentlemen in a London club discussing current events in the summer of
1839:
Terrible news from Birmingham, said Mr Egerton at Brooks. They
have massacred the police, beat off the military, and sacked the town.
News just arrived.
I have known it these two hours, said a grey-headed gentleman,
speaking without taking his eyes off the newspaper. There is a cabinet
sitting now There are not troops enough in the country if there be
anything like a general movement. I hear they have sent the Guards down
by a special train, and a hundred more of the police. London is not overgarrisoned.
But what is the present state of affairs? inquired Mr Berners. Are
the rioters put down?
Not in the least, said Mr Egerton, as I hear. They are encamped in
the Bull Ring amid smoking ruins, and breathe nothing but havoc.3
Rioting featured in Disraelis novel because it was a fact of the world

he lived in. Disraeli understood that the brutal inequality of societythe
division into two nationsmade the possibility of violent upheaval all
too real. But, while Disraeli could be scathing about the ignorance and
ineptitude of the existing ruling class, he had no confidence that the
working class could provide alternative leadership for society.
41
Disraeli had no conscientious objection to violence; indeed, the main

representative of moral force Chartism in the book, Stephen Morley,
turns out to be thoroughly villainous. But above all Disraeli believed that
the working-class was unable to select its own leaders, and thus constantly
fell prey to agitators of the worst type. The riotous Hell-cats, who appear
in the final section of the novel, are led by Bishop Hatton, a crude parody,
shown as being totally ignorant of the movement he is taking advantage
of, not knowing even the five points of the Charter.4 Disraeli was a
politician first and a novelist second, and he manipulated his narrative in
order to make polemical points.
Elizabeth Gaskells North and South (1855) centres on an increasing
understanding between the South and industrial North of England, but also
between contending classesan understanding symbolised by the
eventual union between heroine Margaret Hale and the erstwhile factory
owner John Thornton. One of the problems they encounter is a strike, and
within that strike, a riot.
The riot has a perfectly rational explanationstriking workers are
incensed by the arrival of imported strikebreakers (knobsticks, in the
language of the time) and they attempt to intimidate them. As Margaret
faces the rioters she is aware of the real social causes, but these are buried
beneath a perception of the rioters as dehumanised and irrational:
Many in the crowd were mere boys; cruel and thoughtless, cruel
because they were thoughtless; some were men, gaunt as wolves, and mad
for prey. She knew how it was; they were like Boucher, with starving
children at home relying on ultimate success in their efforts to get
higher wages, and enraged beyond measure at discovering that Irishmen
were to be brought in to rob their little ones of bread Margaret felt
intuitively that in another instant the stormy passions would have
passed their bounds, and swept away all barriers of reason, or
apprehension of consequence.
Gaskell assures uson the basis of what experience we do not know

that it is always the savage lads with their love of cruel excitement, who
head the riotreckless to what bloodshed it may lead.5 Yet she also
believes that this explosion of irrational, animal passion had ringleaders,
notably the unfortunate Boucher, of whom even one of his fellow-workers
says he must go raging like a mad fool, and kick up yon riot.6 Like
Disraeli, she was so bemused by rioting that she could not resolve the
dilemma as to whether it was an explosion of spontaneous folly or the
product of malevolent agency. In Mary Barton (1848), Gaskell depicts,
with considerable sensitivity, the everyday lives of working people, but
42
Chapter Two
here she seems unable to show working-class violence as anything other

than alien and inexplicable.
Charles Kingsleys Alton Locke (1850) shows the appalling living and
working conditions of working people and is overtly sympathetic to
Chartism; a chapter title, How Folks Turn Chartists, shows Kingsleys
genuine attempt to understand the motivations of political radicals.7 Alton
Locke himself, tailor and poet, becomes a Chartist agitator and
addresses a meeting of agricultural workers. Soon the crowd, fuelled by
drink, moves from protest to riot, and Locke, a first-person narrator,
immediately dissociates himself; the mob is seen as both morally culpable
and irrational:
The yard now became a pandemonium. The more ruffianly part of the
moband alas! there were but too many of themhurled the furniture out
of the windows, or ran off with anything they could carry. In vain I
expostulated, threatened; I was answered by laughter, curses, frantic
dances, and brandished plunder. Then I first found out how large a portion
of rascality shelters itself under the wing of every crowd; and at the
moment, I almost excused the rich for overlooking the real sufferers, in
indignation at the rascals. But even the really starving majority, whose
faces proclaimed the grim fact of their misery, seemed gone mad for the
moment. The old crust of sullen, dogged patience had broken up, and their
whole souls had exploded into reckless fury and brutal revenge.8
Locke himself is tried and jailed for sedition, riot and arson. But
though the character participates in the riot and narrates it in the first
person, he still perceives the riot as something external. To show a rioter
as subject rather than object would have meant crossing a boundary that
was morally impassable for Kingsley.
The novelists of the Chartist period were undoubtedly sincere, not only
in their sympathy for the oppressed, but in their attempt to understand the
roots of social conflict. But riots went beyond the bounds of their
comprehension. Riot scenes featured in their work because they were a
reality of the world they lived in, a constant threat to good order. But riots
could not be explained, for they were afraid that explanation might spill
over into justification. So two possible perceptions remained, often
intertwined with each other in contradictory fashion. On the one hand,
riots were an outbreak of irrational passion, something to be condemned
rather than understood. On the other they were the work of agitators, an
achievement which seemed implausible, inasmuch as the agitators were
generally presented as not only morally reprehensible but also lacking in
any skill or intelligence.
43
The violence of the oppressed did not go away, and riots recurred in
the work of novelists of later generations. Often they revealed the same
inability to understand, but in a few cases they showed new insights into
an old problem.
II
If a fear of riots haunted the English novelists of the Chartist period,
the Paris Commune of 1871 cast a shadow over novelists in France and
elsewhere in Europe. Although in reality most of the violence came from
the Versailles troops which crushed the Commune, the thought of working
peopleand worst of all working womentaking society into their own
hands was a terrifying one. With the exception of a tiny minority, all
Frances novelists were hostile to the Commune.9
Over the following decades French novelists depicted scenes of rioting
that clearly reflected a memory of the Commune. To take just one
example, in 1882 the Catholic monarchist G. Maisonneuve published a
novel called 1893, Life Tomorrow.10 This was a dystopian novel of the
near future, depicting a society where Christianity has been suppressed.
The decline in religion is accompanied by a rise of what he calls the
socialist-anarchists. The novel ends with a socialist orgy when a
revolutionary mob sets fire to Notre-Dame and the Sacr-Coeur:
All the hatred, accumulated for over twenty years in the depths of the souls
of the proletarians by unhealthy excitements and the ever-growing
audacity of the socialist agitators, burst out in fearful imprecations, in foul,
terrifying insults women were there in large numbers. They recalled the
odious shrews of the Terror or the furies who served as canteen-women to
the forces of the Commune They were indeed mad, the gaunt, ragged
proletarians, soldiers of the great demagogic army; but mad with
drunkenness poured into their veins by poverty, unfulfilled promises and
blasphemous lies.11
Here all the clichsthe irrational, violent mob, the outside agitators,
the unsexed womencome together. For Maisonneuve it was not so much
a failure of understanding as a refusal to understand.
In terms of literary merit, Maisonneuve and Dostoevsky may be polar
opposites, but their political prejudices were remarkably similar. In The
Possessed (1872), Dostoevskys attack was directed against the emerging
political left in Russia, whom he depicts as corrupt, bloodthirsty and
mentally unbalanced fools and rogues. Dostoevsky was well aware of the
Paris Commune, and the threat of social disorder haunts the novel.
44
Chapter Two
Thus, a fte degenerates into chaos when a revolutionary philosopher

speaks:
But all the while that he was shrieking senselessly and incoherently, the
disorder in the hall increased. Many people jumped up from their seats,
some dashed forward, nearer to the platform There was a furious volley
of applause. The applause did not come from allprobably from some
fifth part of the audiencebut they applauded furiously. The rest of the
public made for the exit, but as the applauding part of the audience kept
pressing forward towards the platform, there was a block. The ladies
screamed, some of the girls began to cry and asked to go home.12
This is followed by a fire which rapidly destroys wooden houses and is

blamed on arson, incendiarism and nihilism. This is linked to the fte
because part of this hopelessly drunken rabble reached the scene of the
fire to make fresh disturbances there.13 The spreading flames not only
symbolise irrational social disorder, but suggest a memory of the fires at
the end of the Paris Commune.
Dostoevsky was in no doubt as to who bore the responsibility for such
scenes. He explained them in terms which combined the irrational mob
with manipulative agitators:
In turbulent times of upheaval or transition low characters always come to
the front everywhere. I am not speaking now of the so-called advanced
people who are always in a hurry to be in advance of everyone else (their
absorbing anxiety) and who always have some more or less definite,
though often very stupid, aim. No, I am speaking only of the riff-raff. In
every period of transition this riff-raff, which exists in every society, rises
to the surface, and is not only without any aim but has not even a symptom
of an idea, and merely does its utmost to give expression to uneasiness and
impatience. Moreover, this riff-raff almost always falls unconsciously
under the control of the little group of advanced people who do act with
a definite aim, and this little group can direct all this rabble as it pleases, if
only it does not itself consist of absolute idiots, which, however, is
sometimes the case.14
Dostoevsky may be a great novelist, but those who claim to find

insight in such passages are in fact hailing the brilliance of his literary
presentation of prejudices they themselves hold in less coherent form.
But with the emergence of an organised working-class movement in
the later years of the nineteenth century, we also start to find novelists
whose perspectives on social divisions and violence are somewhat
different.
45
mile Zola had been at best ambivalent about the Commune, and he
never supported working-class violence, but in Germinal (1885) he wrote
what remains one of the most remarkable descriptions of a strike anywhere
in literature. Zola captures the ebbs and flows of militancy, the complex
and ever-changing relationship between leaders and rank-and-file, with
great skill.
He is also well aware of the way that the strike spills over into
violence. This is shown in picketing scenes, where strikers clash with
scabs, but it also comes out powerfully in the descriptions of the women
who demonstrate in support of the strike. Involvement of women had been
one of the aspects of the Commune that had most shocked reactionary
observers, and some critics have seen Zolas descriptions as revealing the
same attitudes: It was the women who were pushing, yapping, egging on
the men.15
The most notorious scene involves the death of the shopkeeper
Maigrat. Although this depicts brutality that doubtless shocked
contemporary readers, it is no irrational explosion of violence; on the
contrary, it is carefully built up to throughout the novel. We are introduced
to the distasteful character early on in the novel, as Zola prepares us for
the strike with long descriptions of the misery and smouldering anger of
the miners:
It was well-known: when a miner wanted an extension of credit, he simply
had to send his daughter or his wife. Ugly or beautiful, no matter, so long
as they were accommodating.16
The rioting women are not shown as a faceless mob, but are named
characters we have already encountered in the narrative. When Maigrat
dies in a fall the response of the women is immediate:
The shrill voice of La Brl was heard: We should geld him like a
tom cat!
Already La Mouquette was pulling off his trousers, while La Levaque
held up his legs. And La Brl, with her dry old womans hands, opened
his naked thighs and gripped the dead virility. She held it all, snatching it
with an effort that stretched her slender spine and made her great arms
creak.17
The amputated organ is placed on the end of a stick and carried like a
flag. Zola mocks the watching bourgeois women, who in their innocence
think it may be a rabbit skin.
It is impossible to say that Zola actually approves of the rioting
women, but the way in which the scene is prepared and presented makes it
46
Chapter Two
quite possible for readers to identify with the rioters rather than seeing
them as a threat. (When I taught Germinal in the 1970s and 1980s, my
feminist students always showed particular enthusiasm for this passage.)
Zolas notions of scientific objectivity often came into contradiction with
his increasingly radical politics, but at least in parts of Germinal he
succeeded in showing the dynamics of rioting from within.
There was one thing which differentiated William Morris from most
writers of his timehe had actually taken part in a riot. On November 13,
1887Bloody Sundayhe marched with a Socialist League contingent
from Clerkenwell Green to Trafalgar Square. The demonstration was
brutally attacked by police, but Morris managed to make his way to the
square.18
As a Marxist, Morris also had a clear political perspective on riots,
seeing that rioting could only benefit working people if it was part of a
process leading to revolution:
If a riot is spontaneous it does frighten the bourgeois even if it is but
isolated; but planned riots or shows of force are no good unless in a time
of action, when they are backed by the opinion of the people and are in
point of fact indications of the rising tide .19
In Morriss novel News from Nowhere (1890), the visitor from the past
to the future utopia asks old Hammond how the revolution had come
about. He enquires whether it had come peacefully:
Peacefully? said he; what peace was there amongst those poor confused
wretches of the nineteenth century? It was war from beginning to end:
bitter war, till hope and pleasure put an end to it.20
Hammond goes on to relate the consequences of a police attack on a

demonstration in Trafalgar Square:
The whole country was thrown into a ferment by this; meetings were held
which attempted some rough organisation for the holding of another
meeting to retort on the authorities. A huge crowd assembled in Trafalgar
Square and the neighbourhood (then a place of crowded streets), and was
too big for the bludgeon-armed police to cope with; there was a good deal
of dry-blow fighting; three or four of the people were killed, and half a
score of policemen were crushed to death in the throng, and the rest got
away as they could. This was a victory for the people as far as it went. The
next day all London (remember what it was in those days) was in a state of
turmoil. Many of the rich fled into the country; the executive got together
soldiery, but did not dare to use them; and the police could not be massed
in any one place, because riots or threats of riots were everywhere.21
47
Morris neither demonises nor romanticises the rioters. Civil war,

general strike and eventual revolution ensue; the riots are merely the
prelude to a process of social change. Yet Morriss narrative is always
dominated by political purposewhat he gains in political understanding
is often lost in concrete detail, with the result that rioting is presented
rather abstractly, without a sense of chaos and random violence.
III
With the exception of Morris, most nineteenth-century novelists,
whatever their sympathies, stood outside the working-class movement. As
the French revolutionary novelist and critic Marcel Martinet wrote, even
Zola, despite his powerful sympathy for the oppressed, remained outside
the working class, observing it like a French traveller may observe the
Laplanders.22
The massive social upheavals that followed the First World War and
the Russian Revolution produced a new type of writer, who had direct
involvement in the struggles of their age. As a representative of this new
generation we can take Victor Serge, an anarchist who became a
Bolshevik. His autobiographical novel Birth of Our Power (1931)
describes the Barcelona general strike of 1917, in which Serge himself
participated. He describes the street fighting from withinoften it is
chaotic, with no sense of a total picture, but there is always the
consciousness of a shared enterprise:
Attacked from the side by a cavalry charge preceded by a gale of panic
which drove before it a dispersed bunch of fugitives, our group broke up
immediately, as happens with unexpected events. We were just a handful,
men, women, a child, a stout mother whod been knocked over, all forced
back into the blue and white staircase of a small hotel. The road was
blocked off to us by a rifle beneath a three-cornered hat. A trap .
First move: pull my head between my shoulders, pull down my
shoulders, make myself thinner, lie flat on the floor, dig in behind those
who were in front of memy comrades, my brothersmake them into a
shield, because Ive got a good spot, Im right at the back, one of the last
.
Second move: Come on, no, swine, will you stand up!Raise my
head and my chest, then slowly stand upright above the bent spines, as
terror turns into defiance. My eyes scream out to the brute: Shoot me then,
shoot, murderer! And long live the revolution!
The sound of the shot broke the silence as a blast of wind tears through
a sail at sea, and threw us out, onto the murderous little figure; we were
inflamed with a new panic rage. Desperate resistances and flights passed
48
Chapter Two
each other in all directions in the street. Comrades turned over a
newspaper kiosk covered with posters. Further on a cart was on fire
beneath a column of black smoke. A tearful womans voice was calling
out: Angel, Angel.23
But despite the chaos Serge always retained the awareness that this
particular rioting was just a small part of a much larger historical process:
If we are defeated, other men, infinitely different from us, infinitely like
us, will walk, on an evening like this, in ten years time, in twenty (how
long really doesnt matter), down this rambla, contemplating the same
victory; they will think of us, who will perhaps be dead. Perhaps they will
think about our blood. Already I think I can see them and I am thinking
about their blood, which will flow too. But they will take the city.24
IV
The upsurge of political militancy in the late 1960s, with student
occupations and demonstrations against the Vietnam war all around the
world, found a reflectionoften distortedin the popular fiction of the
time.
In 1970, Queen of Crime Agatha Christie published Passenger to
Frankfurt. Though she had made a good living from unexplained dead
bodies, the eighty-year-old Christie was apparently greatly distressed by
the worship of violence which she perceived in the present-day world.
As a natural conservative she disclaimed any interest in politics, but she
was concerned at what she called the youth attitude of rebellion and
anarchy.25 Doubtless she feared that the whole world of St. Mary Mead
and the Orient Express might be swept away.
In Passenger to Frankfurt Sir Stafford Nye, a minor diplomat, is
attending a dinner party at the American Embassy:
Then suddenly an unexpected clamour arose. A clamour from outside the
house. Shouts. Yells. The crash of breaking glass in a window. Shouts.
Soundssurely pistol shots .
Stafford Nye sipped his brandy and listened to the heavy accents of Mr
Charles Staggenham, who was being pontifical and taking his time about
it. The commotion had subsided. It would seem that the police had
marched off some of the hotheads. It was one of those occurrences which
once would have been thought extraordinary and even alarming but which
were now taken as a matter of course.26
We are given little explanation of what has caused this minor riot,
except that those involved were shouting about Vietnam. Christie seems
49
vague and uninterested about the ideas animating the youthful rioters.
Indeed, she seems to have totally misunderstood the meaning of the term
Third Worldone character tells us: quotationYou can create a third
world now, or so everyone thinks, but the third world will have the same
people in it as the first world or the second world or whatever names you
like to call things.
Yet the threat from insubordinate youth is, it appears, very real. An
Italian politician reports:
They march. They have machine-guns. Somewhere they have acquired
planes. They propose to take over the whole of North Italy. But it is
madness, that! They are childrennothing more. And yet they have
bombs, explosives. In the city of Milan alone they outnumber the police.
What can we do, I ask you? The military? The army tooit is in revolt.27
But if Christie can offer no analysis of a social problem, the

conventions of the genre require an answer to the questionwhodunit?
Christie herself entitles the work an extravaganza. As the unfortunate
Stafford Nye investigates, it emerges that the international left is in fact
being manipulated by neo-Nazis, who are preparing the leadership of the
Young Siegfried, a fake son of Hitler. Few will wish to disentangle
Christies plot; what is of interest are the fears that inspired it, and despite
the literary conventions which sometimes produce a complete absence of
plausibility, those fears were very real.
Simon Ravens ten-novel cycle Alms for Oblivion (19641976) sets
out to depict the English upper class between 1945 and 1973. Raven was
at his best covering the period of the Suez crisis and the corruption and
hypocrisy which surrounded it. But he could hardly ignore the upheavals
of the late sixties, and the seventh novel, Places Where They Sing (1970),
is set in 1967 in Lancaster College Cambridge (a thinly disguised version
of Kings College).
Raven seems to have known little of student radicalism and taken less
trouble to find out. Instead, he projected his own fears and fantasies. The
story centres around young lovers Hugh Balliston and Hetta Frith. When
they make love, she calls out ecstatically the names of Mao and Che,
which is just plausible, and those of Engels and Marcuse, which is rather
less so.28
Raven, like Christie, is a natural conservative and has little sympathy
with the radical students ideas, except to show his distaste for any
tendency towards egalitarianism and antiauthoritarianism, but he is aware
of social crisis. One of Hughs left-wing lecturers tells him:
50
Chapter Two
From here on, the order of the day, in England as everywhere else, will be
crisis and flux: disobedience and mutiny on the part of the so called lower
classes; despair and desertion on the part of the upper. In short, Hugh,
things are just going to fall apart.29
Hugh and Hetta are introduced to the mysterious outside agitator

Mayerston, who appears to have some sort of hypnotic power. The climax
comes when Madrigal Sunday is interrupted by the arrival of a brass band
playing Jerusalem:
Swaying off the bridge behind the band was a large platform, borne aloft
by some twenty men, on which a lone youthful figure was posed in an
attitude of aspiration and defiance; and behind this again came a forest of
placards (like the insignia carried behind the Roman Emperor in some
extravaganza of the screen) bearing bold and lapidary legends which
denounced Lancaster, its chapel and its dons, while praising Balliston
and various aspects of progress. Behind the placards marched a small but
deadly-looking platoon of leather-jacketed boys; following them was a
second platform and a second tableau, this one consisting of a huge and
evidently vinous papier mch cleric who was trampling sadistically on
the belly of a real, live and absolutely naked girl; and after this there came
a column, a very long column indeed of young men and women.30
The whole charade ends with attempted fornication on the Chapel altar
and the death of Hetta Frith. Any resemblance to any known student
demonstration is extremely remote. It is therefore curious to note that Mail
on Sunday columnist Peter Hitchens refers to this book and assures us that
Raven knew what he was talking about, and that he accurately depicted
the national atmosphere in that period.31 In fact, Raven, whose main
concern was with producing a lurid and entertaining narrative, seems to
have quite cheerfully exposed his own ignorance.
Richard Allen (the pseudonym of James Moffat) is best known for his
novels about skinheads. But he also turned his attention to student
radicalism; as he noted in the Foreword to his work Demo (1971):
Unlike skinhead violence which is apparently the vicious outlet for
lower-class status-seeking, demonstrators are a unique creation of a Cold
War-Bomb fascination. From simple beginningsthe right of youth to
refuse parental guidance and become fodder for global slaughterthe
demonstration now encompasses every form of protest imaginable.32
The tortured syntax reflects a profound confusion of thought.

The riotous demonstration in Grosvenor Square which opens the novel
follows the usual clichs, and Allen avails himself of the opportunity to
51
pass his own judgments by seeing events through the eyes of Inspector
Trust, in charge of snatch-squads:
He gazed sadly at his monitor saw the streaming, brutal crowd surge
forward and burst into Grosvenor Square. He was glad their closed-circuit
system taped evidence. That policeman going under a vicious group of
kicking, punching young thugs deserved to be revenged. And yethe
doubted if a magistrate would give the culprit more than a 10 fine. It
wasnt his place to argue against legal thinking on how to deal with
offenders but it seemed a crying shame that a policeman doing his duty to
protect the public property should be beaten to a pulp and the punishment
dished out was a finea small fineprobably paid out of a council grant
or a social security kitty.33
A group of World War II veterans recruit their own children to

investigate the causes of the riots. When one of the veterans asserts that
there is a global plot against democracy and these uprisings and
demonstrations are master-minded from Moscow, we are still in Daily
Express territory. But the investigating youth soon discover that their
adversary is a single Soviet master-spy engaged in the demoralisation of
youth, commuting between London, Paris, Berlin, Los Angeles and
possibly other places under a variety of pseudonyms: Jason, Hans
Mannlicher, Julius Gold, Stanley Edmond, Armand Pettu .34
Quite why the Kremlin cannot afford more than a single agent for these
multiple tasks is not explained, but his skills and training are certainly
remarkable:
He was perfectly attuned to the difficulties of youth, too. How young men
and women were underpaid when studying; how university staff obeyed
dictates handed down through the ages; how their masters acted in
accordance with establishment orders. He got to know the several student
malcontents already working for his KGB unit and was trained in the use
of home-made bombs, how to fight civilian police with cobblestones and
use arson to gain an initiative.35
The back cover of the New English Library edition tells us that the
book is "masterfully researched. In fact, not only is the plot implausible,
it is decorated with even more implausible sex scenes. The dialogue is
utterly unrealistic and Allen seems to have problems with foreign names.
Demo is no more than a crude parody of earlier riot novels. Yet, by taking
the obsessions of some of his predecessors to their furthest extent, Allen
exposes the limitations of their perspectives.
Considerably more interesting is Ludovic Peters Riot 71. Published in
1967, it depicts a grim near future of economic crisis and racial
52
Chapter Two
antagonism. Peters is working within the form of the conventional thriller,

in which four men and a young woman succeed in thwarting the forces of
evil. The riotsracist attacks followed by retaliation by the black
populationare initially instigated by a far-right organisation called the
Nordic Union, which not only promotes street violence but has infiltrated
the top levels of the military.
But Peters is aware that agitators are not enoughit is economic crisis
and rising unemployment that make the agitators job possible. As he
notes, this can lead to the collapse of the decency and tolerance so easily
held when men are comfortable.36
In language similar to that of many of his predecessors, Peters shows
how street violence escalates and eventually brings society close to total
breakdown:
Now, almost automatically, unthinking as though driven by a reflex, the
night crowds, ugly and death-obsessed, whirled and screamed through the
streets. The fires they started were higher, wilder, more damaging than
before. The people they killed they killed more fiercely, more cruelly; they
intended murder now, not committing it, as before, almost without
thinking, almost regretfully Many offices and factories closed, some
because they had been damaged, others because of a real or imagined
danger to their staff. More and more the city centres were being left to the
roaming gangs of young unemployed, and to the sudden eruptions of
vanloads of police, riot sticks in hand, who sallied periodically to contain
them. But the prisons filled; and inside their walls too the riots spread
perhaps with more justice than outside.37
Peters does not see his rioters simply as an undifferentiated irrational

mass, nor as malleable victims of agitators. He recognises that mobs
consist of individuals; in one riot scene he singles out three individuals in
a crowd of hundreds chanting racist slogans, and tries to show their
reasons for being there:
Colin Franklin was happy. He was forty-two years old and out of
work. As he ran and shouted, he did not think of his elder brother,
successfully rich, unctuous, giving him inadequate hand-outs at too-long
intervals. He even forgot the structure of complaintagainst life, against
those who had used it better, against employers who did not understand
him or employees who had jobs that could have been hiswhich he had
carefully built over thirty years of failure. He thought of nothing; he was
fulfilled.
As was Harry Jameson, off duty now after a day as a postman. His thin
grey hair, neat usually, stood spiked and ruffled on his head like a symbol
of release. Death was his obsession; soon he would retire, would have to
53
retire, would have to take a step he knew was away from life and towards
the meaningless abyss that awaited him. Death, old age, senility; how to
escape them, how to make himself the one man immune? But he knew that
he too was only man and not immune; in temporary oblivion of his fate he
ran now, his fears silenced in hysteria, all his neurosis suddenly turned
outward towards the sudden chance of an obscure retribution.
And Jimmy Quilton ran, a young man, a youth, his eyes and his face
and his hair curiously pale, washed out. He felt the strength of the crowds
anger, he sucked it in, allowed it to buoy him up. As the fury took him, he
could forget last nights girl, her excitement tuning slowly to
disappointment and finally laughter; could forget this recurrent failure, the
attempt again and again to prove that there was nothing wrong with him
and the recurrent humiliating discovery that there was; could forget that
slowly-rising fear, swaddling all excitement, making the girl who faced
him, perhaps clutched him, the representative of the very pit of terror. So
he ran now, screamed out the crowds slogan, the expression on his face
one of desperation; he needed to find his victim, to take his revenge on
anyonea man, a racewhom he suspected of the simple virtue of an
uncomplicated, animal virility.38
And when the victims of racism retaliate, Peters sees them not just as
an unthinking mob, but as motivated by long-term grievances:
Still the crowd was ravenous. Its thousand heads screamed, teeth ferocious
as predators, the frustrations of twenty years of unavailable rooms,
resentful workmates, forbidden promotions and withdrawn women finding
a final expression. Feet pounded, stumbled, ran on.39
Peters has no sympathy for rioting, but at least he recognises that

rioters are human beings with human motivations.
V
Popular novels of the 1968 period largely failed to grasp the reality of
rioting, but two very different novels from the last few years offer a more
nuanced view. In Leo Zeiligs Eddie The Kid the hero and narrator, Eddie
Bereskin, is arrested for incitement to violent disorder following an
anti-war demonstration in the run-up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Like
William Morris, Zeilig has seen social disorder from within (he was
himself arrested on an anti-war demonstration in 2002).
Bereskin conveys the exhilaration of being involved in disorderly
collective action:
54
Chapter Two
It wasnt enough to make speeches. I was already bored of our speeches.
Our words wouldnt do anything. I was high on action. I wanted to throw
our bodies against the machine, stop the cogs turning even if we were
crushed. I was cocky and self-righteous that night. Mark was just making
another speech.
So Bereskin takes a loud-hailer and climbs onto his friend Marks

shoulders:
I waved my hands, telling the crowd to come to the barriers. The
police bunched up to reinforce the fence, shoving the protestors who
approached them. I swayed on Marks shoulders.
If we coordinate ourselves we can get over the barriers. Come
forward. Hold on. After three, push. People laughed at me, ridiculous and
eight feet tall. A policeman pointed his camera at us. Mark lowered me to
the ground.
One, two, three! I shouted, standing level with the crowd.
Hundreds of hands pushed the barriers. There was a collective rattle as
the fencing lifted a few inches from the ground. Batons hammered on riot
shields. Police vans drove behind the barrier.
Main textYet the narrator is also able to see the limitations of such
action:
We had numbers and humour, but the police had fences, metal and
armour. Did I think we could get through? Defeat the Metropolitan Police
by a simple act of will and a loud-hailer? we retreated, dishevelled, and
the march continued along Whitehall to Trafalgar Square.40
Main textHis own comrades accuse him of behaving like an anarchist.
And in a more reflective mood Bereskin sees rioting merely as a means to
an end:
our solution is simple. Anti-capitalist strikes, demonstrations and
riots are the beginning of our attempts to counterpose workers powerto
run the world exclusively for human need and not for unproductive and
greedy wasters .41
Zeiligs concern is to show the interplay of the political and the

personal; his rioters may be flawed human beings, but they are human,
with human motivations, not gullible dupes or irrational monsters.
A very different novel is Alexis Jennis The French Art of War, which
won the Goncourt Prize in 2011. This epic narrative traces the life of the
soldier Victorien Salagnon through twenty years of warfare, from the
Resistance through the forgotten war in Indochina to Algeria. Jenni,
who disclaims any overt political intention, depicts the brutality of French
colonialism starkly, though its opponents are not romanticised. The
episodes of Salagnons military life alternate with another narrative, set in
the 1990s, in which Salagnon teaches a young man to paint. The
55
alternation between past and present allows Jenni to link Frances colonial
past to modern-day racism.
Thus, he shows that riots in Lyon have short-term causes, often trivial,
but that they relate to a long-term historical context:
One spark and everything burns. If the forest burns, its because it was dry
and covered with brushwood. They track down the spark; they want to
nick the offender. They want to have him, to name him, to expose his
ignominy and hang him. But sparks are produced endlessly. The forest is
dry.
This is illustrated by the story of a ticket collector asking a young man

for his ticket, which the man has just thrown away. A trivial dispute
rapidly escalates:
Events followed with the logic of an avalanche: everything fell
because everything was unstable, everything was ready. The ticketcollector tried to take the offender on one side; he protested. Young people
congregated. The police arrived. The young people howled crazily. The
militarised police charged to clear the station. The young people ran and
threw small objects, then big ones which several rioters joined together to
break loose. The police were deployed according to the rules. Men in body
armour lined up behind their shields. They threw grenades, charged,
accosted people. The station was filled with gas. More young people
poured out of the Mtro. There was no point describing the situation: they
chose sides without anything being explained to them. Everything was so
unstable; confrontation had been prepared .
That may seem absurd: a ticket and a station are incommensurable.
But its not chaotic: those who confronted each other knew their part in
advance. Nothing had been prepared but everything was ready; if the
ticket had set off the riot, it was like a key starting a lorry. All thats
needed is for the lorry to be there and it starts as soon as the key is
inserted.42
At the end of the novel, we see history repeating itself; France cannot
shake off its long history of colonial repression. Observing a police
operation in a quarter inhabited by people of North-African descent,
Salagnon comments:
They are as beautiful as we were they have as much force as we had,
and it wont do them any good either. They are as few in number as we
were, and those they are pursuing will always get away, into the jungle of
staircases and cellars, for there is an endless supply of them, they produce
as many as they catch, for catching them produces more. Theyll
56
Chapter Two
experience failure, just as we experienced failure, the same bitter,
heart-breaking failure, for we had force too.43
It is a gloomy analysis; Jenni has no hope that riots can be the

precursor of human emancipation. But at least there is an honest attempt to
understand, to show that riots have historic roots and social causes.
VI
This brief and often random selection of riots in novels reveals certain
themes. For most novelists, the riot is an explosion of irrationality. Its
protagonists are dehumanised, shown as lacking ideas or individuality,
mere components of a wave of violence. The myth of the agitator is
complementary to this, for it supposes that potential rioters have no values
or intelligence of their own, but are simply passive raw material to be
prodded into action by a malevolent agency whose immorality and
stupidity is presented as obvious to any rational person. If such depictions
appeal to readers, it is because they comfort them by confirming and
flattering prejudices they already hold. Only a handful of writersa Zola
or a Jenniseem able to grasp that riots have real causes, and that those
who take part in them are not irrational or easily manipulated, but that they
have their reasons which we need to understand.
In his essay Londons Overthrow, novelist China Miville quotes
Lionel Morrison, journalist and lifelong campaigner against racism: Let
us just wait for things tofor chaos, really, to take place.44 As inequality
grows, as the polarisation between rich and poor increases and as those
who rule us become ever more shameless in their attempts to humiliate
their victims, it seems likely that chaos will take place. Deprived of a
voice by the increasingly indistinguishable mainstream parties, the
oppressed and exploited will undoubtedly riot againonly the date is
uncertain. Let us hope that future rioters get the chroniclers they deserve.
Notes
Thanks to George Paizis and Bel Druce for helpful comments on a first draft.
1
Stendhal, Le Rouge et le Noir (Paris: Gallimard, 1958), 383.
2
G. Pompidou, Pour rtablir une vrit (Paris: Flammarion, 1982), 246.
3
B Disraeli, Sybil (London, Longmans, Green & Co., 1920), 3245.
4
For an analysis of Disraelis view of the working class, see I. Birchall, The
Enemys Enemy: Disraeli and Working Class Leadership, International Socialism
137 (2013).
5
E. Gaskell, North and South (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970), 2334.

6
57
Ibid., 274, 367.

C. Kingsley, Alton Locke (London: Dent, 1970), 107.
8
Ibid., 262.
9
See P. Lidsky, Les Ecrivains contre la Commune (Paris : La Dcouverte, 2010).
10
I have been able to discover nothing about who Maisonneuve was, other than the
author of two novels and some political pamphlets.
11
G. Maisonneuve, 1893Moeurs de demain (Paris: V. Palm, 1882), 2812.
12
F. Dostoevsky, The Possessed (London: William Heinemann, 1946), 4401.
13
Ibid., 4657.
14
Ibid., 416-7.
15
E. Zola, Germinal (Paris, Fasquelle, 1954), 307.
16
Ibid., 89.
17
Ibid., 351.
18
F. MacCarthy, William Morris: A Life for Our Time (London: Faber & Faber,
1994), 56773; E. P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary
(London: Lawrence & Wishart, 1955), 5756.
19
Cited in Thompson, William Morris, 569.
20
W. Morris, Prose, Verse, Lectures and Essays (London, Nonesuch, 1948), 97.
21
Morris, Prose etc., 104.
22
Cited G. Paizis, Marcel Martinet: Poet of the Revolution (London: Francis
Boutle, 2007), 26.
23
V. Serge, Les Rvolutionnaires (Paris: ditions du Seuil, 1967), 219.
24
Ibid., 209.
25
L. Thompson, Agatha Christie: An English Mystery (London: Headline, 2007),
4689.
26
A. Christie, Passenger to Frankfurt (London: Fontana, 1973), 75.
27
Ibid., 129, 133.
28
S. Raven, Places Where They Sing (St Albans: Granada, 1972), 23.
29
Ibid., 54.
30
Ibid., 204.
31
P. Hitchens, The Abolition of Britain (London: Quartet, 1999), 310.
32
R. Allen, Demo (London: New English Library, 1971), 5
33
Ibid., 134.
34
Ibid.,21, 122, 534.
35
Ibid., 28.
36
L. Peters, Riot 71 (London: Hodder, 1968).
37
Ibid., 179.
38
Ibid.,79-80.
39
Ibid.,129.
40
L. Zeilig, Eddie the Kid (Winchester: Zero Books, 2013), 35.
41
Ibid.,16.
42
A. Jenni, LArt franais de la guerre (Paris: Gallimard, 2011), 1734.
43
LArt franais, 620.
44
C. Miville, Londons Overthrow (London: Westbourne Press, 2012), 83.
7
CHAPTER THREE
THE MEMORIAL DAY MASSACRE:
VIOLENCE, REPRESSION AND THE US
LABOUR MOVEMENT
JOHN NEWSINGER
In early 1937, the defeat of the open shop seemed accomplished and
the advance of the US trade union movement unstoppable. General Motors
had fallen to the United Auto Workers (UAW) on February 11 and US
Steel had surrendered without a fight to the Steel Workers Organizing
Committee (SWOC) on March 1. Chrysler was to fall to the UAW on
April 6. Tremendous victories had been won that completely transformed
the industrial landscape. There were, however, many employers still
determined to resist unionisation by whatever methods necessary, up to
and including lethal force. The Ford Motor Company was still a private
police state ruled over by Harry Bennett and his Service Department
thugs, and successfully held off the UAW until 1943, and there was Little
Steel. Little Steel was the name given to a number of independent steel
companiesRepublic, Bethlehem, Sheet and Tube, National, Inland and
ARMCOthat were only little in comparison with the giant US Steel.
Bethlehem employed almost 80,000 workers, Republic 46,000, Sheet and
Tube 23,000, and so on. They were determined to resist and defeat the
union advance no matter what the cost. The companies had already
assembled private armies ready for the inevitable confrontation. Republic
had an arsenal of 64 rifles, 552 revolvers, 245 shotguns and 143 gas guns.
This was impressive, but still put to shame by Sheet and Tube which was
considerably better armed than most US police forces with an arsenal of
369 rifles, 453 revolvers, 190 shotguns, over a hundred gas guns and four
machine guns. They were ready for war.
Republic began sacking suspected union members at the start of May,
locking out workers at its Canton and Massillon plants on the 20th. SWOC
came under increasing pressure to take action from its members. On May
60
Chapter Three
26 workers at Republic, Sheet and Tube and Inland were called out on
strike. Workers at Bethlehem Steel were not called out until June 11. At
the height of the strike some 80,000 workers were out at some thirty steel
mills across eight states.
Workers at the Republic Steel plant on Burley Avenue in Chicago,
after a brief sit down, walked out on May 26 along with the rest of their
union brothers. Attempts to picket the plant were prevented by the police,
and so on Sunday May 30, Memorial Day, it was decided to hold a protest
rally at the local union headquarters and then march on the plant to
symbolically assert the right to picket. On the day, some 1,500 people
men, women and children, steel workers and their families and
sympathisers, dressed in their holiday clothesmarched on the plant
where they were confronted by the police. Even though the Chicago police
were a byword for corruption and brutality, a point to which we will
return, there was no expectation of violence. In retrospect there clearly
should have been. There was an exchange of abuse between the marchers
and scabs watching from inside the plant and, according to the police,
stones were thrown. The police responded by opening fire on the crowd
with their revolvers before moving in to club anyone unfortunate enough
to get in their way.
By the time the police attack was over, ten demonstrators were either
dead or mortally wounded. Kenneth Reed had been shot three times and
Alfred Causey four times, being beaten as he lay dying. Sam Popovich
was so badly beaten about the head that his skull was crushed and it was
initially thought he had been clubbed to death. It was only later discovered
that these injuries were post-mortem and that he had in fact been shot in
the head. Earl Handley was shot in the leg, but left to bleed to death by the
police, and 17-year-old Leo Francisco died two weeks after being shot
from blood poisoning. Of the dead, three had been shot in the side and
seven in the back, killed trying to escape from the police attack. Of the 40
demonstrators with gunshot wounds, 27 had been shot in the back and nine
in the side. Another 38 were hospitalised from the beatings they received
at the hands of the police, some permanently crippled. And, of course,
there were many more injured who kept away from hospital for fear of
arrest. It was, as far as massacres went, one of the most flagrant in
American labor history, as Meyer Levin, one of the demonstrators, later
remarked.1
The whole murderous episode was filmed by a newsreel crew with
potentially explosive consequences. Showing the film in cinemas across
the country would without any doubt have provoked protests, strikes and
riots. Such consequences were conveniently avoided by Paramount
The Memorial Day Massacre
61
Pictures decision to suppress the film because of the danger it posed to

public order. Instead it was left to the press across the United States to
portray the Chicago police as heroes who had courageously beaten off a
communist attack on the steel plant. Eventually, the film was to be shown
in private to the La Follette Civil Liberties Committee on June 16. Some
of the press reported what it showed:
Those who saw it were shocked and amazed by scenes showing scores of
uniformed policemen firing their revolvers pointblank into a dense crowd
of men, women and children, and then pursuing and clubbing survivors
unmercifully as they made frantic efforts to escape. The impression
produced by these fearful scenes was heightened by the sound record
which accompanies the picture, reproducing the roar of police gunfire and
the screams of the victims The only discernible case of resistance is that
of a marcher with a placard on a stick, which he uses in an attempt to fend
off a charging policeman. He is successful for only an instant. Then he
goes down under a shower of blows. The scenes that follow are among the
most harrowing of the picture. Although the ground is strewn with dead
and wounded, and the marchers are in precipitate flight down the dirt road
and across the field, a number of individuals, either through foolish
hardihood or because they have not yet realised what grim and deadly
business is in progress around them, have remained behind In a manner
which is appallingly businesslike, groups of policemen close in on these
isolated individuals, and go to work on them with their clubs. In several
instances, from two to four policemen are seen beating one man CIO
officers report that when one of the victims was delivered at an
undertaking establishment, it was found that his brains literally had been
beaten out, his skull crushed by blows .2
After watching the newsreel, one dissident Democrat Senator, Maury

Maverick, described what he had seen as one of the most shameful
occurrences in the history of any civilized country.3 In the days
immediately after the massacre, however, the authorities and the steel
companies launched a red scare that rivalled the Haymarket hysteria of
1886.4 With the newsreel suppressed, the press was free to tell whatever
lies it liked, promoting the red scare and portraying the Chicago police
as heroes rather than cold-blooded killers. Instead of the massacre
provoking a general strike in Chicago and industrial action and protest
elsewhere, SWOC began a retreat that bought the great working-class
offensive to a stop.
The violence of the police attack on May 30 was very much in keeping
with the deserved reputation of the Chicago police department for violence
and brutality. Their response to attempts to organise the unemployed in the
city in the early thirties had hardly been subtle. Steve Nelson, at the time a
62
Chapter Three
young Communist Party organiser, later remembered how in March 1930

the police had raided a meeting and arrested the organisers. He was tied to
a chair and beaten and kicked unconscious; one comrade, Harold
Williams, was stretched out on the floor, his pants torn, revealing an
enormous rupture, and another had his front teeth knocked out.5 This was
very much routine procedure in Chicago. Later, in August 1932, the
Communists organised a large militant protest to prevent the eviction of an
elderly black woman that ended with three demonstrators shot dead by the
police.6 As one Communist veteran observed, Nowhere was police terror
as bad as in Chicago during those years.7 Indeed, the so-called third
degree methodslittle more than a euphemism for good old-fashioned
torturewere known in police departments across the USA as the
Chicago treatment.8 This reputation has survived the years with the use of
torture against black suspects continuing into the 1970s and 1980s under
the auspices of Commander Jon Sturge. Indeed, the Chicago Police
Department achieved the remarkable distinction of being cited by the
United Nations Committee Against Torture in 2006!9
While the Chicago police were particularly notorious, the use of
violence against workers trying to organise was very much a long-standing
national tradition. During the Little Steel strike another eight workers were
to be killed by police, private detectives and vigilantes. In Youngstown, on
June 19, the police shot dead two pickets. The veteran left-wing journalist,
Mary Heaton Vorse, dismissed police claims of self-defence in the case of
one of the victims, James Eperjesi: He was fired on point blank I
know because I was there.10 On July 11, in Massillon, the police
machine-gunned the local SWOC headquarters, killing two strikers. This
violence was inflicted with complete impunity. The union was defeated by
a regime of repression and terror to which President Franklin Roosevelt
famously responded with his a plague on both your houses dismissal.
This level of violence was not, of course, just confined to the Little
Steel strike. The class war in US industry was fought with a ferocity on the
part of the employers that is not in evidence in other economically
advanced liberal democracies. There are, of course, a series of well-known
episodesfrom the Lattimer massacre of nineteen unarmed miners on
September 10, 1897 through to the Ludlow massacre of April 20, 1914
that saw a tented camp set up by evicted miners and their families
machine-gunned, killing five men and a boy, and set on fire, with eleven
children and two women dying in the flames and three union men taken
prisoner, being beaten and summarily executedand on to the Memorial
Day massacre. But these episodes were really only the most extreme
incidents in what was a much more routinely violent response by US
63
employers to attempts to unionise. Philip Taft and Philip Ross, in their

classic discussion of American Labor Violence, stated quite bluntly that
the United States has had the bloodiest and most violent labor history of
any industrial nation in the world. This violence was not confined to
certain industries, geographic areas or specific groups in the labor force,
although it has been more frequent in some industries than others. There
have been few sections and scarcely any industries in which violence has
not erupted at some time, and even more serious confrontations have on
occasions followed. They provide a provisional figure of some seven
hundred men, women and children killed in industrial conflict between
1877 and 1968, but note that this certainly grossly understates the
casualties. Indeed, they cite more detailed figures that show a death toll
between 1890 and 1897 alone reaching 92 in just the major strikes, and
between January 1902 and September 1904 an astonishing 198!11 A more
recent discussion by Paul Lipold and Larry Isaac has dramatically
increased the death toll. Between 1877 and 1947 there were at least 270
strikes in which fatalities occurred and, altogether, 1,160 people were
killed, although they concede that the real number is certainly even higher
than this. There were deaths that went unrecorded or were obscured by
complicit authorities, a common phenomenon in the South, that took
place in obscure regions or where the victims died from their injuries
later. And there were another 240 deaths that occurred in non-strike labor
actions, that is to say organisers and activists murdered by police,
vigilantes and company guards, between 1916 and 1941.12
Certainly, as Patricia Cayo Sexton has observed, while Labor
everywhere has war stories to tell nowhere has the record been so
violent as in the United States.13 The great 1919 steel workers strike, for
example, was crushed, not too strong a word, with considerable violence,
that left 26 strikers dead and hundreds injured. As Mary Heaton Vorse
wrote soon after the defeat the employers response to the attempt to
organise the steel workers was warfare. She recalled how the stories of
beatings and arrests came in an endless flood. There was no end to them.
Within two days one was drenched in them. In three days one was
saturated. At a union meeting in Youngstown, she heard the name
Fannie Sellins.14 In the USA, union organisers often took their lives in
their hands, and one of those who fell victim to company gunmen was
Fannie Sellins. On August 26, 1919 she was assassinated in broad daylight
in front of dozens of witnesses, by company guards, on a picket line in
Brackenridge, Pennsylvania. She was shot three times, and while she was
lying on the ground dying had her skull crushed with a club. One of her
killers paraded around in her hat. This killing was found to be justifiable
64
Chapter Three
and in self-defense.15 Her picture, Vorse remembered, hung in every

organisers office throughout the great Steel strike.16 And there was the
little-known Elaine massacre of more than two hundred black
sharecroppers in Arizona in 1919, and the West Virginia mine wars of
19201921 in which at least thirty people were killed. These were war
stories that, as far as economically advanced liberal democracies were
concerned, were unique to the United States.
When the great working class revolt of the 1930s began, it came up
against entrenched employers who had assembled a veritable arsenal with
which to resist attempts at unionisation. The insurgent unions had to deal
with the court injunction that had long been a major weapon in the
employers repertoire of repression. In the 1920s, a time when industrial
conflict was at a low level, the courts issued more than 2,100 anti-union
injunctions, affecting a remarkable one in every four strikes. These court
interventions were designed to make the effective carrying on of a strike
impossible. The most famous was handed down by Judge James
Wilkerson on September 1, 1922 during the great Railway Shopmens
Strike. This injunction not only prohibited picketing but made it illegal for
the unions involved to prosecute the strike in any way at all, including a
prohibition on any consultation with their lawyers about the injunction!
This particular dispute saw the Railway Companies deploy an army of
over 50,000 gunmen, backed up by troops and police, and left over twenty
dead, with one union man lynched by the Ku Klux Klan. The protracted
war between the United Mine Workers and the mine owners in
Pennsylvania in the mid-1920s saw an unknown number of fatalities. The
company police imposed what amounted to martial law over the mining
towns and even operated death squads that disappeared militants. Their
activities were wholeheartedly endorsed by the courts who threw
injunctions around at the drop of a mine owners hat. One injunction,
granted to the Clearfield Coal Company, became notorious because it not
only prohibited picketing, the holding of meetings, using union funds to
provide relief for the strikers and their families, but also prohibited hymn
singing! The reality was that at the end of the 1920s, trade unions were
barely legal in much of the United States.
One particular feature of the class war in the United States at this time
does stand out as virtually uniquethe use by employers of private
detective agencies, as spies, strikebreakers and, on occasion, assassins. To
all intents and purposes, American trade unions were not only semi-legal
but often existed in police state conditions, a situation that has generally
been ignored because it was a private police state rather than the more
conventional state secret police apparatus that was employed. According
65
to Leo Huberman, writing in 1937, the extent to which labor unions are
infected with the plague of spies is so widespread as almost to exceed
belief.17 In a recent academic study, Robert Michael Smith has insisted:
In no other country has the struggle between management and employees
engendered a contingent of mercenaries who specialized in breaking strikes
anti-union entrepreneurs have been part of the business communitys
arsenal from the bloody strikes of the last quarter of the nineteenth century
until today.18
Writing in 1924, John A. Fitch observed in The Causes of Industrial

Unrest that:
In the nature of the case it is difficult to obtain any dependable information
as to the extent to which spies are used in industry. A sufficient amount of
information does exist, however, to suggest that the ramifications of the
spy system are very great. Without any thought of looking for it I have
stumbled upon some sort of evidence of its use in nearly every industrial
community with which I have any familiarity
He describes how one agency circulated a letter to possible business

clients informing them that two of its operatives were delegates at the
forthcoming American Federation of Labour convention, and so would
be in a position to tell what occurred in the committee rooms as well as in
the open convention. He tells of a works manager who regularly proved
to a union official who was a personal friend that his union was penetrated
by spies by telling him of decisions taken at national level before the union
informed him. And he reproduces fascinating material produced by the
Sherman Services agency including instructions they issued to their
operatives during the 1919 Steel strike: We want you to stir up as much
bad feeling as you can between the Serbians and the Italians Call up
every question you can in reference to racial hatred between these two
nationalities. As Fitch observes: a spy system creates an atmosphere
of uncertainty and suspicion People do not know whom they can trust.
They are suspicious not only of strangers but also of friends.19 This, of
course, was very much the intention.
One official in the Machinists Union, Clint Golden, in post-war
Philadelphia, attempted to smoke out the spies operating in the citys
labour movement by placing fake adverts for undercover operatives in the
press. He was astonished by the response. Over three hundred men replied,
some of them just desperate for work, but others active union officers and
committeemen. Among them were officers in his own union and the
president of the Philadelphia Central Labour Union.20 He was later to turn
66
Chapter Three
his knowledge of labour spies to good use. During the SWOC organising
drive in 1937, he placed double agents in various detective agencies. One
of these men reported that Mr Golden used to help me prepare my
reports. He said to give them good strong fictitious ones. He said they
were paying for it and ought to get their moneys worth.21
Although union activists were very much aware that company spies
were everywhere and their presence during organising drives and strikes
was assumed, the actual scale of labour spying was really only definitively
established by the investigations of the La Follette Committee in 1937.
Heber Blankenhorn, who worked for the Committee, recorded the
existence of 230 private detective agencies that engaged in spying on the
unions, providing armed guards and strikebreaking. He estimated the
minimum number of undercover operatives at 40,000, on the basis that
there was at least one spy in every union branch in the country. The real
figure was certainly much higher. According to the testimony of one union
official who appeared before the committee, there is no gathering of
union members large enough to be called a meeting that is small enough to
exclude a spy. John Abt, the committees chief legal counsel, gave a good
idea of the extent of the problem when he recounted the activities of just
the Pinkerton Agency in Indianapolis, a city that was not a byword for
militancy. The Pinkertons:
had operatives in the American Clothing Workers Union, the Street
Railway Union, the American Federation of Hosiery Workers, the
Brotherhood of Railway Shop Crafts, the Brewery Workers Union, the Gas
Station Attendants Union, the Pulp and Paper Mill Workers Union, the
Teamsters Union, the United Auto Workers, the Electrical and Radio
Workers Union, the Wire and Cable Workers Federal Union and local
unions of clerical workers, glass blowers, grocers, warehouse workers,
molders and stereotypers We found spies in every union.22
And this was just the Pinkertons!

Jerold Auerbach, in his study of the La Follette Committee, summed
up its findings in regard to labour spying. The committee found:
espionage to be a common, almost, universal practice in American
industry the list of companies resorting to espionage read like a blue
book of American industry From motion-picture producers to steelmakers, from hookless fasteners to automobiles, from small units to giant
enterprises-scarcely an industry is not fully represented in the list of
clients of the detective agencies. The committee found a correlation
between the decline of labor unions and company expenditures for
espionage.23
67
The effectiveness of this extensive network of spies helped keep

American industry open shop, and where unions did gain a foothold it
helped to keep them weak. The operatives worked undercover, identifying
activists and militants for victimisation, reporting back on union strength
and intentions, sometimes actually taking over union organisations, acting
as agent provocateurs and generally playing a wrecking role. A good
example of how effective the spy system could be is provided by the fate
of the Federal Union of Automobile Workers locals, organising workers at
General Motors in 1934. It had recruited 26,000 members but there were
at least three spies on the union executive board. These men played a
significant part in bringing the organising drive to a disastrous end. By
1936 the local had only 120 members. When Wyndham Mortimer arrived
in Flint in the summer of 1936, he found that a cloud of fear hung over
the city and it was next to impossible to find anyone who would even
discuss the question of unionisation. Workers kept away from the union
because some of its officers were known to be company spies and any
display of union sympathy would cost them their jobs. As for Mortimer,
when he arrived in the city and booked into his hotel he had not even had
time to take his coat off before he had a phone call threatening his life.
Through 1932 until the end of 1936, General Motors spent $1 million on
labour spies.24
As well as hiring detective agencies, there were also companies that
operated their own spy systems. Most notorious, but by no means alone in
this, was the Ford Motor Company. The Ford Service Department, under
Harry Bennett, ran the shop floor like a private police state that was
allowed to function only because of the extent to which wealth had
corrupted the political system in the United States. Ralph Rimar, a former
member of Fords Gestapo, observed that in Fords empire there was
no liberty, no free speech, no human dignity. The company had files on
every employee with agents reporting back: conversations in grocery
stores, meat markets, restaurants, gambling joints, beer gardens, social
groups, boys clubs, and even churches. Women waiting in markets to buy
something might discuss their husbands jobs and activities; if they did, I
soon knew what they said. One agent ran a boys boxing club and the
information he gathered about their fathers loyalties helped me secure
the dismissal of many men .25 Workers were expected to spy on each
other with perhaps as many as one in ten of Fords employees acting as
informers. And the reach of Fords Service Department extended beyond
the factory gates. Union organisers and activists were singled out for
ferocious beatings by Fords thugs often in full view of the police, who
just stood by. In Dallas, one union organiser, George Baer, was beaten so
68
Chapter Three
badly that his attackers left him for dead; he survived but lost an eye and
his front teeth! This was how Henry Ford kept out the UAW.26
The scale and militancy of the great strikes of the 1930s are themselves
testimony to the scale and brutality of the repression that American
workers had to overcome to organise and secure union recognition. Strikes
that often came to assume near insurrectionary proportions were necessary
to force American employers to negotiate. Employers prepared to use
lethal force, deploying private armies, sometimes armed to the teeth, to
resist unionisation, were very much an American phenomenon. Only in
the United States would a captain of industry, Richard Mellon, even
inadvertently remark to a congressional committee in 1928 that you could
not mine coal without machine guns (the fact that his company police
possessed machine guns suggests he meant it!).
Nineteen thirty-four was the turning point when a succession of great
strikes forced employers to terms. In Toledo, workers at Auto-Lite, a car
components firm, walked out on strike in April. Inevitably, a court
injunction banned picketing, and when the union decided to defy the ban
days of fighting began. The numbers on the picket line grew from 1,000
on May 21 to 10,000 on the 23rd. The National Guard were called in and
two pickets were shot dead. The outrage among the citys workers
threatened to spill over into a general strike. Confronted with this
escalating conflict, Auto-Lite backed down, conceding union recognition
on June 2. In Minneapolis, the teamsters struck in May. Following an
ambush in which police and Citizen Alliance vigilantes severely beat some
twenty pickets, including members of the Womens Auxiliary, breaking
the legs of a number of women, the union responded with an ambush of its
own on May 22. The police were once again reinforced by members of the
Citizen Alliance, many dressed for polo but found themselves heavily
outnumbered by teamster pickets armed with clubs, who were reinforced
by hundreds of other workers including building workers who had walked
off the job. The police were driven out of the citys market district
altogether, and two Citizen Alliance strikebreakers were killed. The
teamsters won a temporary victory, but strike action was renewed in July.
On July 20, police opened fire on pickets, killing two and wounding over
sixty others, many of them seriously. Despite the intervention of the
National Guard, the strike continued until the employers gave in. The third
great union victory of 1934 involved the dockers working on the West
Coast, but was centred on San Francisco. They walked out in May, and
thereafter there were continual clashes between police and pickets,
culminating in a pitched battle in San Francisco on July 5 which left two
workers dead, two more who later died from their wounds and others
69
seriously injured. In response to this, other workers began walking out on

strike and, afraid of being left behind, the Central Labour Union called a
general strike throughout the city on July 14. Pickets were killed by the
police in other ports, but the strike ended in an unprecedented victory. One
interesting feature of the strike in San Francisco worth noticing is that the
police allowed a domestic munitions salesman to demonstrate his wares by
firing at pickets during the strike, something he reported back
enthusiastically to company headquarters.
The political context was obviously an important factor in the success
of these strikes, although this should not be exaggerated. Roosevelts New
Deal administration certainly had no intention of unleashing or presiding
over a wave of working-class revolt and there is no credible evidence that
he had any sympathy whatsoever for the labour movement. Roosevelt
would, out of necessity, deal with strong unions, even pretend sympathy,
but weak unions that needed his help were of no account whatsoever as far
as he was concerned and were left to the tender mercies of the employers.
Absolutely crucial was the determination of the workers in dispute and the
amount of support they received from other workers. It was the
determination to take on employers who were prepared to use violence to
keep the unions out that was decisive. In no other advanced liberal
democracy did working class men and women have to fight with such
militancy, risking their lives, for so elementary a democratic right as the
right to unionise. Moreover, not every battle was won.
There was a tremendously important strategic defeat in 1934. In
September, some 400,000 textile workers walked out on strike, a strike
that was to be won or lost in the South. The strikers met with brutal
repression. In Georgia, the Governor, George Talmadge, actually opened
an internment camp that housed over 120 prisoners before the dispute was
crushed. On September 6 at Honea Park in South Carolina, company
guards opened fire on some seventy pickets, killing seven of themshot
down like dogs. By the time the strike ended, fifteen strikers had been
killed. Roosevelts New Deal administration did precisely nothing to help
the textile workers who went on to suffer a disastrous defeat. Thousands of
workers were victimised and evicted from their homes. Victory might well
have opened the South to unionisation which would have decisively
changed the shape of American politics.27
Even after the victories of 1934, it still took the great wave of sit-down
strikes in 1937 to finally force American employers to acknowledge the
right to unionise. There seems little doubt that if conventional strike tactics
had been used against General Motors then the pickets would have been
dispersed by police clubs and gunfire. Indeed, for many workers the
70
Chapter Three
certainty of this prevented them from rallying to the union. The sit-down
tactic gave the union the advantage and once it proved its worth thousands
rallied to join the UAW. UAW membership rose from 88,000 in February
to over 400,000 by October, a seismic shift in the balance of power in the
car industry. Victory at GM was followed by the occupation of Chrysler.
Here, the workers went through the companys files and union organiser
Richard Frankensteen discovered that his best friend, John Barnes, was in
fact an undercover spy and had been since before they met. The company
surrendered, and the example of GM and Chrysler workers inspired a
wave of sit downs across the country. Over the course of 1937 there were
477 sit downs that lasted at least one day, and certainly many more that
ended more quickly as the boss conceded, and even more where
concessions were made to avoid trouble breaking out at all. US Steel was
the great example of a staunchly anti-union employer conceding rather
than facing the certainty of a massive dispute that would probably end in
the companys defeat anyway. SWOC would have used the whole CIO
arsenal to defeat US Steel because its very survival would have depended
on it. Little Steel was not such a vital battle. Indeed, by the time of the
Little Steel strike the union leaders were already rowing back from the
militancy that had achieved such spectacular results. As far as they were
concerned, the potential of militancy had already been amply
demonstrated and now more was to be gained by convincing employers of
their responsibility. Confronted with employers still prepared to kill and
maim to resist the unions, defeat was the most likely result. This, as we
have seen, was certainly the case at Little Steel with the Roosevelt New
Deal Administration doing nothing to help the steelworkers in their fight.
What is clear, however, is that confronted with militant murderous
employers, American workers had to display uncommon courage and
determination to secure union rights.28
The role of force and repression in keeping American unions weak and
the militancy that was necessary to overcome this seems beyond dispute,
but, in fact, this is not the case. Indeed, there is considerable reluctance to
recognise the distinctiveness of the United States in this regard. A recent
Symposium, Was the United States exceptionally repressive? in the
journal Labor History, usefully illustrates the problem. A number of
historians, led by Melvyn Dubofsky critiqued the work of Robert
Goldstein on repression in the USA, insisting that the US was not
exceptionally repressive, and certainly not in comparison with other
countries. Dubofsky made the point that even in Britain, the least
repressive of European states, troops were used when the South Wales
miners shut their industry down, Liverpool port and transport workers
71
paralyzed the citys commerce and Dublin unionists engaged in a general

strike. He went on to note that while the Harding administration
smashed the 1922 railroad shopmens strike the British government
behaved as forcefully and repressively during the 1926 general strike.29
One important caveat worth noting here is that the British state was often
brutally repressive in Britains colonies but, at home, it is certainly true
that it did not routinely use violence to break strikes and crush unions, at
least not since the day of the Luddites and the Merthyr Uprising.
Nevertheless, Dubofsky, it has to be said, appears to be in denial here. One
is reminded of Richard Hofstadters observation regarding his countrymen
and womens lack of memory, where violence is concerned.30 The fatal
shooting of strikers at Llanelli and Liverpool in 1911 and the clubbing to
death of union men, along with the fatal shooting of a 16-year-old girl on
picket duty in Dublin in 1913 were exceptional occurrences. There were to
be no similar episodes for the rest of the century and beyond. In the United
States, such violence was much more central to the methods used to
control the working class and prevent unionisation, and there were to be
many more violent episodes involving loss of life. Dubofskys comparison
between the 1922 railway shopmens strike and the British General Strike
seems particularly perverse in this regard. In the shopmens strike there
were over twenty dead, while in the General Strike and the subsequent
miners lockout there were no fatalities.
Interestingly enough, in The Government in Labor Disputes, published
in 1932, Edwin Witte, a contemporary labour relations expert, made the
point that 1926 witnessed fewer strikes and workmen involved in strikes
in the United States than any previous year for which there are records. In
Britain, on the other hand, there were more strikes and working days lost
through strikes than in any other year, with more than eight times as many
men implicated as in the United States. And, of course, in Britain there
was a nine-day general strike and a six-month lockout involving over a
million coal miners. Nineteen twenty-six not only saw a low level of strike
activity in the US but also, he observes, relatively little violence. Even
so, in some of the minor disputes of that year there was still more violence
than occurred during the British General Strike and the miners lockout:
In the Indianapolis street-car strike, the president of the local union, who
was subsequently shown to have been a spy in the employ of the street-car
company, publicly told the strikers that the time had come to cut loose,
after which cars were stoned, dynamite placed on the track and passengers
injured. At Clarksburg, W, Va, a clash took place between three hundred
pickets and state troopers, the latter using machine guns In a strike
against the Interborough Rapid Transit Co, strikers and police engaged in a
72
Chapter Three
fight which Samuel Untermeyer, counsel for the union, characterized as an

unprovoked attack by the police and which the president of the
Interborough attributed to the fact that the strikers mistook the plainclothes men for spies in the employ of the company .
Certainly, Witte acknowledged that the United States was a more

violent country than Britain, but more important in the examination of
industrial conflict were other factors. In Britain:
organized labor is firmly established and recognized. Strikes are seldom
life-and-death struggles for the union involved. Usually the employers
make no attempt to operate their plants with strike breakers. In some
American industries, the unions are almost outlaws. Employers are far
better organized than in England, and the majority of then believe it to be
an American creed not to deal with labor organizations. When strikes
occur, the employment of strike breakers is almost universal.
This is surely the crucial factor in explaining the violence and intensity
of conflict in the United States: American employers were determined to
resist unionisation and were prepared to use extreme methods, including
lethal violence, to achieve this outcome.
Witte also identified another important factor in what he described as
a peculiarly American institution, the private detective agency. There
are, he wrote, a few private detective agencies in England and
continental Europe, none of them engaged in industrial work, whereas in
the United States this is a very large business, although many wellinformed people have no suspicion of its existence. This ignorance still
seems to affect a surprising number of American labour historians, not
least Melvyn Dubofsky , whose acclaimed The State and Labor in Modern
America is almost entirely unaware of this peculiarly American
institution. As Witte pointed out, a look at the classified telephone
directories of any large city will disclose five to ten of these agencies
listed under the titles Detective Agency, Investigator or Industrial
Engineer. The largest agenciesthe W J Burns Agency, the Pinkerton
Agency, Sherman Service Inc., Corporations Auxiliary, and some others
have offices in most cities. Witte discussed one small agency, Howard W
Russell Inc., which in 1920 with offices only in Milwaukee, had one
thousand inside operatives in plants of the middle west and handled 217
strikes. A strike that did not yield it a revenue of $50,000 to $75,000 is
considered a pikers strike. He goes on: right here is one of the
explanations of the bitterness of American labor disputes. It was his
belief, at the time of writing, that these agencies were finding less
73
business, and although he does not say it one suspects mass

unemployment removed the need for their services. This was to change
with the onset of the great labour revolt of the 1930s.31
One last point made by Dubofsky is worth considering. He refers to an
earlier essay he published comparing Bill Haywood and Tom Mann which
showed that the similarities between national experiences remain as
important as the differences or exceptions.32 This comparison is, in fact,
almost grotesque. There is no serious comparison between the violence,
brutality and repression that constituted Haywoods experience as one of
the leaders of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) in the United
States and Manns experiences in Britain. The beatings, shootings,
lynchings, and jailings that were inflicted on the IWW had no British
equivalent. Just one comparatively little-known dispute should serve to
demonstrate thisthe 1909 Pressed Steel strike at McKees Rocks, in
which over twenty people were killed and state police dragged prisoners
through the streets behind their horses, has no British equivalent.
Similarly, there is no British equivalent of the Everett massacre of 1916
that left perhaps as many as twelve Wobblies dead, or of the lynching
(although assassination seems a more accurate term) of IWW organiser
Frank Little in 1917, or of the 1927 Colorado IWW miners strike during
which six miners were shot dead. The post-war Red Scare that saw the
IWW leadership imprisoned and the union effectively banned throughout
much of the United States similarly had no British equivalent. The list
could really go on and on.
Why was the class struggle fought with such ferocity in the United
States? While this is not the place to explore this question, two factors can
be suggested. First, there was the enormous wealth and power of
American business which provided the US capitalist class with the means
to crush trade unions rather than have to deal with them. American
corporations had the resources to take on the unions in massive struggles
and to continue them to complete victory. They also had a domination
over the US political and judicial system that was used quite ruthlessly in
the war on the unions. The US capitalist class was exceptional in both its
determination and ability to resist unionisation. This is still not enough to
explain the success US employers had in keeping out the unions, however.
Another crucial factor was the reinforcement they received from the
presence of the South as a bastion of reaction. And, of course, however
badly white workers were treated, black workers, both north and south,
were treated worse.
74
Chapter Three
Notes
1
Meyer Levin, In Search (Paris: Authors Press, 1950), 105. Levin remembered
how the shooting starting: The actual instant of conflagration is never known for
sure. Each side always says the other side fired first. But suddenly the little
explosions came, like a chain of firecrackers, and everyone was running back
across the field, and the little explosions continued. I ran with the others, still
imagining the firing was in the air . He only realised the shooting was for real
when he saw a boy, aged about ten, shot in the foot (103104).
2
Richard Hofstadter & Michael Wallace (eds.), American Violence: A
Documentary History (New York: Vintage Book, 1971), 181183.
3
Donald Sofchalk, The Chicago Memorial Day Incident: An Episode of Mass
Action, Labor History 6 (1965): 36.
4
Michael Dennis, The Memorial Day Massacre and the Movement for Industrial
Democracy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 163.
5
Steve Nelson, Steve Nelson: American Radical (Pittsburgh: University of
Pittsburgh Press, 1981), 8283.
6
Randi Storch, Red Chicago: American Communism at its Grassroots 19281935
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2007), 100102.
7
John Williamson, Dangerous Scot (New York: International Publishers, 1969),
81.
8
Richard Leo, Police Interrogation and American Justice (Cambridge: Harvard
University Press, 2008), 4950.
9
For the use of torture by Commander Jon Burge and the Chicago police in the
1970s and 1980s see articles by John Conroy in the Chicago Reader online archive.
10
Dee Garrison, Rebel Pen: The Writings of Mary Heaton Vorse (New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1985), 209.
11
Philip Taft & Philip Ross, American Labor Violence: Its Causes, Character and
Outcome, in Hugh Davis Graham &Ted Robert Gurr, (eds.), The History of
Violence in America (New York: Bantam, 1969).
12
Paul Lipold & Larry Isaac, Striking Deaths: Lethal Contestation and the
Exceptional Character of the American Labor Movement 18701970.
International Review of Social History 54 (2009): 168, 182, 203
13
Patricia Cayo Sexton, The War on Labor and the Left (Boulder, Colorado:
Westview Press, 1991), 55.
14
Mary Heaton Vorse, Men and Steel (London: The Labour Publishing Co, 1922),
61, 67, 81.
15
John Newsinger, Fighting Back: The American working Class in the 1930s
(London: Bookmarks, 2012), 25.
16
Vorse, Men and Steel, 69.
17
Leo Huberman, The Labor Spy (London: Gollancz, 1937), 21.
18
Robert Michael Smith, From Blackjacks to Briefcases (Athens, Ohio: Ohio
University Press, 2003), xiv.
19
John A. Fitch, The Causes of Industrial Unrest (New York: Harper and
Brothers, 1924), 172, 174, 178, 182, 183.
75
20
Thomas Brooks, Clint: A Biography of a Labor Intellectual (New York:
Atheneum, 1978), 5152.
21
Robert Brook, As Steel Goes (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1940), 11.
22
John Abt, Advocate and Activist (Athena: University of Illinois Press, 1995), 64.
23
Jerold S. Auerbach, Labor and Liberty: The La Follette Committee and the New
Deal (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1966), 9798.
24
Wyndham Mortimer, Organize! (Boston: Beacon Press, 1971), 104, 112.
25
Max Wallace, The American Axis (New York: St Martins Press, 2003), 137.
26
Newsinger, Fighting Back, 171177.
27
Ibid., 85104.
28
Ibid., 142171.
29
Melvyn Dubofsky, Was the United States exceptionally repressive?, Labor
History 31 (2) (2010): 295, 298.
30
Richard Hofstadter & Michael Wallace (eds.), American Violence: A
Documentary History (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1971), 3. This lack of
memory of violence is not, of course, just an American shortcoming, as numerous
histories of the British Empire demonstrate.
31
Edwin Witte, The Government in Labor Disputes (New York: Ayer Co, 1932),
175177, 181, 183184, 188. In his The State and Labor in Modern America
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1994), Dubofsky mentions the
Pinkertons in passing with reference to the Homestead strike, and that is the sum of
his engagement with a phenomenon that would have figured in the thinking of
every union activist in the country. For Witte see Theoron Schlabach, Edwin E
Witte: Cautious Reformer (Madison: State Historical Society of Wisconsin, 1969).
32
Dubofsky, Was the United States, 299. See also Melvyn Dubofsky, Tom
Mann and William D. Haywood: Culture, Personality and Comparative History,
in Hard Work: The Making of Labor History, Melvyn Dubofsky (ed.), (Urbana:
University of Illinois Press, 2000).
CHAPTER FOUR
THE SCOTTISH PRE-INDUSTRIAL URBAN
CROWD AND THE RIOTS AGAINST
THE TREATY OF UNION, 17051707
NEIL DAVIDSON
Introduction
The Scottish riots against the Treaty of Union present a particularly
complex mixture of motives on the part of their participants. Ostensibly
acting from a simple patriotic imperative to prevent one of the most intensely
political transformations imaginablethe dissolution of one state (Scotland)
and its absorption into another (Great Britain)the rioters were also
responding to the certainty of increased taxation (an economic issue) and
the potential threat to the integrity of the Church of Scotland (a social and
cultural issue). Nor was it only the crowd which displayed complex
motivations. The figures who inspired or sometimes actually led them
adhered to political positions which were often in direct opposition to each
other, ranging from Jacobites who rejected the Union with England because
theyin effectsupported one with absolutist France, to those who wanted
Scotland to become an independent republic, through to those who opposed
the terms of the Treaty rather than the Union itself, with several intermediary
positions between. This episode therefore provides us with an important
example of the possibilities and limitations of the urban riot as a means of
effecting political change in the pre-industrial, pre-democratic period.
The urban class structure

By the 1690s Scotland ranked only tenth out of sixteen areas in Western
Europe in the league of urbanised societies.1 There was a relatively large
number of towns, but they were mainly small and, with the exception of
Inverness, all of them were in the Lowlands. Only 15.4% of the population
78
Chapter Four
lived in towns of more than one thousand people and only 7.2% in towns of
more than ten thousand, of which there were only two: Edinburgh and its
environs with forty thousand, and Glasgow with thirteen thousand.2 Most
towns were classified as burghs: urban communities which had been given
the right to trade by the crown, to elect magistrates with the authority to enact
and enforce local laws, and to establish merchant and craftsman guilds. By
1688 no more than 7% of the inhabitants of Edinburgh were classed as
burgesses, the other 93% being classed as indwellers.3 The former were
permitted to trade, vote, and stand for election; the latter could do none of
these things, although they were still considered to be part of the burgh
community, a characterisation which at any rate entitled them to receive
poor relief.
In his late sixteenth-century guide to kingcraft, Basilicon Doron,
James VI referred to our third and last estate, which is our Burgesses as
being composed of two sorts of men; Merchants and Craftsmen:
The Merchants think the whole common-wealth ordained for making them
up; and accounting it their lawful gain and trade, to enrich themselves upon
the loss of all the rest of the people, they transport from us things
necessary; bringing back sometimes necessary things, and at other times
nothing at all And the Craftsmen think, we should be content with their
work, how bad and dear soever it be: and if in anything they be controlled,
up goeth the blue blanket.4
Raising the blue blanket was the signal for a riot by the Scottish craft
guilds, usually against the merchants. The conflict between the craft and
merchant guilds carried on throughout the seventeenth-century period of
war, revolution, occupation and restoration, although the participants
attempted to use the shifts in power to their own advantage. But, however
ferocious their disputes became, particularly in the sixteenth century, they
were ultimately inter-class disputes between different factions of the ruling
elite, often about the extent of their representation on the town council.
It is, however, as much of a mistake to treat the craft guilds as proto-trade
unions as it is to treat the merchants as proto-industrialists. The dividing line
between merchant and craftsman was never absolute, with some occupations
being classified differently from burgh to burgh: A maltman, for instance,
was a craftsman in Dundee and Perth but a merchant in Edinburgh and
Glasgow.5 In at least one burgh (Elgin), three members of the skinners
craft guild appear to have also been admitted to the merchant guild on its
foundation in 1640, but they seem to have renounced their craft
membership in order to be elected to the burgh council in 1643. An
agreement establishing the precise demarcation between crafts and
The Scottish Pre-Industrial Urban Crowd
79
merchants on the one hand, and between the individual crafts on the other,
was only reached in February 1658.6 In addition, the craft guilds were
perhaps even more insistent than the merchants that their exclusiveness be
preserved, an attitude that was determined by the greater precariousness of
their economic position. It is simply a mistake to confuse restrictions on entry
imposed by small employers with the type of controls later forced on
employers by trade unions. In Scotland, as everywhere else, the emergence of
a working class depended at least in part on the destruction of the restrictions
that they imposed and the consequent freeing of labour.
Who were the unfree members of the population who stood below the
guildsmen in the urban hierarchy? Some were wage labourers. In the majority
of enterprises the workforce would never have achieved three figures, a
master craftsman typically working with a handful of journeymen. At the
other extreme were the textile manufactories where numbers could be as high
as 1,500, although this was exceptional. We do not know how many wage
labourers there were, since the lists of pollable persons compiled at this time
do not, alas, use Marxist categories, but rather the classifications
manufacturers and labourers, in which they cannot be distinguished.
Greater numbers were involved in what would now be called the service
sector. Male domestic servants comprised 24.1% of the pollable population
of Edinburgh in the 1690s, and also featured strongly in the lesser burghs of
Saint Andrews, Selkirk, Turrif, Huntly and Eyemouth.7 Others had classic
petty bourgeois occupations as shop or tavern keepers. Others still were small
traders like peddlers, ale-sellers or stablers who were neither burgesses nor
guildsmen and whose activities were often on the fringes of legality. Yet the
very fact that they traded for a living placed them in the category of
merchant alongside the great merchants who traded in the Baltic ports
and the Caribbean.
The urban crowd could be volatileEdinburgh was particularly notorious
in this respectbut could rarely be seen engaged in activities that were
exclusively in the interests of the indwellers. As Rab Houston writes, until
the late eighteenth century, riot did not apparently present a threat to the
social fabric. Protest was usually structured and orderly: at least partly an
attempt to remind the authorities of their responsibilities.8 They had few
other means of doing so since the franchise was restricted to a fraction of
the populationin England, over four in every hundred men could vote in
Parliamentary elections by the beginning of the eighteenth century; in
Scotland, the comparable figure was one in every thousand.9 Riots were,
however, rarely simple expressions of the popular will. The riot in Perth
which initiated the Reformation in 1559, and that in Edinburgh which opened
the Covenanting rebellion in 1637, were, at least partially, exercises in
80
Chapter Four
channelling popular discontent behind factions of the ruling class. The riots
which accompanied the revolution of 1688 were also led and partly executed
by the burgesses themselves. This is less surprising than it first appears. The
very immaturity of urban social classes meant that the divisions between
them were often less significant than the formal division into free and unfree
would suggest. A craftsman of the cordiner or cooper guild would work
alongside his apprentices and hired labourers in a small workshop and,
leaving aside the pressures which he could bring to bear on them, would
share many of their views and experiences. Certainly the perceived
differences would have been far less than those between the laird and the
cottar or the coal-master and the collier.
The geopolitical context for the Treaty of Union

The English had broken with their past in the years between 1640 and
1660, and the events of 1688 consolidated what had been achieved in
those years. No such prior transformation had occurred in Scotland. The
main consequences of the revolutionary years between 1688 and 1692
were confined to three areas. First, the freeing of the Parliament from
absolutist control allowed it to act as the main arena for the ruling class
to resolve its internal disputes, although the vast majority of the Scottish
population remained without any say in electing commissioners (i.e.
MPs) to the parliament. Second, the settlement of church government on
a Presbyterian basis removed the Kirk from the role it had hitherto
played as both a catalyst and a focus for wider social discontents. Third,
and finally, the institutionalisation of the religious division between the
mainly Presbyterian Lowlands and the mainly Episcopalian Highlands
consolidated a sense of cultural difference between the inhabitants of the
two regions which had been growing throughout the seventeenth century,
and allowed each to regard the other as enemies of Scotland, regardless
of actual political affiliation. The religious settlement apart, the verdict
thus confirmed was that of the counter-revolution of 1660, minus the
absolutist regime. The events of 1688 in Scotland, like those of 1637,
represented a political revolution which changed some personnel among
the feudal ruling class, but left that class as a whole intact. What, then,
was the overall balance of social forces within Scotland by the late
seventeenth century? There was as yet no conscious struggle for power
between opposing classes, or alliances of classes. Nevertheless, we can
discern three broadly aligned congeries of groups within society.
The first consisted of the majority of the established ruling class, the
Lowland magnates and Highland chiefsa class in economic decline, but
81
whose members still possessed greater individual social power than those of
any other in Western Europe. They were supported by other social groups
whose horizons were limited to maintaining the traditional order, but
making it function more effectively and profitablythe vast majority of
baronial lairds, clan officials and traditional east coast merchants. Elements
from each of these might have been persuaded to consider new ways of
organising economic and social lifethe ways that were so obviously
coming to dominate in Englandif they could be demonstrated that the
potential benefits were worth the risks. But this demonstration would
require some form of alternative leadership, which was exactly what
Scotland lacked.
The second congeries consisted of those groups which had been part of
the existing order but which had either been displaced or threatened by the
political revolution of 1688. Two in particular stand out: the dispossessed
Episcopalian clergy and, more significant in material terms, those Highland
clans alienated from the new regime. Both were excluded from the
revolution settlement and prepared to act as ideologues and footsoldiers
respectively for the Jacobite movement to restore the Stuarts, when it
eventually emerged as a serious movement. For it to do so would require a
more substantial social base than either of these groups could provide. That
would come in due course, but this embryonic movement was already
infinitely more ideologically coherent than either the directionless elites at
the apex of late feudal Scotland or the fragmented forces groping their
separate ways towards a new conception of society.
The third congeries consisted of those actual or potential sources of
opposition to the existing orderor rather, to specific aspects of it. The
economic independence of lairds in Fife or the southwest was compromised
by the social control which the legal and territorial (heritable)
jurisdictions conferred on the lords within whose superiorities they held
their land. The same jurisdictions both rivalled and restricted the activities
of functioning of the Edinburgh lawyers who oversaw the central legal
system. The ambitions of Glasgow merchants were frustrated by both the
privileges afforded by the Scottish state to their traditional east coast rivals
and the limitations imposed by the English state on their trade with the
Americas. The Church of Scotland was prevented from exercising dominion
over the northern territories where Episcopalianism and even Catholicism
still held sway. The territorial expansion of the House of Argyll into the
west on the basis of new commercial forms of tenure was resisted by hostile
clans. But all these groups had different aims and, even where these did not
contradict each other, no faction or ideology existed to unite them, let alone
form a pole of attraction for those whose interests were currently served by
82
Chapter Four
maintaining the status quo. No group like the English Independents, still
less the French Jacobins, was waiting to meld these disparate groups of the
dissatisfied into a coherent opposition.
If Scotland had been isolated from the rest of the world, and the future
of Scottish society entirely dependent on internal social forces, then the
most likely outcome would have been an epoch of stagnation similar to
that which affected the northwestern states of mainland Europe, which in
most respects Scotland closely resembled. But Scotland was neither
isolated nor, consequently, entirely dependent on its own resources, for
several of the main players lay outside the borders of Scotland, although
they sought to influence or even determine what happened within them.
These players were Spain, France, Englandthe states locked in
competition for hegemony over Europe and, increasingly, its colonial
extensions. By 1688 England and, to a much lesser extent, the United
Netherlands were the only surviving sources of a systemic alternative to
feudal absolutism. But the finality usually ascribed to 1688 is only
possible if events in England are treated in complete isolation. It is not
possible, however, to separate developments in England any more than in
Scotland from either the wider struggle with France for European and
colonial hegemony, or the impact of that struggle on the other nations of
the British Isles, as the English ruling class was only too aware at the
time. At the heart of this struggle lay the fundamental difference between
the two statesthe divine right of kings versus the divine right of
propertyand it is here that the differences between England and
Scotland were of the greatest importance.
Counter-revolution can have both external and internal sources, and the
external danger to England after 1688 mainly lay in France. The internal
threat lay not in England, nor in Irelandwhich had been quiescent since
the Treaty of Limerick in 1691but in Scotland. The Scottish and
English states were still harnessed together in a multiple kingdom, even
though they remained at different stages of socio-economic development.
In general, the English ruling class regarded Scotland as a disruptive
element to be contained rather than a potential ally to be transformed, but
as long as Scotland remained untransformed it was a potential source of
counter-revolution. The Scottish feudal classes which had found it
convenient to remove James VII and II might, through a further change
in their circumstances, wish to return him, or at least his family, to the
thrones of the British Isles; but with the Stuarts would come their French
backerthe global rival of the English state. The oft-stated desire of the
Stuarts to reclaim all of their previous kingdoms, combined with the
French need to remove their opponents from the international stage,
83
meant that the English ruling class potentially faced, not only
impoverishment, but also a threat to its continued survival on a capitalist
basis.
Within Scotland, social groups did not align themselves between
France and England according to any clear-cut division into progressive
or reactionary, feudal or capitalist. The first, comprising the majority of
the established ruling class, hoped to avoid the choice if possible, while
retaining their freedom of movement within the composite monarchy of
the British Isles. The second, comprising those who were excluded (the
Episcopalian clergy) or endangered (the Jacobite clans) by the revolution
settlement, were willing to contemplate an alliance with France to secure
its goal of a second Stuart Restoration. The third, comprising the forces
who wished to transform Scottish society in various different ways, did
not counterbalance the second by displaying an equal level of support for
an alliance with England. On the contrary, they were hostile to English
influence, either because they hoped to protect their own sectional
interests (the Church of Scotland, Scots Law) or because they were in
direct competition with their English rivals (the Glasgow tobacco
merchants). Social relations remained essentially feudal and,
consequently, the economy remained trapped within the twin-track of
subsistence agriculture and raw material exports. In the 1690s three
crises, of appalling social cost, brutally revealed the limits of Scottish
development.
The first involved the collapse of foreign trade. The accession of
William and the immediate outbreak of the Wars of the British and Irish
Succession would in any event have had a generally disruptive effect, but
hostilities led to the end of all commercial relations with France, Scotlands
major trading partner, which were not restored at their cessation. Between
1697 and 1702 France banned the import of Scottish wool and fish and
imposed heavy duties on coal, as did the Spanish Netherlands. Most
seriously of all, however, was the decline in trade with England, which had
become increasingly significant during the seventeenth century and, unlike
trade with the European mainland, was not liable to disruption by France.
The second was a massive failure of subsistence. In August 1695, the
Scottish harvest failed for the first time since 1674 and, by December, it was
obvious that the country was on the verge of a famine. It lasted, with peaks
in 1696 and 1699, until normal harvests resumed in 1700. The overall
population loss cannot, however, have been less than 5% and may have
been as high as 15%; that is to say between fifty thousand and one
hundred and fifty thousand people. In some areas the collection of rent
from tenants who had barely enough on which to survive went on
84
Chapter Four
throughout the famine. The main economic effect of the famine was to
further retard development by forcing tenants to devote whatever surplus
they produced towards paying off rent arrears accumulated during the
1690s.
The third was the failure of an attempt to transcend the
developmental impasse by opening up new colonial markets, and
ultimately a colony in the Panamanian Isthmus at Darien, under the
auspices of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies,
which exposed the underlying weaknesses of the state itself. Darien lay
within the overseas territory of the Spanish state, which was guaranteed
to be hostile. The project faced malign neglect and, ultimately, conscious
obstruction by the English state which was allied with Spain against
France. But the principal reason for the failure of the colony, which cost
between one third and a half of national GDP, was the fact that neither
the state nor civil society in Scotland was resilient enough to sustain the
venture.
The effect of this decade of disaster was ultimately paradoxical. On the
one hand it raised popular hostility to the supposed English source of national
humiliation, and to those among the Scottish elite who appeared
insufficiently supportive of the endeavour, as occurred in Edinburgh:
Upon Thursday night last there fell out a very insolent and violent rabble in
this city. The occasion was, some news come of the advantage the Scots got
against the Spaniards in Darien, which did put the people in a very frolic
humour The rabble rose and made themselves masters of the Netherbow
Port, fell a-breaking the windows where there were no illuminations, beat off
and commanded the guard within the town who came to resist them. They
broke down in great madness many windows, especially those of the houses
of the President of the Council, the Lord Seafield, the Lord Carmichael, the
Lord Treasurer Depute, the Lord Provost, and some others of the
Magistrates; and in short all in the Fore street who did not please them by
putting up illuminations.10
On the other hand, the Scottish ruling classes were made aware that,
whatever solution was adopted, the existing situation could not continue.
At the same time, the English ruling class faced the prospect of its greatest
rival, the French, presiding over a world empire which stretched from the
manufactories of Flanders to the gold mines of the Americas, and which was
positioned to seize the English colonies and so cut off one of their main
sources of English ruling class wealth. Successful prosecution of war against
France, temporarily suspended in 1697 at the close of the War of the British
and Irish Succession, and shortly to be resumed in 1702 with the opening of
the War of the Spanish Succession, was absolutely necessary for the security
85
of the English state. This was the context in which the entire debate over
Anglo-Scottish relations took place. It was a strategic necessity for the
English ruling class to prevent a Stuart restoration in Scotland, which
would almost certainly see the country align itself with France. Their
solution was to impose the Hanoverian Succession in Scotland. By 1707,
the Scottish Parliament accepted not only the House of Hanover, but also an
integral union with Englandan alternative which had only a few short years
before seemed the least likely of realisation. What was the nature of the
Parliament that had made this decision?
Parliament and parties

On May 6, 1703 the first commissioners to be elected since 1689
assembled in Holyrood Palace in Edinburgh to begin the ceremony of
Riding the Parliament up the Royal Mile to Parliament House on the High
Street. The Parliamentary Roll consisted, at its fullest, of 67 burgess
commissioners representing the Royal Burghs, 90 baron commissioners
representing the shire or country constituencies, and 67 peers representing
themselvesalthough the only limit to the number of peers attending was the
number in existence, and their preparedness to swear the Oath of Allegiance
which would allow them to take their seat. In effect, the burgh
representatives were a self-perpetuating oligarchy, while those of the shires
were elected, but only by the other barons. As this suggests, in contrast with
the English Parliament, which was divided into elected and unelected
chambers, with the former chosen by property qualifications, the Scottish
Parliament was essentially a feudal baron court. Of course, the Parliament did
not consist solely of feudal superiors and their nominees, but even the smaller
lairds and burgesses who both embodied more advanced social relations and
freedom from the influence of the great noblesa rare combinationwere
present by virtue of the existing feudal means of representation which were
maintained until the Treaty of Union brought the entire body to an end.
Although the Parliament represented the dominant feudal class and their
affinal groups, however, that class was by no means united as to the means of
securing their continued dominance. Political divisions cut across
membership of the feudal estates. What were they?
Above all stood the full-time bureaucracy known as the Officers of State.
These were a handful of officialsthe Lord Commissioner, the High
Treasurer, the Lord Justice Clerk, and so onnominated by the Crown in
whose interests they were expected to act. In that respect they resembled the
Ministry in the English Parliament, but with this differencewhereas the
English Ministry represented (at least theoretically) an independent interest
86
Chapter Four
from both the Whig and Tory Parties, the Officers of State were effectively
the leadership of one of the Scottish parties, the Court Party, which was the
largest of the parliamentary groupings with nearly one hundred supporters.
One reason for this dominance was that the Lord Commissioner used the
Crowns powers of patronage to garner support: The court had intruded
from the general election in the Autumn of 1702 a solid phalanx of
carpetbaggers in the burgess estate, that is gentry who had failed to secure
nomination as shire commissioners but were returned predominantly from
lesser burghs in which they had no office or occupational interest.11
The Court Party appears analogous to the English Whig Party in that it
proclaimed itself to be based on Revolution principles, but given the
different meaning of Revolution in the two countries it should come as no
surprise to find that it also diverged strongly from the Whigs in two main
areas. First, it was strongly in favour of the royal prerogative, largely because
this was the only way to justify its acceptance of instructions from a
monarchy based in England. Secondly, their class basis lay not among the
mercantile bourgeoisie but the feudal magnates. The Lord Commissioner and
consequent leader of the party, Queensberry, was, along with Atholl, Argyll
and Hamilton, one of the four greatest members of this class. To refer to the
Whigs in relation to Scotland at this time is thereforewith the possible
exception of Andrew Fletcher of Saltounto substitute a label for an
analysis.
Where there is a Court Party there is usually a Country Party, and so it
proved in Scotland. Formally, the latter grouping was led by John Hay,
second Marquis of Tweedale, but for all practical purposes the dominant
figure was James Douglas, Duke of Hamilton. The Country Party claimed to
uphold the mantle of patriotism against the Courtiers who were allegedly
betraying Scottish interestsan attitude that carried a certain plausibility
after Darien. It would be wrong, however, to imagine that these sentiments
reflected anything comparable to modern nationalism. After 1689 the
majority of Country members had tended to be nothing more than a new set
of Courtiers in waiting, using the rhetoric of national emergency to propel
themselves into the offices currently occupied by the existing Court Party. In
one respect, however, their 1703 incarnation was different and reflected the
reality of the situation after Darien, in which many of the leading members
had lost heavily. They were set, therefore, not simply on becoming the Court
Party, but a Court Party that held the monarch under their control, rather than
the other way around. This was, of course, the traditional goal of the Scottish
nobility as a class but, as things stood in 1703, it could not be achieved while
the monarchy remained in England, since it was precisely this arrangement
which allowed William to thwart similar attempts at control during the period
87
of post-revolution settlement. The Country Party comprised an unstable

alliance of factions. Only one faction, that of Fletcher of Saltounand at
twenty strong they had perhaps a third of the total membershiprepresented
the intention to control the monarchy in the protonational interest, rather than
for the purposes of noble convenience.
There was yet another party in Parliament, the Jacobites, who,
appropriately enough, referred to themselves as the Cavaliers. With around
seventy members, they were the biggest gainers from the election, partly
from winning contested seats but also through the adherence of twenty lords
who had not previously attended, but who now took the Oath. Like Fletcher,
the Jacobites had a definite solution in mind to the Scottish dilemmaa
restoration of the Stuarts that would also have resulted in Scotland coming
under the domination of France. It is worth considering this when reading
their protestations of concern for Scottish sovereignty. Hypocrisy aside,
however, it is possible to view the Jacobites as being nearer to the modern
notion of a party than either of their competitorsnot in the sense that they
possessed a permanent organisation, but that they had a clearly defined
programme, ideologically distinct from the inchoate shifting between Court
and Country typical of the ruling class as a whole. Scotland was therefore
graced with a counter-revolutionary party before it had given rise to a
revolutionary one. The modernity of the Jacobites in organisational terms was
a consequence of their need to establish an absolutism from below by
overthrowing the existing order, rather than imposing it from above, as had
been done in the rest of Europe through the concentration and centralisation
of existing state power. Jacobitism had few practical implications in Scotland
beforehand because it served no purpose for any significant section of the
Scottish ruling class. They still had hopes of establishing their nation as an
independent player within the state system. It was only after these hopes had
been sunk in the swamps of Darien that Jacobitism, and the historical reversal
of relationships between England and France that it would necessarily have
involved, became an option. Charles, sixth Earl of Home, led the Jacobites,
but Home was even less important in his party than Tweedale was to the
Countrymen. For all practical purposes they too accepted the leadership of
Hamilton.
There were also divisions within the parliament which cut across
party lines, the most important of which were religious. Most Jacobites
were Episcopalians, but not all Episcopalians were Jacobites. The majority
of the Court Party was Presbyterians, but so were their opponents in the
Country Party. In addition, each of the great magnates had a personal
following of dependants, largely, but not exclusively, composed of their
kin. These could usually be relied upon to turn their coats when given the
88
Chapter Four
word, and some, as Byron wrote of a later political opportunist, would

have turned their skins. It was in these shifting crosscurrents of ambition
and allegiance that the question of the Hanoverian Succession was raised.
The Parliamentary session reached stalemate and was adjourned on
September 16, 1703, never to be reconvened. On the one hand, the opposition
had demonstrated their ability to frustrate the Court, but had proved incapable
of forcing the court to give royal assent to their most important enactments.
On the other, Queensberry could refuse royal assent, but had failed in his
positive objectives of securing the succession and obtaining supply (i.e.
funding for defence spending)further stalemate. Then, during the
adjournment, an unforeseen turn of events was to lead to the replacement of
the existing Officers of State and a partial recomposition of the parties. The
farcical details of the so-called Queensberry Plot, as it was known in
Scotland, need not detain us here, but it had two immediate effects. The first
was to ratchet up the post-Darien level of anti-English hostility by a further
notch as a result of the House of Lords conducting its own investigation into
what they insisted on calling the Scotch Plot. This was seen in Scotland as
unwarranted and uncomprehending English interference into Scottish affairs.
The second was that Anne dismissed Queensberry as Lord Commissioner,
The Plot was the occasion rather than the reason for Queensberrys
sacking, since his stock had already irrecoverably sunk after his failing to
carry Parliament for the Court.
The English Ministry was now faced with a difficulty. Queensberry and
his personal faction (which was a large minority of the old Court Party)
were certain to cause trouble in their attempts to lever their way back into
favour, and for obvious reasons neither the Country Party nor the Jacobites
could be entrusted to form a government. The solution was provided by the
formation, in May 1704, of the New Party (i.e. the new Court Party) with
Tweedale at the head. This grouping had a core membership of around
twenty, although it occasionally rose as high as thirty, and largely consisted
of renegade members of the Country Party, including the majority of
Fletcher's supporters, and a handful of Jacobites. The New Party, whom I
will henceforth refer to by their later nickname of the Squadrone Volante (i.e.
the flying squadron), was entrusted with the ministry and told by the queen
that their main objectives must be to secure supply and the succession
supply being the first priority because of the underlying military weakness of
the Scottish central state.
When the session opened on July 6, 1704, the pressures on Tweedale and
the Squadrone to deliver were therefore immense, but they were to prove no
more successful at achieving their objectives than the old Court Party. Less
than a month after the session began Tweedale was offering his resignation to
89
Godolphin on the grounds of his inability to advance his legislative

programme. Godolphin refused it, perhaps astonished that any Scottish
politician would voluntarily offer to resign from a guaranteed source of
income. It is a measure of the anxiety of the English Ministry and the Scottish
Courtiers that, in return for six-months supply, Tweedale was forced to give
assent to an Act of Security on August 5, with almost every opposition
amendment intact, after it had been passed yet again by a majority of sixty
votes. Three days beforehand, Marlborough had led the British forces and
their allies to victory over the French and the Bavarians at Blenheim. Had
news of this triumph, which temporarily shifted the balance of power against
Louis, reached Britain in time, the need for supply would have appeared less
pressing and it is possible that Tweedale might have been able to resist the
passage of the Act. As it was, when the session adjourned on October 7, the
Scottish Parliament had committed itself to a position which entailed
accepting virtually any succession other than the Hanoverian, albeit for
different reasons on the part of each opposition grouping. What was the
English response?
The passing of the Act of Security seems to have been decisive in
persuading the English Tory Ministry, and a section of the Whigs, that an
incorporating union was the only solution to the developing crisis between
the two nations. The first step which the English Parliament took to help
induce voluntary acceptance of the proposal was to pass a piece of
legislation known as the Aliens Act, which deprived Scots of the privileges of
English citizenship, forbade all Scottish imports and, most importantly,
decreed that all estates in England held by Scots were to be confiscated,
unless the Hanoverian succession was accepted by Christmas day, 1705.
Some of the lords, including Hamilton, had estates in England, but more
generally, what the Aliens Act offered was an uncertain economic future in
which they would be excluded from English markets for the goods produced
on their estates. Of no less importance, they would also be denied the
prospect, however slight it might have been, of betterment, or at any rate
escape, from the confines of Scotland through the avenues of the marriage
contract or military service. Yet an alternative to this dismal prospect was
also on offer. The Act contained a clause appointing commissioners to
negotiate a union between the two kingdoms that had passed both English
Houses of Parliament. However, events in Scotland had now passed beyond
the control of the Court. It is perhaps fitting that the episode that signalled this
shift should have been directly linked to the failure of the Darien scheme, and
saw the first intervention of the crowd in the debates.
90
Chapter Four
The first popular intervention

The English Inland Revenue had seized the last ship owned by the
Company of Scotland, the Annandale, early in 1704 at the behest of the East
India Company. On August 12, officers of the company seized an English
merchant ship called the Worcester, which had docked along the Forth, in
retaliation. While the captain and crew were awaiting a resolution of the
affair in Leith, they were arrested and charged with an act of piracy against
another company ship, the Speedy Return, which had vanished in the East
Indies during 1703. The evidence against the men consisted of nothing more
than drunken boasting overheard in a Leith dockside tavern. Nevertheless,
Roderick MacKenzie, Secretary to the Company, saw the opportunity of legal
justification for his seizure of the Worcester and her cargo, and had them
charged not only with piracy, but also the murder of the Speedy Return crew.
Between the arrest of the Worcester crew and their being brought to trial on
March 5, 1705 in Edinburgh, the Aliens Act had passed and, in an
atmosphere of rising tension, they were found guilty and sentenced to death.
All of the disappointed national feeling produced by the Darien debacle,
heightened by subsequent English high-handedness, now came to the surface.
The Scottish legal system had in its power a group of Englishmen
Englishmen who had apparently been directly involved in attacking
Scotsmen who, if not actually Darien colonists, were at any rate employees of
the company into which so much hope and money had been poured.
The men were almost certainly innocent of the charges against them.
Queen Anne herself appealed for clemency and affidavits from members
of the supposedly murdered crew of the Speedy Return were forwarded
from London to Edinburgh, only to be ignored by a court in which the
defence seemed as willing as the prosecution to bring in a guilty verdict.
In short, the Edinburgh crowd wanted blood and the politicians of the
Squadrone were prepared to give it to them. The ferocity of the hatred
directed against Captain Green and his crew impacted directly on the Privy
Council. One Squadrone member, George Baillie of Jerviswood,
recounted in a letter to another, John Ker, fifth Earl of Roxborough, that:
it came to be unanimously resolved, that Green, Marder and Simpson
should be carried to execution; and the rest reprieved till Friday come
seventh night; and it was good it went so, for otherwise, I believe, the
people had torn us to pieces; for I never saw such a confluence of people,
most of them armed with great sticks.
Of the thirty members of the Privy Council, only eleven turned up for the
meeting which decided whether or not the men would be reprieved, the
91
others pleading that they were prevented by such incapacitating complaints as

sprained ankles and common colds. The Councillors who at least had the
courage to attend proceeded to throw away the lives of Green and the others
with brutal cynicism, as Baillie makes clear:
I shall not trouble you with every man's part in this affair; it were too long for
a letter; only say that the authority of the Government is gone; for had these
persons been never so innocent, the Council could not have saved them
without endangering their lives, besides other inconveniences.12
It should perhaps be noted that the leaders of the Squadrone were major
shareholders in the company, which realised 2,823 from the sale of the
Worcester.
On April 11, 1705, the day of execution, an estimated eighty thousand
people, many of them armed, lined the way from Edinburgh Castle to the
gallows on Leith Sands chanting No Reprieve! and howling abuse at the
doomed men. The episode should, if nothing else, give food for thought to
anyone who imagines that the actions of the pre-industrial crowd should
always be retrospectively endorsed by modern socialists. There were times in
the long history of the Edinburgh crowd when its violence was exercised in
pursuit of a justice that would have otherwise have been denied. This was not
one of those occasions.13
After the three men were hanged the public mood apparently changed to
one of revulsion at what had been done. At any rate, the other prisoners were
not executed and there was no noticeable public demand for the sentences of
the court be carried out. They were eventually released in September and the
sentences quietly forgotten. But not everyone regretted the deaths. A poem
written by William Forbes and published anonymously by the Jacobite James
Watson took the view that, despite the lack of any evidence, the three men
were guiltymust have been guiltyand that their demise was a justifiable,
if inadequate, recompense for Scottish losses over Darien:
Villains! Whose crimes to such a pitch were flown,
And blackest Guilt to ripe for Vengeance grown,
That Heaven itself no longer could forbear,
Nor could they shun there own destruction here
Then England for its Treachery should mourn,
Be forced to fawn, and truckle in its turn:
Scots Pedlars you no longer durst upbraid
And DARIEN should be with interest repaid.14
92
Chapter Four
The death of Green and his comrades demonstrated the explosive

nature of frustrated popular proto-nationalism in the Lowlands. One
English visitor, Joseph Taylor, arrived in the aftermath of the Aliens Act
and the lynching. He had left London in trepidation:
We had a great deal of cause to leave our Country with regret, upon
account of the discouragements we received from everybody, even upon
the borders of Scotland, and by what I could gather from the discourse of
all persons I conversed with, I concluded that I was going into the most
barbarous Country in the world; every one reckoned our Journey extremely
dangerous, and told us twould be difficult to escape with our lives.
In the event, Taylor did escape with his life, unlike his unfortunate
countrymen, but he has left us with a record of how English visitors to
Edinburgh were treated in these months. Noting that that the Darien
debacle and subsequent English legislation has given their dull Bards an
occasion to vent out some poetical malice, in barbarous satires, against the
English, Taylor recounts how he purchased the most scurrilous A Pill
for the Pork Eaters, which had already entered the language of popular
culture, and the very boys would pull us in the street by the Sleeve, and
cry a Pill for the Pork Eaters, knowing us to be Englishmen, and indeed its
very observable that the children, which can but just speak, seem to have a
national Antipathy against the English.15
The lynching also meant the end of any possibility that the Squadrone
could continue as the replacement Court Party. They had given into the
mobbad enough under any circumstancesbut had done so in such a way
as to inflame public opinion in England and make the task of achieving a
union that much more difficult. Godolphin had in fact already approached
John Campbell, second Duke of Argyll, to take over from Seafield as Lord
Commissioner. A young man of twenty-five, Argyll was by virtue of birth the
most powerful landowner in Scotland (although virtue is not perhaps the most
appropriate word to use in this context), and was already a veteran of the
French wars. It was from the latter aspect of his career, and not internal clan
conflicts, that he derived his Highland nickname Red John of the Battles.
Argyll set about his task in military style. For accepting this particular
commission he demanded, and got, among other things, the English
Dukedom of Greenwich. He also insisted, much to the disgust of Anne, on
the return of Queensberry as an Officer of State. By the time the session
opened on June 28, 1705 the old Court Party had virtually been restored to
power, but now with a brutally efficient leader and, for the first time in this
parliament, enough money to dispense patronage effectively, although this
was not the most important factor in achieving the union.
93
The struggle over ratification begins

Discussion of the Treaty began on October 12, 1706 in an atmosphere of
high tension. Even before negotiations began, Secretary of State Mar had
warned Carstares that the incorporating nature of the union should not be
divulged: I write this freely to you, though it is not fit this should be known
in Scotland, for fear of discouraging people and making them despair of the
treaty.16 Indeed, one of the first matters to be agreed at the negotiations was
that they should be conducted in secret. Even before the commissioners had
returned to Scotland, however, Lockhart made the contents of the Treaty
public through his fellow Jacobites. The popular reaction was not, as Mar had
anticipated, simply one of despair, but of anger. Edinburgh began to fill with
thousands of people from across the Lowlands intent on demonstrating their
hostility to the Treaty and the politicians who supported it. Each day, as the
Officers of State and the Commissioners neared Parliament House to begin
the session, they were met by the crowd. Queensberry and the treatertraitors had abuse and other, more material objects hurled at them, while
Hamilton and the patriots were cheered and lifted onto the shoulders of the
demonstrators.
The process at this stage is often represented as being virtually concluded,
with an all-powerful court forcing the treaty through in the face of an
impotent opposition within Parliament and an irrelevant one outside. This is
not how events appeared at the time. The opposition strategy was to delay the
proceedings inside Parliament House while popular pressure built up outside,
forcing intimidated commissioners to vote for wrecking amendments which
would be rejected by the English Ministry and hence ruin the Treaty. The
result would be the dissolution of Parliament and new elections, which would
in turn produce a new balance of forces. The crowds who gathered on
Edinburgh High Street were not simply a stage army brought on for the
benefit of the opposition, however, nor were their objections to the proposed
union the same as those of the Jacobite barons who comprised the majority of
the remaining anti-treaty commissioners.
What form did popular opposition take and what were its objectives?
Apart from the daily demonstrations outside Parliament House, opposition
most commonly took the form of petitions submitted to Parliament signed
(subscribed) by the inhabitants of a particular parish or burgh, or by
delegates to a particular institution like the Commission of the Assembly of
the Church of Scotland or the Convention of Royal Burghs. Less frequently,
the Articles of Union were publicly burned. On two occasions, once in
Edinburgh and once in Glasgow, demonstrations turned into serious riots.
Finally, in an extraordinary conjunction, an armed rising was organised
94
Chapter Four
uniting the Presbyterian sects of the south west with the Atholl clans of the
central Highlands. We have greater difficulty in assessing the aspects of the
treaties responsible for stimulating this discontent. Public meetings for the
purpose of political discussion were banned and, although we can assume
that private meetings took place, since any demonstration requires some
initial organisation, there are no records of what was argued or agreed. We
are left, therefore, with the anti-union pamphlets, through which the case was
put to the literate public, the texts of the petitions presented to the Estates, and
the speeches made for public consumption in Parliament House. There are
limitations in using these documents as evidence of popular demands. The
pamphlets recorded the views of people who were both literate and
financially able to express themselves in print. Similarly, the various petitions
were not drafted spontaneously at revolutionary assemblies, but by
individuals or small groups on the basis of demands (or requests, or
beseechments) which would gather the broadest support. To complicate
matters further, many examples of both pamphlets and petitions were drafted
by committed Jacobites who deliberately veiled their real political goals
under a cloak of patriotic rhetoric. The very fact that they were intended to
capture popular support means, however, that the content of at least some
petitions and opposition speeches reflect, at one remove, popular concerns.
Pamphlets dealing with the condition of Scotland had appeared with
increasing frequency from 1700 onwards, as realisation dawned about the
extent of the Darien disaster. The People of Scotland's Groans and
Lamentable Complaints (1701), for example, is a classic of the genre. The
trickle began to gather strength in 1704 with the English response to the
Act of Security. An attempt by the Whig lawyer, William Atwood, to
prove that Scotland was a fiefdom of the English crown, Superiority and
Direct Dominion of the Imperial Crown of England Over the Crown and
Kingdom of Scotland, was answered by Scots lawyer James Anderson in
his Historical Essay Showing that the Crown and Kingdom Of Scotland is
Imperial And Independent (1705). The Scottish Parliament ordered the
first to be burned by the public executioner and awarded the author of the
second 4,800 pounds Scots. Undeterred, Atwood hit back with The Scotch
Patriot Unmask'd (1705), which more or less accused the entire
parliamentary opposition of being in the pay of Louis XIV. This was an
exaggeration, of courseonly some of them werebut by now the
floodgates had opened. The so-called pamphlet war which accompanied
the union negotiations and the ratification process probably involved the
greatest publication and circulation of political literature in the British
Isles of the entire period between the English Revolution of the 1640s and
the advent of a native Jacobinism during the 1790s. In this literary battle,
95
the majority of the Scottish participants were to be found in opposition to

the union, with a minority of Scots and virtually every English contributor
in support, although the only Irish contributor, Jonathan Swift, was also
opposed. A survey of the anti-union contributions gives the impression
that the key issues were, in descending order, the integrity of the Kirk
(threatened by the corrupting influence of Episcopalianism), the
sovereignty of the Scottish people (reduced to insignificance in a state
where they would be a permanent minority) and, some distance behind,
the viability the Scottish economy (called into question by exposure to free
trade with England). Reading the pro-Union arguments, the order of
importance is largely reversed. The difference in emphasis between the
two camps was the result of a series of interventions by the one English
contributor who requires special mention, since his role was considerably
greater than might be supposed solely from his literary contributions.
Daniel Defoe was sent to Edinburgh in September 1706 by the English
Ministry with the twofold purpose of spying on the popular mood and
propagandising on behalf of the union.17 His special contribution to the
debate was to turn the emphasis of the pro-union argument towards the
advantages of free trade that Scotland would supposedly enjoy after
ratification. Many commentators have argued that reliance on Defoe by
historians has been deeply misleading, since his concentration on the question
of trade was not a genuine engagement with the arguments, but an ideological
justification for one side in the dispute. There is a great deal to be said for this
argumentalthough free trade was not thereby of no consequence in the
union debatebut it is also important to remember that the pamphlet war
was to a large extent a shadow play on both sides of the debate. Pamphlets
expressing concern for the likely fate of the Kirk, for example, were chiefly
generated by ministers with their own sectional interest to defend. The
ominous lack of any reference to their constitutional positionin contrast to
the guarantees offered to the legal professionled many to suppose that their
positions, or at least their authority, were once more under threat from
bishops. The majority of the Lowland population shared their concern, but for
reasons more to do with the possible removal of any form of democratic
control over the Kirk than the preservation of clerical benefices. Similarly,
many of the works bemoaning the loss of Scottish sovereignty were produced
by Jacobites, happy to invoke the names of Wallace and Bruce, but whose
own fidelity to Scottish independence should be judged by their willingness
to rely on support from Francea support which carried its own threat to the
sovereignty of the Ancient Kingdom of Caledonia.
With these qualifications in mind, had the pamphlet war any impact on
events? Its significance has been played down by historians like Paul Riley,
96
Chapter Four
whose focus has been solely on relationships within the political elite: In the
last resort the fate of the union would not be settled by the literature, but by
the votes in the Scottish parliament, and of these the majority was
predictable.18 There are reasons for considering this to be too dismissive.
The literature gave expressionin however distorted a wayto popular
concerns, but at the same time it also provided merchants, literate artisans and
shopkeepers with arguments and slogans. This is of some significance since
seventeenth-century Scotland enjoyed relatively high levels of literacy, with
only 25% of craftsmen and tradesmen classified as illiterate, a figure which
had fallen to 18% by the following century. In particular, Edinburgh and
Glasgowwhere the major debates and disturbances over the union took
placehad higher than average levels of literacy. Edinburgh in particular
was perhaps the most important town in Scotland for publishing and
distributing printed material of all kinds, including chapbooks, newspapers,
plays and sermons.19 A relatively wide readership therefore existed and
consisted in turn of the people who organised petitions and led
demonstrations. The real question is whether these more collective forms of
action had any influence on the outcomethe outcome being not simply the
final vote for ratification, but the amendments made to the treaty in its
passage through parliament.
From the moment the commissioners reassembled, a stream of addresses
began to flood into Parliament House. One third of the shires and a quarter of
burghs submitted these petitions, the overwhelming majority of them against
the treaty. Argyll declared with patrician disdain that they served for no
other use than to make kites, and many historians have reaffirmed this
dismissal, albeit in more circumspect terms.20 And at one level a degree of
caution is justified. Noble pressure was still being exerted, since the lords
used their power over tenants as a matter of course when organising petitions
of opposition. Atholl wrote to his lairds complaining about the small number
of Scottish representatives who would sit in the British Parliament:
This, and other things contained in the said Treaty, is so Dishonourable and
Disadvantageous to this nation, that I doubt not that all Honest Scotsmen will
concur to hinder it passing. Its very proper that the nation should Let their
sentiments be known at this occasion by their Addresses, and petitioning the
Parliament. I have sent with the bearer, my servant Robert Stewart, a Draft of
an address which I hope will be satisfying to you, wherefore I expect that the
whole parish will sign it, and those that cannot write Let a Nottier subscribe
for them.21
His biographer and descendant notes that on December 5, Leonard

Robertson of Straloch wrote to his Grace saying that he had accordingly
97
acquainted his Grace's vassals within the respective parishes that had
rendezvoused [i.e. to sign the address] not to do any more till they received
further orders.22
At a lower level in the ruling class hierarchy the Jacobite lairds also
circulated a petition, which as one of them, George Lockhart, later admitted,
was centrally produced. (I shall not deny but perhaps this measure of
addressing had its first original, as they report.) The text of the address
encompasses most of the objections to the Union (framed so as to
comprehend everyone's wish) but is silent on the alternative, and for good
reason since the Jacobites were unlikely to have met such an enthusiastic
response with a petition calling for a Stuart restoration. This in itself suggests,
however, that the signatures were freely given and the view that there was
genuine enthusiasm for the petitions is supported by the difficulties
encountered by the pro-union lords where they tried to raise petitions for the
treaty. Lockhart noted that the Court and Squadrone lords (petty sovereigns
themselves) attempted to force their tenants to give support: Yet they could
not, though they endeavoured to, persuade their vassals and tenants to sign an
address for the Union, and were obliged to compound [i.e. negotiate] with
them not to sign against it.23 The last part of that sentence is astonishing
when one considers the power that the lords still had over their tenants. We
see here, then, at least a partial break with the tradition whereby petitions
were instigated by sections of the local ruling class, and tenants or indwellers
expected to sign, regardless of their own views on the matter.
Nevertheless, the rural tenants had not generated their own petitions, but
merely given unforced support to one produced elsewhere. Petitions which
were drawn up in the burghs, where the influence of the great men was
generally more circumscribed than in the rural areas, reflected popular
demands more directly. The first of these, from Linlithgow, Dunkeld and
Dysart, were presented before the vote on Article One on November 4, and
thereafter they arrived on a regular basis until the end of the year. The same
themes recur throughout. A petition from the burgh of Stirling attacked the
Treaty on the grounds that it would bring an Insupportable burden of
Taxation upon this Land, which all the Grant of freedom of Trade will never
counterbalance, being so uncertain and precarious. And once it had been
passed, there would be no parliament to hear and help us except that of a
British one.24 Similar arguments are raised in the instructions of October 23,
1706 from the Lauder magistrates to their Burgh Commissioner, Sir David
Cunningham, which:
unanimously give as their Humble Opinion, that the Devolving of Power of
the Scots Parliament into the hands of a small Number of Lords, Barons and
Burghs allowed in the said proposed Articles is Disgraceful and Prejudicial
98
Chapter Four
to the Kingdom of Scotland, tending to the destruction of their Ancient
Constitution, and all Rights and Privileges as a free People in general, and to
every Individual Person and Society within the same, Especially that of the
Burghs.25
The Unionist lords used their influence in the burghs to try and secure
pro-Treaty petitions but, as Lockhart explains, with no more success than
in the rural areas:
they did attempt it, but could prevail in no place but the town of Ayr,
where they got one subscribed, but by so pitiful and small a number that they
thought shame to present it, especially when one a little thereafter, against the
Union, was signed by almost all the inhabitants of that town. Neither did they
omit anything in their power to obstruct the addresses against the Union, but
without success, except in the shire of Ayr, where the Earls of Loudoun, Stair
and Glasgow prevailed with most of the gentlemen to lay it aside (though
otherwise they expressed themselves as opposite to the Union as in any other
place), and in Edinburgh, where, after an address was signed by many
thousands, they prevailed with the magistrates to prohibit it by threatening to
remove the Parliament and Judicatories from hence.26
The burgh of Montrose, one of the few with profitable trading links in
England, was almost alone in instructing its commissioner to vote for the
treaty. Eight days before the Lauder petition was signed, the Montrose Burgh
Council was recording in its minute book its intention to write to James Scott
Younger of Logie, stating: if the English Prohibitory Laws which were
repealed last Session of Parliament in order to facilitate the treaty do again
take place as undoubtedly they will, we shall be deprived of the only valuable
branch of our trade, the only trade by which the balance is on our side and
then one needs not the gift of Prophecy to foretell what shall be the fate of
this poor miserable blinded nation in a few years.27 But Montrose was not
Scotland and these burghers were not typical of the Scottish merchant class.
One of the few commissioners who might be said to have represented
capitalist interests of a more advanced nature also opposed the treaty, but for
opposite reasons to the majority of the burghs. William Stewart of Pardovan
was the commissioner for Linlithgow which, as we have seen, was one of the
first burghs to submit a petition. Stewart was also entrusted by the
Convention of Royal Burghs to present its address to the estates, yet unlike
his own burgh or the convention he opposed Article 21 which preserved the
status of the royal burghs precisely because he believed, correctly, that their
feudal privileges were detrimental to a general expansion of trade.28 But
Stewart was as exceptional a burgess as Montrose was a burgh.
99
On balance, therefore, it is impossible to sustain the position held by

Willie Thompson and his colleagues that the uniqueness of the treaty lay
in the fact that a bourgeoisie voluntarily renounced state independence in
order to survive as a bourgeoisie.29 In fact, the bourgeoisie as such were,
in their vast majority, opposed to the union on the eminently material
grounds that exposure to free trade would see their manufactures swamped
by more competitive English rivals. As James Hodges wrote in 1703:
there is no need of any other Argument to prove an Impossibility that the
Scots can ever thrive by Free-Trade with England but a short View of
the necessary Consequences of it. Among the most important in this
context were a multiplying of Demands for all manner of Foreign
Manufacture, as must quickly ruin all those advancements already made in
Several Manufactories, especially being yet in their Infancy. As a result:
Scotland may then bid farewell to the Woolen, Stuff, Stocken, and many
other Manufactures, especially now in so hopeful a way of Thriving among
them, and by which so large a Number of the Poor are maintaind, who
then must go a Beggingall Hope of Erecting New Manufacturies must be
lost.30
The views of the Convention of Royal Burghs, and of the majority of

its constituent burghs, were therefore perfectly in keeping with the
conservative mercantile interests that they still represented. One of the
reasons why Defoe in particular spent so much time stressing the
beneficial effects of free trade was to persuade the mercantile bourgeoisie
how it would act in their interest, whose timidity and fear of competition
he was at a loss to understand. He was neither the first nor the last to judge
Scottish merchant capitalists by English standards and find them wanting.
In terms of mobilising popular opposition, the attitude of the Kirk was
more important than the burgesses regarding subsequent events. The
Reverend John Logan wrote to Mar on August 27, 1706 about the attitude
of the majority:
all of them I converse with in private are of a dissenting judgement
from an incorporating Union, and do look thereupon both as sinful in itself
and of dangerous consequence to the established government of this
Church, it being (as is thought by some) to be contradictory to the
covenants against prelacy in the three domains whereto this nation stands
engaged, and are manifest exposing of their government to patent danger in
regard the British Parliament may at after pleasure avert any fundament in
our constitution without the consent of their constituents they are
apprehensive of that in one nation two legally authorised forms of church
government are unprecedented and so cannot be thought to stand long
Chapter Four
100
in Britain.31
Such attitudes evidently infected Logan himself, since on October 27

he preached a sermon before Parliamentsubsequently reproduced as a
pamphleton the need to value and protect the Kirk.32
On October 16 the Commission of the General Assembly of the
Church of Scotland (the leading body of the Kirk when the General
Assembly itself was not in session) presented its own petition. A week
later, the protests took on a more violent form. On October 23 the crowd
attempted to force its way into Parliament House, but was repulsed by the
guards. Nevertheless, the proceedings broke up with Hamilton going to
visit Atholl instead of allowing the crowd to carry him in triumph back to
his lodgings at Holyrood Palace. The crowd, denied the opportunity
either to confront their rulers or to escort their hero, instead launched an
attack on the house of Sir Patrick Johnson, once a popular Lord Provost,
but now hated as one of the commissioners responsible for agreeing the
Articles of Union. Fortunately for Johnson, he lived, as befitted a man of
his station, on the top floor of one of the tall, narrow tenements in the Old
Town, into which it was difficult to make a forced entry. Nevertheless, as
Mar recounted to Nairne some days later: They assaulted his house, broke
his windows, and did what they could to beat open his door, giving him
names and calling out that they would massacre him for being a betrayer
and seller of his country.33 They had failed to achieve their initial
objective but, as Lockhart reports:
From hence the mob, which was increased to a great number, went through
the streets, threatening destruction to all the promoters of the Union, and
continued for four or five hours in this temper till about three the next
morning, a strong detachment of Foot-guards was sent to secure the gate
called the Netherbow Port and keep guard in the Parliament Close.
But the guards themselves were unreliable, saying: It is hard we should

oppose those that are standing up for the Country, it is what we cannot help
just now, but what we won't continue at.34 Despite this apparent display of
sympathy, the guards remained in place for the duration of the parliament
without any noticeable breach of discipline. In part, this was because the
crowd itself had no long-term objectives which might have enabled them to
win over the guards. One incident in particular throws an interesting light on
the limits of their challenge to authority.
While the disturbances were going on, Mar, together with Argyll and
Lord Lothian, were dining at Lord Loudoun's town residence. Rather than
wait to be attacked they set off with their host, only to run into the very
101
mob they had sought to avoid. Mar recounts what happened next: We
saw great numbers of the rabble with stones in their hands, but as soon as
they saw us they dropped them and let us pass. The crowd followed them,
some cursing, some blessing us, but doing nothing: This expedition of
ours, I confess, was hardly as wise. If one stone had been thrown at us
there had been five hundred, and some of the mob were heard to say after
we had passed the Cross that they were to blame for letting Argyll and
Loudon pass unpunished. However we got free.35 The Edinburgh crowd
were not famous for deferring to the lords but, threats to Johnston's life
notwithstanding, at a crucial moment they were unwilling to strike at
leading members of the political classes, even when they were completely
in their power. Much to Mar's disgust, when Parliament assembled the
next day some of the opposition were unwilling to condemn the riot, with
Andrew Fletcher even arguing that the mob represented the true spirit of
Scotland, and reminding the House that the people had been responsible
for the success of the Reformation and the Revolution. Fletcher was
familiar enough with Scottish history to know that this was, at best, a
half-truth, and the very fact that a man so little enamoured of mob
activity could advance this argument indicates a certain desperation on
his part.
The result of the vote on Article One of the Treaty was as follows:
Nobility
Barons
Burgesses
Total
For
46
37
33
116
Against
21
33
29
8336
Two matters were clarified as soon as the result was announced. The first
was that, of the three estates, the nobility was the most committed to carrying
the treaty. The second was that the Squadrone had decided to cast their 25
votes with the Court Party, thus making eventual ratification much more
certain. From this, the two sides of the House drew different conclusions. The
opposition realised that the only way the treaty as a whole could be stopped
would be by going beyond the confines of Parliament House to the
population at large. Their only hope now lay in using popular pressure to
intimidate the pro-union commissioners into passing wrecking amendments
which would in turn be rejected by the English and hence ruin the treaty. The
Court Party and their Squadrone allies drew a similar conclusion.
Queensberry and his associates felt that the majority for Article One had not
been high enough for safety and that concessions had to be made to the
102
Chapter Four
opposition outside parliament in order to influence the votes inside. Mar

wrote to Nairne the day after the vote that: What with the Addresses and the
humour that's now in the country against the Union, several members left us,
though I'm hopeful that many of them will come about again.37 They, at any
rate, were under no illusions that the matter could be resolved within the
confines of Parliament House.
Neutralising the Kirk

The Court introduced, on the same day Article One was ratified, an Act
for Securing the Protestant Religion and Presbyterian Church Government.
This move to ameliorate the Kirk came not a minute too soon. Between the
introduction of the Act of Security on November 4 and its approval by
Parliament on November 12, the Commission had called a fast, the traditional
method by which the Scots made atonement for their various sins. On the
appointed day, November 7, James Clark, the minister at the Tron Kirk in
Glasgow preached a sermon (text: Ezra 8:21) at the climax of which, Defoe
reports, he said that: Addresses would not do, and prayers would not do,
there must be other methods; it is true prayer was a duty but we must not rest
there; and closed it with the words "Wherefore up and be valiant for the city
of our God."381 The congregation then upped as requested, and within two
hours had grown into a crowd of several thousand which demanded that Lord
Provost Aird and the magistrates sign a petition against the Union. Finding
themselves repulsed they approached the Deacons of the craft guilds who
were supportive and agreed to try and persuade the magistrates of their error.
Denied a second time the crowd rioted, invaded the Provost's house (from
where he had wisely fled with some of the other councillors to the relative
safety of Edinburgh) and seized the supply of arms stored there. The
subsequent arrest of one of the rioters for possession of these arms led to a
second riot to liberate him from the tollbooth, a further attack on the Provost's
house and another flight by the dignitary for the safety of the capital.
Defoe blames the rioting on the influence of Jacobites, Papists and
Episcopal people, and a Jacobite named Finlay was certainly involved in
mobilising for the attack on the tollbooth. The day had yet to arrive, however,
when events in Glasgow were decisive in shaping political events in
Scotland. When Finlay set off for Edinburgh in an attempt to foment a rising,
only forty-five men accompanied him and they encountered no practical
support as they rode east. Defoe speculated, with some degree of plausibility,
that opposition to Jacobitism was a factor in the lack of support for Finlay:
and I believe that is one reason the Cameronian people, though equally
disaffected, would not join him, at least not so as to march from Glasgow or
103
their other towns.39 Nor did Finlay draw support from higher up the social
structure. Equally significant was the rebuff he encountered at Hamilton.
Finlay and his comrades had approached Duchess Anne, mother to the Duke
and herself a formidable anti-unionist, but received only discouragement. The
reason is not hard to find: Anarchy would have been even worse than the
Union.40 Eventually they were dispersed by an advance detachment of
twenty-five dragoons (out of a body of four hundred) who arrested the
ringleaders. This did not end the matter. Finlay and his lieutenant,
Montgomery, were taken under arrest to Edinburgh after which the dragoons
withdrew from Edinburgh. As soon as they were come away, wrote Defoe,
the rabble rose again and took all the magistrates prisoner and declared that
if their two men were not restored and sent home again, they would treat the
magistrates just in the same manner as they should be treated.41 Two
magistrates were sent to Edinburgh to negotiate but were promptly ordered
by the Privy Council to return to Glasgow and take control of the situation.42
As one would expect, the ministers of the southwestern Presbyterian sects
had taken a much harder line against the proposed union than the Church of
Scotland. One pamphlet which appeared in 1706 was entitled Protestation
and Testimony of the United Societies of the Witnessing Remnant of the AntiPopish, Anti-Prelatic, Anti-Sectarian True Presbyterian Church of Christ in
Scotland Against the Sinful Incorporating Union. Apart from providing a
comprehensive list of their enemies, the title also announced that the network
of activists who had once formed the core of the United Societies, now
divided into several competing sects, had resumed a public role. One group
(the McMillanites) chose as the site of their first intervention the burgh
of Dumfries. This was not a random selection. Dumfries was one of the
majority of burghs which voted against the treaty in the Convention of
Royal Burghs on the grounds that it would damage local trade. The parish
representative in the Supreme Ecclesiastical Court of the Church of
Scotland had also spoken against the treaty on the grounds that it
threatened the Presbyterian settlement. These sentiments were apparently
in keeping with those of the majority of inhabitants, for on November 20 a
crowd gathered, including three hundred armed men: Near noonday this
formidable bandmade up partly of high-minded, well-organised men, and
partly of the burgh mobappeared menacingly in the High Street, and
making their way to the [Mercat] Cross unopposed by the authorities, many
of whom sympathised with them, in a calm deliberative manner, proceeded
to their task; and so exciting was it that every other sort of work was
abandoned in the town.43 Their task was to burn a copy of the Articles
of Union, followed by a list of the commissioners. A leaflet later
distributed in the town describes how the articles were carried to the
104
Chapter Four
Market Cross where with great Solemnity, in the audience of many

thousands they were burnt. The organisers were also concernedin the
traditional Cameronian mannerto explain their actions and, in particular,
their contempt for the Commissioners who had negotiated the Treaty:
We must say, and Profess, That the Commissioners for this Nation have either
been Simple, Ignorant or Treacherous, if not all three, when the Minutes of the
Treaty betwixt the Commissioners of both Kingdoms are duly Considered;
and when we compare the Dastardly yeildings unto the Demands and
Proposals of the English Commissioners; who, on the contrar[y], have
valiantly acquit[ed] themselves for the Interest and Safety of their Nation.44
The disturbances in Glasgow and the southwest had largely died down by
December 12 when the Act of Security for the Church was passed with a
majority of 74. Mar breathed an audible sigh of relief to Nairne in a letter
later that day:
You know the great rock we were most afraid to split upon was the Church;
and notwithstanding all the pains and endeavours that have been taken to
delude people on that score, yet we have this day carried the Act securing the
Presbyterian Church government as now by law established in Scotland after
the Union with very little alteration.45
Although separate from the treaty itself, this Act must be considered as
integral to it. The Kirk ministers were not thereby won over to the idea of
union with English Episcopalians, but the protection which the Act offered
them effectively defused their opposition to the extent that they ceased
agitating and started grumbling instead. Lockhart denounced them for their
sectionalism, writing that no sooner did the Parliament pass an act for the
security of their Kirk than most of the brethren's zeal cooledthereby
discovering that provided they could retain the possession of their benefices
they cared not a farthing what became of the other concerns of the nation.46
Lockhart is too dismissive here. The lower Kirk courtsthe Kirk sessions
and presbyterieswere still hostile, but the defection of the General
Assembly at the national level deprived their opposition of any focus or
leadership. A mere two months before the union came into effect, the
Presbyterian attitude had hardened to such an extent that Seafield could write
to Carstares from London: All the presbyterians, and you in particular, have
been very happy of having this opportunity to testify your zeal and loyalty to
her Majesty's person and government, and your fixed resolutions to withstand
and oppose the popish pretender.47
105
A Cameronian-Jacobite Alliance?
More serious than either of the momentary eruptions of collective
disorder in Edinburgh or Glasgow was the possibility of insurrection in the
southwest, where large-scale mobilisations were taking place for the first
time since the Revolution. The burning of the Articles in Dumfries was their
first public manifestation. Lockhart writes of the sects that they divided
themselves into regiments; chose their officers; provided themselves with
horses and arms.48 Was this the appearance of an independent radical
movement committed to overturning the existing ruling class?
Our access to radical political thought is limited for this period, but one
anti-union contribution to the pamphlet war, The Smoaking Flax
Unquenchable, addressed to the True Subjects of the Covenanted
Kingdom of Scotland, certainly envisages a Godly regime modelled on
the Cromwellian Commonwealth, and suggests both the extent of
Cameronian radicalism and its limits. The proposals of the anonymous
author are therefore worth considering in some detail. Elected rulers would
be subject to a number of constraints which, given the venality of Scottish
political life, had radical implications:
we declare ourselves against all Hereditary Offices, either Civil or
Military, as they shall pass from Father to Son, without the qualifications
above mentioned, and the free Election of the People We declare that we
incline and intend to abolish all rents and Revenues given to any in public
Office (either Civil or Military) more than will maintain an honest Christian
life; as that Family and Children may be provided in a Christian way .
In the administration of the law, a select panel of judges, similar to those

operative in the 1650s, would assess the merits of particular cases without
favouring the wealthy: And these Judges may Determine Causes and
Controversies as the manner was at that present time, and thereby partiality
and oppression may be removed, that thereby Justice may be Exercised
towards all Ranks without Respect of Persons. The author fully anticipated
that the nobility would oppose these proposals as mountains in the way:
I doubt not, but that they shall have full Liberty (in the first place) to play their
Game, in order to set up their Kings, that they are contending for, so that they
may drink of the Cup that the Kingdoms of Europe are Drinking of, who are
wasting and destroying one another, which Lot I fear will be Scotland's ere it
be long: and then it shall be found that these great Mountains shall be
removed.
106
Chapter Four
Yet radical though many of the ideas of The Smoaking Flax

Unquenchable are, the key feature of the pamphletas the last quote
suggestsis its passivity. The mountainous nobility may tumble and fall, but
not through any active intervention by the author or his associates. This in
turn seems to be a function of his pessimism about the likely effects of mere
political activity: Yea, they [i.e. the Scots] will rather join with the Citizens
of Darkness (that is with the French), in receiving King James the eighth (as
they call him) or else Hanover, or with the Prince of Prussia (as some has
[sic] already proposed) before that they will Espouse that Government and
these Governors, that's most for the propagating of Religion and Virtue in the
Land.49
Why was ideological radicalism ultimately linked to political quietism?
At one level, the author of The Smoaking Flax Unquenchable was still locked
into the fundamentally religious intellectual framework that had always
characterised the plebeian conventiclers, even at their most extreme. It may
be, however, that beneath the quotations from the Old Testament, more
secular considerations were also at work. During the 1640s, and again
between 1660 and 1688, a millenarianism inspired the southwestern
plebeians to successive military challenges to the Engagers, the New Model
Army and the Restoration regime. Why did this ideology, which once led
them to conclude that God would be best served by these suicidal onslaughts
on the state apparatus, now suggest that His Will be done by surrendering to
the powers and principalities of this world? The answer may lie in the
reference above to join[ing] with the Citizens of Darkness, for as
Anonymous well knew, it was not only the Jacobites who were
contemplating an alliance with France.
A little over a year earlier, in April 1705, a memorial to Robert Harley
from William Houston contained a pro-conventicler account of the last
years of Charles II and the reign of James VII. The main intention of this
epistle was however to provide a political map of Scotland in terms of
religious reliability. The five western shires, Ayr, Renfrew, Galloway,
Nithsdale, Clydesdale and the Stewarty of Galloway were where the
people are all generally strict dissenters from popery, prelacy, erastian
indulgency; exceedingly well armed and disciplined, zealous against the
French or anything that smells of popery. Houston claimed that the gentry
would be unable to resist the will of the people: In fine, the common
enemy cannot project any hopes here. In the central shires adjacent to the
Highlands: The commonality, being zealous Protestants, are obliged,
especially in the winter season, to defend themselves against the ravagings
of the Highlands, committing hardships, thats robbing all their cattle.
Finally, Relating to the army, it is very proper at this juncture that they
107
have honest officersmen of courage, conscience, such as Colonel James

Bruce, who came over with the late King William at the Revolution, and
men of his spirit. The reason why is of some interest: It would conduce
much to the spirit of Britain.50 It is unlikely that Harley reacted with
delight on being informed that sections of the population of southwest
Scotland were prepared independently to take up arms, even if it was
against the common enemy. Nevertheless, Houston had confirmed what
was widely known, even in the depths of Whitehallthe sectaries of the
southwest were Phanatics insofar as their religious beliefs were concerned,
but they could be relied upon to oppose Jacobitism and schemes involving
the French monarchyor so everyone thought.
It now appeared that everyone may have been wrong. Of the situation
in September 1706, Lockhart could write that the goal of the sectaries was
the return of the King [i.e. James] as the most feasible grounds to go upon
to save the country, and in their search for allies they were so far
reconciled to the northern parts (whom formerly they hated heartily on
account of their different principles of religion) and episcopal party, that
they were willing to join and concert measures with them for the defence
of their common native country.51 The reconciliation to which Lockhart
refers involved a military alliance, arranged, at the instigation of local laird
James Cunningham of Aiket, between clan warriors from the Perthshire
superiority of Lord Atholl and the Presbyterian paramilitaries of the
southwest. The strategy involved the former holding the main strategic
pass by Stirling Castle while the latter took Edinburgh, dispersed the
Parliament and then recalled James from exile to take up the succession.
That an alliance was being negotiated had been registered by the English
Ministry as early as September, when Mar had written to the English
Secretary of State, Robert Harley, that: Great endeavours are made by
some to unite those parties against us and the Union, but it is not very
probable that it will be easily done, they being of so different principles.52
Mar almost certainly knew of these plans from double agents who had
infiltrated the Presbyterian wing of the alliance. What is remarkable is the
fact that these agents constituted important members of the leadership. It is
not known whether Cunningham had been in the pay of the Court from the
start, or whether he was subsequently turned. At one point he
successfully denounced John Hepburn, leader of the sect known as the
Hebronites, for warning against an alliance with the Jacobites, but this
may have simply been a stratagem to gain trust within the movement as a
whole. He was certainly paid 100 after the Treaty was ratified and made
demands for further payments for his services in later years. Whatever the
ambiguities of Cunningham's position, however, a second double agent,
108
Chapter Four
John Ker of Kersland, was definitely in the pay of Queensberry from the
start.
Ker was correctly believed to have influence with the sects by virtue of
the leading role played by his family, and particularly his father, in the
struggles between 1660 and 1688. He was therefore sent by Queensberry to
push his way into the leadership, a task that he successfully accomplished
with remarkable speed. Given the pivotal role which the sectaries were
expected to play in the intended rising, Ker was privy to several
conversations in which leading anti-unionists made their true intentions plain:
A Gentleman entirely in Duke Hamilton's Interest told me, that every Body
was then sensible of my prevailing Interest with the Cameronians, and
Believed that it was in my power to be very useful in relieving my bleeding
Country from the Misery it was about to be plunged into from the Union; that
it was better the Pretender should be our King, and we a free people than
under the Notion of Liberty and Property live Slaves for ever I confess
this shocked me .53
Anti-unionists naturally dismissed the threat of French influence (in the

words of one) as the cobweb sophistry of hired Heads, or the waking
Dreams of a Bribed Brain. For, as the same author explains: In a word the
French have neither Affronted, Injured nor falsely Reproached our Nation as
the English have done, but on the contrary, have always proved more
Courteous Friends, Kind Confederates, and more Mannerly Neighbours to us
than the English.54 Yet whatever French relations with Scotland up to that
point, a rising at the time would certainly have involved France, as Lockhart,
who had helped negotiate the alliance between the sectaries and the Atholl
Highlanders, himself makes clear in matter-of-fact terms, noting that
Scotland might have defended itself for some time, till France had
counteracted the troops that were to be sent from abroad.55 Indeed, the
French regime was consciously trying to bring about such a conjuncture.
For Defoe was not the only foreign spy in Scotland at this time. Colonel
Nathaniel Hooke, an Irishman who had fought with Monmouth in 1685
before converting to Catholicism and committing himself to the Jacobite
cause, was sending reports to the French regime on the possibility of a rising
in Scotland against the union and in favour of the Stuarts. Unlike Defoe,
however, Hooke was not just a propagandist; he was engaged in trying to
bring such a rising to fruition. To this end he entered into negotiations with,
among other members of the Scottish Parliament, Hamilton. Hooke
understood, however, that more than one set of forces would be necessary to
overthrow the existing regime and defend Scotland against the inevitable
English intervention: If arms and ammunition are sent only to the
109
Presbyterians of Scotland to make them rise, as they have offered, the finest
opportunity in the world will be lost; for the Presbyterians alone will not
attack England, nor will be able to make themselves masters of Scotland; and
the Scottish Lords will not put themselves at their head whereas if the
insurrection be general, it will be out of the power of the English to prevent
its taking effect.56
Could such a rising have succeeded? Bearing in mind that success in
this context would have meant holding out against troops loyal to the
government and any English intervention until the French fleet arrived, it was
certainly possible. Lockhart writes that:
the nation was unanimous and cordial in the cause and [there were] not seven
thousand standing forces in all Britain, of which those that were in Scotland
were so dissatisfied with the Union that everybody knew, and the officers had
acquainted the government, that they could not be trusted, nine parts of ten
being inclined to join with those that opposed it.57
There are two claims here. First, that the Scottish state was militarily
unable to withstand an insurrection. Second, that the majority of the Scottish
population would have supported that insurrection.
On the one hand, Lockhart was undoubtedly correct to identify the
absence of military power as the key weakness of the Scottish state. In this
respect, nothing had changed in the year since Tweedale had been forced to
give royal assent to the Act of Security in order to gain supply. Nairne wrote
to Mar late in November with a list of Lamentable Groans and Complaints:
there is no powder almost in the magazine, and very little to be got in the
nation. The castle of Stirling, of which I have the command, is mightily out
of repair, and hardly a gun mounted, and there is not five barrels of powder
in it. There's no beds within it for the soldiers to lie in, so they are forced to
lie in the town, by all of which you may see how little secure it would be if
there were anything to be done and how easily it might be taken. It is the
great pass in Scotland, so no place is the more important. The Treasury here
can do nothing to it for want of money, and I'm not to blame, for I have
represented the bad condition of it again and again.58
Nor were the troops themselves reliable. Defoe reported to London in

November that, if any insurrection comewhich I must acknowledge is
not unlikelyI crave leave to say the few troops they have here are not to
be depended upon; I have this confessed by men of the best judgement.59
Could the English army have supplied the firepower that the Scottish state
could not supply on its own behalf? Troops were indeed moved north to
fortify the Border regions, but their use in the event of a rising would have
110
Chapter Four
been a high-risk strategy. English forces could not simply enter Scotland in
response to a French attack, partly because the bulk of them were involved in
the crucial struggle in Flanders, but even more because any move which
smacked of an invasion of Scotlandeven in response to a prior French
invasioncould potentially have incited Scots within the British Army to
mutiny, with unforeseeable consequences. As the century opened Scots held
10% of all regimental colonelcies within the British Army; by the battle of
Blenheim in 1704 they held five of the sixteen regimental colonelcies.60 More
importantly, this disproportionate preponderance was not restricted to the
officer level. During the course of the war in Flanders, Scotland provided two
regiments of dragoons, six battalions of foot (all paid from the English
Exchequer) and the six battalions of the Scots Brigade. In addition to these
ten thousand men, Scots also served in English regiments.61 Against this, the
French state had only recently sustained a serious defeat upon its own
territory at Ramillies on May 23. Presented with an open door, however,
there is little doubt that Louis XIV would have mustered an invasion force
and entered it, to which the English state could have done nothing but reply
with force, whatever the risks.
On the other hand, Lockhart seems to have been wrong over the crucial
question of whether or not sufficient numbers of the Scottish people would
rise in the first place to bring the other elements of the equation into play.
The attitude of the sectaries was crucial, since they were the most
motivated and organised of any group among the subordinate classes.
These comments by Defoe, although condescending in the extreme to the
poor deluded people of Glasgow and the West, nevertheless catch the
nature of their quandary:
will any man say, the men of Glasgow, famous for its zeal in religion, and
the liberties of their country, even from the very infancy of the reformation,
were now turned enemies to the Church of Scotland, and ready to fight
against her, in the quarrel of their bloody and inveterate enemies, the Papists
and Jacobites? will anybody think, that Glasgow men had so far forgot the
history of twenty years ago only, that they could now join with the murderers
of their brethren and fathers, and take up arms in favour of their mortal
enemies?62
Men are known by their friends, noted another pamphlet (perhaps also
written by Defoe) published after the Glasgow riots and the attempted rising:
all the Jacobites are in League with you, the Papists are on your right
Hand, the Prelatists on your left, and the French at your Back on what
account do these people join with you?63 It was a point Defoe returned to
again and again. He wrote gleefully to London on how the leader of the
111
abortive Glasgow rising was conducting himself in Prison: Finlay, though a

prisoner in the Castle, openly drinks King James the 8ths healthand tis as
good a thing as he can do. I have made Mr J. P. write word of it into
Galloway.64 Mr J. P. (Pierce) seems to have been Ker.65 His activities are
often creditednot least by himselfwith having ideologically disarmed the
sectaries by pointing out the inconsistencies involved in their alliance with
the Jacobites: The Reader must know, that from the Confidence the
Cameronians reposed in me, they laid aside their Resentments against the
Union for some Time, and agreed to my proposal, which was to declare
against the Pretender, and all that joined him, as Enemies.66
At the time, Defoe reported to Harley how Pierce had gone into the
mountain fastness of the Hebronites to meet with their leader: He has
opened his [i.e. Hepburn's] eyes in several things, and he shows us he has
been misrepresented in others, and he authorises me to assure you that there
is no danger from him unless some new artifices succeed to influence him.
We do not need to accept Ker's overwhelming powers of persuasion as the
sole reason for the radical retreat, for he was not spreading black propaganda
but simply stating the truth. Indeed, a Scottish anti-union pamphleteer, James
Hodges, had to remind those among his countrymen who were contemplating
the return of the Stuarts of the reasons for the revolutions of 1559, 1637 and
1688: Can you think an Arbitrary and Absolute Monarch a fit Assessor and
Supporter of Your Rights and Liberties as a Free People?67 The Hebronites
seem to have contemplated a rising in conjunction with the Jacobites, but
thought better of it. The McMillanites later denied having ever considered
it.68 It is difficult to see what else they could have done while still retaining
their principles. For the sectaries to support a rising in conjunction with the
Jacobite clans would have been like the Bolsheviks siding with Kornilov
against Kerensky in September 1917.
In the event, Hamilton committed another of his many acts of treachery
against the opposition he was supposed to be leading by sending out
instructions to both sides of the alliance that the rising was cancelled.
Although this dealt yet another blow to the Jacobites it removed the sectaries
from the hook upon which they were impaled. We will never know the
content of the discussions which took place among their ranks, but there is at
least some evidence to suggest that, even if Hamilton had not reneged, they
would not have proceeded with a rising which relied on Jacobite support.
Radical Presbyterians were neither so unprincipled nor so unthinking as to
imagine that the restoration of an absolutist regime, supported externally by
Catholic France and internally by the Episcopalian clans, would benefit them
in either religious or social terms. This was the conclusion that the author of
The Smoaking Flax Unquenchable had also reached, and it must be supposed
112
Chapter Four
that similar considerations operated elsewhere in Scotland. Nevertheless, it is

just possible that some kind of insurgent movement could have arisen, even
under Jacobite leadership, had it not been for the intercession of other, more
general, factors depressing the level of popular unrest towards the end of the
year.
The end of popular opposition to the treaty

There were material reasons for the widespread suspicion of the union.
For the classes below the nobility and the merchant elite, the union offered,
above all else, higher taxation. Moreover, although it was not mentioned in
the treaty, it was quite clear that a more rigorous customs and excise regime
on the English model was to be imposed for the purpose of thwarting the
smuggling operations which provided both illegal employment for many
inhabitants of the east coast and access to cheap goods, especially wine,
elsewhere. Yet many of these concerns were dealt with by amendments to the
relevant articles before the treaty was ratified as a whole. The significance of
these amendments has rarely been recognised. Paul Scott, for example,
writes: Articles 6 and 8, on customs duty, regulations on trade and the duty
on salt, had been referred to a committee because of the many objections
which they provoked, and eventually led to detailed but comparatively trivial
amendments.69 In fact, the vote of December 20 on Article 8, dealing with
Scottish exemption from English salt taxes, was the only serious defeat
suffered by the court throughout the entire ratification process.
Contemporaries were aware of the seriousness of the issue. Paterson, for
example, wrote to London that he continue[d] to think the malt and salt
exceptions the most material of the trade or money matters.70 Why this
issue, above all others?
If taxes on Scottish salt were kept lower than on English or other
imported salt, then it would remain affordable by the mass of the population,
for whom it was a necessity, both to preserve food during winter and to
render their regular diet more palatable throughout the year.71 It would be
inadvisable to dismiss these as merely base material concerns. Given the
highly circumscribed lives of most people at this time, a worsening of their
material conditions in these areas was a serious matter. Therefore, far from
the successful amendments being trivial, as Paul Scott believes, they were
probably of major importance in defusing popular unrest. But Defoe was in
no doubt that the amendments were a victory for the mob: the rabbles and
noise of the party have pushed them [i.e. the commissioners] among
amendments and there is no possibility to avoid it, he wrote, shortly before
they were passed.72
113
Is this not too dismissive of nationalist resistance to the dissolution of

the Scottish state? References to nationalism get us little further forward,
however, unless we believeas some modern nationalists evidently dothat
it is a natural phenomenon requiring no further explanation. The inhabitants
of the Scottish Lowlands were indeed beginning to develop a sense of
national consciousness, but its transformation into political nationalism was
never fully achieved while the Scottish state was in existence. The formative
state of Scottish national consciousness on the eve of union can be
encapsulated by two passages from Hodges, one of the pamphleteers who
opposed what he saw as the surrender of Scottish sovereignty. In one he
discusses the difference between Scottish and English church organisation,
writing that Scotland hath a Distinct Constitution of Ecclesiastic
Government from that of England, which none of the Kingdoms or
Governments mentiond had from those, with whom they united in an
Incorporating Union. Hodges is here distinguishing between kingdoms like
France, Spain or England itself, which became unified states through the
incorporation of many different kingdoms, all of which shared the same
religious forms, and the proposed British state, which would not. These
remarks clearly point towards some sense of national identity based on
cultural and social distinctions. On the same page, however, Hodges talks
about the Scottish nation in precisely the ahistorical, racial terms which can
be traced back to the Declaration of Arbroath:
whereas England hath been four times conquerd, to wit, by the Romans,
the Saxons, the Danes, and the Normans; the Scots are the only People of
Europe whom, tho none more violently assaulted, yet neither Romans, who
conquerd all the rest, nor any other Nation, have ever been able to conquer;
since the first Settling of their Government; they have been able to defend,
and preserve from conquest their National Freedom and Independency, for
several Centuries of Years; above the one third of the World's Age from the
Creation.73
Nationalism involves at the very least some level of identification of the

people with the state, but such an identification was impossible for the vast
majority of Lowland Scots. The Scottish state had failed miserably to achieve
the goals it had set itself in Darien, and the functions that it did perform to
any degree of efficiency were those of a feudal apparatus geared towards
aiding their exploitation. The crowds were provoked rather by a concern for
the Scottish society in which they experienced not only oppression, but also
the things that made their lives halfway bearable. Their nationalism was a
reaction to the specific ways in which the treaty threatened to weaken the
social fabric (through undermining the Kirk, the only institution over which
114
Chapter Four
the plebeians exercised any democratic control) and worsen their material
conditions (through increasing the cost of salt, ale and so on). The combined
effect of the guarantees offered to the Kirk and the amendments which
withdrewat least temporarilythe economic cost of incorporation seem to
have removed these immediate concerns. National identity is not peoples
only identity, as Julian Goodare sensibly points out, nor is it always the
most important one, and it is only from the ideological vantage point of
nationalism itself that anyone could actually doubt this: While Scots went
into union very much as Scots rather than as Britons, they were also
mindful of their interests as Protestants, as capitalists, or as consumers.74
The majority of people did not, of course, become enthusiasts for the Union
as a result, but they were more prepared to tolerate it.
A recognition of the decline in active popular discontent, along with the
realisation that a parliamentary majority for ratification was secure, impelled
the opposition to mobilise their class base in two last minute attempts to halt
proceedings. The first was launched during the final week of December.
Fletcher and Hamilton jointly proposed that the various ranks of landowners
should assemble in Edinburgh to petition Queensberry either to abandon the
ratification process or to suspend proceedings while elections were called
their assumption being that a newly elected Parliament would have a majority
against the union. Queensberry seemed to have shared this assumption. The
petition, however, never got as far as being presented. Between four- to fivehundred lairds descended on Edinburgh, but their mainly Jacobite politics set
them against Fletcher who, consistent to the end, could not be induced to
support a Stuart restoration. More seriously, it also set them against
Hamilton, who refused to proceed with the petition unless a section was
added accepting the Hanoverian succession. Needless to say this was
unacceptable to the Jacobites in their turn and the entire enterprise became
bogged down in fruitless wrangling over the contents of the address. While
the demonstrators argued among themselves, Queensberry seized his
opportunity to issue a proclamation banning assemblies convened to mount
addresses and declaring them to be seditious. With the imposition of this final
obstacle, the majority of the lairds packed up and went back to their estates.
Defoe reported on January 4, 1707: I wrote you last week that the
apprehension we were under here began to vanish the crowd of strangers
lessens amain.75 And two days later: I have little to say today but to confirm
what my last hinted, that all the fears of the matter are now over on this side
and the Angus men and co. are most of them dropped away as silently as they
came.76
The second attempt followed during the second week of January. Time
was running out, as an increasingly confident Court oversaw the ratification
115
of article after article. The opposition leaders therefore decided to concentrate

their efforts on the last two articles, which dealt with representation in the
new British Parliament. Their tactic centred on the delivery of a
protestation declaring that parliament was only a temporary custodian of
the national will and that, consequently, it had no authority to dissolve the
state. It was correctly assumed that Queensberry would be unmoved by this
appeal. After its dismissal the opposition would therefore secede, leaving
parliament with less than two thirds of its members, greatly reducing its
authority and depriving the treaty of any legitimacy which it might have
possessed. In the meantime, the seceders would offer themselves to the nation
as the basis of an alternative government. In effect, this was a resurrection of
the tactic employed by the Jacobites in 1689 when they attempted to set up an
alternative convention in opposition to the revolution parliament. Like that
proposal, it would have amounted to a declaration of civil war. Hamilton was
to present the protestation to parliament. On January 9, 1707, great numbers
of gentlemen and eminent citizens flocked together that morning about the
Parliament house to attend the separating members and assist them in case
they should be mistreated as they came from the house.77 But Hamilton
failed to appear. Eventually, some of his party were sent to inquire after him
at Holyrood, only to be told that the Duke had toothache and was unable to
attend. We have no record of what was said to Hamilton on this occasion, but
he was nevertheless prevailed (as Lockhart puts it) to go to Parliament
House. On arrival, he found it necessary to inquire who would be delivering
the protestation. On being told that, of course, no other person but himself
was qualified to do so, he declined, saying that he would, however, be the
first to adhere once it had been entered. After this debacle the heart went out
of the parliamentary opposition, with many leaving before the end of the
session and those remaining barely bothering to continue their resistance.
Surveying this farce, it is difficult to disagree with the verdict on the
Country Party delivered by one correspondent, who may have been
William Paterson, initiator of the Darien expedition and founder of the
Bank of England: This party, though it be but small and upon the decline,
is as little united itself as it would have this island to be. In short, as they
have the foolishest cause ever was known, they manage accordingly; and
serve the interest they are against more effectually by their opposition,
than they could possibly by their concurrence.78
In the end, the same relative levels of support revealed during the vote
on Article 1 were also present at the final vote on the treaty as a whole on
January 16or would have been had not some of the burgess commissioners
not already departed in disgust:
Chapter Four
116
Nobility
Barons
Burgesses
Total
For
42
38
30
110
Against
19
30
20
6979
All that remained to be done after the final vote was to choose which
Scottish MPs would sit in the new British Parliament. Given the level of
discontent among sections of the enfranchised, Queensberry and Argyll
refused to risk an election. So, true to form, the representatives were
nominated by the Officers of Court from the ranks of the Court Party and,
to a much lesser extent, the Squadrone. Indeed, Squadrone members
received much less than they considered their due in any respect.
Queensberry and Argyll refused to acknowledge their part in carrying the
union and reneged on their promise to allow the Squadrone leaders to
disburse the contents of the equivalent. The resulting enmity between the
two unionist parties was to have unforeseen consequences in the ensuing
period. It should not, however, divert attention from their underlying unity
on the question of the treaty itself.
Conclusion
What conclusions can we draw from this episode? First, although the
crowd was unable to prevent the ratification of the Treaty of Union, it did
achieve a number of amendmentsin effect a form of reform by riotby
securing the central role of the Kirk in Scottish society and, although on a
much shorter-term basis, the withdrawal of some of the proposed tax
increases. Second, the riots were effective because they were aligned with
resistance to the treaty in the rural areas where the majority of the population
lived, often through a joint adherence to radical Presbyterian beliefs among
the leading figures. Third, participants in the demonstrations and riots were
politically sophisticated enough to understand that launching a full-scale
attempt to overthrow the parliament would lead to military intervention by
both France and England, and either the conquest of Scotland and England by
the former or the forcible subjugation of Scotland, along Irish lines, by the
latter. Fourth, and consequently, there were major structural limitations on the
independence and capacity for self-activity of pre-industrial crowds during
the transition to capitalism. Ironically, it would be the union which many of
the participants opposed which lead to the completion of the transition and
the emergence of a unified working class on both sides of the border.
117
Notes
1
Jan de Vries, European Urbanization, 15001800 (London: Methuen, 1984), 39.

Iain D. Whyte, Urbanisation in Early Modern Scotland: a Preliminary Analysis,
Scottish Economic and Social History 9 (1989): 28.
3
Rab A. Houston, Social Change in the Age of the Enlightenment: Edinburgh,
16601760 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994), 32.
4
King James VI and I [1599], Basilicon Doron, in Political Writings, Johann P.
Sommerville (ed.) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994), 29, 30.
5
Michael Lynch, Whatever Happened to the Medieval Burgh?, Scottish Social
and Economic History 4 (1984): 12.
6
Jane Thomas, The Craftsmen of Elgin, 15401660, in Freedom and Authority:
Historical and Historiographical Essays Presented to Grant G. Simpson, Terry
Brotherstone & David Ditchburn (eds.) (East Linton: Tuckwell, 2000), 145, 150,
153.
7
Iain D. Whyte, The Occupational Structure of the Scottish Towns in the Late
Seventeenth Century, in The Early Modern Town in Scotland, Michael Lynch
(ed.) (London: Croom Helm, 1987), 224225.
8
Houston, Social Change in the Age of the Enlightenment, 290.
9
Barry Coward, The Stuart Age: a History of England, 16031714 (Harlow:
Longman, 1980), 306; Rab A. Houston, Popular Politics in the Reign of George
II: the Edinburgh Cordiners, Scottish Historical Review 72 (2) (1993): 167.
10
Marchmont to Pringle, June 22, 1700, in A Selection from the Papers of the
Earls of Marchmont in the Possession of the Right Hon Sir George Henry Rose
Illustrative of Events from 1685 to 1750 (3 volumes, London: John Murray, 1831),
vol. 1, 210.
11
Allan I. Macinnes, Influencing the Vote: the Scottish Estates and the Treaty of
Union, 170607, History Microcomputer Review 6 (2) (1990): 15.
12
Baillie to Roxburgh, April 11, 1705, in Correspondence of George Baillie of
Jerviswood, 17021708 (Edinburgh: Bannatyne Club, 1842), 75.
13
For a later example of Edinburgh crowd activity which can be more plausibly
described as a kind of wild justice, see Henry T. Dickinson & Kenneth Logue,
The Porteous Riot: a Study in the Breakdown of Law and Order in Edinburgh,
17361737, Journal of the Scottish Labour History Society 10 (1976).
14
[William Forbes], A Pill for Pork Eaters: Or, a Scots Lancet for an English
Swelling (Edinburgh: James Watson, 1705), 3, 4.
15
Joseph Taylor [1705], A Journey to Edenborough in Scotland by Joseph Taylor,
Late of the Inner Temple, Esq. (Edinburgh: W. Brown, 1903), 95, 126.
16
Mar to Carstares, March 9, 1706, in State Papers and Letters Addressed to
William Carstares, Relating to Public Affairs in Great Britain, but More
Particularly in Scotland, During the Reigns of K. William and Q. Anne. To which
is prefixed the life of Mr. Carstares, Published from the Originals by Joseph
MacCormick (Edinburgh: John Balfour, 1774), 744.
17
See his request for instructions from Robert Harley and the (unfortunately
incomplete) reply by the latter: Defoe to Harley, September 13, 1706, in The
Manuscripts of His Grace the Duke of Portland, Preserved at Welbeck Abbey
2
118
Chapter Four
[henceforth Portland Manuscripts], vol. 4 (London: Historical Manuscripts

Commission, 1891), 326328 and Harley to Defoe, September 1706, in ibid., 334.
18
P. W. J. Riley, The Union of England and Scotland: a Study in Anglo-Scottish
Politics of the Eighteenth Century (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1978), 245.
19
Rab A. Houston, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1985), 3435, 4647.
20
George Lockhart [1714], 'Scotland's Ruine': Lockhart of Carnwarth's Memoirs
of the Union, Daniel Szechi (ed.) (Aberdeen: Association for Scottish Literary
Studies, 1995), 150.
21
Atholl to the Atholl Lairds, October 24, 1706, in Chronicles of the Atholl and
Tullibardine Families Collected and Arranged by John, Seventh Duke of Atholl, K.
T. (5 volumes, Edinburgh: Ballantyne Press, 1908), vol. 2, 68.
22
Ibid.
23
Lockhart, Scotland's Ruine, 148.
24
Stirling Address, November 18, 1706, Perth Burgh Records B59/34/17/3.
25
Instructions by the Magistrates and Town Council of the Burgh of Lauder, to
their Commissioner in Parliament, in Relation to the Union Proposed Betwixt the
Kingdoms of Scotland and England, National Library of Scotland,
Ry.III.a.24(74).
26
27
The Burgh of Montrose and the Union of 1707a Document, T. C. Smout
(ed.), Scottish Historical Review 66 (182) (1987): 184.
28
Riley, The Union of England and Scotland, 278279.
29
Willie Thompson et al., From Reformation to Union, in Scottish Capitalism:
Class, State and Nation from Before the Union to the Present, Tony Dickson (ed.)
(London: Lawrence and Wishart, 1980), 87.
30
[James Hodges], The Rights and Interests of the Two British Monarchies
Inquird into, and Cleard; with a Special Respect to an United or Separate State
(London, no publisher identified, 1703), 5657.
31
Logan to Mar, August 27, 1706, in Report on the Manuscripts of the Earls of
Mar and Kellie [henceforth Mar and Kellie Manuscripts] (London: Historical
Manuscripts Commission, 1904), 274.
32
A Sermon Preached Before His Grace James Duke Of Queensberry, Her
Majesty's High Commissioner upon the 27 October 1706 by Mr John Logan
Minister of the Gospel at Alloa (Edinburgh: the heirs and successors of Andrew
Anderson, 1706).
33
Mar to Nairne, October 26, 1706, in Mar and Kellie Manuscripts, 298.
34
35
Mar to Nairne, October 26, 1706, in Mar and Kellie Manuscripts, 299.
36
Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, vol. 11, 17021707 Thomas Thomson &
Cosmo Innes (eds.) (Edinburgh: General Register House, 1875), 313315.
37
Mar to Nairne, November 5, 1706, in Mar and Kellie Manuscripts, 312.
38
Daniel Defoe [1709], The History of the Union Between England and Scotland:
With a Collection of Original Papers Relating Thereto (London: John Stockdale,
1786), 269.

39
119
Defoe to Harley, December 7, 1706, Portland Manuscripts, vol. 4, 364.

John S. Gibson, Playing the Scottish Card: the Franco-Jacobite Invasion of
1708 (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1988), 82.
41
Defoe to Harley, December 7, 1706, in Portland Manuscripts, vol. 4, 365366.
42
Defoe to Harley, December 9, 1706, in ibid., 366.
43
William McDowall [1867], History of the Burgh of Dumfries, with Notices of
Nithsdale, Annandale, and the Western Border (Third edition with additional
notes, Dumfries: Thomas Hunter, 1906), 509.
44
An Account of the Burning of the Articles of Union at Dumfries, National
Library of Scotland, Ry.III.a.24(9).
45
Mar to Nairne, November 12, 1706, in Mar and Kellie Manuscripts, 318.
46
47
Seafield to Carstares, March 27, 1707, in State Papers and Letters Addressed to
William Carstares, 764.
48
49
The Smoaking Flax Unquenchable; where the Union Between the Two
Kingdoms is Dissecated, Anatomised; Confuted and Annuled. also, that Good
Form and Fabrick of Civil Government, Intended and Espoused by the True
Subjects of the Land, is Illustrated and Held Out (Edinburgh: no publisher
identified, 1706), 13, 14, 16, 22.
50
William Houston [1705], A Succinct Deduction of the Series of Affairs
Relating to Church and State of Scotland from the Year 1679 to and with this
Present State, in Portland Manuscripts, vol. 8, 373, 374.
51
52
Mar to Harley, September 21, 1706, in Mar and Kellie Manuscripts, 281.
53
John Ker, The Memoirs of John Ker of Kersland in North Britain, Relating to
Politics, Trade and History (3 volumes, London: no publisher identified, 1727),
vol. 1, 3738.
54
William Alexander, An Essay Showing that there's no Probability of there being
so much French Interest, as it's Certain there's English Influence in our Present
Parliament of Scotland (Edinburgh: no publisher identified, 1704), 7, 8. The same
author does note, however, that the English are much better masters than the
French, neither do the English Enslave their Subjects as the French do. See ibid.,
7.
55
56
Nathaniel Hooke, The Secret History of Colonel Hooke's Negotiations in
Scotland in Favour of the Pretender in 1707 Written by Himself (London: T.
Beckett, 1760), 8.
57
58
Nairne to Mar, November 29, 1706, in Mar and Kellie Manuscripts, 305306.
59
Defoe to Harley, November 13, 1706, in Portland Manuscripts, vol. 4, 350.
60
Keith Brown, From Scottish Lords to British Officers: Elite Integration and the
Army in the Seventeenth Century, in Scotland and War AD79 to 1918, Norman
McDougall (ed.) (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1991), 149.
61
S. H. F. Johnston, The Scots Army in the Reign of Anne, Transactions of the
Royal Historical Society, fifth series, 3 (1952), 7.
40
120
62
Chapter Four
Defoe, The History of the Union Between England and Scotland, 265, 266.
[?Daniel Defoe], A Short Letter to the Glasgow Men (no place or publisher
identified, 1706), 2.
64
65
See the evidence assembled in Andrew Lang, A History of Scotland from the
Roman Occupation (four volumes, Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons,
1907), vol. 4, 13031.
66
Ker, Memoirs, vol. 1, 61.
67
[James Hodges], War between the Two British Kingdoms Considered for the
Mutual Interest of Both (London, 1705), 40.
68
All their denials stem from the period after the union had come into effect,
beginning with a Protestation posted in Sanquhar during October 1707, so this may
be retrospective. See the evidence assembled in David H. Fleming [1907], Mr
Langs Cameronian and Jacobite Alliance, in Critical Reviews Relating Chiefly to
Scotland (London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1910), 406410 and appendix B, Did
the Cameronians Coquet with the Jacobites In 1707?, See ibid., 502504.
69
Paul H. Scott, Andrew Fletcher and the Treaty of Union (Edinburgh: John
Donald, 1992), 200.
70
Paterson to ?Harley, December 21, 1706, in Portland Manuscripts, vol. 8, 274.
71
Christopher A. Whatley, Coal, Salt and the Treaty of Union of 1707: a Revision
Article, Scottish Historical Review 66 (181) (1987): 3139.
72
73
[Hodges], The Rights and Interests of the Two British Monarchies Inquird Into,
9.
74
Julian Goodare, State and Society in Early Modern Scotland (Oxford: Clarendon
Press, 1999), 338.
75
Defoe to Harley, January 4, 1707, in Portland Manuscripts, vol. 4, 374.
76
Defoe to Harley, January 6, 1707, in ibid., 379.
77
78
?Paterson to Lewis, October 29, 1706, in Portland Manuscripts, vol. 9, 254.
79
Acts of the Parliament of Scotland, vol. 11, 17021707, 404406.
63
CHAPTER FIVE
I LOVE THE SOUND OF BREAKING GLASS:
THE LONDON CROWD 1760-2011
KEITH FLETT
On the BBCs Weekly Politics programme on December 9, 2010, the

day of the tuition fees protests in London, the historian David Starkey
commented that the capital had seen nothing like it since the Chartist
period of the 1840s. Starkey is a historian of the sixteenth not the
nineteenth century, so he is hardly best placed to make an informed
comment. However, the broader point was well made.
According to some media coveragefor example the London Evening
Standardthe student protests of late 2010 constituted mob violence and,
on occasion, rioting. While the fevered imagination of right-wing
journalists seeking easy headlines may not be the best historical
benchmark, for much of the time since the mid-eighteenth centurywhen
the London mob makes its first real historical appearanceit has been a
factor in shaping what took place.
The definition of what constitutes a riot and rioters according to the
law has changed over time. The reading of the riot act was clear enough
and has modern day parallels, when police warn crowds, albeit with much
less legal backing. But the states definition of what was or was not a riot
and who were or were not rioters was quite clear. John Stevenson, in a
useful survey of the historical incidence of riot in the UK and secondary
literature, notes that historically speaking the definition of a riot was that
three or more people gathered together and, crucially, had a mutual intent
in doing so.1 In other words, the law argued that it was not just the act of
riot that was the issue but whether there was a planned intent behind it or
not.
A further criterion was whether what took place was sufficient to
concern someone of robust physical condition. It may be argued that the
London mob goes much further back than the 1750s. What, for example,
122
Chapter Five
about Wat Tyler and the Peasants Revolt of 1381? What of London
during the 1640s and 1650s? The London Apprentices riot of this period
was certainly very much an urban, proto working-class affair. The point
here is that the crowds involved were mostly pre-proletarian, but in the
earlier cases also pre-plebeian, and that may have given them a rather
different character from the gatherings considered here.
Eric Hobsbawms Primitive Rebels looks at some historical examples.
He refers, for example, to the Palermo riot of 1773 and the Bolognese riots
of 1790, but his emphasis is more on the mob as a reactionary precapitalist formation rather than a progressive element.2
Whether the events in central London on December 9, 2010 really
constituted a riot by either protesters or police is arguable, but there were
certainly scenes reminiscent of the poll tax demonstration at the end of
March 1990. That protest helped to spark a wider movement that saw the
poll tax axed and is thought to have contributed to Margaret Thatchers
departure from office.
Trying to understand these events is a problem for right-wing media
commentators who believe that the era of street protest is long gone.
Grasping what happens when ordinary people decide to protest has been
an issue for as long as the inequalities and divisions of market capitalist
society have sparked the protests themselves. This is really, at least in part,
where the term the mob comes from. It is used to describe a group of
protesters where those in authority have little idea about who, if anyone,
might be leading them, and what they plan to do.
This disturbs those in authority but it is a function of large cities like
London. It is possible in crowded urban areas for people to get up to all
kinds of things without it being officially noticed. Well-off Victorians had
a fear of the working class living in areas adjacent to them, and were
worried that the inhabitants might attack them or their property and then
disappear back into the mysterious neighbourhoods from whence they
came. So, for example, in 1848 the cry of The Chartists are coming was
sometimes heard in well-off London neighbourhoods, heralding an
imminent invasion of protesters supposedly intent on creating havoc. In
the main, Chartist demonstrations were orderly affairs. But there were
occasions, for example in early 1848, when the Chartist influence was
lesser, where less predictable protests took place.
Much the same fear underwrites current talk of the mob. It is not an
anonymous group in reality, it is a mixture of the more and less
committed, of all kinds of ideas and strategies and, on occasion, none.
That is, as we show below, why the left has sometimes preferred not to use
the term mob and has tended to refer to the crowd.
123
The pioneering work is The London Mob of the Eighteenth

Century by the late Marxist historian George Rud, who also wrote the
classic text The Crowd in History. Rud has referred to the sense of the
crowd, rather than a stratum of society or hired strong arm gang.3
It could be said that the difference between the mob and the crowd
is that the former has sometimes been reactionary while the latter is
generally progressive. Not all London riots have been of the left and some
attacked left-wing causes, for example during the period of the French
Revolution in the 1790s. But there is a tradition of left-wing crowds, from
those who stood up for Wilkes and Liberty in the 1760s, to the
unemployed who marched and rioted in London in the 1880s and who
formed an audience for the Marxist Social Democratic Federation, right up
to the modern day with the poll tax.
It could also be said that the street protest and its often chaotic nature
represents an absence of the orderly traditions of the labour movement, or
we might argue that they are a force that can be organised to achieve real
change, a great start pointing to better things.
In the last significant review of the historical literature on riots
published in a 1978 issue of Social History, R. J. Holton identifies four
strands of thinking on the left about the nature of riots.4 For Richard Cobb,
who wrote about the French Revolution, the focus is on popular
mentalities. For Eric Hobsbawm, who worked on pre-industrial societies,
there was a framework of banditry and primitive rebels, which he
occasionally revisits. Charles Tilly looked at collective violence, while for
George Rud the emphasis was on the crowd and the social process that
led people to protest rather than on concepts of the mob or the masses.5
Holton makes several critical points that still hold truefirstly, that the
treatment of the patriotic and jingo crowds is incomplete, and
secondly he draws attention to the potential difference between the preindustrial and the industrial crowd.
The London riotsome historical examples

Here we look at a number of historical examples of London riots,
namely the Wilkes and Liberty riots of the 1760s, the Chartist riots in the
1840s, the riots on the Irish question in 1887 that led to Bloody Sunday,
and, a century on, the poll tax riot of March 1990.
A narrative of the events themselves is not provided in detail as this
can easily be established elsewhere. Charles Dickens novel Barnaby
Rudge, about the Gordon Riots of 1780, is possibly the first fictional
account of them. But these days, prudent allowance for errors (deliberate
124
Chapter Five
or otherwise) and lack of rigour being made, Wikipedia entries provide

reasonable ways in for those who wish to know more about a particular
episode.
Our interest in these four well known periods of London rioting is in
their characteristics. Rud sees the historical treatment of the mob as
falling under three headings: first, as an omnibus term for the lower
orders, second, as a hired gang acting in the interests of a particular
political group, and third, what interests him, as a crowd engaged in
riots, strikes or political demonstrations. 6 In the last case the rioters
would tend to be mostly in employment, as opposed to unemployed, and
often skilled tradespeople. It should also be the case that there were some
underlying economic factors that motivated the need to protest beyond the
ostensible reason for doing so.
The focus here is very specifically on the urban, indeed on the crowd
or mob that from time to time appeared in central Londonthe location of
the central apparatus of the British state, and the symbolic centre of power.
Looking at historical episodes of rioting from the 1760s to the 1990s,
the similarities are striking. Riots invariably and always involve the
smashing of a large number of windows, with subsequent glaziers bills.
The authorities inevitably condemn the action and state their intention to
track down and bring to justice those responsible. Later, where the results
are clear in official papers, they frequently admit that the attempt to do so
was not particularly successful.
The London mob was certainly in existence by the end of the first
quarter of the eighteenth century, and in fact Rud suggests that popular
rioting was endemic throughout the period.7 He notes, for example, that
in 1733 a riot took place as a crowd besieged parliament with a cry of No
slavery, no excise, no wooden shoes. The impact was dramatic as Prime
Minister Robert Walpole withdrew his Excise Bill.
However, the London mob really enters the stage of history as a
regular fixture from the 1760s, and it is this point that is captured in
Ruds book, Wilkes and Liberty.8 John Wilkes was a radical bourgeois
politicianhe referred to his supporters as the inferior sort of people,
was an early example arguably of the gentleman leader and was an MP
and mayor of London in the final decades of the eighteenth century. He
had battles with the establishment and spent time in jail for seditious libel,
but was also a successful political figure, perhaps one of the first of the
modern era.
For example, Wilkes published a paper, the North Briton, for which he
was prosecuted. Parliament met to consider the nature of the paper and
ordered it to be burnt by the common hangman at Cornhill in the City of
125
London. Unfortunately for the authorities, a mob of five hundred people

gathered and the burning could not go ahead. In March 1768 Wilkes stood
as an MP for Brentford in West London. Under the pre-1832 and pre-1867
unreformed parliament there was no secret ballot and polling went on for
several days. Wilkes and his supporters ran an energetic and high profile
campaign and easily won the seat ten miles west of central London.
Many of those responsible for trying to keep order in the capital,
decades before the first regular police force appeared, decamped to
Brentford to keep an eye on Wilkes and his campaign. Unfortunately for
them this left rather few forces in central London, where on March 29 and
30, 1768 the election of Wilkes was greeted with a two-day celebratory
riot aimed at those in authority who had been trying to persecute him.
Rud reports: A mob of 100 men and boys setting out from Charing
Cross about 9pm in the evening smashing windows in Leicester Fields,
Covent Garden, Russell Street, the Strand, Long Acre, Oxford Street and
Piccadilly drank two gallons of beer to Wilkes and Liberty in the Six
Cans Tavern Turnstile Holborn.9
What followed set a pattern for riots to come. Rud indicates that the
Guildhall advertised in the pressthe official London Gazetteto
prosecute with utmost rigour such persons who have been active in the
said riots on March 30, the day after the riot. It appears that the success
rate in apprehending and bringing rioters to court was rather poor as it was
agreed that the results proved decidedly meagre.10
Who were those who participated in and organised the London riots of
the eighteenth century? Historical research on who organised the
processions in support of Wilkes is slim, but someone was responsible, as
the authorities understood. Those who suggest that events happen
spontaneously are really just saying that they dont know who organised
them. It may well be that the same elements of the radical bourgeoisie that
supported Wilkes election in Brentford were responsible, but again detail
is mostly lacking.
But it is known who the rioters were, insofar as they were arrested. The
striking thing here is that while a distinction is frequently made between
the pre-industrial and industrial London crowd, for example by David
Goodway in his excellent work on London Chartism in the 1840s (1982),
which is considered below, the composition of the rioters in the period
Goodway covers appears similar to that of the crowd that supported
Wilkes.11
The latter were invariably not what might be termed the lumpenproletariat,
casual labourers or, mostly, the unemployed. In fact, skilled workers
predominated. Commenting on the Wilkesite crowd, Sir John Fielding
126
Chapter Five
refers to the infinite number of chairmen, porters, labourers and drunken

mechanics.12 Rud himself notes that those involved were wage earners
rarely criminals.13 Finally, the reasons for arrest follow a well-worn
pattern and usually focus on being involved with a mob or leading it,
breaking windows or rioting.
As weve seen in eighteenth-century London, the forces of order that
the state could mobilise to control and prevent riot were relatively limited.
In that sense, a riot was relatively easy to organise and an effective method
of political protest. The organised labour movement and political parties as
membership organisations did not exist in a significant way.
Chartist riots
As industrial capitalism developed and London became the centre of
the worlds first capitalist power, so the forces of order developed. Indeed,
Goodway has described the London of the 1840s as a fully policed city,
and certainly the only one that was. The decade of the 1840swhich saw
peak Chartist activity in the metropolissaw the first significant riots in
London since the Gordon Riots.
The protests around the 1832 Reform Act had certainly been robust but
no riots took place. Similarly, the events of 1839for example the attempt
at a rising in Newporttook place some distance from London. Indeed,
when the riot returned to London it had a focus on events that were
happening elsewhere.
The Chartists, and in particular the National Chartist Association
(NCA) that had been formed in 1841 and was in effect the worlds first
working-class political party, were not in favour of riots. Their chosen
methods of political campaigning were the meeting, the petition, the
demonstration or procession, the strike and, if need be, a general strike, or
national holiday, and ultimately a rising or revolution. All of these things
required planning and organisation in a way that riots broadly did and
could not. Chartists tended to emphasise that their activities were orderly
and that if disorder arose this was as a result not of their actions but of the
police and authorities. Hence the riots that followed the activities of G. W.
M. Reynolds in 1848, outlined below, were not sanctioned or supported by
the Chartists.
F. C. Mather, in his definitive study Public Order in the Age of the
Chartists,14 sees three clusters of riots in the Chartist period. These are
from spring 1837 to January 1840, before the NCA was formed, the
summer months of 1842, around the general strike of that year, in reality
127
behaviours related to a political industrial dispute, and finally February to

August 1848, which of course was the Year of Revolutions.
At the top level an attempt to link organised Chartism to riot doesnt fit
that well.
The figures for committals and convictions for riots (from G. R. Porter,
The Progress of the Nation, 1847)15 show 1,280 convictions in 1837 rising
to 2,181 in 1839; 1842 had 1960 convictions for riot, but by 1845 the
figure had declined again to 1,339, not far off the earlier 1837 level.
Again, it is difficult to link the changes in convictions specifically to
Chartism1839 and 1842 were years of greater social disorder and unrest
than 1837 and 1845.
John Stevenson, in his survey of Chartism and rioting Popular
Disturbances in England 17001870 (1992), makes the point that Chartist
speeches often displayed a rhetoric of violence and physical force. In 1848
such rhetoric was enough to get numbers of leading Chartists arrested.
However, he also notes the emphasis placed by the trades delegates and
Chartist leaders on orderliness during the period of the 1842 General
Strike.
The reality was, as the account below underlines, that the predisposition of Chartism was towards organisation and ordered mass
protest, unless these avenues of protest were closed to them by the
authorities. So, for example, when it came to the presentation of the May
1842 Chartist petition the state did not interfere. However, in 1848, against
a backdrop of revolution in Europe, the Chartists found themselves banned
from presenting a petition to Parliament on April 10, 1848 by the
Tumultuous Petitioning Law, which was equally in force in 1842 and
could have been used then, but was not.
Stevenson notes that a range of Chartist activities16 could have been
seen to comprise seditious activity from drilling with arms to conspiring to
make an insurrection, but middle class radicals who campaigned for the
1832 Reform Act might equally have fallen foul of the law in many of the
same areas had the government felt confident enough to use it.
***
August 1842 saw the plug plot, a general strike in northern mill
towns, and troops were despatched by train from Euston station to keep
order. The departure of the troops was the occasion for what Goodway
suggests was a week and a half of daily meetings, processions and
fighting with the police.17
128
Chapter Five
From August 1315 crowds gathered near Euston station and in Regent
Street, groaning and hissing at the troops, and by August 15 the Chartist
paper the Northern Star reported that troops were compelled to charge the
people at the point of the bayonet before they could gain entry to the
railway station. After the first few days, Chartist meetings and gatherings
were called to consider the general strike in the north and the role of the
army.
The first meeting was at Stepney Green on August 16, 1842, followed
by a gathering at Islington Green two days later. It was this event that
provided probably the first recorded instance of a familiar occasion to
modern day protesters in London. Questions were asked about what the
police had been doing as the mob traversed central London unimpeded.
The meeting on Islington Green dissolved peacefully and the police,
assuming that this was it for the evening, stood down. In reality, the
Chartists re-grouped and marched to Clerkenwell Green around 15
minutes away. Meanwhile, another group of Chartists appeared at Lincolns
Inn.
The police, however, had been expressly instructed to stop the
Chartists from gathering in central London, and the police commissioner
Sir Richard Mayne was required to account for events to Prime Minister
Sir Robert Peel and his Home Secretary Sir James Graham. Graham had
been forced to interrupt his dinner and go to the Home Office to take
charge of matters. Maynes excuse was that for much of the time the
Chartists had not been in the Metropolitan Police area but that of the City
of London Police, and so this was nothing to do with him.
On August 19, 1842 the temperature in London reached 92F, and
further Chartist gatherings and encounters with the police took place at
Clerkenwell and Lincolns Inn, despite the fact that on that very morning
the government and Lord Mayor of London had banned all meetings. The
authorities were simply ignored.
After these tumultuous few days a further characteristic of such
occasions may be noted. For several days absolutely nothing at all
happened. Then, on Monday August 22 events reasserted themselves in a
slightly different register.
In Victorian London the tradition of the working week running from
Tuesday until late Saturday, with Sunday as a day off and Saint Monday
as an unofficial holiday, remained strong. So a large daytime
demonstration on an August MondayBank Holidays were not
introduced until 1871was not in itself a surprise. By the afternoon of
August 22, Goodway estimates that forty thousand Chartists were gathered
on Kennington Common. It was a day of cultural activitiesa phrenologist
129
lectured, games of cricket were playedfollowing which the meeting

started at 6.30 pm.
The police were determined to prevent the assembly and, as a cry of
The peelers, the peelers went up, police on horseback rode into the
crowd. It has become a familiar tactic in the 170 years since. The press
reaction likewise set a tone that was to continue. The Times praised the
police for a masterly style and avoidance of unnecessary violence.
The Chartist Northern Star, by contrast, noted that three hundred to four
hundred people had been injured.
Finally, as in more recent times, the police tactic did not work
effectively. The crowd were driven into surrounding streets where they
were able to re-gather and spend the evening throwing missiles at the
police. Similar scenes took place with a crowd of ten thousand at
Paddington station, where a fight with the police lasted for three hours
starting at 6.30 pm, before the area round the station was cleared.
Who took part in these August 1842 protests in central London that led
to confrontation with the police and the army and some episodes of
rioting? Goodway estimates that at least 80 people and probably
considerably more were arrested, but details are available for only 22.18
However, they echo precisely Ruds earlier point about who the rioters
were. Goodways account indicates that there were three shoemakers,
three carpenters, two tailors, a surgical instrument maker, several people
employed in the building trades, a printer and a paper-stainer. In short,
from this sample, most were skilled craftsmen. Official records indicate
that three people arrested were drunk and three were known to be
Chartists. Finally, not all were young by any means. A shoemaker was 40,
a tailor 32, a plasterer 39 and a carpenter was described as a very
respectable looking elderly man.
The next period of significant riot in London was in 1848, the year of
revolutions. The obvious influences here, and ones that were to feature
again in episodes of riot, were revolutionary events abroad, initially in
France, and economic depression at home over the winter of 1847.
On March 6, Charles Cochrane called a rally in Trafalgar Square
against income tax. The square was not yet completed but Cochranes call
elicited the first ever police ban of a demonstration at the venue. The first
ever traditional response followed as Cochrane withdrew but maverick
Chartist, journalist and bestselling novelist G. W. M. Reynolds stepped in
to chair it.
A sketch from March 6 shows the square packed with protesters and in
the foreground police officers grappling with them. A Chartist rally of
around ten thousand was about to dissolve peacefully when, the Northern
130
Chapter Five
Star reported, some provocative remarks by an anti-Chartist bystander

caused a scuffle.
Matters would probably have gone no further than that were it not for
the fact that the police made an ill-timed intervention into what was, after
all, a banned protest. By 6 pm police reinforcements had gained control of
the square and withdrawn. At that point, the crowd that had been dispersed
into the surrounding streets returned. Again, in what was probably a first,
the crowd took down wooden hoardings from around Nelsons Column
and proceeded to use them to defend themselves.
During the evening of March 6, a group broke away from the crowd at
the square and, raising the cry to the palace, headed towards
Buckingham Palace, smashing windows and gas lamps as they went.
There was a second day of rioting on March 7 from as early as 9 am,
and disturbances in the Trafalgar Square area and the West End of London
continued for a week. Goodway reports that by March 8 well over two
thousand police officers were deployed to contain the rioters. That day
there were further marches and window smashing in central London,
including plate glass windows in Swan and Edgars shop in Regent Street
and other establishments.
After this, the disturbances melted away as suddenly as they had
arisen. They were clearly partly politically influenced by Chartist and
other radical demands, but the fact that on occasion bakers were forced to
hand out bread suggests other more immediately material demands were
also at work. Goodways summary of the 127 arrested during the week of
riots shows that 61 were less than 20 years old.
Events then moved after a lull of a week to Camberwell, south of the
Thames, on March 13. This time, G. W. M. Reynolds was joined by other
Chartist leaders in organising a meeting. There were 3,881 police on duty
and a crowd of protesters numbering five hundred maximum. However, it
did no good. The crowd was local and, departing at noon, took back-ways
where the police could not follow. Window smashing and some minor
looting took place.
The whole thing took an hour and later arrests saw 18 men sentenced
to seven to fourteen years penal transportation. In other words, the state
was now determined to crack down hard on rioters. Many were young but
again, Goodways research notes that most had trades including bakers,
shoemakers, ropemakers, printers and glass-blowers.
The events of March 13 and the reaction to them set the tone for the
massive government presence on the Chartist demonstration of April 10.
In fact, although the protest for the Charter and the vote at Kennington
131
Common on Monday April 10 was one of the worlds first mass

demonstrations, it did have an element of riot to it that has remained
largely unresearched by historians.
Frustrated that, having gathered at a location south of the Thames, the
bridges allowing a march back to parliament were then blocked by police
and troops, a significant number of Chartists marched to the south side of
Blackfriars Bridge once the Kennington rally had finished on the Monday
afternoon. Here took place a serious confrontation and significant fighting
that was only dispersed because it started to rain heavily.
There were outbreaks of riot associated with London Chartism in late
May and June 1848, and these followed the pattern we have outlined
above in the main. However, elements of the focus of the London crowd
since the 1840s also made an appearance. For example, on May 29, 1848 a
crowd of three thousand to four thousand heard Chartist speakers and
marched down Fleet Street, halting to hoot and groan at the offices of
the Weekly Dispatch. Cries were also heard to march to the offices of
The Times.
Goodway identifies the final London riot associated with Chartism in
the London of the 1840s as taking place at Bethnal Green on June 4, 1848.
When the Chartist demonstration of Monday April 10, 1848 passed
without significant concern, the worries of better-off Londoners and the
authorities that a revolution on the European model might be in hand were
forgotten. Chartist organisation and agitation continued and if anything
intensified, but as David Goodway notes19 the events of the summer of
1848 foundered almost entirely without trace. In private, Palmerston was
a good deal more cautious. He pronounced the Chartist a snake to be
scotched not killed.
As Goodway again notes, whatever the view later taken of April 10 in
the summer of 1848 it was not seen as decisive and new Chartist branches
or localities were formed after it.
There was a logic to the events of August 1848 in London that needs to
be grasped and specifically in the context of riots and strategies of protest.
After April 10 the Chartists adopted a new and tighter form of
organisation and began to make links with the Irish Confederates
(nationalists). Revolution in Ireland in 1848 may have been a more likely
prospect than on the UK mainland.
A series of meetings and protests took place during May 1848 with a
number of leading Chartists making revolutionary speeches focused on
physical force. Fussell made a speech where he noted that the Emperor of
Austria had fled because he feared assassination. This speech, reported in
the press, evidently alarmed Queen Victoria who pressed the Home
132
Chapter Five
Secretary Lord John Russell to apprehend those who made similar

speeches. At length this was done, and in most cases what appears to have
been an agreed sentencing tariff of two years was handed down.
After much legal sophistry The Irish Confederate leader John Mitchel
was found guilty under the newly introduced Treason Felony Act and
sentenced to 14 years transportation to Bermuda on May 27.
Russell meanwhile declared in parliament that there was no popular
desire for the Charter. The Chartists responded by calling a day of national
demonstrations on Monday June 12. In response, the government banned
all assemblies in London and mobilised the armyto the tune of 4,576
mento protect the capital.
The Chartists gathered at Bishop Bonners Fields (now part of Victoria
Park in the East End) in large numbers, but did not attempt to have a
meeting.
It was this sequence of events that led first the Chartist leadership and
then, as they were arrested, the London leadership to start planning an
insurrection.
Planning or plotting meetings took place in pubs and coffee houses
from June to August 1848. We know this because the meetings were
infiltrated by several police spies.
The frustrations of the Chartists can be understood. They had seen
revolutions sweep away autocratic regimes across Europe, and in Britain
they had faced bans and arrests if they protested peacefully.
In addition, as Goodway points out, London had a conspiratorial
political tradition to which some of those involved in 1848 were heirs.
William Cuffay, the black leader of London Chartism became the
effective leader of the attempt at revolution in the days up to the August
16, although whether his aim was to control it or prosecute it has never
been clear.
Even so there was a clear plan and this was to barricade an area of
central London and take effective control of the Capital. There were also
less clear plans to put effect to this by firing gas mains, thereby causing
fires and explosions.
The plan for a revolutionary rising was clear enough. Victorian
historians have argued that very few supported it at the time and, like April
10, 1848, it was a damp squib. As Goodway again points out, this was not
the case. He estimates that around five thousand Chartists and
confederates were mobilised in London on August 16. That number would
certainly have been a good match for the authorities forces.20
In reality, neither side seemed prepared to actually do the deed. While
the authorities had intelligence of what was planned the police who were
133
mobilised at Seven Dials on August 16 neither went into action or, on the
day itself, made arrests.
The Chartists who gathered at Seven Dials on the evening of August
16 around 9 pm did not attempt to occupy it either. On word that the police
knew of the plan they dispersed.
Arrests, including that of Cuffay and some others, did take place in the
days that followed.
As David Starkey was aware when commenting on the recent student
protests, the Chartist riots provide the historical template for such events in
London, which is why they are considered in some detail here.
Before looking at two more recent examples of London riots
Bloody Sunday and its aftermath in 1887 and the poll tax protest a
century later in 1990it is worth reviewing some of the issues that can be
drawn out from the Chartist period that have a wider application to the
London mob.
The issue of the weather remains an interesting one. It may be argued
that the very hot weather in August 1842 facilitated crowd activity and
riot, as much as the rain prevented a more serious outbreak of rioting on
April 10, 1848. Certainly, the day of the London poll tax riot, March 31,
1990, was itself a very warm and sunny day for late spring in the capital. It
would be wrong to argue that the weather is a key factor in such matters
but it may, from time to time, be a contributory matter.
The other point raised by the events on the afternoon of Monday April
10, 1848 is why the day is characterised historically as a mass
demonstration rather than a riot. Here it may be arguedand the historical
criteria have remained implicit rather than explicitthat the intent was an
organised demonstration. The riot was a subsidiary affair, and also in
practice less significant than the demonstration. The same point might well
apply to the anti-Suez protests in central London in 1956 and the antiVietnam War demonstrations at Grosvenor Square in 1968. Both
contained elements of riot, as considered here. What they all lacked was
the sense of a crowd or a mob in procession through the streets and
damage to property, and in particular the smashing of windows.
The other side of the equation is how the state, primarily the police,
handled the Chartist riots. Goodway argues that one of the most striking
aspects of the next two or three decades was the virtual elimination of
riot. 21 That may be a historically accurate statement but the policing
tactics of the 1840s are unlikely to have been the decisive factor. The
reality that the Chartist challenge to the state was ultimately defeated was
probably the key issue. However, the tactics of the police in the Chartist
decade are strikingly similar to those used since.
134
Chapter Five
The range available has not changed much, even if some of the
technology has. In 1842 the police occupied some meeting places such as
Clerkenwell Green to prevent crowds doing so, though this clearly
depended on the weight of numbers on either side. On occasion, speakers
were arrested or their identity noted by officers for arrest after the event.
Goodway notes that, on the whole, the mistake of not allowing
adequate exits for dispersal which invariably led to riots, then and now,
was not made. The method of dispersing a crowd has also stood the test of
time. A favourite method was for a line of police to advance and push the
crowd away from its location using force such as the truncheon, where
needed. If fighting ensued, as Goodway again notes, bystanders caught up
in the melee were as likely to get injured as rioters.
The result of all this was that even as early as the 1840s the policeman
had displaced all other objects as the symbol of oppression and the
Londoners hatred of him helps to explain the single-minded concentration
on battling with the force that typified the Chartist riot, and, it might be
added, also on numbers of other occasions since.22
The difference between the riot of the pre-industrial era of the 1700s
and the industrial one of the 1800s is a fine but important one. In the
former period the riot was the main form of political expression; in the
latter it was not. It was a by-product of attempts to hold meetings, address
crowds or march that were, in various degrees, frustrated by authority,
usually the police. Yet, the actual form of a riot, once it started, was very
similar, if not identical, in both periods.
Bloody Sunday
While Goodway argues that London was quiet in the decades after the
1840s it is always possible to find examples of demonstrations that had
elements of riot about them. For example, the protest on May 6, 1867, led
by the Reform League campaigning for manhood suffrage, which defied a
government ban on demonstrations in Hyde Park, tore down the railings
and held a rally anyway, certainly had elements of a riot about it. The
result was the resignation of the home secretary and the passage of the
Second Reform Act, a salutary historical note to those who argue that
robust protests never achieve anything.
However, it was in the 1880s, with the beginnings of the modern
general trade unions and the birth of Britains first Marxist grouping the
Social Democratic Federation (SDF), that regular protests returned to the
streets of central London. The most well knownwell covered by
135
socialist historian John Charltonis termed Bloody Sunday, and took

place on Sunday November 13, 1887 in Trafalgar Square.23
The preceding years had seen a series of large demonstrations in
central London, sometimes over the impact of slumps in the economy,
sometimes over overtly political issues such as government coercion in
Ireland, and on occasion a mixture of both. The SDF had played a role but
window smashing had also been a feature.
The demonstration on the November Sunday had been banned by the
Metropolitan Police Commissioner, Sir Charles Warren. The police, armed
with cutlasses and guns, were very heavy handed indeed with protesters.
The radical MP for Lanark, Cunningham Grahame, was brutally arrested
and injuries were numerous.
The movement gained momentum and a further protest was held the
following Sunday, November 20, 1887, when a young clerk Alfred Linnell
was killed by police action. This led to further protests and a mass political
funeral for the unfortunate man.
Events such as Bloody Sunday remain contentious even though they
took place well over a century ago. The Metropolitan Police website is still
keen to cover up and spin the violent role that the police played in these
events, despite the fact that any officer serving at the time is long dead.
Charlton argues, following Frederick Engels, that the events of
Bloody Sunday taught a new generation of protesters a good deal about
the brutality of the state when push came to shove. That is clearly right
and is an issue in all the episodes we look at here. An aim of the police is
invariably to use tactics that remind people that there are penalties for
daring to protest. The impact of this is much harder to judge. Some no
doubt are dissuaded, while others may draw political lessons and become
more determined.
The century between Bloody Sunday and the poll tax riot of 1990
did not, of course, see London protest and riot free. We mentioned the
anti-Suez and anti-Vietnam War confrontations above. The Great Unrest
of 1911 and the General Strike of 1926 certainly saw tumultuous events in
London, as elsewhere, but these were centrally related to industrial
disputes that provided the broader political framework.
The great poll tax riot

The poll tax riot of Saturday March 31, 1990 certainly, however, takes
its place in history as a key moment of rebellion in the capitals history.
The poll tax, which replaced the old household rating system as a way of
136
Chapter Five
funding local council services, had been introduced a year earlier in

Scotland and was due to be implemented in England on April 1, 1990.
A mass campaign of opposition to it had grown up, organised by a
range of left wing and community based groups. The Trade Union
Congress had stayed clear of the campaign and did not back the March 31
demonstration, while Labour local authorities implemented the charge and
prosecuted non-payers.
There was real anger about the poll tax. First, it was a new tax and
often a quite substantial cost for people who had not previously had to pay
it, and it applied to everyone. Secondly, it was a regressive tax since
everyone in the same area was charged the same, however rich or poor
they were. Finally, the poll tax was a product of the hated Thatcher Tory
government and had been designed in such a way that Tory councils such
as Westminster had to charge very little.
The one-hundred-thousand-strong protest gathered at Kennington
Common, the scene of some of the most robust Chartist protests, and
marched to Trafalgar Square for a rally. It was here that a riot broke out
and contained all the classic elements described above. Over-zealous and
thuggish policing provoked sections of the crowd into retaliation.
Temporary portakabins being used for building work around Trafalgar
Square were set alight, and as the evening wore on groups of protesters
made their way round parts of central London, and windows were
smashed.
In the following days there was a media furorethe riot was every bit
as embarrassing to the authorities in modern terms as the central London
riots in March 1768 by supporters of Wilkesand just as that time,
demands were made for those involved to be brought to justice.
Rough music to revolution

The focus here has been on a slice of the London crowd and the riots
that have sometimes led on from its activities in the last 250 years or so.
The aim has been to try and understand some of the core elements of the
crowd and some well-known riots in London history to see how they have
related to the political agenda of the left.
Certainly, in the industrial era from the 1820s on it would be
reasonable to argue that the left has not sought out riots as a deliberate
strategy but has understood that tensions and crisis in society and the
actions of the authorities around that can sometimes spark riots.
The work of Charles Tilly has attempted to provide some kind of
historical/sociological indices of riots and assess their numbers and
137
types.24 But what differentiates the riot from the political demonstration or
simply the crowd that may gather in central London on significant political
occasions?
The most prominent elements that identify a riot as distinct from any
other form of political gathering are the announced procession of a mob
through some of the wealthier parts of the West End, the frightening of
well-to-do people, and the breaking of glass.
This suggests that, once formed, or often more accurately provoked,
the London crowd feels antagonism towards the rich and the symbols of
the rich, but this does not mean it is likely to be acting on a revolutionary
programme. It is a sign of wider discontent to be harnessed or suppressed.
Some perspectives are also needed. Taking the broad sweep of several
London centuries, perhaps the interesting thing is how relatively peaceful
and riot free the capital has been for much of the time, not how often riots
have taken place. This does not suggest that Londoners are on the whole a
placid lot but rather, as David Goodway has argued, with the capital being
the first fully policed metropolis in the world, when a riot does occur in
London it is a sign of very serious political issues indeed.
We must also recognise that not all the crowds that have gathered in
London have been politically progressive, although that has been what we
have considered here. The Church and King riots of the 1780s were
certainly not in themselves in any way on the left. However, curiously, it
may well be that by demonstrating about often quite reactionary demands
the crowd gained a sense of its own power and could become a threat to
the establishment.
As the crowd, or probably more accurately the mob, that gathered to
embarrass transgressors against social mores in pre-industrial and early
industrial Britain in E. P. Thompsons Rough Music suggests, very often
the demands were reactionary. 25 There was nothing automatically
progressive or left wing about a crowd, but the possibility that it could
come from the left was not denied. The Rough Music gathering, so called
because of the cacophony it made outside the house of the apparently
guilty party late at night, was as likely to be condemning a wife beater as it
was a gay man, but both were possibilities.
The point here is that it is important to understand the politics and the
possibilities of the crowd and its behaviour and not to lump all instances of
disorder and discontent together in the same framework.
A recent book by Clive Bloom, Violent London, is guilty of just this
trend.26 Even if we accept that London is a particularly violent capital,
which is historically doubtful, the fact that fascists and other reactionaries
138
Chapter Five
sometimes cause disturbances in it does not tell us anything much at all

about the nature of the London crowd or mob.27
The one thing we can say about London mobs and London riots is that
they have defied, over several centuries, all attempts by the authorities to
make their reappearance impossible and every effort by academics to
argue that they are definitively a thing of the past. That seems set to
continue to be the case.
Notes
1
John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England 17001870 (London:
Longman, 1992), Introduction.
2
E. J. Hobsbawm, Primitive Rebels (Manchester: Manchester University Press,
1959).
3
George Rud, The London Mob of the Eighteenth Century, Historical
Journal 2 (1) (1959): 12.
4
R. J. Holton, The Crowd in History: Some Problems of Theory and Method,
Social History 3 (2) (1978).
5
Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 17581834 (Harvard:
Harvard University Press, 1995).
6
Rud, The London Mob of the Eighteenth Century.
7
George Rud, Wilkes and Liberty, A Social Study of 17631774 (Oxford: Oxford
Univeristy Press, 1962).
8
Ibid.
9
Rud, Wilkes and Liberty, 43.
10
Ibid., 45.
11
David Goodway, London Chartism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1982).
12
Rud, Wilkes and Liberty, 6.
13
Ibid., 15.
14
F. C. Mather, Public Order in the Age of the Chartists (New York: Barnes and
Noble, 1959)
15
G. R. Porter, The Progress of the Nation (London: Charles Knight, 1847).
16
Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England.
17
Goodway, London Chartism, 106.
18
Ibid., 111.
19
Ibid., 79.
20
Ibid.
21
Ibid., 123.
22
Ibid., 125.
23
John Charlton, London, 13 November 1887, Socialist Review 224 (1998)
http://pubs.socialistreviewindex.org.uk/sr224/charlton.htm.
24
Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 17581834.
139
25
E. P. Thompson, Rough Music, in Customs in Common (London: Merlin
Press, 1991).
26
Clive Bloom, Violent London (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010).
27
The Guardian, November 18, 2010.
CONCLUSION
KEITH FLETT
This book looks at a range of historical incidences of riots and tries to
understand the logic of their occurrence and some of the motors behind
them.
However, while much of the historiography of riots assumes that a riot
is something of historical interest only, this quite obviously is not the
reality in 2013. While the Riot Act was abolished in the UK in 1973 in
apparent confirmation of the point, riots themselves have not been
abolished.
A Home Office review document published in 20031 noted that in the
past 20 years riots have occurred in England and Wales in 1981, 1985.
1991, 1995, 2001, 2002. The same document refers to the 1986 Public
Order Act where the definition of a riot is that twelve or more people come
together to commit acts of unlawful violence.
The official historical memory appears to be quite brief, since antiVietnam war demonstrations in London in 1968 had raised in the minds of
both politicians and media commentators whether recourse to existing
lawssuch as the seventeenth-century statute on tumultuous petitioning
or new ones were needed. This applied particularly to the one-hundredthousand strong protest on October 27, 1968 which started on the
Embankment and ended, at least in part, outside the US Embassy in
Grosvenor Square. The Labour Home Secretary James Callaghan observed
both the beginning and end of the march and felt that, in the main, fighting
in Grosvenor Square notwithstanding, it had been quite orderly. He
declined requests by Conservative MPs to take further action. It may be
that the authorities were less concerned than on some other occasions
because it was an overtly political demonstration and the identities of the
key organisers were well known, meaning it was unlikely to be
spontaneously repeated with little notice. The demonstration was later the
subject of a book which analysed what went on in some detail.2
The issue of how the law deals with civil disorder is one thing but the
question of who pays for the damage that takes place when a riot does
occur is not one that can be avoided.
142
Conclusion
The fact that riots are a common feature of modern societies, as much
in the industrialised West as elsewhere, found official confirmation in a
decision made by British Home Secretary Theresa May on May 9, 2013.
Ms May made a written statement which provided for an independent
review of the 1886 Riot [Damages] Act applied in the wake of the 2011
UK riots.
It was reported in the wake of these riots that there was a debate going
on about whether the police would classify them as riots, and thereby
trigger payments under the Act, or whether it would be left to the
insurance industry to pick up the bill depending on individual policies.
The report commissioned by the Home Secretary was published in
September 2013.3 It suggests that the definitions of riot contained in the
1886 Act may need to be revised particularly to take account, for example,
of the subsequent invention of the motor vehicle. The point is made that
only in recent times, since 1981, has there been sufficient riotous activity
to warrant the possibility of a review. For much of the twentieth century it
suggests riots were rare and damages and other matters relating to them
left to the appropriate police authority to deal with. Concern around recent
riots has focused on the ability of insurers to get police to reimburse them,
whether damages can extend for lost business beyond the day of a riot and
of course the question of cars that are damaged or destroyed4.
The riots themselves, as noted in this volume, were the occasion for
considerable media commentary on the history of riots, and in particular
the London riot.
More original sources are becoming available for the study of riots and
new research is now being undertaken in some areas.
The records of proceedings at the Old Bailey are now accessible online
and carry some cases relating to riot and rioters, while the original modern
London riots, the Gordon Riots, have also been the subject of new
research.5
There are also new research angles opening up around an understanding
of riots. Three I will mention here relate to the centrality of glass in riots,
the importance of the barricade and the role of state agent provocateurs. In
the first two cases, there are recent books which focus particularly on the
nineteenth-century aspect of these questions.6
When it comes to the role of agent provocateurs in riots the historical
record and framework are, perhaps of necessity, less clear. Certainly at
least the beginnings of the Gordon Riots were officially inspired and the
same may be thought true of the entirely reactionary anti-Irish Murphy
riots of the mid-nineteenth century.
A History of Riots
143
This book has not focused, beyond a brief consideration of the Gordon
Riots, on riots that might be termed reactionary or motivated by the
political right against the left. The main reason is that one book can only
cover so much and the origins of this volume stem from a conference of
socialist historians trying to review and understand the motors for what
might be termed popular riots coming from the political left.
It is invariably the case that understanding the purpose of many of
those involved in a riotsometimes casually as bystandersis inchoate.
Yet riots are not entirely spontaneous and there is a purpose given to them
by those who have, however loosely, organised them.
Whether agent provocateurs can provoke such a riot remains
historically an unknown, as would, to some extent, the motivation for
doing so.
Barricades
In his book The Insurgent Barricade,7 primarily about nineteenth century
France, Mark Traugott has a chapter titled The Barricade Conquers
Europe In the introductory paragraphs Traugott makes it clear that while
much of mainland Europe did see barricades in 1848, England, the most
heavily industrialised country, did not, and neither did Russia, the least
heavily industrialised.
Traugott is not quite up with the 1848 political geography of the
British Isles but does note that there were barricades (briefly) in Ireland
during the Year of Revolutions. He argues that their absence on the British
mainland was due to the possibility that the Chartists felt there might be a
chance of achieving political change through reform rather than revolution.
No doubt some did, but as David Goodway has argued, London radical
politics in particular was the heir to a revolutionary conspiratorial tradition
which saw its last significant presence in 1848. Those who plotted a
revolutionary uprising in central London in August 1848, as we have seen,
did indeed have a plan to barricade much of central London against troops.
Earlier in the year, in late May and early June, Bradford may also have
intended an armed rising, and John Saville notes drilling and organising of
Chartists to this possible end.8
Barricades, of course, might be used as much for revolts or
revolutionary uprisings as riots, and there is something about the mobility
of many riots that works against the idea of a barricade. The mob passes
through and passes on in many instances. However, there are equally
many occasions when riots have included barricades, often to protect areas
144
Conclusion
and keep the forces of authority out. Free Derry in Northern Ireland is an
excellent example of this in the post-1945 period.
Charivari
While commentary from the orthodox left, ranging from Hobsbawm
and Rud to E. P. Thompson, has understood the reasons for riots and the
motivations of rioters and is therefore largely not commendatory of them,
it has not applauded them either. Moreover, Rud in particular, with the
exception of the comments on the events of May 1968 and the English
Riots of 1981, has warned of the dangers of trying to extrapolate the
experience and lessons of crowds and riots from period to period. He has
suggested that new wine has on occasion been poured into new bottles,
but often the entirely new vintage is an improvement on the old.9 It should
be noted, however, that in a brief preface to the 1981 edition of The Crowd
in History, Rud, does suggest that the tumultuous events of the past
fifteen years had shaped the way modern historians saw the crowd.
Hence more recent work in social history, including some by
Thompson himself, and also Ruds collaborator on Captain Swing Eric
Hobsbawm, has begun to address another angle 10 ; namely, that a riot,
chaotic and disorderly though it may appear to the observer, and may on
occasion be to its participants, is also a festival of the oppressed. A
moment when the normal conventions of law, order and authority are
temporarily swept aside and a charivari or carnival of the streets takes
place.
The foremost theory of this approach was the Russian Marxist Mikhail
Bakhtin,11 who wrote extensively on the Carnivalesque. It is an approach
arguably shared, albeit in more measured tones, by the novelist Peter
Ackroyd when looking at the long history of riots in London. He told The
Independent in August 201112:
Rioting has always been a London tradition. It has been since the early
Middle Ages. There's hardly a spate of years that goes by without violent
rioting of one kind or another. They happen so frequently that they are
almost part of London's texture. The difference is that in the past the
violence was more ferocious, and the penalties were more ferociousin
most cases, death.
A moral economy of riots now and then

If one were to take a broad view of the place of the riot in British
history from the eighteenth century to the present day, it would start with
A History of Riots
145
the point that food riots and what E. P. Thompson calls collective
bargaining by riot, though understandable in the eighteenth century 13
became less so in the nineteenth as the structures to address issues by other
and more formalised means were developed, and shouldnt really exist at
all in the twenty-first century.
Yet riots still do take place around the world very frequently, and to
say that they really shouldnt any more hardly helps understanding or
analysis.
E. P. Thompson, both in the Making of the English Working Class and
at much greater length in his later collection Customs in Common,14 used
the concept of moral economy to explain why riots took place and why
they did so at certain times, places and in particular forms.
Thompsons frame of reference was Andrew Ures Philosophy of
Manufactures15 which laid out a moral code for the factory system, and in
particular for those who worked in it. It was what today would be called a
market economy or neo-liberal approach, but the time-work discipline that
Thompson referred to in a famous essay16 is essentially the same in the
modern workplace as it was in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth
centuries.
That, at any rate, is the contention of this book, even if it does go
against the implicit historical framework which is often associated with
riots.17
Thompson looked at the value system of those who opposed the
factory system and argued that they had a different view of what a moral
economy might be. Some of this was rooted in custom, but some was
developed as capitalism itself advanced
Thompson notes of the eighteenth-century riot18 that it rested upon
more articulate popular sanctions and was validated by more sophisticated
traditions than the word riot suggests. Thompson goes on to suggest
that the main motivation was a moral economy that taught the immorality
of any unfair method of forcing up the price of provisions by profiteering
upon the necessities of people.
This sounds remarkably like the modern discontents over large
companies that make large profits but avoid taxes or energy companies
that charge what are thought to be excessive and unjustified prices. As
Thompson notes, any sharp rise in prices precipitated riot.
Thompson also doubts how far many riots were exactly spontaneous,
arguing that they required more preparation and organization than is at
first apparent.
Thompson referred to the theory and practice of the moral economy in
the late eighteenth century as a deeply rooted pattern of behaviour and
146
Conclusion
belief,19 going on to argue that behind every such form of popular direct
action some legitimizing notion of right is to be found.
Looking at the eighteenth-century London mob or crowd detailed by
George Rud, Thompson agrees it was transitional towards a perspective
of radical, rich v poor politics, and notes that Rude is right to rescue the
London crowd from the imputation of being mere hooligans and criminal
elements. He goes on to suggest that in the late eighteenth century the
crowd was nevertheless still often directed from above, describing it as a
halfway house. This, of course, is not true of the London crowd of the
late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.
While Thompson seeks, mainly, to situate the concept of a moral
economy in a specific historical time and context, there remains a sense in
which it is unfinished business. There is often an ethical dimension, of unredressed wrongs, to more recent and modern riots which seeks to place an
alternative moral-economic politics on the agenda beyond the demands of
the market. Certainly, as Thompson acknowledged in Customs in
Common, much of the criticism of the moral economy came from those
who took it that he was also making a point about modern day politics and
the primacy of the market
Some concluding parameters

As Mark Harrison notes in Crowds and History,20 while a new Riot
Act was introduced in 1715, remaining in force until the 1970s, the forces
locally available to manage disorder remained woefully inadequate. The
Black Act of 1723 added fifty capital offences to the statute book, and
people were certainly hanged.21 Many, however, were not. The reason for
the large number of capital offences was in effect to provide some element
of policing to disorder which the army was either unable or unwilling to
do.
By 1848 that had changed significantly, as David Goodway notes of
the Chartist challenge in London in the Spring and Summer of 1848.
The overriding point here is that most riots can be prevented if there
are sufficient forces to do so, and providing them does not signify the
authorities intention to provoke a riot. That is why the English law places
the onus for damages from riots on the police, and it is expected that they
will prevent such activities. Problems arise when the scale and spatial
reach of riots make this difficult.
The authorities perception of rioters, which focuses on the acts they
carry out, tends to be, in any age, that they are looters and arsonists.
Rioters, in the main, have had a rather different understanding. We may
A History of Riots
147
reasonably surmise that many who participated in riots or might have done
so saw themselves as Freeborn Englishmen [and women]. Adrian Randall
has noted22 that there were boundaries of customary behaviour which
accounted for the orderliness of many crowds. Those who rioted did not
often seek to hide their activity, assuming as Randall again notes that they
were exercising their rights as free-born Englishmen.23 A riot, on this
analysis, would often be a reaction to an actual or perceived breach of
customary expectations of behaviour.
The range of examples in this book however suggest other frameworks
and possibilities for the cause of riot, perhaps most often provocations by
the authorities. However, in a sense these two fall into a category where a
customary right to protest has been denied and reacted against.
Riots, hence, were often more symbolic events than episodes of
sustained violence. There are some, very much in tune with newspaper
coverage of riots, whether in the nineteenth century or early twenty-first
century, who see riots as inherently violent, even when, as was and is more
often than not the case, there is little or no actual violence. Carl Griffin,
writing in Past and Present,24 refers to the violent Captain Swing, for
example, arguing that violence was an inferred threat, whether through
threatening letters or the invocation of spilt blood. Griffin quotes the late
Roy Porter, who argued that violence was as English as plum pudding.
Perhaps so, but the actual violence was mostly very limited and directed.
Indeed, as James C. Scott notes in Randall,25 it was the threat of riot
as the trump card of the crowd that gained them at least a reluctant
hearing. Randall himself refers to the theatre of riot26 and noted in a
later volume 27 that even in the most riotous of communities men and
women did not riot for fun.
As noted above in terms of the charivari and carnivalesque associated
with popular protest, and against the position of Griffin, it was the
impression of something that might happen rather than something actually
happening that the crowd sought to provide. A spectacle, as Randall puts
it, of drums, horns, trumpets and flags provided the visual and oral
signals to attract support and intimidate opponents.28
But if here we are trying to understand what the nature of riotous
situations actually was there is another line of historical understanding
which focuses on why riots took place when and where they did so. The
main authority in this field of inquiry has been Andrew Charlesworth who,
with others, has produced several important Atlases 29 mapping the
development of various forms of protest over the last two centuries.
Charlesworth looks at models of how riots spread, much as
commentators did in the summer of 2011. He notes the importance of the
148
Conclusion
London road in the era of horse and coach travel, when news of riots could
be passed on at each stop, and Thomas De Quincys The English Mail
Coach30 makes reference to link men who spread news of riots. But for
Charlesworth, news from up the road was not enough, organisation was
needed.31 He argues that since Sunday, for many, was the only reliable
non-working day of the week, riots were planned then and carried out on
Mondays and Tuesdays.32
While this discussion of the nature of riotous behaviour, and when and
why it took place, is firmly rooted in nineteenth-century history, the
general themes raised are as relevant now as they were two hundred years
ago. That is a surprise to historians and to politicians alike, and more than
justifies the conference on which this book is based.
Notes
1
Home Office 2003. Riot (Damages) Act 1886. Consultation on options for review
(London: Home Office, 2003).
2
James D Halloran, Philip Elliott & Graham Murdock (eds), Demonstrations and
Communication: a Case Study, The Guardian Monday October 28, 1968.
Independent Review of the Riot (Damages) Act 1886. Report of the Review. Neil
Kinghan, London, September 2013
4
The following links have more detail on this discussion,
http://www.parliamentonline.co.uk/queensspeech/riot-damages-bill.pdf
http://webarchive.nationalarchives.gov.uk/20031220221854/http://www.homeoffic
e.gov.uk/docs2/riotdamagesactreview.pdf
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2183652/Police-insurers-waryears-riot-payouts.html
5
Old Bailey online; The Gordon Riots, Politics, Culture and Insurrection in Late
Eighteenth-Century Britain, Ian Haywood & John Seed (eds.), 2012.
6
Isobel Armstrong & Victorian Glassworlds, Glass Culture and the Imagination
18311880 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); Mark Traugott, The
Insurgent Barricade (London: University of California Press, 2010).
7
Traugott, ibid.
8
John Saville, 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 1987), 144150.
9
George Rud, The Crowd in History, 268.
10
Rud was an historian of crowds and riots while Hobsbawm was an economic
historian. The combination worked brilliantly on Captain Swing. Of the two
historians, Rud rarely passed comment outside of his historical period, extending
to the mid nineteenth-century, while Hobsbawm was more frequently to be found
making historical parallels with present events. In Captain Swing, Hobsbawm
compares the condition of Hodge, the generic name for a peasant labourer in
nineteenth-century England, to that of the inhabitant of the black ghettos in US
A History of Riots
149
cities in the 1960s. As Rud was co-author of the book it seems likely he
concurred.
11
Mikhail Bakhtin, Rabelais and his World (Indiana: Indiana University Press,
1984).
12
Peter Ackroyd, The Independent, August 22, 2011.
13
Ian Gilmour, Riots, Risings and Revolution (London: Hutchinson, 1992).
14
E. P. Thompson, The Moral Economy Revisited, in Customs in Common
(London: Merin Press, 1991).
15
Andrew Ure, The Philosophy of Manufactures (London: Charles Knight, 1835).
16
E. P. Thompson, Time Work Discipline and Industrial Capitalism, Past and
Present 1967
17
George Rude, Marxism Today, 1981
18
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth:
Penguin, 1963), Satans Strongholds.
19
Ibid.
20
Mark Harrison, Crowds and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1988), 28.
21
Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged (London: Penguin, 1991).
22
Adrian Randall, Riotous Assemblies. Popular Protest in Hanoverian England
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 308.
23
Ibid., 311.
24
Carl Griffin, The Violent Captain Swing?, Past and Present 209 (2010).
25
James C Scott in Randall, Riotous Assemblies, 194.
26
Adrian Randall & Andrew Charlesworth, Moral Economy and Popular Protest.
Crowds, Conflict and Authority (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000), 11.
27
Randall, Riotous Assemblies, 312.
28
Ibid., 306.
29
Andrew Charlesworth, An Atlas of Rural Protest in Britain 15481900 (London:
Croom Helm, 1983).
30
Thomas De Quincy, The English Mail Coach (London: Blackie and Son, 1905).
31
Andrew Charlesworth, Social Protest in a Rural Society. The Spatial Diffusion
of the Captain Swing disturbances 183031 (Norwich: Historical Geography
Research Group, 1979), 24.
32
Ibid., 50.
BIBLIOGRAPHIC AND HISTORIOGRAPHIC

COMMENTARY
Bloom, Clive. Riot City. Protest and Rebellion in the Capital. London:
Palgrave Macmillan, 2012.
. Violent London. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010.
Charlesworth, Andrew. An Atlas of Industrial Protest in Britain 1750
1990. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 1996.
Charlton, John. London, 13 November 1887. Socialist Review 224
(November 1998).
Dyos, H. J. & Michael Wolff, [eds]. The Victorian City: Images and
Realities. London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul, 1973.
Goodway, David. London Chartism. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1982.
Hobsbawn, E. J. & G. Rude. Captain Swing. Harmondsworth:
Pelican,1970.
. Primitive Rebels. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1959.
. Revolutionaries: Contemporary Essays. London: Weidenfield and
Nicholson,1973.
Holton, R. J. The Crowd in History: Some Problems of Theory and
Method. Social History 3 (2) (1978).
Jenkins, Mick. The General Strike of 1842. London: Lawrence and
Wishart, 1980.
Kaye, Harvey J. The Face of the Crowd, Studies in Revolution, Ideology
and Popular Protest. New Jersey: Harvester, 1988.
Mace, Rodney. Trafalgar Square, Emblem of Empire. London: Lawrence
and Wishart, 1976.
Mather, F.C. Public Order In The Age of The Chartists. New York: Barnes
and Noble,1959.
Navickas, Katrina. Whats Next for Chartist Studies. History Today
(July 1, 2013).
Poole, Steve (Ed.). Captain Swing Reconsidered. Southern History 32
(2010).
Randall, Adrian. Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian
England. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006.
152
Bibliographic and Historiographic Commentary
Randall, Adrian & Andrew Charlesworth. Moral Economy and Popular

Protest, Crowds, Conflict and Authority. London: Palgrave Macmillan,
2000.
Reicher, Steve & Cliff Stott. Mad Mobs and Englishmen? Myths and
Realities of the 2011 Riots. Kindle e-book London, 2011.
Rud, George. The London Mob of the Eighteenth Century. Historical
Journal 2 (1) (1959).
. Paris and London in the Eighteenth Century, Studies in Popular
Protest. London: Fontana/Collins, 1970.
. Wilkes and Liberty, A Social Study of 17631774. Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1962.
. The Crowd in History: A Study of Popular Disturbances in France and
England 17301848. New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1964.
Saville, John. 1848: The British State and the Chartist Movement.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987.
Stevenson, John. Popular Disturbances in England 17001870. London:
Longman, 1992.
Thompson, E. P. The Moral Economy Revisited. Customs in Common.
London: Merlin 1991.
. Rough Music. In Customs in Common. London: Merlin 1991.
Tilly, Charles. Popular Contention in Great Britain, 17581834. Harvard:
Harvard University Press, 1995.
***
The essential literature specifically on the history of riots and their
causes is not vast in quantity. There is a considerable amount of related
literature on food riots and the moral economy relating mainly to the late
eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century period, which has as one
of its starting points an understanding, if a disputed one, of what starts
riots, who participates in them and what the results are. A good summary
of this can be found in E. P. Thompsons The Moral Economy Revisited.
The two key historiographical approaches are those taken by E. P.
Thompson and Charles Tilly, and they still broadly underwrite most
writing on riots today.
Tilly, an historical sociologist, looks for trends in what he calls
contentious behaviour, which includes but extends well beyond riots to a
range of forms of political protest. From these he draws statistics which
explain the trends he has identified. Books such as Popular Contention in
Great Britain 17581834 are important here.
A History of Riots
153
By contrast, E. P. Thompson did not, in the main, see history as

something that could be summed up by statistics but rather by a process of
struggle, challenge and change. Thompsons work on food riots and rough
music, both contained in the collection Customs in Common, delves into
the undergrowth of the eighteenth-century riot. For reasons explained in
this book, his writing remains pertinent to understanding many of the riots
that take place around the world today, although perhaps less so in the
Western economies.
There is also a clear difference of emphasis within a broadly Marxist
approach between the positions of George Rud and EP Thompson. Rud
sees a crowd rather than a mob and is keen to debunk ideas from the right
that those involved in riots are largely criminal elements. While Thompson
would not dissent from that conclusion, his view is that there was an
historical progress from a backward mob with little political consciousness
towards an advanced and political crowd that had a clear agenda, if not
always to authority. Thompson is prepared to allow both criminality and
reactionary aims in some riots. In the Satans Strongholds chapter of The
Making of the English Working Class, Thompson however argues that it is
a mistake to make a false division of the people into the organized or
chapel-going good and the dissolute bad in the Industrial Revolution .
The sections of The Making of the English Working Class which deal
with riots remain a significant template for anyone interested in their
parameters.
Contemporary writing on riots also tends to fall on this axis between
historical explanations and statistics. A number of books by Clive Bloom
serve primarily as important reminders that London in particular has had a
violent and riotous past. The Guardian and LSEs Reading the Riots
project takes a far more statistically focused approach but is also notable
for contextualising the English riots of 2011 in recent history, notably that
of US cities in the 1960s.
There are other more detailed studies of riots and books on popular,
social and working-class movements which look at the issue. F. C.
Mathers Public Order in the Age of the Chartists is one such, while David
Goodways definitive volume on London Chartism provides an important
example of another approach, emphasising the range of strategies used by
the Chartists in the capital that only relatively rarely involved riots.
Books by John Stevenson and David Randall range over the question
of protest in the first half of the nineteenth century, and in doing so
invariably touch on the parameters of the riot and details of individual
riots.
154
Bibliographic and Historiographic Commentary
There are relatively few examples of the statistical approach taken by

reading the riots in nineteenth-century historiography, but such is Andrew
Charlesworths An Atlas of Industrial Protest in Britain 17501990. This
looks at the location and spread of riots around the Captain Swing period
in the early 1830s and draws interesting conclusions on how news of riots
and riots themselves might have spread.
Captain Swing by Eric Hobsbawm and George Rude, as underlined in
Captain Swing Reconsidered, is the definitive work here. Some of it
prefigured the current interest in a spatial approach to history, as
highlighted by Katrina Navickas in a recent History Today article.
The broad parameters of debate are between, again, Rud, who would
seek to do as much as possible to get into the mind of rioters, to
understand the mentalities of those who rioted, and Charlesworth and
others, who focus on the connections between rioters and the mechanisms
by which the possibility of rioting was communicated and spread. Of
course, the two are not necessarily opposed, although they have tended to
be in existing historiography.
E. P. Thompson made his position clear in a well-known passage in the
preface to The Making of the English Working Class. He wrote:
The notion of class entails the notion of historical relationship. Like
any other relationship, it is a fluency which evades analysis if we attempt
to stop it dead at any given moment and anatomize its structure. The fine
meshed sociological net cannot give us a pure specimen of class The
relationship must always be embodied in real people and in a real context.1
Charles Tillys position, while far from denying the strength of
Thompsons approach, focuses more on ways in which riots and other
forms of contentious behaviour can be counted, measured and hence
compared.
Tilly argued in his book Popular Contention I do not imagine that
platoons of machine readable data strenuously disciplined will line up in
neat rows and shout out unexpected answers to great historical
questions.2 However, his references to what we are trying to measure3
and statistical tables which clarify the roads not taken4 do make it clear
that his approach was significantly different to that of Thompson. Tillys
view was that this was necessary to make sure that both the sensational
and routine5 were included in historical surveys rather than just the bestknown and most dramatic events, which might distort the picture of
historical reality.
A History of Riots
155
Notes
1
E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1963),

preface
2
Charles Tilly, 64.
3
Ibid., 67.
4
Ibid., 72.
5
Ibid., 68.
INDEX
1919 US steel workers strike, 63

1934, defeats and victories, 69
1937, sit-down strikes, 69
Aliens Act, 90
Amalgamated Society of Engineers,
15
Arab Spring, 9
Bakhtin, M, 144
Barricades, 143
Battersea, Progressive Alliance, 36
Bloody Sunday, 11, 12, 135
Bloom, Clive, 137
Breaking of windows, 100
Bristol Riots, 1
Burns, John, 12
Camberwell riot, 130
Captain Swing, 147
Charivari, 144
Chicago police, 62
Christie, Agatha, Passenger to
Frankfurt, 48
Court Injunctions, 64
Crowd, objectives of, 94
Demonstrations, banning of, 6
Disraeli, Sybil, 41
Dostoevsky, Feodore, The
Possessed, 44
Edinburgh Crowd, 92
Eight Hour Day, 14
Fictional riots, 39
Free speech and assembly, 21
Gaskell, Elizabeth, North and South,
40
Glass, smashing of, 7
Jenni, Alexis, The French Art of
War, 55
Kennington Common, 131
Kingsley, Charles, Alton Locke, 42
La Follette Committee 1937, 61, 66
Linnell, Albert, 23
Little Steel, 59, 62
Maisonneuve, Paul, 1893, 43
Mann, Tom, 13
Meetings, ban on, 19
Memorial Day, 60
Mieville, China, London's
Overthrow, 57
Mobilising popular opposition, 105
Moral economy of riots, 144,145
Morris, William, News From
Nowhere, 46
National Reformer, The, 11
New Unionism, 15
Northern Star, 4, 5
Notting Hill, 8
Pamphlet War, 95
Peters, Ludovic, Riot 71 52
Physical Force, 15
Police, brutality of, 22
Poll tax riot, 136
Pre-industrial crowd, 92
Public Order Act 1986, 141
Raven, Simon, Arms For Oblivion,
49
Reading the Riots, 3
Reform by riot, 116
Riot Act, 141
Riot Damages Act 1886, 142
Rising against the Union, 106
Rudeification, 3
Scottish Parliament, 1703, 85
Scottish Urban Class Structure,
1690s, 78
Serge, Victor, Birth of Our Power,
47
Seven Dials, 133
Social Democratic Federation, 13,14
158
Social Democratic Federation,
Battersea, 13
Spies, 65, 66
Spies, Ford Motor Company, 67
Spies, General Motors, 67
Taxes on Scottish salt, 112
The Man with the Red Flag, 17
Trafalgar Square, 21
Tumultous Petitioning Act 1661, 5
United Auto Workers Union, 59
Index
Urban crowd, 79
US and Britain, comparison of
violence in labour disputes, 72
Warren, Sir Charles, 19
Wilkes, John, 3
William, Cuffay, 133
Windows, smashing of, 17
Zelig, Leo, Eddie the Kid, 54
Zola, Emile, Germinal, 45

A History of Riots

Hochgeladen von

Dokumentinformationen

Copyright

Verfügbare Formate

Dieses Dokument teilen

Dokument teilen oder einbetten

Freigabeoptionen

Stufen Sie dieses Dokument als nützlich ein?

Sind diese Inhalte unangemessen?

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

A History of Riots

Hochgeladen von

Copyright:

Verfügbare Formate

A History of Riots

Preface ....................................................................................................... vii

An alternative word for a riot is an emeute and that is perhaps a better

1. The 1831 Bristol Riots and a British tradition

2. Historiographies of the Riot

intellectual outlook of the crowd better. He argued8 for a requirement to

3. Carnival and the language of riots

Secondly, it is entirely wrong on the question of who actually

4. Petitions, Tumults and Riots

5. The City and Riots

nineteenth century London. He also allows that cities where motor

6. Glaziers, Riots and smashing glass

capitalism to display itselfa practical way of demonstrating that not all

7. Simon Jenkins,17 Egypt and the moba continuing

century, he is more or less equally unenthusiastic about those who seek to

So reported The National Reformer in January 1887.1 The opposition

From Revolution to New Unionism

The Work of the SDF

Parliamentary election. In the internal split that followed SDF leader

Trade Unionism and the Eight Hour Day

From Revolution to New Unionism

John Ward supported Burns, but was if possible more revolutionary. He

Eight Hours League

From Revolution to New Unionism

The Enquiry recommended reforms of the police to remedy the following

Sir Charles Warren

From Revolution to New Unionism

From Revolution to New Unionism

Eleanor Marx wrote:

Bloody Sunday: The Aftermath

The Death of Albert Linnell

From Revolution to New Unionism

The Impact of Bloody Sunday

On Saturday November 12 the Liberal Club in Park Street Croydon

The Club passed a resolution protesting against the infamous tyranny

From Revolution to New Unionism

From Revolution to New Unionism

He pictured the setting on fire of 70 or 80m places in the West End, a

The Nature of the Unrest 18861887

Bloody Sunday does appear to have been a catalyst for a change in

Burns was also pessimistic. At the Law and Liberty meeting on

From Revolution to New Unionism

he now addressed could make Trafalgar Square their revolutionary square,

The Continuing Importance of Free Assembly

Burns Election to the LCC

From Revolution to New Unionism

The Burns Wages Fund

From Revolution to New Unionism

Park and on Clapham Common. He had the chance to become a practical

This assessment seems valid as a reflection of the stage to which Burns'

The New Unionist wave

The National Reformer, 23 January 1887, 55.

From Revolution to New Unionism

The Times, November 21, 1887, 13.

From Revolution to New Unionism

http://hansard.millbanksystems.com/commons/1890/jul/01/processions-to-hydepark (accessed August 5, 2014).

Some Riots in Fiction

general strike in human history, wrote to Franois Mauriac stressing the

Rioting featured in Disraelis novel because it was a fact of the world

Imagined Violence: Some Riots in Fiction

Disraeli had no conscientious objection to violence; indeed, the main

Gaskell assures uson the basis of what experience we do not know

here she seems unable to show working-class violence as anything other

Imagined Violence: Some Riots in Fiction