1820: Scottish Rebellion E-Book

• Herausgeber: John Donald
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Seitenzahl: 534

Beschreibung

The 1820 Scottish Rising has been increasingly studied in recent decades. This collection of essays looks especially at local players on the ground across multiple regional centres in the west of Scotland, as well as the wider political circumstances within government and civil society that provide the rising's context. It examines insurrectionist preparation by radicals, the progress of the events of 1820, contemporary accounts and legacy memorialisation of 1820, including newspaper and literary testimony, and the monumental 'afterlife' of the rising. As well as the famous march of radicals led by John Baird and Andrew Hardie, so often seen as the centre of the 1820 'moment', this volume casts light on other, more neglected insurrectionary activity within the rising and a wide set of cultural circumstances that make 1820 more complex than many would like to believe. 1820: Scottish Rebellion demonstrates that the legacy of 1820 may be approached in numerous ways that cross disciplinary boundaries and cause us to question conventional historical interpretations.

Leseprobe

1820SCOTTISH REBELLION

The 1820 Address to the Inhabitants of Great Britain & Ireland.(Paisley Museum Collection, TEMP 2019.412. Copyright of OneRen Ltd)

First published in Great Britain in 2022 by

John Donald, an imprint of Birlinn Ltd

West Newington House

10 Newington Road

Edinburgh

EH9 1QS

www.birlinn.co.uk

ISBN: 978 1 788855 33 4

Copyright © Individual contributors severally 2022

The right of the contributors to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored, or transmitted in any form, or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the express written permission of the publisher.

The publishers gratefully acknowledge the support of the University of Glasgow towards the publication of this book

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

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

Typeset by Biblichor Ltd, Scotland

Printed and bound in Malta by Gutenberg Press

Contents

Acknowledgements

Notes on contributors

Introduction: ‘The ebbing of the old shallow tide’: The civil context of the Radical War (1820)

Catriona M.M. Macdonald

1   The 1790s: Establishing the mind of government in 1820

Emma Macleod

2   The Belfast press and the Scottish connection, 1791–1820: Radicalism in Belfast, the Thomas Muir trial and the Scottish Radical War

Carol Baraniuk

3   1820 in contemporary press account

Rhona Brown

4   Policing the industrial order in the west of Scotland: The Radical War and its aftermath in the Glasgow Herald, 1819–20

Alex Benchimol

5   ‘The most loyal of towns’: Greenock and the Radical War of 1820

Shaun Kavanagh

6   ‘A great, and dangerous, and treasonable conspiracy, by some persons unknown’: Duntocher, Dunbartonshire and the Scottish Insurrection of 1820

Kevin Thomas Gallagher and George Smith

7   The looker-on: Carlyle and the radical disturbances of the 1820s

Ian Campbell

8 Finding Alexander Rodger, the Glasgow poet, in 1820

Gerard Carruthers and John Gardner

9   In search of the Langloan radicals: Janet Hamilton’s ‘Reminiscences of the Radical Time in 1819–20’

Gerard Carruthers and Maria Marchidanu

10 The satirical poetry and commemorative contests of Scotland’s 1820 Radical War

Michael Demson

11 1820 and radicalism in Paisley Museum and Archives

Archie Henderson

12 1820 in the museum: A review of Glasgow Museums’ collections of Scottish radical political history of the time

Anthony Lewis

13 Remembering the Radical War: Monuments, markers and commemorations

Craig Lamont

Select bibliography

Index

Acknowledgements

The editors are thankful for the brilliant organisational skills of Dr Moira Hansen in helping bring this collection to fruition. We are grateful too for the contribution of Dr Catriona Macdonald, the superb wrangler of an online conference on the events of 1820 in January 2021 which was part of the ‘proof of concept’ behind the volume. This event was run under the aegis of the Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies at the University of Glasgow, whose Director is Dr Macdonald.

Advice on chapters, help in sourcing and the granting of permissions for material and its reproduction are gratefully acknowledged from Jo Sherington and West Dunbartonshire Council, Judith Rowett, Beth Spence and Historic Environment Scotland, Mr Sam Gibson, the Leverhulme Trust, the late Dorothy McMillan, the Eighteenth-Century Writing Group at Stirling University, Susan Pacitti, Fiona Hayes and Glasgow Life, Chris Wilson and Inverclyde Council, the British Library, and University of Glasgow Special Collections.

We are delighted to have for our cover a detail from Ken Currie’s ‘Radical Wars’ (1987), in the People’s Palace Museum, Glasgow, and we are very grateful both to Ken and Glasgow Museums under the aegis of the Glasgow Life Trust for making this possible.

Notes on contributors

Alex Benchimol is Senior Lecturer in Scottish Romantic Print Culture at the School of Critical Studies, University of Glasgow. Alex was a founding co-Convener of the Scottish Romanticism Research Group from 2010–2019. Alex has recently published articles and essays on the Scottish newspaper press in the eighteenth century, including on the Glasgow Advertiser, Caledonian Mercury and Aberdeen Journal. This research is part of a larger book project exploring Scottish periodical history and its relationship to new modes of material improvement and civic identity in Scotland since 1707.

Carol Baraniuk is a Research Associate in Robert Burns Studies at the University of Glasgow, working on the project ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century’. She has presented and published widely on Burns and his contemporaries in Ulster. Carol has a particular interest in how radical activity in Scotland and Ulster was reported in Belfast newspapers of the 1790s and the early nineteenth century. Her monograph James Orr, Poet and Irish Radical (Pickering and Chatto) appeared in 2014. Her essay ‘Bringing it all back home: the fluctuating reputation of James Orr’, in Rethinking the Irish Diaspora (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018), discusses the marginalisation of Ulster Presbyterian radical voices in Irish and British literary traditions.

Rhona Brown is Senior Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century Scottish Literature and the Periodical Press at the University of Glasgow. She is author of Robert Fergusson and the Scottish Periodical Press (2012) and co-editor of Before Blackwood’s: Scottish Journalism in the Age of Enlightenment (2015), and has published widely on Scots language poetry and the eighteenth-century Scottish press. She is Co-Investigator on two major AHRC-funded textual editing projects: ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century: Poems and Correspondence’, where she is co-editor of Burns’s Letters, and ‘The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay’, on which she is editor of Ramsay’s Poems and Prose. Brown is also Co-Editor of the Scottish Literary Review.

Ian Campbell is Emeritus Professor of Scottish and Victorian Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Born in Switzerland and educated there and in Scotland, he studied at the Universities of Aberdeen and Edinburgh, and since 1967 has been on the staff of the Department of English Literature with visiting appointments including Japan, China, Canada and USA. The Duke-Edinburgh edition of the Carlyle Letters, of which he is one of the senior editors, is approaching completion (2022) with volume 50. He has for many years taught and researched Scottish literature, particularly of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Gerard Carruthers is Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow. He is General Editor of the multi-volume Oxford University Press edition of the Collected Works of Robert Burns and is Co-Editor of the Burns Chronicle. Recent publications include contributions to the collections, Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience and Claim-Making During the Romantic Era (2019) and A History of British Working-Class Literature (2017). With Don Martin, he is co-editor of Thomas Muir of Huntershill: Essays for the Twenty-First Century (2016).

Michael Demson is an associate professor at Sam Houston State University, where he teaches courses in Romanticism, World Literature, and Literary Theory. His recent publications include Romantic Automata: Exhibitions, Figures, Organisms (2020), co-edited with Christopher Clason, Commemorating Peterloo: Violence, Resilience, and Claim-making in the Romantic Era (2019), co-edited with Regina Hewitt, and an English translation Me, Mikko, and Annikki (2020), a Finnish graphic novel by Tiitu Takalo. He has published articles in various journals including European Romantic Review, The Nathaniel Hawthorne Journal, Romanticism, the Keats-Shelley Journal and Romantic Circles.

Kevin Thomas Gallagher won a College of Arts scholarship in 2017 to undertake doctoral research on his PhD thesis, ‘Editing Robert Burns for the Nineteenth Century’, which has recently been completed. Kevin was the Shaw Scholar in 2016–17, which allowed him to complete a Masters degree, wherein he explored the critical reception of Burns in the Scottish Modernist period. Kevin has worked closely with co-editor on this volume, Gerry Carruthers, as editorial assistant for the forthcoming The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns, and has been on the editorial boards of eSharp and The Kelvingrove Review.

John Gardner is Professor of English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University; he is currently also Leverhulme Trust Research Fellow on the project ‘Engineering notes on contr ibutors xi Romanticism’. John has published widely on eighteenth to twentieth century literature and his monograph Poetry and Popular Protest (2011, 2018 pbk.) was shortlisted for the European Society for the Study of English prize. Current work includes an edition of Pierce Egan’s Life in London for Oxford University Press and a collection of essays, The 1830s, for Cambridge University Press.

Moira Hansen is a postdoctoral researcher and tutor in Scottish Literature at the University of Glasgow, and an Associate Lecturer with the Open University. Her research interests lie in the eighteenth-century intersections between literary culture and medical practices, and in the life and works of Robert Burns as shaped by his physical and mental health. She is also currently reviews editor for the Burns Chronicle, published by Edinburgh University Press.

Archie Henderson, MA Ancient Studies, PgCert Genealogical Palaeographic and Heraldic Studies, is a Social History Researcher at Paisley Museum. His museum and heritage sector career has reflected his passions for cultural heritage, genealogy and social history. Research interests include Scottish Literature, Jacobite Studies, Early Medieval Scotland, Celtic Civilisation, Classical Civilisation, and Christian Theology.

Shaun Kavanagh is a former PhD student at University of Glasgow where his thesis focused on the experiences of Irish and Highland migrants in nineteenth-century Greenock. His publications include an article in the edited volume Scotland and the Easter Rising, 1916, by Luath Press, and on employment networks between Ireland and Greenock in the Journal of Scottish and Irish Studies. He is currently a secondary school teacher in Modern Studies and Politics in Inverclyde.

Craig Lamont is Research Associate in the Centre for Robert Burns Studies, University of Glasgow, working on two AHRC-funded projects: ‘Editing Robert Burns for the 21st Century’ (PI: Gerard Carruthers) and ‘The Collected Works of Allan Ramsay’ (PI: Murray Pittock). His PhD won the Ross Roy Medal in 2016. His essays have appeared in Studies in Scottish Literature, Scottish Literary Review, Book Collector, Burns Chronicle and other journals, and his monograph, The Cultural Memory of Georgian Glasgow, was published by Edinburgh University Press in January 2021.

Anthony Lewis is the curator for Scottish History for Glasgow Life Museums. Within his remit are collections concerning Scottish government, politics, and literature. These include collections on Scottish radical politics.

Catriona M.M. Macdonald is Reader in Late Modern Scottish History at the University of Glasgow, a former editor of the Scottish Historical Review, current president of the Scottish History Society, and director of the Centre for Scottish and Celtic Studies at the University of Glasgow. Author of the Radical Thread (2001), and Whaur Extremes Meet (2009), editor of Unionist Scotland (1998) and co-editor of Scotland and the Great War (1999), and author of many other essays and articles on Scottish politics and culture in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, she is currently working on a monograph exploring Scottish historiography since 1832.

Emma Macleod was educated at the University of Edinburgh, and is a senior lecturer in history at the University of Stirling. She is the author of A War of Ideas: British Attitudes to the Wars Against Revolutionary France (1998) and British Visions of America, 1775–1820: Republican Realities (2013), and the coeditor of Political Trials in an Age of Revolutions: Britain and the North Atlantic, 1793–1848 (2019), eds Davis, Macleod and Pentland, and The Wodrow-Kenrick Correspondence, 1750–1810, Volume 1: 1750–1780 (2020), eds Fitzpatrick, Macleod and Page. She is the co-editor of the Scottish Historical Review.

Maria Marchidanu is a Scottish Literature PhD candidate. Her research focuses on a comparative study of female identity from Enlightenment philosophy to early nineteenth-century women’s writing. In 2018, Maria was the project coordinator and editor of the literary anthology You Don’t Look British (Lumphanan Press) exploring identity and diversity in Scotland. In 2019–2020, Maria was Lead Editor of the eSharp academic journal and in 2021 her research was presented during the ‘Adventurous Wives’ Chawton House conference.

George Smith is employed in the field of Community Education. He is a published author and play-wright. Publications include, with Gerard Carruthers, ‘Scottish Rebellion 1820’ in Open House (2020), ‘Alexander Wilson’s manuscript notebook: A Scottish poet in America, 1801–1803’ in Scottish Literary Review (2017) and ‘Daylight Rabbery: The Story of Antique Smith Robert Burns’s Forgeries’ in The Drouth (2013).

Introduction

‘The ebbing of the old shallow tide’

The civil context of the Radical War (1820)

Catriona M.M. Macdonald

According to Peter MacKenzie’s Reminiscences, the location of the famous Reform meeting in Thrushgrove in October 1816 was only settled upon following a series of thwarted attempts to meet elsewhere.1 In this, the organisers of the conference in which these essays originate have much in common with their predecessors: both tried to find a home in the Trades Hall in Glassford Street, Glasgow, and both had to think again. While in the nineteenth century the obstacle proved to be local magistrates who denied the reformers use of the Hall in favour of ‘some mountebank . . . with his live Salamander’, in 2020 the organisers faced the challenge of the Covid pandemic, booking and re-booking the famous Trades Hall in the hope of claiming a space Glasgow’s radicals were denied, before ultimately settling on a virtual gathering – covering an expanse far larger than the Thrushgrove fields of tobacconist, James Turner – a year beyond the two hundredth anniversary.2

I. CONTEXT

The essays in this collection (belatedly) join many other anniversary publications in asserting the importance of the events in the west of Scotland in April 2020.3 In contrast to other recent works, which typically seek to narrativise the events in the wider context of Scottish radicalism, this volume adopts a different approach, acknowledging the paucity of evidence we have for what ‘actually’ happened; highlighting the contrasting and conflicting perspectives of groups and individuals who sought to understand and ascribe meaning to the events; and offering different frames within which the radical rising has been appreciated across the generations. Rhona Brown’s chapter is telling in this regard: the Scottish press has been mined for the insights it offers on the events of 1820, but what faith can we have in its accounts? There is no attempt in this volume to capture the essence of 1820, assert a definitive account, or claim it for any cause. This collection deliberately points in many directions in an attempt to re-set the historiography of 1820 and suggest new research possibilities: among them, the insights offered by material culture, as evidenced here in the work of Archie Henderson and Anthony Lewis. It moves beyond claim and counter-claim from contemporary radical and loyalist interests and seeks distance from self-appointed ‘legatees’ of and aspirants to the ideals that are said to inhere in the events of Easter week, 1820 (not that there is any consensus on what these were). This is seen most obviously in Craig Lamont’s chapter which skilfully addresses how 1820 has etched its influence on the Scottish landscape, and how the drama of that year inspired Scottish writers. The meaning of ‘1820’ has always been found in how and when it has been remembered, mis-remembered and forgotten. That was the case in the court rooms for John Baird, Andrew Hardie, James Wilson and others. It is the case now. The meaning of 1820 is not found solely in the motives of the few participants we can name, and those honoured as martyrs in the cause of democracy: here, Gerard Carruthers and John Gardner offer a fascinating insight into the work of Alexander Rodger, and Michael Demson identifies satire as a powerful political weapon. History is often the study of opaque utterances, stubborn silences and unintended consequences.

The context within which the events of 1820 took place is critically important in this regard – it dictated the bounds of the possible (and the probable), and should be appreciated both in the long- and short-term. Posterity is usually a less reliable guide than circumstance.

II. LONG-TERM

James Carlyle, father of philosopher Thomas Carlyle, died in 1832, the year that the franchise grew to accommodate those who posed the biggest threat to established interests – the middle class. Born a decade after a civil war had offered Scotland little but two versions of monarchy (Stuart and Hanoverian) and the killing field of Culloden, he had seen the loss of the American colonies, the French Revolution and decades of warfare on a global scale. And yet, as Ian Campbell emphasises in his chapter, it was in his final years, lamenting the worsening conditions of the ‘poor man’, that he predicted that ‘the world could not and would not last as it was.’4

The changing nature of poverty and working-class life in Scotland in the early nineteenth century in part explains ‘1820’. The process of urbanisation in Scotland was rapid and came later than in England and Wales: in 1750 just 9.2% of the Scottish population lived in towns with over 10,000 inhabitants (16.7% in England and Wales); by 1850, 32% of Scots were town dwellers (40.8% in England and Wales).5 Such demographic change was bound to have consequences, particularly as a major driver for urban development in Scotland was manufacture – with very few exceptions, the Scottish town was a workers’ town. Thus, when local authorities failed to keep pace with the challenges wrought by population growth, few of their new citizens had the private resources to call on to survive the problems of modern urban life: housing shortages, overcrowding, cyclical unemployment, an overstretched poor relief system devised in an arguably simpler age, and low standards of public health. Established urban communities were destabilised as daily they were forced to accommodate migrants with little familiarity with the chains of obligation that to date had ensured urban stability. In 1820 it would not take much to strain these chains to breaking point. Seen in this light, it is perhaps not surprising that while the manufacturing towns of the west of Scotland generally recorded significant support for the strike action called on 1 April, many of the sites where radicals actually took up arms were outwith the big cities, in smaller conurbations like Duntocher and Strathaven which, as Kevin Gallagher and George Smith demonstrate in Chapter 6, were still small enough to ensure the intimate relations between neighbours that would make them more likely to trust one another.6 Similarly, in the poet Janet Hamilton’s Langloan locale, as Gerry Carruthers and Maria Marchidanu reveal, while neighbours both sympathetic and opposed to reform were aware of local radical activity, generally a conspiracy of silence held. It is also telling, as Shaun Kavanagh explains, that in many instances ‘outsiders’ were blamed for disturbances: in Greenock, where strike action did not take place and the local elite were proud of the town’s ‘loyal’ reputation, the disruptive elements in 1820 were identified as being from elsewhere.

When the rising was called in 1820, Scotland had been at war for thirteen of the previous eighteen years, and the period of peace heralded by victory at Waterloo in 1815 had not ended the militarisation of Scottish society – something only too evident in the authorities’ response to the rising when professional and ‘citizen’ soldiers were deployed.7 Peace also made a casualty of the war-time economy: by 1820 some sectors that had been protected from foreign competition due to war-time blockades were struggling, and inflated demand for war-time essentials came to an abrupt end, reducing demand for other associated products and services. Scottish weavers were hit hard, but so too were many other occupations: in the Highlands, the decline of the kelp industry produced a wave of migrants, seeking opportunity in Lowland towns that were already struggling. Thousands of demobilised soldiers discovered that the Scotland to which they returned had not been worth the sacrifice, and found a hollow echo of the loyalty they had shown King and country in the sentiments of an elite that aped military mores while displaying the very oligarchical, corrupt and un-Christian values they had been told they defeated in the war with France.8

The principles of political economy, now more diffused throughout the fabric of Scottish society than had been the case in the eighteenth century, were compromising the traditional bonds of social cohesion that had served to protect workers from the most intense pressures of the marketplace. Magistrates could no longer set wages in local communities, and paternalism within the workplace was in jeopardy as workers were laid off, wage rates declined and craft status was imperilled by new practices and modes of manufacture. The Corn Laws from 1815 demonstrated that it was only the landed elite that could expect protection from market forces – protection that came at a huge cost to industrial workers, who found the price of bread rise at the very same time as wages fell. Is it any wonder that workers came to appreciate that only by gaining the power to change laws might the law defend them? The years leading up to 1820 saw workers across the British Isles seek redress through the courts, as their power to combine in defence of pay and conditions was curtailed. This was particularly the case in Scotland following 1813, and Carol Baraniuk explains in her chapter how this was manifest in Belfast too in 1816.9

III. SHORT-TERM

It is clear that by 1820 discontent with the power of the Scottish elite was long-standing in many areas of industrial Scotland. It is one thing, however, to nurse grievances, and quite another to act on them. The short-term context is well known: the Peterloo ‘Massacre’ of 1819, the Cato Street conspiracy of February 1820, and – often forgotten – the general election (6 March to 13 April 1820). The Lanark Burghs election was held on 31 March, the day before the rising, when the popular candidate, the mill owner Robert Owen, was overruled by the burgh councillors who settled on Henry Monteith, Lord Provost of Glasgow, as their MP. In later life Robert Owen reflected:

. . . four of the Old Lanark voters upon whom I had every reason to depend, had, by being feasted, kept intoxicated, and by other means known at this time to most candidates, been bribed over to my opponent . . . but twenty to one I was the popular candidate with the people, and much were they disappointed at the result . . . while I was a candidate, Sir Robert Peel, the late Premier, wrote to me for my support of the Government, expecting my election to be certain.10

At the conclusion of the heated open ballot held in Lanark, Owen was lauded, while Monteith ‘was received with marks of disapprobation’, according to the Caledonian Mercury, which also suggested that the local yeomanry were in a state of readiness: this the day before the ‘Address’ calling for a general strike was posted in Glasgow.11 Arguably the biggest ‘what if’ for Scottish socialism is not ‘what if the radical rising had been successful in 1820?’, but ‘what if Robert Owen had been elected MP for Lanark Burghs?’.

The election context meant that Scotland’s workers were acutely aware of the power of parliament (and their disenfranchisement), and the hypocrisy of their civic leaders. The first of these themes is central to the chapter by Emma MacLeod, who – by setting the treason trials of 1820 in a British context stretching back to the 1790s – explains the conservative and authoritarian approach of the government in 1820. The second of these themes is addressed by Alex Benchimol, who examines the policing response of the Glasgow authorities, and their mouthpiece – Samuel Hunter’s Glasgow Herald.

Benchimol’s chapter, alongside those of Gallagher and Smith, Kavanagh, and Baraniuk, makes a compelling case that the ‘local’ affords a research frame which still offers much to be exploited.12 What happened in the months after April reinforces this, particularly if one settles on the civil context. Scholars have convincingly argued that the Queen Caroline affair which dominated politics over the summer and autumn of 1820 demonstrated the potential for a radical-Whig alliance which in Scotland was manifest in petitions to the king at the end of the year for the dismissal of his ministers.13 Yet, there has been insufficient attention paid to how this new alliance was brokered. There is a consensus that workers learned a lesson in April – put simply, that physical force would not deliver reform or improve their ‘lot’.14 But what did the Whigs learn from April 1820, and how did Scottish civil society change to accommodate a radical-Whig entente?

IV. CIVIL SOCIETY

Arguably, the defeat of the radicals in 1820 was ultimately of second importance to the threat that they were said to pose at the time, as it was this that moulded the response of the authorities and has, to a much greater extent than is typically admitted, shaped the contested historiography of ‘1820’. Regardless of how much we might seek to measure the intent, the popularity, or the potential of the radicals, it was sufficient that their threat to established interests and national stability was deemed real enough. In many ways it was the elite (particularly the Scottish Tories) who were the most effective progenitors and carriers of the idea that ‘1820’ amounted to a working-class rebellion.15 They had already established the context for clandestine action, as, without the Six Acts (passed following Peterloo), the meeting of radicals in secret would not have been necessary, and actions designated ‘crimes’ (e.g. the meeting together of more than fifty people) would not have been the concern of the law courts. Also, it was their response to what happened – in particular, accusations of treason, and the imposition of the death penalty on three radicals, despite calls for clemency – that became the most powerful element of the story, elevating a simple narrative of unrest to the status of epic, and in the process creating martyrs.

Further archival labours are required to unearth more exacting evidence of the radicals’ political philosophy, beyond the famous ‘Address to the Inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland’, of which much is said but little known. Until then, it is clear that the workers, who participated in strike action, forged pikes, or marched more in hope than in realistic expectation of support on a scale that would force the authorities to relent, did not have a singular vision of a new world order beyond that which began with simply making the current system work better on their behalf. It is undeniable that there was much to which they objected – the despotic contempt with which earlier petitions had been received, the corrosion of constitutional rights, corruption. But the ‘Address’ can also be read as a statement of popular loyalism as much as radicalism. After all, it defends constitutional precedent, and emphasises the sanctity of private property: ‘we think it indispensably necessary to DECLARE inviolable, all Public and Private Property’. Indeed, given the number of former soldiers linked to radical activity, one reading of the Address might be as a declaration of loyalism appropriate for a modern peacetime setting, shorn of the elite self-interest that was jeopardising the bonds of mutual dependence that war had lauded, just as it was condemning thousands to poverty. One might also propose that, in the absence of the papers of the Committee of Organisation (the purported authors of the ‘Address’), it was the authorities who most readily linked all the episodes (Ayr, Bonnymuir, Cathkin Braes, Paisley, Duntocher) into a general treasonable conspiracy, arguably making them bigger than the sum of their parts due to the necessity of creating plausible grounds for allegations of capital crimes.16 As MacLeod makes clear in this volume, the authorities were caught in a double bind of their own making – at once needing to appear both in control and at risk. The precedent set in the 1790s, and most recently following the Cato Street conspiracy, to charge radicals with treason, limited the options of the authorities, and raised the stakes. It is the allegations made by the authorities that are the most compelling grounds on which one might assert the revolutionary potential of 1820, but if we – like they – accept the guilty verdicts, the idea of martyrs is compromised. Baird, Hardie and Wilson become (un)common criminals, and they too are also caught in a double bind: they can only be considered martyrs if we adopt a concept of justice divorced from law, but it is the law that offers the most forceful evidence of the scale of their ambition. If they committed treason and were punished for that, the law itself no longer stands accused. Neither the authorities nor the radicals (nor historians) can have it both ways.

What was starkly apparent at the end of the eventful year of 1820, when George IV had tried and failed to use parliament to solve his matrimonial difficulties with Queen Caroline, thus uniting radicals and Whigs in defence of the constitution (and/or some ill-defined notion of chivalry), was that the aristocracy and Tory placemen were no longer seen by most as part of the solution.17 The lawyer, Francis Jeffrey, concluded in November 1820 that, ‘The Crown and the multitude have risen – the influence of the great proprietors has sunk. They are no longer sure of being followed by the people, or capable of making head against the Crown, without popular support.’18 Interests were reshaped in the course of 1820: on the last day of the year the Examiner recorded how thousands of Glasgow citizens had crowded into John Street church to call for the dismissal of the king’s ministers, joining the 13,000 Edinburgh citizens who had already signed a petition to that effect.19 The multiple voices that told the story of 1820 and the new alliances forged that year ought to make us sceptical about tired binaries (e.g. radical/reform, radicalism/loyalism) and encourage us to look beyond the interests that to date have shaped the narrative. It is in this respect that the civil sphere offers new perspectives on 1820. It is not a coincidence that, after William Rae’s controversial handling of the rising, the role of the Lord Advocate in Scottish politics came in for scrutiny.20 Burgh reform too attracted attention both before and long after 1820, and offers a lens on the networks and complexities involved in the cause for reform. For example, ten months prior to the rising, Lord Archibald Hamilton, the Whig MP for Lanarkshire who had been instrumental in the impeachment of Lord Melville in 1805, and – alongside Henry Brougham and Joseph Hume, radical MP for Aberdeen Burghs – was one of Queen Caroline’s chief defenders in Westminster in 1820, had succeeded in defeating the government by securing the right for petitions from the Scottish Royal burghs to be referred to a Select Committee.21 As many have argued, civil society was where Scottish politics were ‘made’ in the years after 1707: it was there also that Scotland was re-made in the nineteenth century.22 Only by appreciating how the law, the church, civil institutions and the politics of burgh and county responded to the events of April 1820 can we hope to understand the road to 1832, when, following the Franchise Act of that year, the Scottish electorate rose from one in 125 males to one in eight. What follows are two short and hesitant steps on that road.

V. CHALMERS AND THE CHURCH

Much has been made of how Presbyterianism (and the Covenanting years in particular) inspired generations of Scottish reformers.23 And yet there is a palpable silence on how religion may have inspired the radicals of April 1820, beyond (mostly sceptical) comments on the scaffold orations of Baird, Hardie and Wilson and the clergy standing beside them. Declarations of faith by the condemned appear as ill-fitting codas at the end of histories told largely in the language of ‘1789’, and so it is easy to merely treat them as part of the polite rituals of death. And yet, ‘liberty’ in Scotland has always been a word carrying the weight of religious history, and the Reformation of 1560 and the Revolution of 1688–9 offered powerful precedents for reformers.24 The idea of Protestant martyrs had inspired the Whigs of the eighteenth century, and when the call to arms sounded against revolutionary France, Scots defended the settlement of 1689: Scots had practice in weighing up the demands of loyalism and freedom. The claims of the April radicals also echo the ‘moral economy’ which Valerie Wallace has identified as a bridge between covenanting tradition and popular protest in the early eighteenth century, and they have much in common with patronage disputes that were re-shaping the culture of dissent at this time.25 Kavanagh’s chapter points to the contribution of Neil Douglas, a universalist preacher, to the radical tradition in Greenock, and Baraniuk emphasises that in Ulster, Old Light evangelical Presbyterianism was an important inspiration for reformers aspiring to end the Anglican ascendancy. It also pays to be reminded that the Address was often posted on church doors, and the events in the west of Scotland in April 1820 took place in Easter week – a time when society’s treatment of the poor in its midst was dominating clerical commentary. This was particularly the case in Glasgow, where Rev. Thomas Chalmers’ St John’s experiment, an attempt (from 1819) to address soaring demand on the poor law through philanthropic practice, was attracting attention. (Chalmers had for many years at this point enjoyed the support of the Edinburgh Review, and its editor, Francis Jeffrey – the lawyer who, having defended weavers in the courts for years in their claims for fair wages, combination and (in 1817) against accusations of conspiracy, defended Baird and Hardie in 1820.26) Two sermons by Chalmers must serve to illustrate the much greater potential offered by a more thoroughgoing analysis of the religious roots and consequences of ‘1820’.

The sermon delivered by Chalmers in the Tron Church in Glasgow on Wednesday 19 November 1817, the day of the funeral of Princess Charlotte, and his sermon on ‘The importance of civil government to society and the duty of Christians in regard to it’, preached in St John’s Church on 30 April 1820, highlight the ‘spaces’ where, after April 1820, potential existed for a more confident Scottish critique of government, the influence of which led not just to 1832, but to 1843 and the Disruption of the Church of Scotland.27 The first of these was published by Chalmers to counter claims that his sermon had attacked the government. He rejected such an imputation, but it is easy to see why some identified in it a direct challenge to the authoritarian direction of the state and the conceit of wealthy Christians whose sole interest was ‘keeping the neighbourhood in a state of political tranquility’.28 ‘The loyalty of subalterns, in the low game of partisanship [and] worshippers-in to an existing administration’ was attacked: ‘I know nothing more hateful than the crouching spirit of servility. I know not a single class of men more unworthy of reverence, than the base and interested minions of a court.’29 Social division was seen to be undermining ‘the sensibilities of our common inheritance’: ‘Among the rich, there is apt at times to rankle an injurious and unworthy impression of the poor . . . Among the poor . . . there is often a disdainful suspicion of the wealthy, as if they were actuated by a proud indifference to them and to their concerns.’30 Failure to address such division in towns (‘the great instruments of political revolution’) would have consequences. Chalmers emphasised:

I am surely not out of place, when, on looking at the mighty mass of a city population, I state my apprehension, that if something be not done to bring this enormous physical strength under the control of Christian and humanized principle, the day may yet come, when it may lift against the authorities of the land, its brawny vigour, and discharge upon them all the turbulence of its rude and volcanic energy.31

Three years later, and four weeks after the rising, when it may be argued that Chalmers’ prediction had come true, he again stood out against ‘the soft and placid disguises of well-bred citizenship’, which hid ‘the real deformity of the human character’.32 In particular, Chalmers attacked the ‘trick and treachery of business’, ‘the frauds and the forms of bankruptcy’ that co-existed with ‘a spirit of injustice’.33 Having also condemned the spies and agents provocateurs who had gulled the radicals, he instructed the congregation to ‘set your theology upon its right basis . . . set your loyalty upon its right basis . . . with a view to impress a right practical movement on those who hold a natural or political ascendancy in our land’.34 That Easter, God, not the civil authorities, had ultimately saved the city from ‘the frenzy and fierceness of a misguided population’.35 But the ‘want of . . . Christianity in earnest [had] brought our nation to the brink of an emergency so fearful as that upon which we are standing.’36 Again returning to the divisions between the classes, Chalmers commented on the extent to which ‘the taste of many among the higher orders of society is at war with the best security that can be devised for the peace and well-being of society’: ‘among the richest of fortune and accomplishment in our land, we know not the individual whose virtues, if transplanted into the unkindlier region of poverty, would have withstood the operation of all the adverse elements to which it is exposed.’37 Enlightenment notions of ‘taste’ were seen as thin gruel in comparison to the sustaining power of faith, and yet there were many ‘holders of a great and ascendant influence in our land [to whom] godliness is puritanism, and orthodoxy is repulsive moroseness, and the pure doctrine of the Apostles is fanatical and disgusting vulgarity’.38 Such attitudes had been imbibed by the ‘sour and sturdy Radical, who, equal to his superior in the principles of ungodliness, only outpeers him in his expressions of contempt for the priesthood, and of impetuous defiance to all that wears the stamp of authority on the land.’39 Chalmers concluded: ‘It is the decay of vital godliness amongst us, that has brought on this great moral distemper.’40 ‘Where godliness exists, loyalty exists.’41

It is clear from Chalmers’ sermons that fear of working-class revolt did not in all instances translate into authoritarianism or demands for brutal repression: his focus was on the provision of seating for the unchurched masses in Scotland’s rapidly growing towns, and on the availability of Sabbath schools. Chalmers, like other church ministers, also urged clemency in the case of those convicted of treason in 1820 (not that he received much credit for that from radical poet Alexander Rodger, as Carruthers and Gardner demonstrate).42 Critiques like that offered by Chalmers opened a space in civil society where the classes could come together (although that did not mean they had to agree on all matters). This was an important preliminary to both the reform agitation of the 1820s, and the Ten Years’ Conflict in the Church of Scotland which, as much as anything else, was an attack on Moderatism, so closely associated – in the Evangelical mind at least – with loose moral standards, and ultimately a protest against the British state for not upholding the Veto Act of the General Assembly of the Church of Scotland.43

VI. THE ‘NATIONS’ WITHIN – GLASGOW STUDENTS IN 1820

Having unsuccessfully defended Baird and Hardie in the summer, the year 1820 ended for Francis Jeffrey with his first election to public office as Lord Rector of the University of Glasgow. On the surface, this might not warrant much attention, in comparison to his actions in the courtroom, until one realises that Jeffrey defeated the sitting rector, the former MP for Clyde Burghs, and former Lord Provost of Glasgow, Kirkman Finlay (Robert Owen’s opponent, Henry Monteith, had succeeded him in the provost’s role). Widely recognised as the man who had secured the services of Alexander Richmond as a government spy, reporting on Glasgow radicals,44 Finlay was a powerful and controversial member of the Glasgow cotton elite who had already earned the scorn of Glasgow students when, as MP, he had voted in favour of a duty on foreign corn. Peter Mackenzie records: ‘The very Students of the University of Glasgow, consisting of the sons of “bien”, or rich, or opulent citizens, who never knew what it was to feel the least pangs of want, began to entertain compassion for [the weavers].’45

There was an added dimension to the rectorial election in 1820, however, that spoke to the preoccupations with legitimate authority and rights that had animated Glaswegians all year. A month before the radical rising, the Scotsman announced that contrary to tradition, the office of Rector of the University of Glasgow that had ‘long afforded a solitary instance of the popular election of a public officer in Scotland’, was being re-cast. The College had prepared for presentation to Parliament:

. . . a bill for confining the privilege of voting in the election of Rector to themselves and the Master[s] of Arts, or, in other words, to themselves exclusively, for the Masters of Arts, who have obtained their degrees in Scotland, retain no connection whatever with the University whence their honours are derived. Yet these are the men who declaim so loudly against every innovation in favour of liberty, and pretend to consider antiquity an apology for every abuse. We hope it is not true that the present Rector, Mr Kirkman Finlay, has undertaken to present the bill for disfranchising the students, by whose votes he has been elected.46

On 15 November, the Glasgow students wrote to the Scotsman to confirm that it had proved impossible to return Kirkman Finlay for a second term, given his role in preparing a Bill ‘having for its object to abridge the privileges of the Students’: he had ‘forfeited all claim to the continuance of their support’.47 The students confirmed that they had chosen Francis Jeffrey as their preferred candidate due to his ‘literary eminence’ and his principles that ‘would lead him to oppose with independence any innovation upon their long-established rights’.48 Each of the four ‘nations’ into which the students of the University of Glasgow were divided, voted unanimously for Jeffrey. Commending the students’ ‘free and manly spirit’, the Scotsman commented:

Let Mr Kirkman Finlay have his civic honours as useful and active magistrate – let the Duke of Montrose have his sinecure49 – a reward adapted to his merits: but let not the literary distinctions of our universities be profaned by being bestowed on such men. It is honour enough for them to stand as defeated candidates against such a man as Mr Jeffrey. We trust this election will prove the era of the emancipation of the University, and that it will be followed by conduct equally spirited hereafter.50

On 28 December, Jeffrey was installed as rector at a rowdy event in Glasgow (described by the Glasgow Herald as ‘insubordination’).51 Jeffrey’s speech was respectful of the gravity of the situation (and a platform party populated by those who had not voted for him).52 Still, while acknowledging that he ‘had not the support of those revered and learned persons, of the value of whose good opinion I trust I am fully aware’, he allowed himself one pointed reflection when expressing his gratitude for a distinction that had been bestowed on him ‘without stir or solicitation of mine, by something that approaches very nearly to a popular suffrage’.53

A petition on behalf of the Senate and the Faculty of the College of Glasgow was certainly presented to the House of Commons on 8 December 1819, noting that ‘it is expedient that the present mode of election of the Lord Rector should be altered’.54 Whether matters ever progressed to the drafting of a bill is unclear: in his rectorial address, Jeffrey considered the prejudices that prevailed against Finlay had proceeded in a great degree from misapprehension.55 Whatever had transpired, the presumed threat to the student franchise had been determining. And Scottish civil institutions were becoming spaces where the urge for reform would grow as the 1820 generation gained public office.56 The office of the rector became increasingly political. The next rectorial election at the University of Glasgow in 1822 saw Sir James Mackintosh of Kyllachy Whig MP and historian (among his works, a History of the Revolution in England in 1688 (1834)) defeat the Tory novelist Sir Walter Scott.57 After Mackintosh, Henry Brougham, erstwhile Attorney General and supporter of Queen Caroline, became rector (he also defeated Scott), and Henry Cockburn, Jeffrey’s great friend and co-author with him of the Scottish Reform Act (1832) became rector in 1831.

CONCLUSION

Civil society was instrumental in moulding the legacy of April 1820. Francis Jeffrey’s contribution to the law, the church, and civil institutions demonstrate how civil society moved from a position of hostility to reform to become the principal medium of reform itself. The constitutional imperative at the heart of the radicals’ ‘Address’ became the central message of reformers and radicals for a decade: Jeffrey himself emphasised in May 1820 that ‘To restore its integrity to the Constitution, by abridging the means of corruption, seems indispensably necessary for the salvation of the State.’58 Consensus did not happen by accident; it was not only the radicals who learned lessons that April. It is interesting to note that many moderate Tories did not blanche at the thought of the dismissal of the king’s ministers that winter, but the Incorporation of Weavers of Glasgow refused to sign the petition in favour of their dismissal.59 Much had changed.

Five years after Robert Owen, the defeated candidate for Lanark Burghs, published his Report to the County of Lanark of a Plan for Relieving Public Distress (1821), advocating labour as the most appropriate theory of value to shape a more equitable society, Lord Archibald Hamilton, whose own hopes for burgh reform had been thwarted, spoke in the Commons of the state of Lanarkshire:

The noble Lord observed, that it was exceedingly painful to him to read the description of the state of destitution, hopelessness, and helplessness under which the weavers of the county which he had the honour to represent were suffering; knowing, as he did, how accurately that description conformed to the melancholy facts of the case. Many of them, they said, were without any employment at all. That he knew to be the case; and that of course they were in utter want, and suffering absolute starvation . . . It was further stated by the petitioners, that in consequence of their necessities they were destitute of decent clothing, and were thereby prevented from attending divine service. Their representations on this head, so far from being exaggerated, to his knowledge, fell short of the truth. The families of the weavers were crying to them for bread, which they were unable to give: how then was it possible they could afford clothes?60

As this book demonstrates, from a vantage point two hundred years hence, the legacy of 1820 may be judged in numerous ways that cross disciplinary boundaries and cause us to question conventional historical interpretations. But the failure of the radical cause had more immediate material and humanitarian consequences for Scots that ought not to be forgotten. Neither the death of the radical martyrs, the utopianism of Owen, the respectable evangelical Protestantism of Chalmers, nor the reforming passions of Jeffrey addressed the crippling poverty of the 1820s: you cannot eat the constitution.

NOTES

The title of this introduction comes from Henry Cockburn, Memorials of His Time (Edinburgh, 1856), p. 373: there, Cockburn highlights the challenge the students of Glasgow University in 1820 posed to the vested interests of the professoriate and local lairds when they elected Francis Jeffrey as rector.

1 Peter Mackenzie, Old Reminiscences of Glasgow and the West of Scotland, vol. 1 (Glasgow, 1890), p. 102.

2Ibid., p. 102. An online conference was eventually held on 8 January 2021.

3 Three books dominated ‘popular’ sales: Murray Armstrong, The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820 (London, 2020); Maggie Craig, One Week in April: The Scottish Radical Rising of 1820 (Edinburgh, 2020); Kenny MacAskill, Radical Scotland: Uncovering Scotland’s Radical History from the French Revolutionary Era to the 1820 Rising (London, 2020).

4 Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, eds. Ian Campbell and K.J. Fielding (Glasgow, 2006).

5 J. De Vries, European Urbanisation, 1500–1800 (London, 1984), pp. 39–48, as cited in T.M. Devine, ‘Urbanisation’, in People and Society in Scotland, vol. 1: 1760–1830, eds. T.M. Devine and Rosalind Mitchison (Edinburgh, 1988), p. 28.

6 For a similar argument, see Gordon Pentland, The Spirit of the Union (Abingdon: 2011), p. 106.

7 Malcolm Chase, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester, 2013), pp. 121–2. See also G.C. Moore Smith (ed.), The Autobiography of Lieutenant-General Sir Harry Smith, vol. 1 (London, 1902), chapter 29.

8 ‘Letter II. To Mr Canning, on his speeches recently delivered at Liverpool; on the necessity of conciliating the Reformers; and on the recent events in Scotland, France, and Spain. London 10 April, 1820’, Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 15 April 1820.

9 See W.W. Straka, ‘The Law of Combination in Scotland Reconsidered’, Scottish Historical Review, vol. 64, no. 178 (1985), pp. 128–142.

10 Robert Owen, The Life of Robert Owen by Himself (London, 1920), pp. 316–7.

11Caledonian Mercury, 13 April 1820.

12 Recently Neil Davidson and Jamie Allinson have sought to ‘de-provincialise’ 1820, claiming it as the ‘first ever truly general strike’ (p. 145) and asserting that the ‘demands of the strikers were class and democratic, not national, ones.’ (p. 169). Such a perspective does not disprove the significance of the local and the need for further work in local archives. See Neil Davidson and Jamie Allinson, ‘Deprovincialising 1820: The West of Scotland General Strike in the Mirror of Uneven and Combined Development, Part I’, Scottish Labour History, vol. 55 (2020).

13 Catriona M.M. Macdonald, ‘Abandoned and Beastly?: the Queen Caroline Affair in Scotland’, in Twisted Sisters: Women, Crime and Deviance in Scotland since 1400, eds. Yvonne Galloway Brown and Rona Ferguson (East Linton, 2002), pp. 101–16.

14 W.H. Fraser, Conflict and Class: Scottish workers, 1700–1838 (Edinburgh, 1988).

15 Henry Cockburn, Memorials of His Time (Edinburgh, 1856), chapter 6.

16 There are echoes here with how ‘Red Clydeside’ has been historicised. The phenomenon is convincing only if the protests of the shipyards, the engineering shops, the housing reformers, the ILP journalists, 1919 strikers, and the anti-conscription lobby are seen as part of a singular moment of protest. If each is treated in isolation, the phenomenon more readily resembles a ‘myth’.

17 Catriona M.M. Macdonald, ‘“Their laurels wither’d and their name forgot”: Women and the Scottish Radical Tradition’, in Scottish History: The Power of the Past, eds. E.J. Cowan and R.J. Finlay (Edinburgh, 2002), pp. 225–52.

18 Francis Jeffrey, Review of ‘Speech of Lord John Russell in the House of Commons, on the 14th December 1819, for transferring the Elective Franchise from Corrupt Boroughs to Unrepresented Great Towns’ (London, 1820), Edinburgh Review (November 1820), pp. 461–501 at p. 483.

19Examiner, 31 December 1820.

20 Pentland, Spirit of the Union, p. 123.

21 Lord Archibald Hamilton (1770–1827) ODNB, <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/12051> [accessed 24 April 2021].

22 Graeme Morton, Unionist Nationalism: governing urban Scotland, 1830–1860 (East Linton, 1999).

23 See, for example, J.D. Brims, ‘The Covenanting Tradition and Scottish Radicalism in the 1790s’, in Covenant, Charter and Party, ed. T. Brotherstone (Aberdeen, 1989), pp. 50–62.

24 C.A. Whatley, ‘Reformed religion, Regime Change, Scottish Whigs and the Struggle for the ‘Soul’ of Scotland, c. 1688–1788’, Scottish Historical Review, vol. 92 (2013), pp. 66–99.

25 Valerie Wallace, ‘Presbyterian Moral Economy: The Covenanting Tradition and Popular Protest in Lowland Scotland, 1707–c. 1746’, Scottish Historical Review, vol. 89 (2010), pp. 54–72.

26 S.J. Brown, Thomas Chalmers and the Godly Commonwealth in Scotland (Oxford, 1983).

27 Thomas Chalmers, ‘A Sermon Delivered in The Tron Church, Glasgow, on Wednesday, Nov. 19, 1817, the day of the Funeral of Her Royal Highness the Princess Charlotte of Wales’, The Works of Thomas Chalmers, D.D. Minister of the Tron Church, Glasgow, vol. 3 (Hartford, 1822) pp. 379–410; ‘The Importance of Civil Government to Society, and the Duty of Christians in regard to it. A Sermon preached in St John’s Church, Glasgow, on Sabbath, 30th April, 1820’ (Glasgow, 1820).

28Chalmers, ‘A Sermon Delivered in the Tron Church’, p. 397.

29Ibid., pp. 387, 398.

30Ibid., p. 391.

31Ibid., pp. 409, 406.

32 Chalmers, ‘The Importance’, p. 9.

33Ibid., p. 10.

34Ibid., pp. 17–18.

35Ibid., p. 20.

36Ibid., p. 23.

37Ibid., p. 25.

38Ibid., p. 26.

39Ibid., p. 29.

40Ibid., p. 29.

41Ibid., p. 30.

42A Memoir of Greville Ewing, Minister of the Gospel, Glasgow by his Daughter (London, 1847), p. 455.

43 In 1838, Jeffrey – then a judge in the Court of Session – supported the evangelicals who appealed the court’s decision against the Church of Scotland in the Auchterarder case.

44 W.M. Roach, ‘Alexander Richmond and the Radical Reform Movements in Glasgow in 1816–17’, Scottish Historical Review, vol. 51 (1972), pp. 1–19.

45 Mackenzie, Old Reminiscences, p. 107. Mackenzie seems to confuse the dates when Finlay was MP and when he was installed as rector.

46The Scotsman, 11 March 1820.

47The Scotsman, 18 November 1820.

48Ibid.

49 The 3rd Duke of Montrose was Chancellor of the University of Glasgow from 1781 to 1836. He was succeeded by the 4th Duke of Montrose who held the office from 1837 to 1874, and was preceded by the 2nd Duke of Montrose who held the post from 1743 to 1780 and the 1st Duke of Montrose who was in office from 1714 to 1743. The 3rd Duke was also Lord Lieutenant of both Dunbartonshire and Stirlingshire at the time of the radical rising.

50The Scotsman, 18 November 1820.

51Glasgow Herald, 29 December 1820.

52 University of Glasgow, Senate Minutes, 17 November 1820, pp. 57–8. The Senate members unanimously gave their votes to Kirkman Finlay.

53Inaugural Address delivered by Francis Jeffrey, Esq., on Thursday, December 28, 1820, pp. 4, 9.

54 Senate agreed the wording of the petition in early December. University of Glasgow, Senate Minutes, 2 December 1819, p. 20.

55Ibid., p. 10. House of Commons Journal (vol. 75, 23 November 1819 to 23 November 1820), 8 December 1819, p. 34. The Journal identifies Finlay as one of those entrusted to progress the matter.

56 Three members of the Glasgow Senate dissented from a petition to the king in December 1820 recording the university’s satisfaction with ‘the wisdom of your Majesty’s Councils’: Mr Mylne, Dr Muirhead and Mr Millar (who had earlier dissented from the petition to the Commons in support of the reform of elections to the office of rector). University of Glasgow, Senate Minutes, 2 December 1819, 13 December 1820, pp. 20, 59.

57 Jeffrey used his casting vote against Scott, and Mackintosh used his casting vote for Brougham in 1824. See Donald Wintersgill, Rectors of Glasgow University, 1820–2000 (Glasgow, 2001), pp. 8, 12.

58 See Francis Jeffrey, Review of ‘A Guide to the Electors of Great Britain Upon the Accession of a New King, and the immediate Prospect of a New Parliament’, Edinburgh Review, May 1820, pp. 471–93 at p. 493.

59 Jeffrey, Review of ‘Speech of Lord John Russell’, p. 465.

60Hansard, House of Commons, vol. 16, 5 December 1826.

1

The 1790s

Establishing the mind of government in 1820

Emma Macleod

In April 1820 James Wilson, John Baird and Andrew Hardie were all involved in leading rather small and weak armed bands marching to attack government forces. They did not, in truth, present a threat of any substance to the British state. The only fatality at the Battle of Bonnymuir, where Baird and Hardie were present, was a horse.1 While perhaps a hundred armed men had rallied in Strathaven on the night of 5 April, only twenty-five set out in the Scottish downpour at dawn on the 6th. They had expected to join several thousand Glasgow radicals waiting for them on the Cathkin Braes south of Glasgow, but instead they found the place deserted, and returned home, demoralised. Yet forty-six men were tried in Scotland between April and July for treason, of whom twenty-four received capital convictions and three were actually executed – James Wilson in Glasgow on 30 August, and John Baird and Andrew Hardie in Stirling on 8 September, the others being transported to the penal colonies. Why did the Scottish authorities react so roughly towards Wilson, Baird and Hardie and their colleagues in the trials of July?

The 1820 Rising is no exception to the rule that, at least since the 1960s and the work of E.P. Thompson and others, historians and literary writers have, reasonably, spent less time examining the great and the not-so-good in favour of the downtrodden and the oppressed.2 In the case of the state trials of the 1790s, and again in 1820 (and this is perhaps particularly true of the prosecutions in Scotland), the memory is largely all about the victims. The classic working-class history of the Radical Rising by Peter Berresford Ellis and Seumas Mac a’ Ghobhainn in 1970, James Kelman’s 1978 radio play, Hardie and Baird, about what Kelman called this ‘episode of suppressed radical history in Scotland’, through to Maggie Craig’s vivid One Week in April and Murray Armstrong’s The Fight for Scottish Democracy, both written for the bicentenary in 2020, all build on the Exposure of the Spy System pursued in Glasgow, written by Peter Mackenzie, a loyalist Glasgow Sharpshooter in 1820 turned radical journalist by 1832 when his book was published.3 Even if our primary concern is for the memory of the victims of state violence, however, we do not do them full justice if we do not try to understand the other side. Gordon Pentland’s The Spirit of the Union (2011) is thorough and illuminating on the actions of central government and its agents in Scotland, and Alex Benchimol’s essay in this collection discusses the role of the local authorities, but they are unusual in this respect.4

Eighteenth-century Britain was not ancien régime France, Prussia or Russia. It was proud of the liberties and the protection of the rights of the individual. It saw in some sense as its distinctive values since the Revolution of 1688 the rights to toleration, consent and the rule of law, together with the values of individualism, freedom of conscience and rationalism.5 Without pressing the point too far, or ignoring the undoubted conservatism of all but a small minority of radical Whigs in the eighteenth century, it was nevertheless one of the more liberal political systems in the world. Its British subjects had great freedom to question publicly the actions of the current government and even the nature of the political, social and religious order.6 How then did the British state come, apparently, to repudiate these values so ruthlessly in the period between 1793 and 1820? What causes the government of a state, where legal precedent and public consent matter, where Enlightenment conceptions of humanitarianism, regard for the rule of law, and the value and rationality of the individual have been accepted, at least to a certain degree, to pursue such rough justice?