Volume I Part 6 (1/2)
The Chartists had held a Convention in London the week before the 10th, and were unable to obtain any place of meeting except a small social inst.i.tution in John Street, Tottenham Court Road, which could not seat 150 persons at the Convention table. The hall was lent to them by the most pacific body of politicians in London--the followers of Robert Owen. Yet Mr. Thomas Hughes adopted and authenticated Kingsley's incredible belief, that the country was in danger of these earnest but entirely impotent Chartist pet.i.tioners; and Mr. Hughes actually quotes believingly in his introduction to ”Alton Locke” a statement that: ”The Duke of Wellington declared in the House of Lords that no great society had ever suffered as London had during the proceeding, while the Home Secretary telegraphed to all the chief magistrates of the kingdom the joyful news that the peace had been kept in London.”*
* Prefatory Memoir of Kingsley's Works, by Thomas Hughes, p. 13.
Never did the craziest despotic Government in Europe engage in such a political imposture. It was pitiable that the Duke of Wellington should have had no more self-respect than to compromise his great career by fortifying London against an imaginary enemy. The Government had plentiful information and must have known the truth--the contrary of what they alleged.
It may be said in extenuation of these affected Ministerial terrors, that the Parisian revolution of that year had communicated unrest to the people of England. It had inspired them with pleasure, but not with insurgency, for which they were as uninclined as they were unprepared, and none knew this better than the Duke of Wellington. The Parisian population had seen military service. They understood the use of arms, had them, and knew how to settle their differences at the barricade.
London had never seen a barricade. The people were all unused to arms, and were without the means or the knowledge to storm a police station.
Yet, according to Canon Kingsley, Wellington told the Government ”that no capital had gone through such days as England had on the 10th of April,” when no man was struck--no man was killed--no riot took place anywhere. It would seem that ignorance, rashness, wildness, and irresponsible language are by no means peculiar to the working cla.s.ses.
We must cease to wonder at the Duke of Wellington when an accredited publicist like Judge Thomas Hughes, who was educated at Rugby, could tell the world himself that ”It is only by an effort that one can realise the strain to which the nation was subjected.”
On that awful day, n.o.body was reported as found looking into a shop window with a predatory glare in his eyes, and no account came up from the provinces that a single Chartist was observed to peep over a hedge in a menacing manner.
I was out on the 10th of April. On Sunday, the night before, I was the lecturer at John Street The audience was composed largely of delegates to the dreadful Convention that so perturbed the ”Iron Duke.”
My advice to them, published at the time, was to ”Beware of the police,”
and not to strike again if they were struck. Many of them, I knew, were willing to die for their country, if that would save it. They would serve it much better by dying without resistance, than dying with it. If any were killed whilst walking in the procession their comrades should move quietly on. Nothing would tell more strongly on public opinion than such heroic observance of order. Hetherington, one of the bravest who walked in the ranks, told me he would do it. The Government, by their ostentatious provocation, in garrisoning the Bank with soldiers, crowding Somerset House with them, parading troops on Clerkenwell Green, had brought, it is computed, more than two millions of persons into the streets. The conclusion to which the Chartist leaders came, was that the Government wanted to create a conflict, shoot down a number of the people, and then proclaim to Europe that they had ”saved Society,”
by murder, as one of their chief special constables did soon after in Paris.
As I had been personally a.s.sociated with all the chief Chartists, in prison and out, from the beginning of the movement, I can speak with some knowledge of them on that day.
On the morning of the 10th of April, Mr. C. D. Collet, the well-informed Secretary of the People's Charter Union, myself, Richard Moore, and others, organised a band of forty persons, who were to distribute themselves over London, note-book and pencil in hand, in the character of reporters. The police took kindly to us, and gave us good positions of advantage, where we could see everything that took place thereabouts, and even protected us from being incommoded. We were there to watch the police, not the people, as the disorder, if there were any, would come from them. My station was in Bridge Street, Blackfriars, where a row of constables was drawn up. I found a coa.r.s.e, plethoric alderman, going from man to man, saying only three words: ”Strike hard to-day.”
The people behaved admirably. Not a blow was struck which gave a colourable ground for outrage on the part of the police. In justice to the police, it ought to be said, neither did they incite disorder.
At night the Home Secretary spent the money of the State, in telegraphing to all the mayors in the land ”the day had pa.s.sed off quietly,” thus creating a false terror everywhere that London had been in danger--danger of the Government's creating.
The Bull Ring Riots in Birmingham in 1839, when I was resident there, were created entirely by the magistrates, who introduced a hundred London policemen into the town, which led to the loss of life and property.
I and others on the deputation to Mr. Walpole told him at the time, when the railings were broken down in Hyde Park, that if he made a show of soldiers and policemen, people were sure to be killed. At the peril of his own reputation, he kept them out of sight, and no disorder took place, though violent members of the Government tried to destroy Mr. Walpole for his wise and n.o.ble forbearance. Dean Stubbs, in his interesting book on Charles Kingsley, says (p. 97): ”On the 10th of April, 1848, a revolution was threatened in England. One hundred thousand _armed men_ were to meet on Kennington Common and thence to march on Westminster, and there to compel, by physical force, if necessary, the acceptance of the People's Charter by the Houses of Parliament.” Could such a lunatical statement be written by any one, and his friends not procure a magistrate's order for his removal to the nearest asylum? How were the ”hundred thousand” to get the arms into London--if they had them. Whence were they to procure them? Where could they store them, seeing that at that time there was not a single place of Chartist meeting that was not known to be in debt, unless its rent was paid by the charity of some well-to-do sympathiser? What were muskets or pikes to do against the stone walls of the Houses of Parliament or the Bank? How were cannon to be drawn from the centre of London to Kennington Common with ample service of powder and shot?
Marvellous is the history which Churchmen can write!
The utterly groundless and incredible representations of the ”10th April,” which Charles Kingsley and Thomas Hughes published, as we have seen, were to my amazement resuscitated as late as 1902 for the historic instruction of the students of the Working Mens College in Great Ormond Street, London, by Mr. R. P. Lichfield, vice-princ.i.p.al of the college, who for forty-seven years has rendered it important service, for which all friends of education for workmen are grateful. Yet in his address to the students (October 1, 1902), he tells them that in 1848 ”the wave of democracy which swept over Europe gave fresh impetus to the Chartist agitation. On the memorable 10th of April it looked as if we were to have a revolutionary outbreak on the Parisian pattern. This we were saved from, partly by an army of volunteers, special constables, partly by the Duke of Wellington's discreet placing of his troops.... The attempt to overawe Parliament by a 'physical force' demonstration was a fiasco.” The world knows a good deal of historians who draw upon their imagination for their facts, but here is a responsible teacher, drawing upon his terrors of fifty years ago, for statements which n.o.body believes now or believed then, who knew the facts. The Duke of Wellington's great name in war imposed upon amateur politicians. The Duke--contrary to his reputation for military veracity--readily lent himself to the Government of that day, that they might figure before the country as the deliverers of England, from the nation-shaking a.s.sault of a miscellaneous crowd of penniless and unarmed combatants, who had neither cannon nor commissariat. Everybody was aware that the knowledge of the Iron Duke, outside war, was very limited, and his political credulity was unbounded. At the end of the Peninsular War he wrote to the Government of that day, informing them ”the bankers of Paris were furnis.h.i.+ng large sums to Revolutionists in England.” Only old residents in Bedlam would believe that. There were no leaders of Revolutionists in England, to whom the money could be a.s.signed or consigned, and bankers were the last persons in the world to subscribe money for a wild, speculative, and uncertain enterprise. No spy of Pitt, or Sid-mouth, would have sent home so insane a report, from fear of instant dismissal from their sinister employment.
This is but a sample of the airy, false, and fictionary foundation on which the Legend of the Tenth of April was built. These incidents of historic perversion, though bygones of half a century ago, are worth remembering.
CHAPTER VIII. THE CHARTISTS OF FICTION
The Chartists have made as much noise in the world as they knew how--yet to the generation of to-day they are ambiguous. They have had no historian. Carlyle went to look at them in prison, and defamed them with that bitterness and contempt he had for partisans who lacked the sense of submission to the dictates of those superior persons who knew what was best for everybody, of whose aspirations they knew nothing, and for whose needs they had no sympathy. Chartism, however, has won conspicuous treatment in fiction. What it was in fact, is a very different thing.
There is the Church Chartist by Canon Kingsley, and the Positivist Chartist by George Eliot, drawn by two famous artists. The pictures are hung upon the line in the great gallery of literature. So brilliant is the work of Kingsley that it has imposed on so accomplished a connoisseur as Dean Stubbs, who, in his life of the fervid Rector of Eversley, has taken it for a painting from real life. I present the Church Chartist first.
In my time I have seen much good done by Christians with a view to extend their faith. Some few, like Samuel Morley, who excelled all lay Dissenters I have known in the manly sense of the dignity and independence of Nonconformity, would do generous things from the humaneness of their own minds alone. Some Quakers and Unitarians have had this quality. Others, Churchmen, Roman Catholics, and orthodox Christians, I have known to mitigate privation for the ”Lord's sake,”
not for humanity's sake. This was to some extent the case of the Rev.
Frederick Denison Maurice, Canon Kingsley, and their n.o.ble colleagues, Edward Vansittart Neale, Judge Thomas Hughes, and J. M. Ludlow.
They became Christian Socialists not so much because they cared for Socialism, as Maurice owned his ”object was not to Socialise society, but to Christianise Socialism.” Startled by the dislike and even resentment against Christianity expressed by men of poverty and intelligence at being asked to adopt a belief which brought them no relief, Maurice, Kingsley, and their a.s.sociates concluded that privation was the cause of alienation from the Church. In like manner Dissenters thought that it was the bad condition of industrial life which kept working people from chapel. None realised that alienation from Christianity had its seat in the understanding--in intellectual dissatisfaction with the tenets of Theology. The absentees from church and chapel alleged that no relief came of belief, and never had since the days when manna fell in the Jewish wilderness, and loaves and fishes were miraculously plentiful on the hills of Galilee. There was no sense or profit in adopting a faith which had been unproductive for nearly 2,000 years. It had taken the slave, the serf, and the hired worker a long time to see this. But at last experience had told upon the thoughtful. But the theologians neither in the dominant, nor dominated camps perceived it.
Very generous is Kingsley's sympathy, in ”Alton Locke,” with the lot of working people, but he believed that when the rebellious shoemaker fully realises that good priests would mitigate the lot of those who labour in workshops or in fields and mines, he will become reconciled to the Thirty-nine Articles. Alton Locke is a Church Chartist--not one of the Chartists of real life whom I knew, who were current in Kingsley's days, who signed the famous doc.u.ment which Place drew and Roebuck revised.
They had principles. They did not seek paternal government of friendly Churchmen, nor of Positivists, nor that n.o.bly organised kind of pa.s.sive competence which Mr. Ruskin meditated for the people. The real Chartists--like the Co-operators--sought self-government for the people by the people. The alienation of the people from church and chapel was not founded on lack of spiritual patronage, or thirst for it, but from intellectual dissatisfaction with theological tenets.