Peterloo: Manchester’s Massacre and the Fight to Be Heard

Why Manchester wanted a voice

Manchester’s growth had not brought it a parliamentary constituency of its own. A small number of residents qualified to vote in Lancashire’s county elections, but the great majority had no electoral means of influencing the people who governed them. Meanwhile, tiny boroughs continued to return MPs. Economic importance and political representation bore little resemblance to each other.

The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 had brought serious economic distress. Textile workers faced falling earnings and insecure employment. The Corn Law of 1815 restricted grain imports until domestic prices reached a prescribed level, protecting British agriculture while making the price of bread a bitter political grievance. For people struggling to feed a household, the composition of Parliament was a practical question.

Hunt was the celebrated speaker; the meeting depended on the work of reform societies across the surrounding towns. Groups assembled and practised marching so they could arrive together in good order. The authorities, alarmed by radical politics and the possibility of revolution, read those preparations very differently. Discipline that organisers intended as reassurance could be presented by their opponents as evidence of a force preparing for insurrection.

The connections with food and wages matter here. When textile earnings fell, decisions made by a Parliament that gave Manchester no constituency of its own still reached straight into the lives of people who worked there.

Who came to St Peter’s Field

Contingents arrived with bands and banners, many participants dressed in their best clothes. Oldham’s procession included women in white carrying demands for universal suffrage, annual parliaments and voting by ballot. These were specific proposals: a much wider electorate, representatives who faced frequent elections and a vote that could be cast without public pressure.

“Universal suffrage” needs care here. The movement’s principal demand was votes for men. Women organised reform societies, raised support and appeared on the speakers’ platform without being included equally in the franchise they were campaigning to extend. Roughly one in eight of those present is thought to have been a woman. I find that distinction more illuminating than describing the gathering as though everyone already agreed on our present understanding of equal voting rights.

Mary Fildes, president of the Manchester Female Reform Society, stood on the platform with a banner. She was injured during the attack and survived. Women who brought children later explained in testimony that they had believed the meeting would be safe. Their presence matters when assessing its character, although peaceful intent should not have required proof in the form of a family outing.

Samuel Bamford, who led the Middleton contingent, subsequently defended the banners and music in a petition to Parliament. He described them as familiar ways of keeping a procession orderly and cheerful. His account was a participant’s defence of the meeting, and should be read as such. It nevertheless gives us something the phrase “a large crowd” leaves out: people had travelled in organised groups, with neighbours they knew and a purpose they could explain.

The detail I remember from the accounts is the care people took over the processions. They brought banners and music. Mary Fildes and the women who organised alongside her had work of their own to do before anyone got to St Peter’s Field.

How a reform meeting became the Peterloo Massacre

The magistrates watched from a building overlooking the field. They ordered the arrest of Hunt and other leaders, calling on the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, a local volunteer cavalry force. The yeomanry entered the densely packed gathering with drawn sabres. They struck people as they forced their way towards the platform.

Regular soldiers of the 15th Hussars were then brought in to support the yeomanry and clear the field. It is worth distinguishing the forces because their responsibilities otherwise disappear into a vague reference to “the army”. The initial decision came from the local civil authorities; local cavalry carried it into the crowd; regular troops participated in the dispersal.

People suffered sabre wounds and blows, fell under horses or were crushed as those around them tried to escape. William Fildes, a small child, was among the dead. Some victims died later from their injuries, which is one reason to treat the familiar casualty figures as estimates rather than a complete count taken at the end of that afternoon. The hospital list is only one part of the evidence.

The name Peterloo joined St Peter’s Field to Waterloo, the victory over Napoleon four years earlier. Its bitterness becomes particularly clear in the life of John Lees, an Oldham cotton spinner who had served at Waterloo and later died from injuries received at Peterloo. I do not need a heroic account of the demonstrators to find the use of mounted, armed force against this gathering indefensible. The fear of revolution helps explain the magistrates’ outlook. It does not establish that the people before them were attempting one.

What the government did after Peterloo

Two Home Office letters make the official response unusually clear. On 4 August, before the meeting eventually took place, Henry Hobhouse wrote on behalf of the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth. He advised the Manchester authorities against forcibly dispersing the gathering unless it proceeded to felony or riot. He also said the government had reason to believe Hunt would discourage disorder.

On 23 August, another Home Office letter recorded both Sidmouth’s approval and the Prince Regent’s satisfaction with the magistrates’ conduct. The authorities responsible for the violence received official support. Hunt and other reformers faced prosecution and imprisonment. Bamford, who insisted that he had helped organise a peaceful procession, received a year in prison.

Parliament’s response included the Six Acts of 1819. These restricted large political meetings and military drilling, extended controls over radical publications and increased the reach of newspaper stamp duty. Together they made organising and circulating arguments for reform more difficult. The immediate result of Peterloo was a tightening of restrictions on the movement.

Petitions asking for an inquiry continued for years. Parliamentary Archives research records more than a hundred petitions to the two Houses, including accounts from injured participants. There was no parliamentary inquiry. That refusal deserves space in the story: the people who survived were also denied the public examination of responsibility they had requested.

The two letters repay reading together. One was written when there was still time to decide how to handle the meeting. The other shows whose judgement the government backed once people had been killed and injured.

The hospital list, Relief Fund and radical newspaper

The University of Manchester’s digitised Peterloo collection lets us get beyond a single account of the day. The Relief Fund book records names, addresses, occupations, injuries and payments to those who needed help. I value the occupations and addresses as much as the descriptions of wounds. They place the injured back in communities where a damaged arm or leg could affect a household’s ability to earn.

There is an awkward detail about the infirmary list with which I began: the surviving copy is in the hand of William Robert Hay, one of the magistrates involved in the decision to send troops into the gathering. His papers also preserve material he considered seditious. An archive assembled partly to watch and oppose reform now helps readers examine the consequences of its suppression. It would be a mistake to dismiss everything in an official collection as a single official version.

The radical Manchester Observer gathered eyewitness reports and challenged the authorities. Its editors were participants in the political struggle, not detached onlookers. Their reporting still supplied evidence that a government account could omit or minimise. Newspapers were shared and read aloud, allowing their arguments to reach beyond the people who could afford a copy.

The paper faced repeated libel prosecutions; four of its principal editors and proprietors were imprisoned over its lifetime. I admire the persistence involved while keeping the distinction between advocacy and verification. A sympathetic account needs checking, just as a magistrate’s letter does. Comparing the documents is what makes the scale of the violence and the effort to justify it so difficult to evade.

I’d put a page of the Relief Fund book beside the newspapers. A claim about whether the crowd was dangerous is one kind of record. A name, an occupation and a payment to help someone through an injury are another.

What changed after Peterloo

The Reform Act of 1832 finally gave Manchester parliamentary representation of its own, thirteen years after Peterloo. It redistributed seats and widened the electorate, but property qualifications still excluded most working men. Women were expressly excluded by the Act’s definition of the voter as male.

Chartism grew from the disappointment with that settlement. The People’s Charter of 1838 again demanded votes for all men, a secret ballot and annual parliaments, alongside other changes intended to make representation more equal and accessible. Further Reform Acts in 1867 and 1884 widened the male electorate. In 1918 the parliamentary vote reached almost all men aged 21 and over and some women aged 30 and over; equal voting terms for women and men followed in 1928.

Thirteen years is a long time when you give it the measure of somebody’s working life. The 1832 Act gave Manchester MPs, and there were still plenty of people who could have marched in 1819 and never lived to vote.

What survives of St Peter’s Field

St Peter’s Field has been built over. To orientate yourself, use Peter Street and the former Free Trade Hall, then the Peterloo Memorial outside Manchester Central at the junction of Windmill Street and Lower Mosley Street. St Peter’s Square is nearby, but its modern layout should not be mistaken for the outline of the 1819 meeting ground.

The Free Trade Hall’s grand sandstone frontage dates from the 1850s, decades after the massacre. A plaque records the connection with Peterloo. I would pause here because the building adds a second political history to the site: it was erected by the Anti-Corn Law movement on land associated with the meeting. Its carved shields represent Lancashire towns involved in that later campaign. The building is now a hotel; the exterior and plaque provide the useful historical stop, without needing to treat the interior as a surviving room from 1819.

The memorial, completed for the bicentenary in 2019, was designed by Jeremy Deller with Caruso St John Architects. Concentric stone steps carry the names of the dead and the places from which demonstrators came. I like that geographical emphasis. It gives proper weight to the surrounding towns instead of making Peterloo an exclusively Manchester story.

The design also has a serious limitation. Its raised levels are reached by steps, and disability campaigners objected to the lack of full access. There is a flat circular element at ground level, but that is not equivalent to reaching every part of the stepped memorial. The architects’ current project account still acknowledges the dispute. For a monument concerned with participation and equality, I find that a substantial criticism, and visitors should know about the physical arrangement before coming.

To read farther after you’ve seen the site, I’d choose Gallery One at the People’s History Museum or the digitised Relief Fund book. The first gives you the longer story of political reform. The second brings you back to particular people in the field.