The Peterloo Massacre and Shelley's great poem The Mask of Anarchy.

Posted By: Rob Normey

I note that The Guardian newspaper features an interview with Mike Leigh, director of a number of superb films like High Hopes, Vera Drake, and Mr Turner, indicating that his next project will be a dramatization of the infamous 1819 Manchester massacre, a traumatic event in British history. The massacre is believed to have involved 18 deaths and injuries to as many as 700 protesters, who paid the price for exercising their democratic rights and freedom of assembly. Leigh indicated that "apart from the universal political significance of this historic event, the story has a particular personal resonance for me, as a native of Manchester and Salford."

"Peterloo" is a play on Waterloo, the triumph of the British over Napoleon's troops on the battlefield, which had occurred four years previously. Peterloo involved the assembly of a large crowd of citizens at St Peter's Field in Manchester. They had turned out to hear the radical orator Henry Hunt at a rally to demand significant reform of Parliament, so that it might better represent the population. The rally was peaceful and aimed to address the serious poverty in the region--considered to have been exacerbated by the disastrous Corn Laws--and a "democratic deficit" in a Britain that allowed fewer than two per cent of the population to vote. The crowd that gathered was reported to have conducted itself with dignity and to have turned out in its Sunday best. Hunt climbed onto a simple cart which served as his platform and gazed out at banners which proclaimed: "REFORM, EQUAL REPRESENTATION, and one, most hopefully -LOVE." Many of the banner poles were topped with the red cap of liberty, a powerful bond for reformers and engaged citizens in that era.

However, local magistrates peering out a window from a building near the field panicked at the size of the crowd, and proceeded without any notice to read the Riot Act, ordering the assembled listeners to disperse. It would almost certainly have been the case that only a very few would have heard the magistrates. The official "guardians of the peace" then promptly directed the local Yeomanry to arrest the speakers. The Yeomanry might be described as a kind of paramilitary force with no training in crowd control and little in the way of proper discipline. On horseback, they charged into the crowd, and pierced the air with cutlasses and clubs. It was known that they held serious grudges against some of the leading protesters (in...