Peterloo: Through the Eyes of the Ordinary

1819.

Work.

Maggie Jones was expecting the rabble outside. It was usual. But the commotion coming from the kitchen? Now that was intriguing.

The maid had only ever known Manchester. Within her lifetime, the place had expanded beyond her knowledge of it, but the space she would forever see as home was relatively small. The two-bedroom flat near the railway; her mother and three younger brothers; the smell of the engines. That was home. Since Maggie was twelve, she had worked in this big house, lighting the fires before the master awoke, cleaning the floors, and changing bed sheets. This was her world: downstairs. She was now almost seventeen and–

The sound of broken pottery pulled Maggie back to the present, where high, narrow windows loomed and sacks of potatoes sat piled on the floor. The noise from the kitchen next door had been silenced by a plate hitting the flagstones. She stepped cautiously out of the storeroom and across the corridor. Hurried, whispered conversation began again as Maggie quietly swept the shards from the paved kitchen floor, but she paid little attention to them. Next to the leg of the central table was a dropped sheet of paper. She was only just literate, but the maid could make out the large print at the top, ‘ILLEGAL MEETING’. The notice had probably been ripped away from a wall and was badly torn on one side, but the message was clear enough. Henry Hunt’s name too appeared on the paper: he was to come and speak in Manchester. Against corruption, and for representation in the Commons.

“Want a hand?”

It was the footman, George. Maggie smiled, and he helped her collect the last pieces of the plate. Of course it had been George who chaotically brought a reformer’s broadside into the kitchen of their employer’s house. For the five years they had worked alongside each other, Maggie had always known him to be rebellious. He believed that all men should have a vote, and that the Corn Laws had caused the food shortages in few years after the wars with the French had ended. The maid however did not dare think that all men could be equal. She and her brothers had grown up near the slums and making it into service was the greatest achievement Maggie’s mother could have wished for her daughter. Maggie held few expectations in her life, and fewer dreams, but, despite herself, she saw that George envisioned a different future. A better future. 

It was for this dream that Maggie was determined to see Hunt speak at the meeting. George had said he would be at St Peter’s Field on the sixteenth of August, and that Monday was her free day.

Betrayal.

The figure stood just outside the crushing crowd on the field wore a starched apron and white linen cap over her dark dress. Maggie was not distinctive from the rest of the gathered fifty thousand spectators on St Peter’s field; she too was just as intrigued and as watchful as the reformers crowding around the raised platform in the centre. Henry Hunt had just climbed the steps and was preparing to speak. The crowd hushed, but still Maggie, just out of earshot, had to strain to listen. She could catch the occasional word: “parliament”, “the war”, “proud… so many”, but even if she had missed these, she could have guessed at his speech to the assembly. It was now mid-August, and throughout the summer of 1819 there had been large-scale meetings across the country discussing the rights to universal male suffrage. For the House of Commons to be made up of common people; to forbid the rotten boroughs from nominating members of parliament. People from all over had been arrested and imprisoned without trial for such a campaign, something Maggie had read in the papers that George pressed and showed her before they were handed, neatly folded, to the master of the house.

George. Where was he? She had expected to see him that morning before the parade had gathered on the field, but after waiting half an hour for him to show, she had left for St Peter’s by herself. The field would be safe enough. Maggie had walked past children as young as two years old, their families excited for their day out to watch ‘Orator Hunt’ speak while the children played and wrestled on the floor around them.

Where was George though? She wondered again now, as the crowd grew by the minute. There must have been many thousands of attendees – men, women and children, old and young. Maggie glanced behind her towards the buildings overlooking the place. Someone was at a window, watching. She turned back to where Hunt had paused for breath. He had been talking for no more than a minute, but from somewhere across the field Maggie heard a shout. 

“Police!”

The maid was not tall enough to see them weaving their way through the crowds, but she could hear their impact. More shouts emanated from Maggie’s right as constables began attacking the peacefully gathered people of Manchester. Cries of those trying to flee grew, and the crowd surged backwards. She took a few paces back herself, attempting to keep a space which she could run to if it became necessary, fearing that the constables would fall upon those at the sidelines as easy prey for arrest. She stumbled a little, but kept her balance, stepping around the young family behind her. Being arrested meant risking losing her place at the house. Why was she here? She still couldn’t see George, and Maggie was beginning to think that she should not have come at all.

“Contain the revolutionaries!”

Blood rushing in her ears, Maggie tensed. But the crowd had stopped moving back so fast towards her, instead dispersing enough for her to be able to make out a young man with a familiar loping stride near the central platform. Was it George? Maggie strained her eyes to see, balanced on the toes of her shoes. Yes. It was him. She let out a breath she hadn’t known she had been holding. He was here after all. She would be safe. What the maid was slow to realise was that the same constables causing such panic in the crowd were beating a bloody path towards the stage. Towards Henry Hunt, and towards George.

Upon seeing the direction of such violence, she felt a cry leave her throat. A hollow warning across an impossible distance. She couldn’t reach him, couldn’t warn him. Now being pushed backwards again, the space she had previously protected diminished in the pressing bodies, the stink of fear and sweat filling the air. Overwhelmed by the inability to release her limbs from the grasp of other people around her, Maggie fought to keep upright. She knew that if she fell, she would be trampled in the stampede to leave the field.

For liberty.

Just a week earlier Maggie Jones had been sweeping broken pottery from the paved kitchen floor of her employer’s house, but now she stood in a small bedroom over the footman. She could only watch as he was knocked to the floor by constables’ truncheons and narrowly missed by the hooves of the Manchester cavalry, brought in to support the Yeomen with their brutal campaign. Not only men had been targeted, Henry Hunt the most-high profile had escaped, but women and even children had been struck down. Among those who had not survived was a boy, barely two years old, who had slipped from his mother’s arms and to the ground in front of a horse. Leaving the field, Maggie had seen muddied faces and blood-soaked cloth dragged past her. One woman seemed as the walking dead, dragging her leg behind her, matted hair in caked strands across her face.

The papers claimed only eleven deaths at ‘Peterloo’, as the event was nicknamed. A cruelly ironic twist on the victorious battle of Waterloo against the French just four years earlier, Peterloo saw the British forces turned against their own people. Not an armed enemy, but a calm civilian population. And the more Maggie witnessed, the more she doubted that the reported mortality rate was accurate.

George lay on her mother’s bed, wheezing and gasping for each breath. His ribs had been badly crushed, and a deep gash to his face had left him feverish. Maggie feared he would never make it back to work: if he even survived the week. The victims of Peterloo were far greater even than those who had escaped the field but died of their injuries days later. Those who couldn’t return to work, the families that relied on their income, the men and women who would rather suffer quietly than risk losing their employment over having attended that meeting.

Weeks turned to months, and George did recover somewhat, but it became clear to Maggie that she would not live to see justice. Trials held for compensation and holding those responsible to account were suspended and abandoned by courts bowing to officials fearing the spread of radicalism and a repeat of the French Revolution. Sometimes it felt as if nothing had changed. The corruption in parliament, the franchise limited to men of wealth, Maggie was ever more doubtful that things could change. But something in popular opinion had shifted after the Wars, and Peterloo had brought a unity of purpose which ignited hope within her.

Bibliography:

Three Accounts of Peterloo by Eyewitnesses Bishop Stanley, Lord Hylton, John Benjamin Smith; with Bishop Stanley's Evidence at the Trial, ed. by F. A. Bruton (Project Gutenberg, 2011). 

Morgan, Alison, Ballads and songs of Peterloo (Manchester University Press, 2018), pp.40-64. 

Poole, Robert, ‘Peterloo August 1819: the English Uprising’, Historian, 142, (2019), pp.32-35. 

Filmography:

Viner, Katharine, ‘Episode 1 - The build-up to Peterloo’, from Peterloo: The Massacre that Changed Britain, (BBC Radio 4, 2019).

Viner, Katharine, ‘Episode 2 - The aftermath of Peterloo’, from Peterloo: The Massacre that Changed Britain, (BBC Radio 4, 2019).