Peterloo, the Great Reform Act and Chartism, 1819-1858
A Country on a Knife-Edge, 1815-1819
In 1815 Britain had just won the Napoleonic Wars, but victory left the country exhausted. Soldiers returned to a shrinking job market, harvests failed, and the new Corn Laws kept the price of bread artificially high to protect aristocratic landowners. Across the industrial north, weavers and factory hands began to gather in their tens of thousands to demand parliamentary reform — a vote that would let them speak for themselves. The government, terrified of a French-style revolution, reached for repression.
On 16 August 1819, around 60,000 unarmed men, women and children gathered at St Peter’s Field, Manchester, to hear Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt speak for parliamentary reform. Local magistrates ordered the cavalry to charge. At least 18 people were killed and several hundred injured. The crowd nicknamed the day ‘Peterloo’, mocking Waterloo.
Peterloo and the Six Acts
The Peterloo Massacre stunned the country, but the government’s answer was not concession. Within months, Lord Liverpool’s ministry pushed through the Six Acts, restricting meetings, taxing the radical press out of reach of the poor, and giving magistrates wider powers of search. When a small group of radicals plotted to assassinate the Cabinet in the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820, the plot was used to justify the new laws. For another decade, mass open-air meetings in industrial towns were dangerous things to organise.
Why Reform Became Unavoidable
By the late 1820s, three pressures forced reform onto the agenda. Catholic Emancipation in 1829 showed that even a Tory government could change the constitution. The July Revolution in France in 1830 raised fears that Britain might be next. And the new industrial cities — Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds — had no MPs of their own, while empty ‘rotten boroughs’ like Old Sarum returned two MPs from a handful of voters. Riots in Bristol, Nottingham and Derby in 1831 showed that the issue could no longer be ignored.
The Great Reform Act 1832 abolished 56 rotten boroughs, gave seats to large industrial towns for the first time, and standardised the right to vote at the ‘ten-pound householder’ level — men who occupied property worth at least £10 a year. Around 217,000 voters were added, raising the electorate to roughly one in seven adult men. Working men, agricultural labourers and all women remained excluded. Many of the men who had marched at Peterloo and afterwards still had no vote.
From Disappointment to Chartism
For working-class radicals, the 1832 Act was a betrayal. They had marched, signed petitions and faced soldiers; the new electorate was the middle class. Out of that anger came Chartism, the first mass political movement in British history led by working people. The People’s Charter of 1838 set out six demands: votes for all adult men, secret ballots, equal-sized constituencies, paid MPs, no property qualification for MPs, and annual parliaments.
Chartism mobilised through new tools. Feargus O’Connor’s newspaper the Northern Star reached 50,000 readers a week. Local groups organised mass meetings on Kersal Moor and Kennington Common. And petitions of unprecedented size were carried to Parliament: 1.3 million signatures in 1839, 3.3 million in 1842, and millions more in 1848. Each one was rejected.
After Parliament rejected the first petition in 1839, a section of the movement turned to ‘physical force’. In November 1839 around 5,000 South Wales miners marched on Newport under John Frost, hoping to free Chartist prisoners held in the town. Soldiers stationed in the Westgate Hotel opened fire; at least 22 Chartists were killed. The leaders were sentenced to be hanged for treason — commuted to transportation after a public outcry. Newport showed both the depth of feeling and the cost of armed confrontation. After 1848, with troops mobilised on Kennington Common and the petition mocked in Parliament, the movement collapsed.
Why Chartism ‘Failed’ but Mattered
In its own moment, Chartism lost. Not one of the six points was conceded in the 1840s, leaders were jailed or transported, and the 1848 petition was publicly humiliated when Parliament claimed many signatures were forgeries. Yet five of the six demands eventually became law — the property qualification for MPs abolished in 1858, the secret ballot in 1872, roughly equal constituencies from 1885, paid MPs in 1911, and universal manhood suffrage in 1918. Only annual parliaments never came. More importantly, Chartism pioneered the techniques of modern mass politics: a national newspaper, mass petitioning, public meetings on a huge scale, and an organised working-class voice in Parliament. Every later movement — trade unions, suffragettes, the Labour Party — stood on the foundation Chartism laid.
The Six Points of the People’s Charter (1838) were: universal manhood suffrage, secret ballot, equal constituencies, paid MPs, no property qualification for MPs, and annual parliaments. Five became law over the following 80 years; annual parliaments never did.
The Factor Thread
This lesson sets up two factors that will return again and again. The economy — post-war distress, the Corn Laws, industrial wages — created the discontent that filled St Peter’s Field. Communication — the radical press, the Northern Star, mass petitioning — turned local anger into national movements. The same pairing will reappear with the Anti-Corn Law League, the suffragettes and the General Strike. Notice how government swings between repression (Six Acts) and concession (1832 Act) depending on whether it can hold the line.