Back in the Day: The radical road to reform in 1832

There is no national monument as such, at least not one paid for by the state. There are also no plans on a national basis to commemorate the bicentenary of the Radical War next month. That is a disgrace, as I will show this week how the Radicals and the martyrs helped to change not only Scotland but the UK.

As far as I know, however, there are several monuments and memorials, including the one I have featured in Greenock.

George M Mitchell wrote to tell me: “There is a commemorative wall plaque in Stirling which deserves mention. This is fixed to the wall of the old Tolbooth in Broad Street where the two martyrs were executed, as the street rises upwards towards the Castle. It says: “In Memory of John Baird and Andrew Hardie who were publicly hanged here on 8th September 1820 ‘For the cause of Justice and Truth’, Stirling Labour Party, May Day 1966.”

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The other monuments commemorating those who were killed for their part in the Radical War are the Martyrs’ Monument in Woodside Cemetery in Paisley, the memorial to James ‘Purly’ Wilson at Strathaven, the memorial to the Battle of Bonnymuir near Bonnybridge, and the biggest of them, the Martyrs’ Monument in Sighthill Cemetery in Glasgow.

The imposing monument in Sighthill Cemetery has, on its eastern side, a sculpture carved in relief and the following text:

“Erected by public subscription July, 1847, to the memory of JOHN BAIRD, aged 32, and ANDREW HARDIE, aged 28, who for the cause of FREEDOM suffered death at Stirling, 8th Sep., 1820.”

At the base of the southern side, it is recorded that “James Wilson, executed in Glasgow on 30th August 1820 is buried in Strathaven”.

The Monument is a listed building and the report on that listing states: “Baird and Hardie were not allowed to be buried in a public burial ground. In 1847 Sighthill was a private cemetery”.

In that year, the remains of Baird and Hardie were removed from Stirling and reinterred at Sighthill, but the government attached conditions to this. The circumstances are recorded on the monument itself and show that the British government was both embarrassed by the State killings of the martyrs and the strong feelings that their sacrifice engendered even 27 years after the event.

The inscription shows that the then Lord Advocate, Andrew Rutherford, wrote back to the Monument organising committee saying there was no opposition by the government “to the removal of the remains of those unfortunate me from their present place of interment.”

He went on to say, however, that “permission is given under the express condition that the removal shall take place without any public notice or intimation and without any procession or concourse or attendance of people but in the presence of a few friends only.”

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Even then, the government wanted their foul deeds forgotten and to stop any veneration of the martyrs – hundreds of "friends" duly turned up and the Monument had been visited by countless thousand over the last 173 years. I have no doubt it will be the focus of commemorations in Glasgow of the Radical war.

Also listed there are the names of those who were originally sentenced to death, but who were transported to Australia instead, and who were given a royal pardon in 1835 and at the base of the northern side it states: “This memorial was restored in 1986 through public appeal made by the 1820 Society.”

Full commendation to the Society for the work they have done and continue to do to keep alive the memory of those who suffered for justice and truth.

I know that what I am about to write will be controversial to those who would dismiss the Radical War as a blip in Scotland’s history, but I see history as a continuum, and I have no doubt that the next great upheaval in Scottish and indeed British political history was partly inspired by the radicals and their sacrifices. The Great Reform Act of 1832 is one of the major turning points in British history after which nothing was ever the same again, and it had its genesis in radicalism.

SHORTLY after the Radical War, a General Election took place, brought on by the death of King George III earlier in the year. The Tories won a thumping majority over the Whigs, the latter party having advocated parliamentary reform.

Formerly the Prince Regent, George IV came to the throne and already obese and probably addicted to laudanum, he allowed Prime Minister Lord Liverpool and the Tories free rein, though he was no fool and saw that some sort of reform was inevitable. He also carried out one of the strangest "marketing events" in Scottish history with his tartan-clad visit to Scotland in 1822 which was organised by Sir Walter Scott – I’ll be writing about that soon, so will merely say that the first visit to Scotland by a reigning monarch for nearly 200 years boosted the Union and helped play down the radicalism that still abounded in the country.

It was Scott, by the way, who suggested to the King that the unemployed weavers whose ranks had provided so many of the radicals should be brought from the west to Edinburgh to work on road improvements, particularly in the Royal Park of Holyrood. The pathway they created is known as the Radical Road to this day, and at least Scott deduced that job creation was needed to assist the unemployed.

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Yet radicalism had not gone away, and in the unlikely shape of the Church of Scotland, agitation for reform continued. As early as 1817, a fiery preacher called the Rev Neil Douglas found himself on trial for “wicked sedition” because he had compared George III to Nebuchadnezzar while the Prince Regent was the debauched prodigal son.

Three "spies" – obviously not very good ones – were sent to gather evidence from Douglas’ next sermon, only for the good rev to spot them and denounce the trio as “a parcel of infernal scamps, or spies, sent, not by Nebuchadnezzar, but by Beelzebub, from the Council Chambers to entrap him.” Douglas was found not guilty of sedition but promised not to have a pop at royalty again.

Yet he continued to speak for reform and was joined by a man of huge intellect and compassion, the Rev Thomas Chalmers. In his spell at St John’s parish in Glasgow he not only brought in practical improvements for the thousands of poor people in his area, but also set out his theories about reform which had developed from his long interest in political economy, the science founded by Adam Smith.

What made political reform inevitable, however, was the fact the middle classes, particularly smaller landowners, merchant and manufacturers all felt disenfranchised by a political system across Great Britain and Ireland which could only be summed up by one word – corrupt.

In 1801, the House of Commons was composed of 658 members, of whom 513 represented England and Wales and the remainder Scotland and Ireland. The two types of constituency were counties and boroughs with MPs in the former supposed to represent landholders, while borough members were elected to represent the mercantile and trading classes. In practice it just didn’t work and the opportunities for graft and corruption were massive.

It seems ludicrous to us now, but there were small boroughs in England – the so-called "Rotten Boroughs" where the electorate consisted of a single person, usually a local landowner in cahoots with the MP he elected. Scotland was woefully under-represented so that the growing city of Glasgow had to share MPs with Lanarkshire and Dunbartonshire.

The writer Sydney Smith wrote in 1821: The country belongs to the Duke of Rutland, Lord Lonsdale, the Duke of Newcastle, and about twenty other holders of boroughs. They are our masters.” It was true – they each controlled multiple constituencies, and bribery of voters was common.

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Public meetings began to be organised across Scotland with some of the biggest taking place in Glasgow. The Radical War had let the genie out of the bottle and people began to organise, this time peacefully, and agitate for change.

The campaign was being led in cities like Bristol and Birmingham where the Political Union was founded to press for reform. In Scotland the curious mixture of radicalism and middle-class angst proved very powerful and there were calls for reform to be extended to local government as well.

The press of the day reported – accurately, it seems – on the meetings that were held and the statements that were made, and it appears that the path of reform by stealth was popular with just about every strata of society save the very rich and those kept in power by Westminster’s corrupt arrangements.

Small concessions were made by the Tory government to the reformers. Some rotten boroughs in England were disenfranchised but their seats were not given to the cities where population growth driven by increasing industrialisation meant that tens of thousands of people were effectively barred from the political process – they simply did not have a vote.

Slowly but surely the campaign for reform of Parliament gained traction and came to a head after the death of George IV in 1830. His younger brother the Duke of Clarence came to the throne as William IV (III in Scotland) and he favoured reform of a limited kind as he could see the growing threat to the entire Establishment. The problem was that the Duke of Wellington was the Tory Prime Minister and the hero of Waterloo was in no mood for reform, although curiously he had supported one form of reform, namely Catholic emancipation which had split the Tories.

The death of George IV meant a General Election and the cause of political reform was to the fore, with the Whigs actively supporting it, led by Earl Grey. When the results came in during September 1830, the Tories had won a majority but Wellington’s position as prime minister was weak, largely because of his failure to support reform.

HE was reported as telling Parliament that he was “fully convinced that the country possessed, at the present moment, a legislature which answered all the good purposes of legislation – and this to a greater degree than any legislature ever had answered, in any country whatever".

He would go further, and say that the legislature and system of representation possessed the full and entire confidence of the country. As long as he held any station in the government of the country, he should always feel it his duty to "resist reform measures, when proposed by others".

Though revered, Wellington fell from grace and William IV asked Earl Grey to head up the government with a pledge to reform Parliament.

The reforms were simple in one respect – take away seats from the rotten boroughs and give them to fast-growing cities like Manchester, Birmingham and Glasgow. It would also increase the electorate massively, and after the first Bill fell – it passed by one vote at the second reading but was lost in the committee stages – Earl Grey took his case to the country and in the General Election of 1831 the Whigs won a majority of 136 over the Tories. After the second and third reform bills were sabotaged by the House of Lords, and with the country in serious state of near-revolution, Earl Grey managed to pilot the Great Reform Act of 1932 through Parliament.

Overnight Scotland’s electorate went from 4000 to 65,000 and the number of Scottish MPs rose from 45 to 53.

Edinburgh and Glasgow now had two MPs each. It was not universal franchise by any means but the radicals and reformers had won and soon Scotland and the UK would be on the road to proper democracy, something we must all defend with out lives if necessary.