CHAPTER XIII

THE EMANCIPATION OF THE PLATFORM

PUBLIC meetings prohibited, except such as were convened and approved by the "powers that be," or held in a house or building; public speech free only to the extent that the most ignorant, bigoted, or intolerant Justice of the Peace might, in his graciousness, please to permit; the right of petition, which had been wrung from reluctant sovereigns, practically annihilated-such, under a Tory Ministry, and an unreformed Parliament, was the spectacle which England-the vaunted mother of liberty, the boasted home of freedom, of free speech, and of a free Press-presented to the world at the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century-little more than seventy years ago.

It is hard to realise that such should have been the state of things so short a time since-within the lifetime of many men now living-yet so it was, and it is the more remarkable when we consider the absence of justification for it. No justification was afforded by a breakdown or insufficiency of the ordinary law, or from any inability to put it in force. The law was in effective working order. If the meetings were illegal, as was so strenuously contended, the people attending them could have been prosecuted for attending illegal meetings. If anything seditious was said at them from the Platform, the speaker could have been easily rendered amenable for seditious libel, or, following the precedent of Yorke's case, seditious conspiracy. There was no difficulty in framing an indictment that would bring an offender within the meshes of the law, and juries, as constituted then, were by no means too prone to acquit persons charged before them. Nor had Ministers any justification from the circumstances of the time. Their great exemplar-Pitt-whom they were so

slavishly following, had at least some for his repressive legislation, the panic begotten by the horrors of the French Revolution; the war with France, in which England's existence was at stake; the silly coquetting of certain Societies in England with foreign enemies; the wild excitement of the times; the novelty of large public meetings. Lords Liverpool, Sidmouth, and Castlereagh, almost a generation later, had not the shadow of an excuse for their policy. The horrors of the French Revolution had faded into the past; England, powerful and self-confident, was at peace with all the world; there was no intriguing with foreign foes; there no Corresponding Societies or other organisation for agitation; large meetings of the people had become more or less familiar to the general public; and in no case had there been disturbance or disorder, or breach of the peace at any meetings, except where it had been provoked or actually caused by the authorities.

And now, there was a new King upon the throne-George IV., but only nominally a new King, for as Regent he had been virtually King for many years; and the people could derive little hope of a change of policy from the nominal change in the occupant of the throne, for it was his hand that had welded the final link in the fetters that now bound them. Once a Liberal, and a boon companion of the "men of the people," he, like many others, had been frightened by the French Revolution from his Liberal leanings; gradually he had fallen in with Pitt's repressive legislation. From "The Two Acts" he had passed on to "The Four Acts," and, with accelerated strides, from "The Four Acts" to "The Six Acts"; and now he was actually King, and less likely than ever to side with the people against a Tory Ministry. And then, as if to confirm him and his Ministers in their policy, within less than a month of his accession to the throne, an event happened which appeared to afford justification for "The Six Acts." The Cato Street Conspiracy came to light. It was the work of Thistlewood-whose name has already been mentioned and some confederates, and it was aimed at the lives of the Ministers, and the overthrow of the Government. Information of the plot having reached the Government, the conspirators were arrested, most of them forthwith in a loft in

Cato Street, the remainder soon after. The plot was seized on by the King and King's Ministers as a defence of their policy. "The flagrant and sanguinary conspiracy which has lately been detected," said the King in his speech proroguing Parliament, "must vindicate to the whole world the justice and expediency of those measures to which you judged it necessary to resort in defence of the laws and Constitution of the kingdom."

There is not, however, any justification for condemning the Platform on account of this event, much less for silencing public discussion and preventing public meetings in the country. Thistlewood had taken some part in the first meeting at Spa Fields in 1817 and in the riot, and had been tried for the latter on the absurdly exaggerated charge of high treason, and been acquitted; but he was not a Platform orator or agitator, nor was he of the type to be contented with meetings and speeches. Indeed, as has already been shown, he was repudiated by the man most identified with the Platform at the time-Henry Hunt. There is, as a matter of fact, not one tittle of evidence to show that the Plaftorm had incited him and his fellow conspirators to the action they contemplated, or that it had in any way encouraged them in their infamous designs; and even if it could have been distinctly proved that the Platform was directly responsible for this result, that would not have been a justification for depriving the whole population of Great Britain of the right of public meeting and free speech.

It must have seemed to Ministers an adverse fate which again necessitated a general election, with its attendant meetings and Platformings, just after they had exhausted their ingenuity in devising means for the prevention of meetings, and the suppression of free speech. But a new King having come to the throne, a new Parliament had to be elected, and the existing Parliament was dissolved on the 28th February 1820.

Of the general election little need be said. No special feature distinguished it from many that had gone before; no sensible change took place in the composition of parties in the House of Commons. The boroughmongers held the key of the Parliamentary position, Scotland, with but two exceptions, supporting them.

The election is, I think, mainly remarkable for a speech made by Canning, which must be regarded as a most important event in the history of the Platform, for it was an acknowledgment or an avowal by a Cabinet Minister1 of his relation to his constituents-an acknowledgment of a relationship far closer than had ever been avowed before. Speaking at a public dinner at Liverpool in March 1820, he said: "With respect to the transactions of the last short session of Parliament previous to the dissolution, I feel that it is my duty, as your representative, to render to you some account of the part which I took in that assembly to which you sent me-I feel it my duty also as a member of the Government by which those measures were advised. Upon occasions of such trying exigency as those which we have lately experienced, I hold it to be of the very essence of our free and popular Constitution, that an unreserved interchange of sentiment should take place between the representative and his constituents; and if it accidentally happens, that he who addresses you as your representative, stands also in the situation of a responsible adviser of the Crown, I recognise in that more rare occurrence a not less striking or less valuable peculiarity of that Constitution, under which we have the happiness to live, by which a Minister of the Crown is brought into contact with the great body of the community; and the service of the King is shown to be a part of the service of the people." It is the first avowal of a Minister as to the right of his constituents to hear him, and it set an example which other statesmen, coming after him, might find it to their advantage to follow.

The election over, it might be assumed that with the Seditious Meetings Act in force public meetings and speeches would have been over also, but no very great length of time elapsed after the general election before the Platform revived. And here a very notable difference must be pointed out between the result of the suppression of the Platform by Pitt in the end of the eighteenth century, and its suppression by Lord Liverpool's government at the end of the second decade of the nineteenth century, for it is a difference which very 1 He was President of the Board of Control. 2 Therry's Canning, vol. vi. pp. 369, 370.

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strongly marks the progress the Platform had made in the intervening period. On the former occasion the Platform was absolutely and completely suppressed, and for many years no attempt whatever was made to revive it. But in the latter case the revival of the Platform began almost immediately after its suppression. It is true that the revival was not the same in its character as the meetings which had been suppressed and prohibited, but the revival nevertheless showed that, in one form or another, the Platform had become an institution in the country which would be had recourse to, if not by one, then by some other section of the people who needed it to speak by.

But if the revival in 1820 differed in one respect from the revival in 1805, it most curiously resembled it in two others -first, that suppressed among the civic industrial population it was revived by the county freeholders and electors in the large cities; and next, that the primary cause of its revival was, once more, iniquity in high places.

The scandal which, after Pitt's suppression, awoke the Platform into life and action concerned the public life of no less a person than one of the principal Ministers of State; the scandal on the present occasion concerned the private life of even greater personages-the greatest in the land-the King and the Queen. Personal cases are often more hotly espoused by the general public than political principles, and this case was to afford an illustration of this circumstance. Popular attention was quickly riveted on the quarrel, and every means was taken of showing the interest felt in it. Into the details of that unsavoury business it is unnecessary to enter. The King, whose moral character partook very much of the description applied by his father to the Wilkes' agitation, that of "outrageous licentiousness," had separated himself from his wife, and having reason to believe that her conduct since their separation, while she was travelling abroad, was not above reproach, he, regardless of his own notorious delinquencies, and scandalous immoralities, determined, if possible, to get a divorce from her. On his accession to the throne, his wife, now become Queen of England, returned home to 1 See Correspondence between George III. and Lord North-the King to North, 16th April 1769.

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