A print depicting the Peterloo massacre. Photo: Published by J Evans and Sons in 1819.
‘Some sought sanctuary in the Meeting house… The soldiers followed, continuing their onslaught’
Friends Meeting House in Manchester was a key location during the Peterloo massacre of 1819. So where, asks David Boulton, were all the Quakers?
This summer has been marked by a season of events commemorating what came to be known as the Peterloo massacre. On 16 August 1819, troops attacked a peaceful demonstration of 60,000 people in St Peter’s Field, Manchester, wounding and maiming over 600 and killing at least fifteen men, women and children.
The peaceful protest, probably the largest the country had ever seen, was the culmination of a period of agitation for parliamentary reform and relief of Lancashire, Cheshire and Yorkshire cotton workers on starvation wages. Public outcry at the brutality set in motion a century-long but irresistible process of electoral reform, free trade unions and the basic elements of a liberal democracy.
‘Dreadful slaughter’
So where were the Quakers in all this?
In one sense, they were at the centre of the action. Manchester’s Meeting house, on the site of the present one in Mount Street, stood in ‘Quakers Yard’ on the northern edge of St Peter’s Field. When the cavalry charged the crowd, many turned and fled in the direction of the Meeting house, only to be met by foot soldiers driving them back. Some scrambled over the ten-foot high wall which surrounded the graveyard, where they were attacked by cavalry officers. Others sought sanctuary in the Meeting house by breaking down the doors. The soldiers followed, continuing their onslaught, leaving the floors and the yard outside stained with blood.
As a report in The Examiner put it, three weeks after the event: ‘The foot troops were marched to a station at the south end of the Quaker’s Meeting-house, to intercept the people who might fly in that direction; and here there was indeed most dreadful slaughter. Crowds pressed onto this quarter and were forced back by the bayonets of the infantry, the cavalry cutting them in the rear. The shouts, screams and confusion, were here truly terrible. The people, maddened with the danger, seemed under the influence of supernatural energy; they scaled the walls of the Meeting house yard in every direction, while those near the yard gates burst them open; the soldiers followed up the steps into the yard, and cut away without any seeming compunction. The Meeting house doors were then, in the terror of the people, also forced; but even a Quaker place of worship was no sanctuary – the soldiers still followed and many wounds were given here; – even in the galleries, which is difficult of access, there were many, many stains of blood. For several days afterward, workmen had to be employed to plane away, and otherwise obliterate the evidence left here of the butchering which had taken place.’
‘No mention of the incident’
Mayhem on such a scale within a Quaker Meeting house would surely have been recorded at some length in the minutes of Hardshaw East Monthly Meeting (of which Manchester was a part). A search of all the contemporary Quaker records was made in the centenary year 1919 by members of Mount Street Meeting, but they found no mention of Peterloo. Elizabeth Bailey, of Central Manchester Meeting, wrote in February 2019: ‘Over the last few years, members of Manchester and Warrington Area Meeting Documents and Manuscript Committee have trawled Quaker archives, including ten years of the various Hardshaw Area Meeting and Preparative Meeting minutes and records, in search of contemporary references to the events of Peterloo. None have been found. There is no mention of the incident happening at all… The Local Meeting accounts for 1819-1821 were examined for cleaning and carpentry bills. Again, none were found.’
I have scoured the minute books of the men’s and women’s Meetings and found nothing. Committee appointments, marriages and disownments for ‘marrying out’, fornication, bankruptcy or non-attendance are meticulously recorded, but there is not a word about a traumatic butchery within their own walls.
‘An outlook of non-involvement’
Well over a century later, however, in 1938, Quaker writer Elfrida Vipont Foulds published Lift up your Lamps: the Pageant of a Friends Meeting. This included a chapter on ‘The Battle of Peterloo’ in which two fictional Quakers, William and Sarah, are described tending the wounds of fugitives. This appears to be the source for the claim that Friends were present on the day and organised a makeshift field-hospital – a claim which is pictured in the Kendal Quaker Tapestry (below) under the heading: ‘Relief Work - Britain. “Our life is helping one another up with a tender hand.”’
But there is no contemporary evidence, Quaker or non-Quaker, to support the suggestion that Quakers were present during or immediately after the attack, let alone evidence of Friends’ relief work in an organised ‘field hospital’. On the contrary, it seems that Friends kept away from the protest and from their Meeting house that day and went to some lengths to disassociate themselves from what happened in their absence.
As Elizabeth Bailey writes, Quakers ‘did engage in much philanthropic activity to ameliorate the sufferings of the poor and uneducated in particular. However, any attempt to alter the actual framework of society was discouraged… The corporate outlook, in this age of reform, was one of non-involvement. Repeated warnings were issued. Any who took part in active politics tended to incur the displeasure of other Quakers’. The consequence of political quietism and withdrawal from worldly affairs, however, was that the status quo was unchallenged, and the distressed poor remained poor and distressed.
‘Respectable members’
Meeting house historian David Butler says there were ‘about 540’ Manchester Friends, ‘some very prosperous’ – mill owners, tradesmen and professionals. Their Meeting house, built in 1795 and replaced by the present building in 1830, was described in a city survey in 1808 as being ‘like the respectable members of the sect which here worship, plain and substantial’.
One respectable and substantial Quaker who missed the attack but collected witness statements immediately afterwards was mill owner and part-time journalist John Edward Taylor (son of John Taylor who supervised the Quaker school newly erected in St Peter’s Field in 1819). John Edward was critical of the reform movement’s leadership, but he wrote a report for The Times, based on his file of witness statements. Two years later he was one of the founders and the first editor of the Manchester Guardian.
Contrasting responses
Contrasted Quaker responses to Peterloo may be illustrated by the actions of two Quaker surgeons, John Ransome, of Manchester Meeting, and John Earnshaw, of Oldham Meeting. Both treated casualties and gave evidence at the investigations and inquests that followed. John Ransome was evidently a ‘loyalist’. He told the magistrates that ‘the cavalry must have studied to do as little mischief as they could, for the wounds were so slight’. When James Lees was brought to Manchester infirmary with a five-inch sabre cut to his head, John Ransome asked him if he’d ‘had enough of Manchester meetings. On his reply in the negative, he was told there was no room for him’.
John Earnshaw of Oldham took a very different view of what his Quaker commitment required of him. His story has been skilfully uncovered by Elizabeth Bailey in a paper for the Oldham Historical Research Group. He and two fellow Quakers watched the meeting in St Peter’s Field from an upstairs window in a house in Windmill Street, behind the hustings. They were the only three Quakers we know of who were direct witnesses to the military intervention and subsequent carnage. John Earnshaw was called by the defence team at the inquest on the death of John Lees but, true to Quaker testimony against oath-taking, refused to swear and was not allowed to proceed beyond a brief statement that the protest had been peaceful until the cavalry charge.
Elizabeth Bailey’s research reveals John Earnshaw as both committed Friend and prominent radical. He had regular convictions and fines for non-payment of tithes and military taxes, in obedience to the Peace Testimony. But he incurred the displeasure of his Meeting by his open, active support for political reform.
He is recorded as chairing the first public radical meeting in Oldham on 16 September 1816. Another mass meeting was held on 4 January 1817, again with John Earnshaw in the chair. Captain William Chippendale of the local militia, a government informer, sent a colourful report to Henry Addington, the home secretary. ‘A numerous Cavalcade of the Working Class’, he wrote, ‘was headed by a Quaker. The novel sight of a Quaker, leading up a Procession with a Band of Music at its Head, playing Marches and other Military Tones, excited no little Risibility… The Quaker’s name is Earnshaw… He is remarkable for his Disloyalty’.
Another informer, John Lloyd, wrote to the Home Office that he had reported John Earnshaw to ‘the leading men of that sect’, whereupon a deputation of Quakers had assured him that the Society ‘discourages all political dissensions’, quoting words to that effect from the Yearly Meeting epistle. John Lloyd boasted that he had received assurances from the deputation that ‘Earnshaw will be brought before the society and expelled’. Two attempts at disownment followed, but apparently were not approved after appeal to Quarterly Meeting.
Standing with those who suffered
Elizabeth Bailey summarises her research on John Earnshaw as follows:
‘What emerges is a partial portrait of a compassionate, principled, courageous and measured Oldhamer; a man who despite his comfortable background and position in society was prepared to stand with those who suffered from the injustices and inequalities of the political and social systems of that time, and with those who wanted to reform them; a man who withstood the onslaughts of the religious, legal and political bodies about him, who truly lived out the testimonies to truth, integrity and equality, an example for all times.’
And one who acquits his beloved Society of Friends of the charge that all Quakers were indifferent to Peterloo, and who had the reformers’ determination, in William Penn’s words, to ‘mend the world’ rather than withdraw from it.
David is a former president of the Friends Historical Society.
