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The Peterloo Massacre is a major event in Manchester’s history, and a defining moment for Britain’s democracy. A moment when ordinary people stepped up to protest in a way that has made its mark in history and with a legacy that lives on to today.

On 16 August 1819, 60,000 people congregated in St Peter’s Field in Manchester, with demands for the right to vote, freedom from oppression, and justice. Historian Dr Shirin Hirsch explains how, despite its peaceful beginning, this was a day that would end with a bloody outcome.

From Waterloo to Manchester
In 1789 the French Revolution shook the world and the ideas of liberty, equality, and fraternity spread rapidly. In Britain, less than 3% of the population could vote and the system was entirely corrupt. The ideas of the French Revolution were therefore eagerly received and most powerfully expressed in Thomas Paine’s book, Rights of Man (1791). Paine’s words inspired ordinary people to question the systems they lived under, systems that had been challenged by those across the channel. The British government prepared for war not simply to defeat the revolutionary ‘menace’ in France, but also to destroy the revolutionary ‘menace’ in Britain that Tom Paine had helped unleash.

The protestors were peaceful and unarmed. There were crowds of people in all directions, full of humour, laughing and shouting and making fun. It seemed to be a gala day with the country people, who were mostly dressed in their best and brought with them their wives…’ The crowds waited in eager anticipation to hear the principal speaker of the day, Henry Hunt.

In an overlooking building, staring down on the scene, were the magistrates. After two hours of observing, they gave the orders to the enforcers of law surrounding the crowd that the protesters must be dispersed, while the radical reform leaders were to be arrested. On hearing these orders, the recently formed, Manchester and Salford Yeomanry pulled out their sabres and charged the crowd on horseback. The first victim of the attack was a two year old child, who was thrust from his mother’s arms when she fled the cavalry. At least 18 people were killed, of whom three were women, and almost 700 were injured; 168 of these were women.

In the days that followed, the massacre was named ‘Peterloo’ by a journalist in a mocking reference to the celebrated victory at Waterloo in the Napoleonic Wars that Britain had fought. Lees’ dying words to his friend were, at ‘Waterloo there was man to man, but at Manchester it was downright murder’.

Legacy of Peterloo
The British government was keen to cover up the massacre, imprisoning the reform leaders and clamping down on those who spoke out against the government.

When Percy Bysshe Shelley heard of the massacre, he penned the poem The Masque of Anarchy, powerfully indicting those who were responsible. Yet Shelley could not find a publisher brave enough to print his words, with the genuine threat of imprisonment hanging over radicals in this period. It was only in 1832, after Shelley’s death, that the poem was first published, and the new Chartist movement would take up his words with gusto.

Shelley begins his poem, with the powerful images of the unjust forms of authority of his time, "God, and King, and Law" – and then imagines the stirrings of a radically new form of social action: "Let a great assembly be, of the fearless, of the free". The crowd at this gathering is met by armed soldiers, but the protesters do not raise an arm against their assailants:

Stand ye calm and resolute,
Like a forest close and mute,
With folded arms and looks which are
Weapons of unvanquished war.

And if then the tyrants dare,
Let them ride among you there;
Slash, and stab, and maim and hew;
What they like, that let them do.

With folded arms and steady eyes,
And little fear, and less surprise,
Look upon them as they slay,
Till their rage has died away:

Then they will return with shame,
To the place from which they came,
And the blood thus shed will speak
In hot blushes on their cheek:

Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!

Men of England, heirs of Glory,
Heroes of unwritten story,
Nurslings of one mighty Mother,
Hopes of her, and one another!

What is Freedom? Ye can tell
That which Slavery is too well,
For its very name has grown
To an echo of your own

Let a vast assembly be,
And with great solemnity
Declare with measured words, that ye
Are, as God has made ye, free.

The old laws of England—they
Whose reverend heads with age are grey,
Children of a wiser day;
And whose solemn voice must be
Thine own echo—Liberty!

Rise, like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number!
Shake your chains to earth, like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you:
Ye are many—they are few!Læs mere