Peterloo Massacre

On 16 August 1819 cavalry charged into a peaceful mass meeting for parliamentary reform at St Peter's Field in Manchester, England. Historians count about eighteen dead and somewhere between 400 and 700 injured. A local newspaper soon dubbed the event "Peterloo", in bitter mockery of the Battle of Waterloo four years earlier, and it became one of the defining episodes in the long struggle for the vote in Britain.

The end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 brought hard times to the textile districts of Lancashire. Handloom weavers who might have earned 15 shillings a week in 1803 were down to five or less by 1818, while the Corn Laws kept the price of bread high. Only around 11 per cent of adult men could vote, and fast-growing industrial towns such as Manchester had no MPs of their own, while tiny "rotten boroughs" like Old Sarum each returned two members. Radicals argued that only parliamentary reform could relieve the distress, but mass petitions were rejected by the House of Commons.

In 1819 the Manchester Patriotic Union invited the celebrated radical speaker Henry Hunt to address a great open-air meeting. Originally planned for 9 August, it was put back to 16 August after the magistrates declared the original meeting illegal and the organisers took legal advice. The organisers urged discipline: contingents from surrounding towns marched in order, under banners calling for universal suffrage, annual parliaments and repeal of the Corn Laws, and were told to carry no weapons. Women's reform societies, dressed in white, took a prominent part. The authorities, alarmed by reports of men drilling on the hills, assembled a large force of regular troops, yeomanry and special constables.

Estimates of the crowd vary widely: contemporaries suggested anything from 30,000 to 150,000, a figure of around 60,000 is often quoted, and recent historians have proposed between about 30,000 and 50,000. Hunt arrived shortly after 1 p.m. and climbed onto the hustings, two carts lashed together.

The magistrates, watching from a nearby house, issued a warrant for the arrest of Hunt and other speakers and called on the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, a part-time cavalry drawn from local tradesmen. On its way to the field one trooper knocked down a mother and killed her two-year-old son. The yeomanry forced its way into the dense crowd, where its inexperienced horses panicked and the riders began slashing with their sabres. Hunt was arrested, but the troopers then attacked banners and people around them. The magistrates' chairman, William Hulton, believing the yeomanry was under attack, sent in the 15th Hussars, and the Cheshire Yeomanry charged from another side. Exits were blocked and people were trampled. Within about ten minutes the field was cleared, leaving the dead and wounded behind. Women were injured at a strikingly high rate.

The government backed the magistrates, and the Prince Regent sent them his thanks. Hunt was sentenced to 30 months in prison for sedition, and the editor of the Manchester Observer, which coined the name Peterloo, was jailed for a year. A civil action against yeomanry officers failed. By the end of the year the government had brought in the Six Acts to curb radical meetings and publications. The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote The Masque of Anarchy in response, though it could not be published until 1832.

Peterloo did not speed up reform, but it became a rallying cry for radicals and liberals for generations. A group of Manchester businessmen led by John Edward Taylor, who had witnessed the massacre, founded the Manchester Guardian in 1821, and after the Great Reform Act of 1832 Manchester elected its first two MPs. Further extensions of the vote followed in 1867, 1884 and 1918. A memorial by the artist Jeremy Deller, listing eighteen names of the dead, was unveiled on the bicentenary in 2019.

Our 1815 map shows Britain, at the centre of the British Empire, as it stood four years before the massacre; Manchester is today in the north-west of England, part of the United Kingdom.