In 1819, a great demonstration took place in St Peter's Fields, Manchester – one of the new cities that had no parliamentary representation. Some 60,000 mainly working-class men, women and children marched on the town, calling for reform.
The huge crowd was carefully marshalled, with the brass bands accompanying each division playing patriotic tunes. When they struck up the National Anthem, the men in the crowd took off their hats. On that beautiful summer's day, families picnicked and the children played while their parents listened to radical orators.
Manchester's 10 magistrates, watching from the edge of the crowd, believed the rumours that an armed insurrection was about to erupt. They demanded that the deputy constable arrest the speakers, but he refused. So the magistrates read the Riot Act and ordered in the military, who were waiting in side streets. The first to arrive was the badly trained part-time Manchester Yeomanry, comprising middle-class shopkeepers and tradesmen, some of whom may have been drunk.
The horsemen charged at the peaceful crowd, swinging their sabres. The men, women and children that they attacked were cut down by the swords and trampled by the horses. The yeomanry killed 11 and wounded about 400 in what, in a savage parody of Waterloo, became known within days as the 'Peterloo Massacre'.
One of the speakers that day, Richard Carlile, reported the incident in Sherwin's Weekly Political Register two days later:
The Yeomanry Cavalry made their charge with a most infuriate frenzy; they cut down men, women and children, indiscriminately, and appeared to have commenced a pre-meditated attack with the most insatiable thirst for blood and destruction.
The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley read about the massacre while he was in Italy. He was so incensed that he wrote a long poem The Mask of Anarchy that was so vitriolic that it could not be published in his lifetime. He described a 'ghastly masquerade' with 'Anarchy' – misgovernment – riding a blood-spattered white horse and with a mark on his forehead that proclaimed: 'I am GOD, AND KING, AND LAW.'
With a pace stately and fast,
Over English land he passed,
Trampling to a mire of blood
The adoring multitude.
And a mighty troop around,
With their trampling shook the ground,
Waving each a bloody sword,
For the service of their Lord.
The poem was finally published in 1832, the year when the Reform Act began the transformation of parliamentary democracy.
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 Peterloo Massacre
www.spartacus.schoolnet.co.uk/peterloo.h
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Information on this event put in historical context and alongside eyewitness accounts.
The Peterloo Massacre, 1819
www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/1819peterloo
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A short article about the massacre, written by an historian a century later.
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