The Life and Legend of a Rebel Leader by Stephen Basdeo

Author:Stephen Basdeo
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: HISTORY / Europe / Great Britain / General
ISBN: 9781526709813
Publisher: Pen and Sword
Published: 2018-02-27T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER FIVE

Radicalism and Chartism

As to the motives that have always actuated REFORMERS and LEVELLERS; (for the words are, with very few exceptions, synonymous) – whether Wat Tyler, Jack Cade, Kit the Tanner, Tom Paine, or the Spa Fields Orators – Reformation is the specious pretext, but REVOLUTION and PLUNDER the real object and end!

Anon. The Morning Post (1817)

This man was much in advance of his period; he was well-informed and well-intentioned; he was a radical of a nature that astounded ‘the powers that were’ – an aristocracy so very high in Toryism, they could believe no improvement in the people’s condition less than a crime, for which there was no punishment bad enough. All who attempted to show that the people’s necks were bowed down, trodden on, and they were fools to submit to it, were stigmatised as ‘scandalous and wicked traytours’; and the idea of abolishing villeinage was greeted with a shout of scornful laughter.

Pierce Egan the Younger, Wat Tyler; or, The Rebellion of 1381 (1841)

Up! Up! Ye English peasantry, for whom Wat Tyler bled;

Up! Cited serfs, whose sturdy sires Cade and Archamber led;

Up! Up! For equal rights and laws: your cause is all as good

As when in the presence of the Smith a traitor monarch stood.

Anon. A Song for the Next Rebellion (1841)

We have seen how Wat Tyler was radicalised during the late eighteenth century when he was appropriated by authors such as Thomas Paine and Robert Southey. Radical appropriations of Wat Tyler continue during the early-to-mid nineteenth century at precisely the same moment that political reform movements burst onto the political scene. Radical orators invoke Wat Tyler’s name at mass meetings. Radical poets call on Tyler’s spirit to rouse the working classes into action. Tyler’s name was particularly important to members of the working-class Chartist movement, which existed between 1838 and 1858. Chartist poets would sing Tyler’s praises. Novelists portray Tyler as a proto-Chartist, notably Pierce Egan the Younger, whose novel Wat Tyler, or, The Rebellion of 1381 (1841) was a huge bestseller. Various branches of the Chartist movement named themselves the Wat Tyler Brigade or the Wat Tyler League.1 Let us now examine representations of Tyler between c.1800 and c.1840.

Let it be remembered that, during the early nineteenth century, by and large, neither the middle classes nor the working classes had the vote. A man had to own over forty shillings in freehold property to be eligible to vote. The property qualification for the vote, having been established during the fifteenth century, was clearly inadequate for the nineteenth century. Moreover, the constituency map was outdated. Important ‘new’ towns such as Manchester and Leeds, which had grown in size and economic importance, returned no MPs, while places like Old Sarum in Wiltshire which was nothing but a field by the 1830s, returned two MPs. The practice of voting itself was open to corruption. Voting was not via secret ballot as it is today but done in public. Voters were often either bribed or ‘persuaded’ to vote a particular way.

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