Days of May
The Days of May was a period of significant social unrest and political tension in the
The campaign to broaden the electoral franchise had garnered wide and organised national support over the preceding years, led by Thomas Attwood's Birmingham Political Union, which boasted that it "had united two million men peacefully and legally in one grand and determined association to recover the liberty, the happiness, and the prosperity of the country".[1]
While Attwood was careful to keep the unions' activities legal and non-violent, he also encouraged the widespread belief that they were potentially a powerful and independent extra-parliamentary force; he boasted that the nation could be mobilised in an hour.
The crisis was defused by the reinstatement of Grey's government on 15 May and King
Historians debate as to how decisive this extra-parliamentary pressure was in securing the passage of the bill, but the period is seen as one of the times when the United Kingdom came closest to a revolution, which could have also led to the end of the monarchy in the manner of France.
Background
Reform also had a record of inspiring popular discontent. In 1819 a crowd of 15,000 had gathered at Newhall Hill in Birmingham to symbolically elect Charles Wolseley as the town's "Legislatorial Attorney and Representative" in Westminster; when Manchester followed Birmingham's lead two months later, troops opened fire and killed 15: this event became known as the Peterloo Massacre.[6]
By the 1830s the most influential extra-parliamentary support for reform came from the Birmingham Political Union, which had been founded by Thomas Attwood in December 1829 as "a General Political Union between the lower and middle classes of the people" to engineer the political reform that Attwood had come to think necessary to achieve his ultimate goal of currency reform.[12] The unusually small size of the units of production characteristic of the Birmingham economy, coupled with the resulting high degree of social mobility and shared economic interest between Birmingham workers and factory owners, enabled the BPU to attract a broad support across classes[13] and maintain its position of leadership among the hundreds of more fragmented unions that followed its example and formed across the country in 1830 and 1831.[14]
The BPU had made its reputation amid the spontaneous rioting that had accompanied the fall of the First Reform Bill in 1831, assembling 150,000 protesters at Newhall Hill in the largest political assembly the country had ever seen.[15] Its threat to reorganise itself along semi-military lines in November 1831 had led to suggestions that it was trying to usurp the civil authority, and made a deliberate, if implicit, threat of the possibility of armed revolt in the event of the formation of an anti-reform government.[16] The Times called the BPU "the barometer of the reform feeling throughout England",[17] while Attwood himself was dubbed "King Tom" by William Cobbett and described by Francis Place as "the most influential man in England".[18]
Causes of the riots
Change of leader
On 9 May 1832, after the
BPU meeting
The news of Grey's resignation was not reported in London on the day it happened, but on 10 May 1832, news reached Birmingham about the situation.
Progress and events
Pro-reform organisations such as the
Revolutionary potential
Although at the time it was claimed that the nation could be mobilised in an hour, commentators disagree on how real the threat of revolution was during the Days of May. Contemporary observers had little doubt:
See also
Notes
- ^ Predecessor of the now Conservative Party.
References
- ^ Flick 1971, p. 356
- ^ Ferguson 1960, p. 269
- ^ Evans 1983, p. 5
- ^ Evans 1983, p. 5
- ^ Evans 1983, p. 4
- ^ Moss 1990, pp. 77–78
- ^ Cannon 1973, pp. 177–188
- ^ Cannon 1973, p. 203
- ^ Cannon 1973, p. 204
- ^ Evans 1983, p. 32
- ^ Evans 1983, p. 33
- ^ LoPatin-Lummis 2008
- ^ Briggs 1952, pp. 297–298
- ^ Rudé 1967, p. 95
- ^ Flick 1971, p. 359. "It was the great meetings called by the council to support the new Whig government's reform bill which gave the union its reputation. There is little doubt but that they were the largest political assemblages held in England to that date."
- ^ Ferguson 1960, pp. 268–269
- ^ Briggs 1952, p. 300
- ^ Briggs 1948, p. 190
- ^ Hilton 2006, p. 426
- ^ Hilton 2006, p. 426
- ^ Butler 1914, p. 379
- ^ Martin 1996, p. 89
Bibliography
- Briggs, Asa (1948), "Thomas Attwood and the Economic Background of the Birmingham Political Union", Cambridge Historical Journal, 9 (2): 190–216, JSTOR 3020620
- Briggs, Asa (1952), "The Background of the Parliamentary Reform Movement in Three English Cities (1830-2)", Cambridge Historical Journal, 10 (3): 293–317, JSTOR 3021116
- Butler, J. R. M. (1914), The Passing of the Great Reform Bill, Longmans Green, OCLC 891220, retrieved 2009-11-11
- Cannon, John Ashton (1973), Parliamentary Reform 1640-1832, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-09736-3, retrieved 2009-11-10
- Evans, Eric J. (1983), The Great Reform Act of 1832, Routledge, ISBN 0-416-34450-X, retrieved 2009-11-07
- Ferguson, Henry (March 1960), "The Birmingham Political Union and the Government 1831-32", Victorian Studies, 3 (3): 261–276, JSTOR 3825499
- Flick, Carlos T. (August 1971), "Thomas Attwood, Francis Place, and the Agitation for British Parliamentary Reform", The Huntington Library Quarterly, 34 (4): 355–366, JSTOR 3816950
- Hilton, Boyd (2006), A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People?: England, 1783-1846, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-822830-9, retrieved 2009-11-07
- LoPatin-Lummis, Nancy (2008), "Birmingham Political Union (act. 1829–1839)", Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Online ed.), Oxford University Press, retrieved 2009-11-06
- Martin, Howard (1996), Britain in the Nineteenth Century, Cheltenham: Nelson Thornes, ISBN 0-17-435062-7, retrieved 2009-11-06
- Moss, David J. (1990), Thomas Attwood: The Biography of a Radical, Montreal: McGill-Queen's Press, ISBN 0-7735-0708-6, retrieved 2009-11-06
- Royle, Edward (2000), Revolutionary Britannia?: Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, 1789-1848, Manchester: Manchester University Press, ISBN 0-7190-4803-6, retrieved 2009-11-06
- Randall, Adrian (2006), Riotous Assemblies: Popular Protest in Hanoverian England, Oxford University Press, ISBN 0-19-925990-9, retrieved 2009-11-10
- Rudé, George (July 1967), "English Rural and Urban Disturbances on the Eve of the First Reform Bill, 1830-1831", Past and Present, 37 (37): 87–102, JSTOR 650024