Rebel Britannia
13th September 1819:
He was known for his white hat and his huge voice, he invented the powdered breakfast, and there is a legend that when Bob, his favourite horse, died the people of Preston gave it a state funeral. Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt (1773-1835) was the most famous, loved and feared politician of his time, a gentleman farmer and the son of a gentleman farmer who, having been radicalised in prison, said of himself when serving as an MP “I profess only to represent the working classes of England in the House of Commons.”
Hunt’s early story was conventional enough, and it wasn’t until he separated from his wife in 1802, having eloped with the woman who became his lifelong love (and who happened to be already married to one of his friends), that things started to go a bit wobbly. His marital scandal alienated him from the rural posh amongst whom he’d grown up, and this seems to have left him predisposed towards rebellion against their view of the world.
He served his first prison sentence in 1800. Hunt was a member of the volunteer yeomanry (a kind of paramilitary police force, made up of country gentlemen) and got in trouble for challenging his commanding officer to a duel. Given what we know of his character, this isn’t surprising; all his life he had an extraordinary talent for falling out with people who were supposed to be his allies, along with a very high estimation of his own worth and a determination that he should be in charge of whatever situation he found himself in.
During his six weeks inside, he met several leading liberals and radicals, and enjoyed (prison being a pretty relaxed affair for rich men in those days) stimulating dinners and other gatherings with some of the finest constitutional and economic thinkers of the era. By 1805, Hunt was making public speeches consisting of “general condemnation of all peculations and peculators.” At the same time, he was above all an enthusiastic and skilled farmer and all-round jolly countryman.
Long-running disputes with neighbours – culminating in Hunt being charged for assaulting a famous fisticuffer who had been sent to beat him up - led to another term of imprisonment. Again he treated the jail as if it was a three-star hotel hosting an Open University residential school. Again, he emerged better educated and more radical: he was now committed to greater democracy in both the political and the economic spheres. He began to be seen by middle-class moderates, who argued for minor and gradual reforms, as an extremist, a fundamentalist in the dangerous cause of liberty for all. In truth, his position was opposed to both the insurrectionists, who wanted to overthrow the established order through physical uprisings, and the moderates who, then as now, didn’t really want anything in particular, other than political careers for themselves.
Hunt’s strictly constitutional approach to campaigning, uncompromising in its demands and peaceful in its methods, based on massive rallies of impeccably self-disciplined crowds and huge petitions, alongside work in parliament and the law courts, became the typical model for popular movements until the middle of the century. Over the next few years, the man now known as Orator Hunt became nationally famous for his powerful public speaking. By 1816 he was frequently addressing outdoor audiences numbered in the tens of thousands.
The weaver-poet Samuel Bamford described him as “gentlemanly in his manner and attire, six feet and better in height, and extremely well formed. He was dressed in a blue lapelled coat, light waistcoat and kerseys, and topped boots. He wore his own hair; it was in moderate quantity and a little grey. His lips were delicately thin and receding. His eyes were blue or light grey - not very clear nor quick, but rather heavy; except as I afterwards had opportunities for observing, when he was excited in speaking; at which times they seemed to distend and protrude; and if he worked himself furious, as he sometimes would, they became blood-streaked, and almost started from their sockets. His voice was bellowing; his face swollen and flushed; his griped hand beat as if it were to pulverise; and his whole manner gave token of a painful energy."
So you can see why he’d draw an audience, if only to watch his eyes pop.
The Peterloo Massacre of 16th August 1819 (which Rebel Britannia will return to at another time) changed everything for Hunt – as it did for so many. As part of a campaign to demonstrate the scale of the anger felt by working people at the continuing refusal to give them the vote, and thus frighten the government into action through “pressure from without,” agitators organised a giant open-air meeting in Manchester, to be addressed by Orator Hunt.
A large, peaceful crowd – armed, as per Orator’s instructions, “with no other weapon but that of a self-approving conscience” - gathered at St Peter’s Field. The rally was attacked by cavalry; more than a dozen people died, and many hundreds were injured. Hunt, and other leaders, were arrested for “exciting discontent." A period of total repression of all dissent had begun in Britain.
Hunt spent his time as a political prisoner writing. His three-volume Memoirs of Henry Hunt, Esq., Written by himself in his Majesty's Jail at Ilchester and two-volume To the Radical Reformers, Male and Female of England, Ireland and Scotland go a long way to explaining his poor reputation in the 21st century. To modern eyes, they can come across as bombastic and self-aggrandising. But if we judge people by results, rather than by how irritating they are, then this period of Hunt’s life can only be considered an astonishing success: his writings on the cruelty and corruption of the prison system led to the governor of Ilchester being prosecuted, and the prison itself being demolished.
On his release, “the Captive of Ilchester” set about rebuilding his fortune. As usual, he combined his entrepreneurship with political activism. Radical Breakfast Powder was made of roasted, ground corn, long before the invention of breakfast cereal, and was a cheaper alternative to tea or coffee. But not only was it cheap – it was made from tax-free ingredients, so allowing radicals to start the day with a hot drink that did not put money into the exchequer of a regime they despised.
An advert for the breakfast powder in 1820 read: “Now that we are deprived of arms, the revenue is the only effectual manner in which we can overthrow the junto.” Hunt also promoted his breakfast powder as a health food, calling it “wholesome and nutritious,” a “most salubrious and nourishing Beverage that can be substituted for the use of Tea and Coffee, which are always exciting, and frequently the most irritating to the Stomach and Bowels.” Coffee, he pointed out, was a “heating, deleterious, narcotic berry, the production of a foreign clime.”
When Orator was ridiculed in parliament for selling his Matchless shoe-blacking, which came decorated with the slogan “Equal Laws, Equal Rights, Annual Parliaments, Universal Suffrage and the Ballot,” he sent the member in question a complimentary bottle of Matchless along with his thanks for the free publicity.
In 1830 Hunt was elected member of parliament for Preston, one of the few “potwalloper boroughs,” in which any man who owned a hearth big enough to boil a cauldron was granted a vote in parliamentary elections. It was then that he declared that he would act in the interests of “the Working Classes and no other.” His determination to oppose minor reform bills, to hold out for universal adult suffrage and nothing less, was not always popular. His consistent warnings that the working class should never be distracted, conned or divided by the tinkering reformism of middle-class liberals cost him what remained of his respectable following.
Although during his two years as an MP he spoke in the House more than a thousand times, always in support of the poor and for democracy (including votes for women), the political mood had moved on and he lost his seat in 1832. His years of political struggle had cost him his health as well as his fortune, and he died in 1835, following a stroke. His popularity rose again, needless to say, after his death, when he was seen as one of the great martyrs of the struggle for vote reform.
As for this date … on the 13th September 1819, in between his arrest for exciting discontent at Peterloo, and the beginning of his trial, Hunt arrived in London to attend a dinner in his honour, preceded by a “triumph” - a kind of procession-cum-demonstration which has since those days vanished from our political life.
It must have been an extraordinary sight. Even the government admitted that 200,000 people lined the route; the poet John Keats, an eye-witness, and sympathiser, reckoned it was 300,000. (The population of London at that time was about one and a half million). In a letter to relatives Keats reported that “The whole distance from the Angel at Islington to the Crown and Anchor was lined with multitudes,” and apologised that “to give you anything like detail” would “take me a whole day and a quire of paper.”
He was hardly exaggerating. The procession included hundreds of footmen bearing branches of oak and poplar, various emblems of the different wings of the democracy movement, such as “a bundle of sticks stuck on a pitchfork,” a red flag with the inscription “Universal Suffrage,” a white flag “surmounted and bordered with crape,” and a green silk flag “with gold letters and Irish harp”; members of “The Committees, bearing white wands, and all wearing knots of red ribband and laurel leaves in their hats”; carriages full of Hunt’s friends and comrades; Hunt himself, of course; endless bands and horsemen – and, says E.P. Thompson, a dog with “No Dog Tax” on his collar.
(The dinner itself was something of a disaster; not entirely unpredictably, Orator used the occasion to publicly fall out with most of the other leaders and the whole day cost so much that the poor sod who’d been lumbered with organising it all ended up in debtor’s prison.)
Sources:
The making of the English working class by EP Thompson (Penguin, 1991)
‘Orator’ Hunt by John Belchem (Breviary Stuff Publications, 2012)
https://spartacus-educational.com/PRhunt.htm
www.parliament.uk/about/living-heritage/transformingsociety/electionsvoting/womenvote/parliamentary-collections/1866-suffrage-petition/the-first-petition/
www.oxforddnb.com
www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820-1832/member/hunt-henry-1773-1835
https://blog.nationalarchives.gov.uk/peterloo-whatever-happened-to-henry-hunt/
Shelley and the Revolution in Taste: The Body and the Natural World by Timothy Morton (Cambridge University Press, 1994)
British drama of the industrial revolution by Frederick Burwick (Cambridge University Press, 2015).