Do you still count as a rebel, if Queen Victoria is amongst your supporters? I think if you're sentenced to imprisonment with hard labour for wanting higher wages, as the Ascott Martyrs were, then on balance the answer has to be yes. Especially what with the babies being sent to jail, and the riot and everything.
Ascott-under-Wychwood was a farming village in West Oxfordshire, and as in all such places at that time, poverty wages were standard, and the people employed on the land lived more like feudal peasants than free workers.
But there was in the 1870s a flowering of hope, as union fever spread through rural England - briefly, but with lasting consequences. When the National Agricultural Labourers' Union, under the charismatic leadership of Joseph Arch, arrived in Ascott, the effects were tumultuous.
A strike against the biggest landowner in the area, Mr Hambidge, began in the spring of 1873, with his men demanding a rise of two shillings a week. He sacked them, and brought in scab labour from elsewhere. Now, at that time it was legal to go on strike - but illegal to picket. So when a pair of young lads reported for work at one of Mr Hambidge's fields on 11th May they were met, not by union members, but by the womenfolk of the village - the wives, mothers and sisters of the strikers.
As a legal loophole, if that was the intention, this was never going to work, and seventeen alleged ringleaders among the women were charged at a court in Chipping Norton police station with obstruction and coercion. A union official stood by with his purse open, ready to pay the inevitable fines, but to everyone's shock the sentence was imprisonment with hard labour: nine women got seven days, seven got ten days. One was acquitted. The ages of the convicted ranged from sixteen to 45. Two of them had babies still nursing, who would go to prison with them.
Fury at this manifest injustice (no serious evidence for obstruction or coercion was ever produced, and even if it had been, hard labour was an astonishingly harsh sentence) exploded almost instantly. Within a short while, the police station was surrounded by well over 1,000 angry people, drawn from all over the area. The building came under sustained physical attack, with windows, lamps and roof tiles being smashed, while the authorities, besieged, cowered within, their prisoners squashed together in two tiny, dark cells.
Police reinforcements eventually broke through in the early hours of the next morning, and the sixteen women and two babies - hungry, dirty and cold - arrived at Oxford Gaol at 6am. But beyond the prison, the union was busy fanning the flames. First local and then national newspapers covered the story, it was raised in parliament, and it rapidly became the topic of the week throughout the nation.
It was widely believed at the time (though it's never been proved) that Victoria herself was so disgusted at the treatment of "the Ascott Martyrs" that she intervened personally with the Home Secretary. Certainly the government quickly understood that it needed to throw some water on the fire, and the sentences were commuted allowing the women to be freed immediately. Such is the tortuous way of the legal system, however, that by the time all the formalities had been completed, all the prisoners had already completed their sentences. Still, it was a massive propaganda victory for the union.
The martyrs were celebrated as great heroines by large crowds, outside the prison, back home in their villages, and at every stop in-between. A legend which has lasted from then to now has it that the Queen sent each of them five shillings and a red petticoat. Whether that's true or not, the union did present each martyr with five pounds and the material to make a dress in union blue, all paid for by public donations. Five pounds was at least two months' wages, and a new dress must have been a rare pleasure indeed.
Most importantly, the striking land workers got their two shillings per week extra.
*
Sources:
www.ascottmartyrs.co.uk
Country Standard (Summer 2018)
https://spartacus-educational.com/TUarch.htm
www.historic-uk.com/HistoryUK/HistoryofEngland/Ascott-Martyrs
www.oxfordmail.co.uk/news/15031065.sixteen-women-caused-riots-chipping-norton-won-approval-queen-victoria-beverley-mccombs-new-book-tells-t/