Murray Armstrong - The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820
Here you can read online Murray Armstrong - The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820 full text of the book (entire story) in english for free. Download pdf and epub, get meaning, cover and reviews about this ebook. City: London, year: 2020, publisher: Pluto Press, genre: History. Description of the work, (preface) as well as reviews are available. Best literature library LitArk.com created for fans of good reading and offers a wide selection of genres:
Romance novel
Science fiction
Adventure
Detective
Science
History
Home and family
Prose
Art
Politics
Computer
Non-fiction
Religion
Business
Children
Humor
Choose a favorite category and find really read worthwhile books. Enjoy immersion in the world of imagination, feel the emotions of the characters or learn something new for yourself, make an fascinating discovery.
- Book:The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820
- Author:
- Publisher:Pluto Press
- Genre:
- Year:2020
- City:London
- Rating:3 / 5
- Favourites:Add to favourites
- Your mark:
The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820: summary, description and annotation
We offer to read an annotation, description, summary or preface (depends on what the author of the book "The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820" wrote himself). If you haven't found the necessary information about the book — write in the comments, we will try to find it.
Three Scottish weavers, James Wilson, Andrew Hardie and John Baird, were hanged and beheaded for high treason in the summer of 1820. Nineteen more men were transported to the penal colony of Botany Bay. Their crime? To have taken up arms against a corrupt and nepotistic parliament, and the aristocratic government that refused to reform it.This Radical War was the culmination of five years of unsuccessful mass petitioning of Westminster by working people in Scotland and England. The contempt and intransigence of the Tory government forced an escalation in tactics, and on Easter Monday of 1820, the call for a general strike was answered throughout the western counties of Scotland. Their demands were threefold: the vote for all men, annual parliaments and equal constituencies. Coupled with an armed rebellion, the strike was met by the full military might of the British state; hundreds were arrested and imprisoned without trial, while hundreds more fled the country.This Scottish general strike and insurrection is a little-known chapter of British history and yet remains an immensely important one in the long fight for democracy. In The Fight for Scottish Democracy, Murray Armstrong brings these events dramatically to life.
Murray Armstrong: author's other books
Who wrote The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820? Find out the surname, the name of the author of the book and a list of all author's works by series.
Murray Armstrong
John MacCormick
Peter Berresford-Ellis
David Stevenson
Noonan
Clare John
Malcolm Chase
The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820 — read online for free the complete book (whole text) full work
Below is the text of the book, divided by pages. System saving the place of the last page read, allows you to conveniently read the book "The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820" online for free, without having to search again every time where you left off. Put a bookmark, and you can go to the page where you finished reading at any time.
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
The Fight for Scottish Democracy
The Fight for
Scottish Democracy
Scottish Democracy
Rebellion and Reform in 1820
Murray Armstrong
First published 2020 by Pluto Press
345 Archway Road, London N6 5AA
www.plutobooks.com
Copyright Murray Armstrong 2020
The right of Murray Armstrong to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 978 0 7453 4132 3 Hardback
ISBN 978 0 7453 4133 0 Paperback
ISBN 978 1 7868 0656 7 PDF eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0658 1 Kindle eBook
ISBN 978 1 7868 0657 4 EPUB eBook
Typeset by Stanford DTP Services, Northampton, England
For Cath
Contents
Acknowledgements
This book owes a great deal to the helpful professionalism of the staff at the National Archives in Kew, the National Records of Scotland and the National Library of Scotland, both in Edinburgh, the British Library in London and the London Library. The combined resources of these institutions, on their shelves and online, are formidable research tools. My thanks also goes to Mary Dunne of Airdrie Public Library and Karen Gallacher of the North Lanarkshire Archives in Motherwell for assembling so many valuable local documents for me to read.
A special thanks is due to Anne Beech, commissioning editor for Pluto Press, who had faith in this story and stuck with it for many months, as well as Jeanne Brady, who did such a speedy and accomplished edit of my manuscript.
( John Houston)
1
1820: Death on the Green
The two women left their hiding place and crossed the burial ground to the newly dug grave. In the clear light of a waning August moon, they struggled to shovel away the loose sods and soil until they were waist deep. The blade of a spade struck the coffin. They hesitated before scraping the earth from the rough wooden box and forced open the lid as silently as they could. The bloodstained handkerchief covering the decapitated head was all the identification needed. It was the hanky James Wilson had dropped earlier that day to signal to the hangman he was ready to meet his end. After the hanging, a masked and cloaked axeman severed the head from the lifeless body, held it up to the thousands watching, and called out This is the head of a traitor!
Murder! Murder! they roared, He has died for his country!
Lillian Walters grabbed a handle on her fathers coffin while her cousin, Mrs Ritchie, and two helpers who had arrived with a horse and cart, took the others. They hauled the heavy casket from the ground and manhandled it to the wall, where they lifted it over and placed it on the waiting cart. They left the paupers ground, under the walls of the ancient cathedral and, shortly after midnight, drove down Glasgows deserted High Street towards their home town of Strathaven. They passed the high clock steeple of the town hall at the cross and their silence seemed to intensify as they continued south on Saltmarket and neared the new courthouse and jail at the entrance to Glasgow Green. This was where, at 3 oclock that afternoon, the 63-year-old Wilson, dressed in white prison clothes, was executed for treason in front of 20,000 onlookers. The authorities were anxious on account of public sympathy shown for the old radical and had the scaffold and surrounding streets protected by a regiment of infantry with loaded muskets, reinforced by mounted and heavily armed dragoon guards.
Wilson had requested that his body be taken home and buried in the churchyard behind his cottage, and his daughter and niece had come to Glasgow in mourning clothes that day to witness his end and to supervise the transport of his body home. This was common practice after an execution, but in Wilsons case the authorities insisted he be buried without ceremony somewhere in the city. Some understanding official had, however, passed a hint to the family that the coffin would not be too difficult to recover, so friends in Strathaven organised a farmers cart and the two women hid in the shadows of the cemetery before it was closed and locked. It was 4 oclock in the morning before Lillian Walters, Mrs Ritchie, and their two friends reached the outskirts of Strathaven, where a large number of townsfolk, with their heads uncovered, accompanied them to the churchyard behind the Wilsons cottage and laid him in an unofficial grave, which remained unmarked for more than two decades because of opposition from local ministers.
Wilson had been condemned for taking part in a rising called by a provisional government. On 1 April 1820, posters appeared on the streets of towns and villages across the west of Scotland appealing to the inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland to take up arms for the redress of our common grievances and some 60,000 people in the five counties surrounding Glasgow downed tools in a general strike in support of the demand.
Petition after petition asking for an extension of the vote and reform of outdated constituencies and rotten boroughs had been rejected by parliament since the first popular movement for universal male suffrage in 1792. Wilson had been a member of the Scottish Friends of the People at the time and had attended a radical convention in Edinburgh in 1793 where he represented the reformers of Strathaven who were mostly, like him, weavers. That organisation was crushed and its national leaders prosecuted for sedition and transported to the new penal colony of Sydney Cove in Australia. Wilson was instrumental in keeping democratic ideas alive through more than twenty years of war with France, when political liberties were restricted and national organisations banned. At the end of the war in 1815, he campaigned against the newly introduced Corn Laws, which kept the price of bread high for the benefit of landowners, and he joined the renewed movement petitioning for parliamentary reform.
On the day after his death, the Glasgow Chronicle, which dismissed the 1820 radicals as A handful of poor, ignorant, presumptuous mechanics, without principles, without abilities, without funds or leaders, or a digested scheme of operations, nevertheless credited Wilson with being a good neighbour and a useful obliging man; and though a wag, and possessed of a fund of humour he conducted his drollery so as seldom to offend. He was a free thinker on religious subjects who sometimes went to church, but was more attached to Tom Paines criticism of organised religion, The Age of Reason. The Tory Glasgow Herald was more circumspect. On Friday, 1 September, it declared, By one set of people he is said to have been an easy-tempered man, led away by others, and it is with equal confidence asserted on the other hand that he was a man of bad morals, and of the worst principles in respect both of religion and of politics. His warmth was remembered by a friend, Margaret Hunter. I kent Jeems Wilson lang afore he was a prominent Radical, she recalled in 1887 at the age of 96. He was a noble weever, and mony a time made stockings and drawers for my guidman. He was often in oor hoose in Kilbride, and had dinner with us twenty times. He was highly respeckit a roun the kintra side.
The Political Union societies set up after the Napoleonic Wars, which advocated radical reform, were designed for education and discussion, and Wilson was class leader in Strathaven, most meetings taking place under his roof. By 1819, the gatherings in his house were discussing the English radical press, such as the
Light
Font size:
↓
↑
Reset
Interval:
↓
↑
Bookmark:
Make
Similar books «The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820»
Look at similar books to The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820. We have selected literature similar in name and meaning in the hope of providing readers with more options to find new, interesting, not yet read works.
John MacCormick
Peter Berresford-Ellis
David Stevenson
Noonan
Clare John
Malcolm Chase
Reviews about «The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820»
Discussion, reviews of the book The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820 and just readers' own opinions. Leave your comments, write what you think about the work, its meaning or the main characters. Specify what exactly you liked and what you didn't like, and why you think so.