On the 1st April 1820, 2000 armed men approached the town of Huddersfield in West Yorkshire. They came from four different directions and their intention was to take the Garrison that was situated there. Approximately 400 of these men came from within Huddersfield itself.
The Yorkshire rebellion is surprisingly not widely known about; it doesn’t feature in many of the history books. While we hear about the Cato Street conspiracy of February 1820, and the massacre of Peterloo of August 1819, we don’t often hear or read about the rebellions that occurred in Yorkshire, and it is only comparatively recently that the connected insurrection in Scotland, despite the execution of 3 of the rebels, has been brought to public awareness.
In June 1815, Napoleon Bonaparte was defeated in the battle of Waterloo. There will have been great rejoicing that the war was over and much joy and relief that the soldiers would be coming back to their loved ones, and few would have realised the economic backlash that this would bring.
The Napoleonic wars lasted for twelve and a half years, in which time the National Debt grew astronomically. However during the war the economy was strong as there was much demand for items to pursue the war and this gave rise to high employment and a rich and profitable manufacturing industry. With peace there was a ruinous drop in demand for many items causing massive layoffs, and in addition to this, there came into the workplace, the 250,000 demobilised soldiers and sailors, who with no pensions were now desperate for work. The response of the government to this was to introduce laws that would protect the purses of the wealthy rather than the stomachs of the poor.
Then in early 1820, King George III died, putting his unpopular son, the Prince Regent, now King George IV, on the throne. The French revolution ended only two decades previously, and the ‘power of the people’, was far from forgotten. Did Britain need a King? France had toppled theirs with its cry of ‘Liberty, Equality, Fraternity’. ‘Liberty’ was the rallying cry of the American Revolution, that finished in 1789, only a decade before the end of the French revolution, when Thomas Jefferson in the Declaration of Independence, wrote that ‘all men are created equal. With such a heady brew of ideas to draw from, was it surprising that the English working class should group together in political societies to plot and plan for a better society, and dare to hope that in Britain also all men could be considered equal.
The Yorkshire Rebellion of 1820 was however, less successful and much less ‘bloody’ than they early revolutions that may have inspired them.
In Huddersfield the attack was called off, there is no known reason given for this. No arrests were made on the day, but four Huddersfield radicals were subsequently arrested, two of whom were later transported to Tasmania and another two were sent to the prison hulks, only to be pardoned after two years.
In Barnsley, the Barnsley Union Society received word that in the early hours of 12th April there was to be a second attempt to capture Huddersfield. As a result about 400 of them marched to the outskirts of Huddersfield, at Grange Moor, to await the arrival of other radicals to arrive. Only 20 men appeared. They had expected thousands. When the men from Barnsley understood that no more were coming to join them, they panicked and fled back to their homes. Troops hearing of the prospective uprising later arrested 17 individuals, and confiscated the weapons that had been abandoned in the flight.
A similar situation happened in Sheffield. On the night of the 11th April, about 200 men, under the banner of a local agitator, John Blackwell, congregated on the Haymarket; Blackwell fired a pistol, but no other acts of violence occurred, and they later dispersed. Only Blackwell was arrested and he received a sentence of 30 months.
References
Fred Donnelly, 2007. The Yorkshire Rebellion of 1820: What caused it? Albion Magazine Online Summer 2007.
Fred Donnelly, 2012, Blackwell Reference Online
The Yorkshire Rebellion 1820. Yorkshire Roses online ,2012.
Yorkshire West Riding Revolt of 1820. Wikipedia, 2014.
Northern Voices: The Yorkshire Rebellion of 1820. Online archive 2020.