Test Bank for Financial Accounting A Critical Approach CANADIAN Canadian 4th Edition by

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02. Financial Statements: A Window on an Entity

1. Which of the following statements best describes the IFRS conceptual framework?
A. It provides a set of rules for accountants to follow.
B. It provides concepts, since accounting is based on nature of law.
C. It helps equity investors interpret the earnings per share.
D. It provides a basis for preparing and presenting financial statements.

2. Financial information is relevant for all of the following reasons except:

A. for making predictions about the future cash flows
B. for making comparisons with industry data.
C. to determine the liquidation values of capital assets
D. for confirming or correcting past evaluations.

3. The use of a company's financial statements to assess a new share offering would rely most heavily onwhich
of the following characteristics of information?
A. Verifiability
B. Relevance
C. Going concern assumption
D. Unit of measure assumption

4. Which of the following is an objective of general purpose financial reporting?

A. To provide information about an entity's economic resources, obligations, and equity/net assets.
B. To provide information that is helpful to investors, creditors and other users in making resource allocation
decisions and/or assessing management stewardship.
C. To provide information that is useful in assessing the economic performance of the entity.
D. All of these are objectives of financial reporting.

5. Financial information does not demonstrate comparability when:

A. companies in the same industry use different accounting policies to account for the same type of transaction.
B. one company changes its estimate of the residual value of a fixed asset while the other company does not
change it.
C. one company fails to adjust its financial statements for changes in the fair value of short term investments,
while the other company makes the adjustment.
D. both companies use different suppliers.
6. The transition to International Financial Reporting Standards can be seen as enhancing which of the
following qualitative characteristics?
A. Verifiability
B. Comparability
C. Understandability
D. Timeliness

7. Anvilles Inc. manufactures metal sheets for construction. Mr. Anvilles, the sole shareholder, arranges to
transport two hundred metal sheets to the family cottage in Mont Orford. He tells the bookkeeper to record the
cost of the metal sheets as cost of goods sold.
Which of the following qualitative characteristics of accounting information has not been respected?
A. Both verifiability and the entity concept
B. Both the unit of measure assumption and faithful representation
C. Both faithful representation and the entity concept
D. Both relevance and the unit of measure assumption

8. Mr. Switch, a local business man, owns two different businesses—a lumber sawmill and a restaurant. The
price of lumber has declined and therefore sawmill is in financial difficulty. However, the restaurant is thriving,
and Mr. Switch would like to start paying two of the sawmill employees under the restaurant's payroll. His
accountant explains that this is not in accordance with certain basic principles in accounting. Which principle is
he referring to?
A. Full disclosure
B. Periodic-reporting assumption
C. Entity concept
D. Unit-of-measure assumption

9. One drawback to the unit-of-measure assumption is:

A. it inhibits an assessment of going concern.
B. information about individual items being measured is lost.
C. it makes it easier to measure certain assets, such as intellectual property, human capital, and social costs.
D. it makes it harder to measure transactions.

10. The assumption that a business enterprise will not be sold or liquidated in the near future is known as the:
A. entity concept.
B. unit-of-measure assumption.
C. going-concern assumption.
D. periodic-reporting assumption.
11. When assessing general purpose financial statements, the financial analyst takes into consideration the fact
that many important assets may not be included in the company's statement of financial position, such as human
resource capital, intellectual property and social responsibility. This limitation is the result of applying which of
the following characteristics of financial information?
A. Entity concept
B. Unit-of-measure assumption
C. Going-concern assumption
D. Periodic-reporting assumption

12. Which of the following statements about general purpose financial statements is correct?
A. General purpose financial statements are designed to meet the information needs of
B. every stakeholder in every situation.
C. General purpose financial statements provide information to all stakeholders.
D. General purpose financial statements are intended for specific use only.
E. The financial statements of non-public companies are general purpose financial statements.

13. How often do companies prepare general purpose financial statements?

A. At least once a year.
B. Only when asked for by a stakeholder.
C. Every time management needs to make a financial decision.
D. As often as GAAP requires.

14. The best description of the financial statements that a public company prepares is:
A. tax-based financial statements.
B. specific purpose financial statements.
C. general principle financial statements.
D. general purpose financial statements.

15. General purpose financial statements include which of the following sets of statements?
A. Balance statement, income statement, statement of long-term debt, cash flow statement
B. Balance sheet, income statement, statement of shareholders' equity, cash flow statement
C. Balance sheet, income statement, statement of shareholders' equity, statement of long-term debt
D. Balance statement, income statement, statement of retained earnings, cash balance

16. What does the term "consolidated" mean when used to describe financial statements?
A. Consolidated means that financial statements are presented for two years.
B. Consolidated means that the financial statements have been approved by an auditor.
C. Consolidated means that the five financial statements have been totalled together.
D. Consolidated means that the financial statements contain the information of more than one company.
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against him was that of going with a mob which extorted five shillings
from the Rev. J. Joliffe at Barton Stacey. He admitted that he had
accompanied the mob, partly because the labourers had urged him to do
so, partly because he hoped that Mr. Joliffe, being accustomed to public
speaking, would be able to persuade the labourers to disperse before any
harm was done. There was no evidence to show that he had anything to
do with the demand for money. He was found guilty and sentenced to
transportation for life. When asked what he had to say for himself, he
replied, ‘If the learned Counsel, who has so painted my conduct to you,
was present at that place and wore a smock frock instead of a gown, and
a straw hat instead of a wig, he would now be standing in this dock
instead of being seated where he is.’

Six men were reserved for execution, and told that they must expect no
mercy on this side of the grave: Cooper, the leader in the Fordingbridge
riots; Holdaway, who had headed the attack on Headley Workhouse;
Gilmore, who had entered the justices’ room in Andover ‘in rather a
violent manner’ and parleyed with the justices, and afterwards, in spite
of their remonstrances, been a ringleader in the destruction of a foundry
in the parish of Upper Clatford; Eldridge, who had taken part in the
Fordingbridge riot and also ‘invaded the sanctuary’ of Mr. Eyre Coote’s
home; James Aunalls, a lad of nineteen, who had extorted money at night
with threats of a fire, from a person whom he bade look over the hills,
where a fire was subsequently seen, and Henry Cook. Cook was a
ploughboy of nineteen, who could neither read nor write. For most of his
life, since the age of ten, he had been a farm hand. For six months before
the riots he had been employed at sawing, at 10s. a week, but at the time
of the rising he was out of work. After the riots he got work as a
ploughboy at about 5s. a week till his arrest. Like the other lads of the
neighbourhood he had gone round with a mob, and he was found guilty,
with Joseph Mason, of extorting money from William Dowden. For this
he might have got off with transportation for life, but another charge was
preferred against him. Mr. William Bingham Baring, J.P., tried, with the
help of some of his servants, to quell a riot at Northingdon Down Farm.
Silcock, who seemed the leader of the rioters, declared that they would
break every machine. Bingham Baring made Silcock repeat these words
several times and then seized him. Cook then aimed a blow at Bingham
Baring with a sledge-hammer and struck his hat. So far there was no
dispute as to what had happened. One servant of the Barings gave
evidence to the effect that he had saved his master’s life by preventing
Cook from striking again; another afterwards put in a sworn deposition
to the effect that Cook never attempted to strike a second blow. All
witnesses agreed that Bingham Baring’s hat had suffered severely: some
of them said that he himself had been felled to the ground. Whatever his
injuries may have been, he was seen out a few hours later, apparently in
perfect health; next day he was walking the streets of Winchester; two
days later he was presented at Court, and within a week he was strong
enough to administer a sharp blow himself with his stick to a handcuffed
and unconvicted prisoner, a display of zeal for which he had to pay £50.
Cook did not put up any defence. He was sentenced to death.
Perhaps it was felt that this victim to justice was in some respects ill
chosen, for reasons for severity were soon invented. He was a heavy,
stolid, unattractive boy, and his appearance was taken to indicate a brutal
and vicious disposition. Stories of his cruelties to animals were spread
abroad. ‘The fate of Henry Cook,’ said the Times correspondent (3rd
January 1831), ‘excites no commiseration. From everything I have heard
of him, justice has seldom met with a more appropriate sacrifice. He
shed some tears shortly after hearing his doom, but has since relapsed
into a brutal insensibility to his fate.’ His age was raised to thirty, his
wages to 30s. a week. Denman described him in the House of Commons,
after his execution, as a carpenter earning 30s. a week, who had struck
down one of the family of his benefactor, and had only been prevented
from killing his victim by the interposition of a more faithful individual.
This is the epitaph written on this obscure ploughboy of nineteen by the
upper classes. His own fellows, who probably knew him at least as well
as a Denman or a Baring, regarded his punishment as murder. Cobbett
tells us that the labourers of Micheldever subscribed their pennies to get
Denman’s misstatements about Cook taken out of the newspapers. When
his body was brought home after execution, the whole parish went out to
meet it, and he was buried in Micheldever churchyard in solemn silence.
Bingham Baring himself, as has been mentioned, happened to offend
against the law by an act of violence at this time. He was not like Cook, a
starving boy, but the son of a man who was reputed to have made seven
millions of money, and was called by Erskine the first merchant in
Europe. He did not strike his victim in a riot, but in cold blood. His
victim could not defend himself, for he was handcuffed, being taken to
prison on a charge on which he was subsequently acquitted. The man
struck was a Mr. Deacle, a small farmer who had had his own threshing
machine broken, and was afterwards arrested with his wife, by Bingham
Baring and a posse of magistrates, on suspicion of encouraging the
rioters. Deacle’s story was that Baring and the other magistrates
concerned in the arrest treated his wife with great insolence in the cart in
which they drove the Deacles to prison, and that Bingham Baring further
struck him with a stick. For this Deacle got £50 damages in an action he
brought against Baring. ‘This verdict,’ said the Morning Herald, ‘seemed
to excite the greatest astonishment; for most of the Bar and almost every
one in Court said, if on the jury, they would have given at least £5000 for
so gross and wanton an insult and unfeeling conduct towards those who
had not offered the least resistance; the defendants not addressing the
slightest evidence in palliation or attempting to justify it.’ The judge, in
summing up, ‘could not help remarking that the handcuffing was, to say
the least of it, a very harsh proceeding towards a lady and gentleman
who had been perfectly civil and quiet.’ Meanwhile the case of the
magistrates against the Deacles had collapsed in the most inglorious
manner. Though they had handcuffed these two unresisting people, they
had thought it wiser not to proceed against them. Deacle, however,
insisted on being tried, and by threatening the magistrates with an action,
he obliged them to prosecute. He was tried at the Assizes, and, as we
have seen, the trial came to an abrupt conclusion under circumstances
that threw the gravest suspicion on the methods of the authorities.[476]
Meanwhile the treatment these two persons had received (and we can
imagine from their story how innocent poor people, without friends or
position, were handled) had excited great indignation, and the
newspapers were full of it. There were petitions sent up to Parliament for
a Committee of Inquiry. Now the class to which Cook was unlucky
enough to belong had never sent a single member to Parliament, but the
Baring family had five Members in the House of Commons at this very
moment, one of whom had taken part with Bingham Baring in the
violent arrest of the Deacles. The five, moreover, were very happily
distributed, one of them being Junior Lord of the Treasury in Grey’s
Government and husband of Grey’s niece, and another an important
member of the Opposition and afterwards Chancellor of the Exchequer
under Peel. The Barings therefore were in less danger of
misrepresentation or misunderstanding; the motion for a Committee was
rejected by a great majority on the advice of Althorp and Peel; the leader
of the House of Commons came forward to testify that the Barings were
friends of his, and the discussion ended in a chorus of praise for the
family that had been judged so harshly outside the walls of Parliament.
When the Special Commission had finished its labours at Winchester,
101 prisoners had been capitally convicted; of these 6 were left for
execution. The remaining 95 were, with few exceptions, transported for
life. Of the other prisoners tried, 36 were sentenced to transportation for
various periods, 65 were imprisoned with hard labour, and 67 were
acquitted. Not a single life had been taken by the rioters, not a single
person wounded. Yet the riots in this county alone were punished by
more than a hundred capital convictions, or almost double the number
that followed the devilish doings of Lord George Gordon’s mob. The
spirit in which Denman regarded the proceedings is illustrated by his
speech in the House of Commons on the amnesty debate: ‘No fewer than
a hundred persons were capitally convicted at Winchester, of offences for
every one of which their lives might have been justly taken, and ought to
have been taken, if examples to such an extent had been necessary.’[477]

These sentences came like a thunderclap on the people of Winchester,

and all classes, except the magistrates, joined in petitions to the
Government for mercy. The Times correspondent wrote as follows:—
‘W , Friday Morning, 7th Jan.
‘The scenes of distress in and about the jail are most terrible.
The number of men who are to be torn from their homes and
connexions is so great that there is scarcely a hamlet in the
county into which anguish and tribulation have not entered.
Wives, sisters, mothers, children, beset the gates daily, and the
governor of the jail informs me that the scenes he is obliged
to witness at the time of locking up the prison are truly heart-
breaking.
‘You will have heard before this of the petitions which have
been presented to the Home Office from Gosport, Portsmouth,
Romsey, Whitchurch, and Basingstoke, praying for an
extension of mercy to all the men who now lie under sentence
of death. A similar petition has been got up in this city. It is
signed by the clergy of the Low Church, some of the bankers,
 and every tradesman in the town without exception.
Application was made to the clergy of the Cathedral for their
signatures, but they refused to give them, except
conditionally, upon reasons which I cannot comprehend. They
told the petitioners, as I am informed, that they would not sign
any such petition unless the grand jury and the magistracy of
the county previously affixed their names to it. Now such an
answer, as it appears to me, is an admission on their part that
no mischief would ensue from not carrying into effect the
dreadful sentence of the law; for I cannot conceive that if they
were of opinion that mischief would ensue from it, they
would sign the petition, even though it were recommended by
all the talent and respectability of the Court of Quarter
Sessions. I can understand the principles on which that man
acts, who asserts and laments the necessity of vindicating the
majesty of the law by the sacrifice of human life; but I cannot
understand the reasons of those who, admitting that there is
no necessity for the sword of justice to strike the offender,
decline to call upon the executive government to stay its arm,
and make their application for its mercy dependent on the
judgment, or it may be the caprice, of an influential
aristocracy. Surely, of all classes of society, the clergy is that
which ought not to be backward in the remission of offences.
They are daily preaching mercy to their flocks, and it wears
but an ill grace when they are seen refusing their consent to a
practical application of their own doctrines. Whatever my
own opinion may be, as a faithful recorder of the opinions of
those around me, I am bound to inform you, that, except
among the magistracy of the county, there is a general, I had
almost said a universal, opinion among all ranks of society,
that no good will be effected by sacrificing human life.’[478]
This outburst of public opinion saved the lives of four of the six men
who had been left for execution. The two who were hung were Cooper
and Cook. But the Government and the judges were determined that the
lessons of civilisation should not be wanting in impressiveness or in
dignity. They compelled all the prisoners who had been condemned by
the Commission to witness the last agonies of the two men whom public
opinion had been unable to rescue. The account given in the Times of
17th January shows that this piece of refined and spectacular discipline
was not thrown away, and that the wretched comrades of the men who
were hanged suffered as acutely as Denman or Alderson themselves
could have desired. ‘At this moment I cast my eyes down into the felons’
yard, and saw many of the convicts weeping bitterly, some burying their
faces in their smock frocks, others wringing their hands convulsively,
and others leaning for support against the wall of the yard and unable to
cast their eyes upwards.’ This was the last vision of English justice that
each labourer carried to his distant and dreaded servitude, a scene that
would never fade from his mind. There was much that England had not
taught him. She had not taught him that the rich owed a duty to the poor,
that society owed any shelter to the freedom or the property of the weak,
that the mere labourer had a share in the State, or a right to be considered
in its laws, or that it mattered to his rulers in what wretchedness he lived
or in what wretchedness he died. But one lesson she had taught him with
such savage power that his simple memory would not forget it, and if
ever in an exile’s gilding dreams he thought with longing of his
boyhood’s famine-shadowed home, that inexorable dawn would break
again before his shrinking eyes and he would thank God for the wide
wastes of the illimitable sea.

The Special Commission for Wiltshire opened at Salisbury on 2nd

January 1831. The judges were the same as those at Winchester; the
other commissioners were Lord Radnor, the friend of Cobbett, and Mr. T.
G. B. Estcourt. Lord Lansdowne, the Lord-Lieutenant, sat on the bench.
The foreman of the Grand Jury was Mr. John Benett, who has already
figured in these pages as the proprietor whose property was destroyed
and the magistrate who committed the culprits. There were three hundred
prisoners awaiting trial.
The method in which the prosecutions were conducted in Wiltshire,
though it did not differ from the procedure followed in Hampshire and
elsewhere, provoked some criticism from the lawyers. The prosecutions
were all managed by the county authorities. The clerks of the committing
magistrates in the different districts first took the depositions, and then
got up all the prosecutions in their capacity of solicitors to the same
magistrates prosecuting as county authorities, to the exclusion of the
solicitors of the individual prosecutors. Further, all the prosecutions were
managed for the county by a single barrister, who assisted the Attorney-
General and left no opening for other members of the Bar. The counsel
for one of the prisoners objected to this method, not only on the ground
of its unfairness to the legal profession, but on the wider ground of the
interests of justice. For it was inconsistent with the impartiality required
from magistrates who committed prisoners, that they should go on to mix
themselves up with the management of the prosecution; in many cases
these magistrates served again as grand jurors in the proceedings against
the prisoners. Such procedure, he argued ‘was calculated to throw at
least a strong suspicion on the fair administration of justice.’ These
protests, however, were silenced by the judges, and though the Attorney-
General announced that he was willing that the counsel for the
magistrates should retire, no change was made in the arrangements.
The Salisbury prisoners were under a further disadvantage peculiar, it is
to be hoped, to that gaol. They were forbidden to see their attorney
except in the presence of the gaoler or his servants. This rule seems to
have been construed by the authorities in a manner that simplified
considerably the task of the prosecution. The facts of the case of James
Lush, condemned to death on two charges of extorting money in a mob,
were made public by Hunt in a letter to the Times, 22nd January 1831.
Lush was a very poor man, but when first committed he sent for an
attorney and made a full confession. ‘This confession, so confidentially
made to his attorney (by an extraordinary rule of the gaol) the legal
adviser was compelled to submit to the inspection of the gaoler, which
paper he kept in his hands for several days and in all human probability,
this document, or a copy of it, was either submitted to the inspection of
the judge, or placed in the hands of the prosecutor, the Crown Solicitor,
or the Attorney-General: when this man was called up for trial, such was
his extreme poverty, that he could not raise a guinea to fee counsel, and
he was left destitute, without legal advice or assistance.’ The Attorney-
General could only answer this charge in the House of Commons by
declaring that he had no recollection of any such circumstance himself,
and that no gentleman of the Bar would avail himself of information
obtained in such a manner. Lush could not distinguish these niceties of
honour, or understand why his confession should be examined and kept
by the gaoler unless it was to be used against him, and it is not surprising
that he thought himself betrayed. It is only fair to Lord Melbourne to add
that when Hunt drew his attention to this iniquitous rule in Salisbury
Gaol he had it abolished.
The cases tried were very similar to those at Winchester; batch after
batch of boys and men in the prime of life were brought up to the dock
for a brief trial and sentence of exile. Such was the haste that in one case
at least the prisoners appeared with the handcuffs still on their wrists, a
circumstance which elicited a rebuke from the judge, and an excuse of
overwork from the gaoler. Amongst the first cases eight prisoners,
varying in age from seventeen to thirty, were sentenced to transportation
for life for doing £500 worth of damage at Brasher’s cloth mill at Wilton.
Thirteen men were transported for seven years and one for fourteen years
for breaking threshing machines on the day of the Pyt House affray. Mr.
John Benett was satisfied with this tale of victims in addition to the man
killed by the yeomanry, and refrained from prosecuting for the stones
thrown at him. For this he took great credit in the House of Commons,
and no doubt it was open to him to imitate Bingham Baring’s friends,
and to talk of that kind of outrage as ‘murder.’
At Salisbury, as at Winchester, evidence about distress and wages was
ruled out by the judges whenever possible; thus when twelve men, nine
of whom were afterwards transported for seven years, were being tried
for breaking a threshing machine on the farm of a man named Ambrose
Patience, the cross-examination of Patience, which aimed at eliciting
facts about wages and distress, was stopped by the court on the ground
that in a case of this sort such evidence was scarcely regular; it was
intimated, however, that the court would hear representations of this kind
later. But some light was thrown incidentally in the course of the trials on
the circumstances of the prisoners. Thus one of the Pyt House prisoners
urged in his defence: ‘My Lord, I found work very bad in my own parish
for the last three years, and having a wife and three children to support I
was glad to get work wherever I could get it. I had some work at a place
four miles from my house.’ He then described how on his way to work
he was met by the mob and forced to join them. ‘It is a hard case with
me, my Lord; I was glad to get work though I could earn only seven
shillings per week, and it cost me a shilling a week for iron, so that I had
only six shillings a week to support five persons.’ Another prisoner,
Mould of Hatch, was stated by Lord Arundel to be very poor: he had a
wife and six children, of whom one or two had died of typhus since his
committal. They had nothing to live on but what they got at Lord
Arundel’s house. The benevolent Lord Arundel, or the parish, must have
supported the survivors indefinitely, for Mould was exiled for seven
years. Barett again, another of these prisoners, was supporting himself, a
wife, and a child on 5s. a week. The usual rate of wages in Wiltshire was
7s. a week.
Evidence about the instigation of the labourers by those in good
circumstances was also ruled out, and much that would be interesting in
the history of the riots has thus perished. When six men were being
prosecuted for breaking a threshing machine on the farm of Mr. Judd at
Newton Toney, counsel for the defence started a cross-examination of the
prosecutor designed to show that certain landowners in the parish had
instigated the labourers to the outrages, but he was stopped by Mr.
Justice Alderson, who declared that such an inquiry was not material to
the issue, which was the guilt or innocence of the prisoners. If the
prisoners were found guilty these circumstances would be laid before the
court in mitigation of punishment. However strong the mitigating
circumstances in this case were, the punishment was certainly not
mitigated, for all six men were sentenced to the maximum penalty of
seven years’ transportation. In a similar case in Whiteparish it came out
in the evidence that Squire Bristowe had sent down buckets of strong
beer, and that Squire Wynne, who was staying with Squire Bristowe, was
present at the breaking of the machine. In the affair at Ambrose
Patience’s farm already mentioned, the defence of the prisoners was that
Farmer Parham had offered them half a hogshead of cider if they would
come and break his machine, whilst in another case three men were
acquitted because one of the witnesses for the prosecution, a young
brother of the farmer whose property had been destroyed, unexpectedly
disclosed the fact that his brother had said to the mob: ‘Act like men, go
and break the machine, but don’t go up to the house.’
The proportion of charges of extorting money was smaller at Salisbury
than at Winchester: most of the indictments were for breaking machines
only. In some instances the prosecution dropped the charge of robbery,
thinking transportation for seven years a sufficient punishment for the
offence. Three brothers were sentenced to death for taking half a crown:
nobody received this sentence for a few coppers. In this case the three
brothers, William, Thomas, and John Legg, aged twenty-eight, twenty-
one, and eighteen, had gone at midnight to the kitchen door of the house
of Mrs. Montgomery, wife of a J.P., and asked the manservant for money
or beer. The man gave them half a crown, and they thanked him civilly
and went away. A curious light is thrown on the relations between
robbers and the robbed in the trial of six men for machine-breaking at
West Grimstead: the mob of fifty persons asked the farmer for a
sovereign, he promised to pay it next day, whereupon one of the mob, a
man named Light who was his tenant, offered to pay the sovereign
himself and to deduct it from the rent.
At Salisbury, as at Winchester, the fate of the victims depended largely
on the character given to the prisoners by the local gentry. This was
especially the case towards the end when justice began to tire, and a
good many charges were dropped. Thus Charles Bourton was only
imprisoned for three months for breaking a threshing machine, whilst
John Perry was transported for seven years for the same offence. But
then John Perry had been convicted seven or eight times for poaching.
In Wiltshire, as in Hampshire, the judges were particularly severe to
those prisoners who were not agricultural labourers. A striking instance
is worth quoting, not only as illustrating this special severity, but also
because it shows that the judges when inflicting the maximum penalty of
seven years’ transportation for machine-breaking were well aware that it
was tantamount to exile for life. Thomas Porter, aged eighteen, a
shepherd, Henry Dicketts, aged nineteen, a bricklayer’s labourer, Aaron
Shepherd, aged forty (occupation not stated), James Stevens, aged
twenty-five, an agricultural labourer, and George Burbage, aged twenty-
four, also an agricultural labourer, were found guilty of machine-
breaking at Mr. Blake’s at Idmiston. Stevens and Burbage escaped with
two years’ and one year’s imprisonment with hard labour, respectively,
and the following homily from Mr. Justice Alderson to think over in
prison: ‘You are both thrashers and you might in the perversion of your
understanding think that these machines are detrimental to you. Be
assured that your labour cannot ultimately be hurt by the employment of
these machines. If they are profitable to the farmer, they will also be
profitable ultimately to the labourer, though they may for a time injure
him. If they are not profitable to the farmer he will soon cease to employ
them.’ The shepherd boy of eighteen, the bricklayer’s labourer of
nineteen, and their companion of forty were reserved for a heavier
penalty: ‘As to you, Aaron Shepherd, I can give you no hope of
remaining in this country. You Thomas Porter, are a shepherd, and you
Henry Dicketts, are a bricklayer’s labourer. You have nothing to do with
threshing machines. They do not interfere with your labour, and you
could not, even in the darkness of your ignorance, suppose that their
destruction would do you any good.... I hope that your fate will be a
warning to others. You will leave the country, all of you: you will see
your friends and relations no more: for though you will be transported
for seven years only, it is not likely that at the expiration of that term you
will find yourselves in a situation to return. You will be in a distant land
at the expiration of your sentence. The land which you have disgraced
will see you no more: the friends with whom you are connected will be
parted from you for ever in this world.’
Mr. Justice Alderson’s methods received a good deal of attention in one
of the Salisbury trials, known as the Looker case. Isaac Looker, a well-
to-do farmer, was indicted for sending a threatening letter to John
Rowland: ‘Mr. Rowland, Haxford Farm, Hif you goes to sware against or
a man in prisson, you have here farm burnt down to ground, and thy
bluddy head chopt off.’ Some evidence was produced to show that Isaac
Looker had asserted in conversation that it was the magistrates and the
soldiers, and not the mobs, who were the real breakers of the peace. But
this did not amount to absolute proof that he had written the letter: to
establish this conclusion the prosecution relied on the evidence of four
witnesses; the first had quarrelled with Looker, and had not seen his
writing for four or five years; the second denied that there had been any
quarrel, but had not been in the habit of speaking to the prisoner for five
or six years, or seen his writing during that time; the third had not had
‘much of a quarrel’ with him, but had not seen his writing since 1824;
the fourth was the special constable who found in Looker’s bureau,
which was unlocked and stood in the kitchen where the family sat, a
blank piece of paper that fitted on to the piece on which the letter was
written. More witnesses were called for the defence than for the
prosecution, and they included the vestry clerk of Wimborne, an ex-
schoolmaster; all of these witnesses had known Looker’s writing
recently, and all of them swore that the threatening letter was not in his
writing. Mr. Justice Alderson summed up against the prisoner, the jury
returned a verdict of guilty, and sentence of transportation for life was
passed upon Looker in spite of his vehement protestations of innocence.
‘I cannot attend to these asseverations,’ said Mr. Justice Alderson, ‘for
we all know that a man who can be guilty of such an offence as that of
which you have been convicted, will not hesitate to deny it as you now
do. I would rather trust to such evidence as has been given in your case,
than to the most solemn declarations even on the scaffold.’
The learned judge and the jury then retired for refreshment, when a
curious development took place. Edward, son of Isaac Looker, aged
eighteen years, came forward and declared that he had written the letter
in question and other letters as well. He wrote a copy from memory, and
the handwriting was precisely similar. He explained that he had written
the letters without his father’s knowledge and without a thought of the
consequences, in order to help two cousins who were in gaol for
machine-breaking. He had heard people say that ‘it would get my
cousins off if threatening letters were written.’ He had let his father
know in prison that he had written the letters, and had also told his
father’s solicitor. Edward Looker was subsequently tried and sentenced
to seven years’ transportation: Isaac’s case was submitted to the Home
Secretary for pardon.
Although, as we have said, the Government, or its representatives, grew
rather more lenient towards the end of the proceedings at Salisbury, it
was evidently thought essential to produce some crime deserving actual
death. The culprit in this case was Peter Withers, a young man of twenty-
three, married and with five children. His character till the time of the
riots was exemplary. He was committed on a charge of riot, and briefed a
lawyer to defend him for this misdemeanour. Just before the trial came
on the charge was changed, apparently by the Attorney-General, to the
capital charge of assaulting Oliver Calley Codrington with a hammer.
His counsel was of course unprepared to defend him on this charge, and,
as he explained afterwards, ‘it was only by the humane kindness of the
Attorney-General who allowed him to look at his brief that he was aware
of all the facts to be alleged against his client.’ Withers himself seemed
equally unprepared; when asked for his defence he said that he would
leave it to his counsel, as of course he had arranged to do when the
charge was one of misdemeanour only.
The incident occurred in an affray at Rockley near Marlborough. Mr.
Baskerville, J.P., rode up with some special constables to a mob of forty
or fifty men, Withers amongst them, and bade them go home. They
refused, declaring that they did not care a damn for the magistrates. Mr.
Baskerville ordered Mr. Codrington, who was a special constable, to
arrest Withers. A general mêlée ensued, blows were given and received,
and Codrington was hit by a hammer thrown by Withers. Withers’ own
version of the affair was that Codrington attacked him without
provocation in a ferocious manner with a hunting whip, loaded with iron
at the end. Baskerville also struck him. He aimed his hammer at
Codrington and it missed. Codrington’s horse then crushed him against
the wall, and he threw his hammer a second time with better aim. There
was nothing in the evidence of the prosecution to discredit this version,
and both Baskerville and Codrington admitted that they might have
struck him. Codrington’s injuries were apparently more serious than
Bingham Baring’s; it was stated that he had been confined to bed for two
or three days, and to the house from Tuesday to Saturday, and that he had
a scar of one and a half inches on the right side of his nose. No surgeon,
however, appeared as a witness, and the hammer was not produced in
court. Withers was found guilty and reserved, together with Lush, for
execution.
The special correspondent of the Times who had been present at
Winchester made an interesting comparison between the Hampshire and
the Wiltshire labourers on trial (8th January 1831). The Wiltshire
labourers he described as more athletic in appearance and more hardy in
manner. ‘The prisoners here turn to the witnesses against them with a
bold and confident air: cross-examine them, and contradict their answers,
with a confidence and a want of common courtesy, in terms of which
comparatively few instances occurred in the neighbouring county.’ In
this behaviour the correspondent detected the signs of a very low state of
moral intelligence.

When the time came for the last scene in court there was no trace of the
bold demeanour which had impressed the Times correspondent during
the conduct of the trials. For the people of Wiltshire, like the people of
Hampshire, were stunned by the crash and ruin of this catastrophic
vengeance. The two men sentenced to death were reprieved, but one
hundred and fifty-four men and boys were sentenced to transportation,
thirty-three of them for life, the rest for seven or fourteen years, with no
prospect of ever returning to their homes. And Alderson and his brother
judges in so punishing this wild fling of folly, or hope, or despair, were
not passing sentence only on the men and boys before them: they were
pronouncing a doom not less terrible on wives and mothers and children
and babes in arms in every village on the Wiltshire Downs. One man
begged to be allowed to take his child, eight months old, into exile, for
its mother had died in childbirth, and it would be left without kith or kin.
He was told by the judge that he should have remembered this earlier.
The sentence of final separation on all these families and homes was
received with a frenzy of consternation and grief, and the judges
themselves were affected by the spectacle of these broken creatures in
the dock and round the court, abandoned to the unchecked paroxysms of
despair.[479] ‘Such a total prostration of the mental faculties by fear,’
wrote the Times correspondent, ‘and such a terrible exhibition of anguish
and despair, I never before witnessed in a Court of Justice.’ ‘Immediately
on the conclusion of this sentence a number of women, who were seated
in court behind the prisoners, set up a dreadful shriek of lamentation.
Some of them rushed forward to shake hands with the prisoners, and
more than one voice was heard to exclaim, “Farewell, I shall never see
you more.”’
‘The whole proceedings of this day in court were of the most afflicting
and distressing nature. But the laceration of the feelings did not end with
the proceedings in court. The car for the removal of the prisoners was at
the back entrance to the court-house and was surrounded by a crowd of
mothers, wives, sisters and children, anxiously waiting for a glance of
their condemned relatives. The weeping and wailing of the different
parties, as they pressed the hands of the convicts as they stepped into the
car, was truly heartrending. We never saw so distressing a spectacle
before, and trust that the restored tranquillity of the country will prevent
us from ever seeing anything like it again.’
The historian may regret that these men do not pass out before him in a
cold and splendid defiance. Their blind blow had been struck and it had
been answered; they had dreamt that their lot might be made less
intolerable, and the governing class had crushed that daring fancy for
ever with banishment and the breaking of their homes; it only remained
for them to accept their fate with a look of stone upon their faces and a
curse of fire in their hearts. So had Muir and Palmer and many a political
prisoner, victims of the tyrannies of Pitt and Dundas, of Castlereagh and
Sidmouth, gone to their barbarous doom. So had the Lantenacs and the
Gauvains alike gone to the guillotine. History likes to match such calm
and unshaken bearing against the distempered justice of power. Here she
is cheated of her spectacle. Outwardly it might seem a worse fate for
men of education to be flung to the hulks with the coarsest of felons: for
men whose lives had been comfortable to be thrust into the dirt and
disorder of prisons. But political prisoners are martyrs, and martyrs are
not the stuff for pity. However bitter their sufferings, they do not suffer
alone: they are sustained by a Herculean comradeship of hopes and of
ideas. The darkest cage is lighted by a ray from Paradise to men or
women who believe that the night of their sufferings will bring a dawn
less cold and sombre to mankind than the cold and sombre dawn of
yesterday. But what ideas befriended the ploughboy or the shepherd torn
from his rude home? What vision had he of a nobler future for
humanity? To what dawn did he leave his wife or his mother, his child,
his home, his friends, or his trampled race? What robe of dream and
hope and fancy was thrown over his exile or their hunger, his poignant
hour of separation, or their ceaseless ache of poverty and cold

‘to comfort the human want

From the bosom of magical skies’?

The three judges who had restored respect for law and order in Wiltshire
and Hampshire next proceeded to Dorchester, where a Special
Commission to try the Dorsetshire rioters was opened on 11th January.
The rising had been less serious in Dorset than in the two other counties,
and there were only some fifty prisoners awaiting trial on charges of
machine-breaking, extorting money and riot. The Government took no
part in the prosecutions; for, as it was explained in a letter to Denman,
‘the state of things is quite altered; great effect has been produced: the
law has been clearly explained, and prosecutions go on without the least
difficulty.’[480] Baron Vaughan and Mr. Justice Parke had given the
charges at Winchester and Salisbury: it was now the turn of Mr. Justice
Alderson, and in his opening survey of the social conditions of the time
he covered a wide field. To the usual dissertation on the economics of
machinery he added a special homily on the duties incumbent on the
gentry, who were bidden to discourage and discountenance, and if
necessary to prosecute, the dangerous publications that were doing such
harm in rural districts. But their duties did not end here, and they were
urged to go home and to educate their poorer neighbours and to improve
their conditions. The improvement to be aimed at, however, was not
material but moral. ‘Poverty,’ said Mr. Justice Alderson, ‘is indeed, I
fear, inseparable from the state of the human race, but poverty itself and
the misery attendant on it, would no doubt be greatly mitigated if a spirit
of prudence were more generally diffused among the people, and if they
understood more fully and practised better their civil, moral and religious
duties.’
The Dorsetshire labourers had unfortunately arrived at the precipitate
conclusion that a spirit of prudence would not transform 7s. a week into
a reasonable livelihood. They used no violence beyond breaking up the
threshing machines. ‘We don’t intend to hurt the farmer,’ they told the
owner of one machine, ‘but we are determined that the land shall come
down, and the tithes, and we will have more wages.’ When money was
taken it seems to have been demanded and received in an amicable spirit.
The sums asked for were often very small. Sentence of death was
pronounced on two men, Joseph Sheppard and George Legg, for taking
2s. from Farmer Christopher Morey at Buckland Newton. The mob
asked for money, and the farmer offered them 1s.: they replied that they
wanted 1s. 6d., and the farmer gave them 2s. Sheppard’s character was
very good, and it came out that he and the prosecutor had had a dispute
about money some years before. He was transported, but not for life.
Legg was declared by the prosecutor to have been ‘saucy and impudent,’
and to have ‘talked rough and bobbish.’ His character, however, was
stated by many witnesses, including the clergyman, to be exemplary. He
had five children whom he supported without parish help on 7s. a week:
a cottage was given him but no fuel. Baron Vaughan was so much
impressed by this evidence that he declared that he had never heard
better testimony to character, and that he would recommend a less severe
penalty than transportation. But Legg showed a lamentable want of
discretion, for he interrupted the judge with these words: ‘I would rather
that your Lordship would put twenty-one years’ transportation upon me
than be placed in the condition of the prosecutor. I never said a word to
him, that I declare.’ Baron Vaughan sardonically remarked that he had
not benefited himself by this observation.
The tendency to give less severe punishment, noticed in the closing trials
at Salisbury, was more marked at Dorchester. Nine men were let off on
recognisances and ten were not proceeded against: in the case of six of
these ten the prosecutor, one Robert Bullen, who had been robbed of 4s.
and 2s. 6d., refused to come forward. But enough sharp sentences were
given to keep the labourers in submission for the future. One man was
transported for life and eleven for seven years: fifteen were sentenced to
various terms of imprisonment; seven were acquitted. It was not
surprising that the special correspondent of the Times complained that
such meagre results scarcely justified the pomp and expense of a Special
Commission. In the neighbouring county of Gloucester, where the
country gentlemen carried out the work of retribution without help from
headquarters, seven men were transported for fourteen years, twenty for
seven years, and twenty-five were sentenced to terms of imprisonment
ranging from six months to three years. All of these sentences were for
breaking threshing machines.
The disturbances in Berks and Bucks had been considered serious
enough to demand a Special Commission, and Sir James Alan Park, Sir
William Bolland and Sir John Patteson were the judges appointed. The
first of the two Berkshire Commissions opened at Reading on 27th
December. The Earl of Abingdon, Lord-Lieutenant of the County, and
Mr. Charles Dundas were the two local commissioners. Mr. Dundas has
figured already in these pages as chairman of the meeting at
Speenhamland. One hundred and thirty-eight prisoners were awaiting
trial at Reading: they were most of them young, only eighteen being
forty or over. The rest, with few exceptions, varied from seventeen to
thirty-five in age, and must have lived all their lives under the
Speenhamland system.
It is impossible to compare the accounts of the Special Commissions in
Berks and Bucks with those in Hampshire and Wiltshire without noticing
a difference in the treatment of the rioters. The risings had been almost
simultaneous, the offences were of the same character, and the
Commissions sat at the same time. The difference was apparent from the
first, and on 1st January the Times published a leading article pleading
for uniformity, and pointing out that the Berkshire Commission was ‘a
merciful contrast’ to that at Winchester. The cause is probably to be
found in the dispositions and characters of the authorities responsible in
the two cases. The country gentlemen of Berkshire, represented by a man
like Mr. Dundas, were more humane than the country gentlemen of
Hampshire, represented by men like the Duke of Wellington and the
Barings; Mr. Gurney, the public prosecutor at Reading, was more lenient
than Sir Thomas Denman, and the Reading judges were more kindly and
considerate than the judges at Winchester. Further, there had been in
Berkshire little of the wild panic that swept over the country houses in
Hampshire and Wiltshire. The judges at Reading occasionally interjected
questions on the prisoners’ behalf, and in many cases they did not
conceal their satisfaction at an acquittal. Further, they had a more
delicate sense for the proprieties. Contrary to custom, they asked neither
the Grand Jury nor the magistrates to dinner on the first day, being
anxious, we are told, to free the administration of justice ‘from the
slightest appearance of partiality in the eyes of the lower classes.’ The
Lord Chancellor and Lord Melbourne had been consulted and had
approved.
It must not be supposed that Mr. Justice Park’s theories of life and social
relationships differed from those of his brothers at Winchester. In his
address to the Grand Jury he repudiated with indignation the ‘impudent
and base slander ... that the upper ranks of society care little for the
wants and privations of the poor. I deny this positively, upon a very
extensive means of knowledge upon subjects of this nature. But every
man can deny it who looks about him and sees the vast institutions in
every part of the kingdom for the relief of the young and the old, the deaf
and the lame, the blind, the widow, the orphan——and every child of
wretchedness and woe. There is not a calamity or distress incident to
humanity, either of body or of mind, that is not humbly endeavoured to
be mitigated or relieved, by the powerful and the affluent, either of high
or middling rank, in this our happy land, which for its benevolence,
charity, and boundless humanity, has been the admiration of the world.’
The theory that the rich kept the poor in a state of starvation and that this
was the cause of the disturbances, he declared later to be entirely
disproved by the conduct of one of the mobs in destroying a threshing
machine belonging to William Mount, Esq., at Wasing, ‘Mr. Mount
having given away £100 no longer ago than last winter to assist the
lower orders during that inclement season.’
A feature of the Reading Commission was the difficulty of finding
jurymen. All farmers were challenged on behalf of the prisoners, and
matters were at a deadlock until the judges ordered the bystanders to be
impannelled.
The earlier cases were connected with the riots in Hungerford. Property
in an iron foundry had been destroyed, and fifteen men were found guilty
on this capital charge. One of the fifteen was William Oakley, who now
paid the penalty for his £5 and strong language. But when the first cases
were over, Mr. Gurney began to drop the capital charge, and to content
himself, as a rule, with convictions for breaking threshing machines. One
case revealed serious perjury on one side or the other. Thomas
Goodfellow and Cornelius Bennett were charged with breaking a
threshing machine at Matthew Batten’s farm. The prisoners produced
four witnesses, two labourers, a woman whose husband was in prison for
the riots, and John Gaiter, who described himself as ‘not quite a master
bricklayer,’ to prove that Matthew Batten had encouraged the riots. The
first three witnesses declared that Batten had asked the rioters to come
and break his machine in order to serve out his landlord and Mr. Ward,
and had promised them victuals and £1. Batten and his son, on the other
hand, swore that these statements were false. The prisoners were found
guilty, with a recommendation to mercy which was disregarded.
Goodfellow, who was found guilty of breaking other machines as well,
was sentenced to fourteen, and Cornelius Bennett to seven years’
transportation. The judge spoke of their scandalous attempt to blacken
the character of a respectable farmer: ‘it pleased God however that the
atrocious attempt had failed.’ It would be interesting to know what were
the relations between Matthew Batten and his landlord.
On the last day of the trials Mr. Gurney announced that there would be
no more prosecutions for felony, as enough had been done in the way of
making examples. Some interesting cases of riot were tried. The most
important riot had taken place as early as 19th November, and the hero
of the proceedings was the Rev. Edward Cove, the venerable Vicar of
Brimpton, one of the many parson magistrates. A mob had assembled in
order to demand an increase of wages, and it was met by Mr. Cove and
his posse of special constables. On occasions like this, Mr. Gurney
remarked, we become sensible of the great advantages of our social
order. Mr. Cove without more ado read the Riot Act; the mob refused to
disperse; his special constables thereupon attacked them, and a general
mêlée followed in which hard blows were given and taken. No one
attempted to strike Mr. Cove himself, but one of his companions
received from a rioter, whom he identified, a blow rivalling that given to
Mr. Bingham Baring, which beat the crown of his hat in and drove the
rim over his eyes: it was followed by other and more serious blows on
his head and body. The counsel for the defence tried to show that it was
distress that had caused the rioters to assemble, and he quoted a remark
of the Chairman of Quarter Sessions that the poor were starved almost
into insurrection; but all evidence about wages was ruled out. The court
were deeply impressed by this riot, and Mr. Justice Park announced that
it had alarmed him and his fellow judges more ‘than anything that had
hitherto transpired in these proceedings.’ ‘Had one life been lost,’ he
continued, ‘the lives of every individual of the mob would have been
forfeited, and the law must have been carried into effect against those
convicted.’ As it was, nobody was condemned to death for his share in
the affray, though the more violent, such as George Williams, alias
‘Staffordshire Jack,’ a ‘desperate character,’ received heavier penalties
for machine-breaking in consequence.
Three men were reserved for execution: William Oakley, who was told
that as a carpenter he had no business to mix himself up in these
transactions; Alfred Darling, a blacksmith by trade, who had been found
guilty on several charges of demanding money; and Winterbourne, who
had taken part in the Hungerford affair in the magistrates’ room, and had
also acted as leader in some cases when a mob asked for money. In one
instance the mob had been content with £1 instead of the £2 for which it
had asked for breaking a threshing machine, Winterbourne remarking,
‘we will take half price because he has stood like a man.’
Public opinion in Berkshire was horrified at the prospect of taking life.
Petitions for mercy poured in from Reading, including one from ladies to
the queen, from Newbury, from Hungerford, from Henley, and from
other places. Two country gentlemen, Mr. J. B. Monck and Mr. Wheble,
made every exertion to save the condemned men. They waited with
petitions on Lord Melbourne, who heard them patiently for an hour.
They obtained a reprieve for Oakley and for Darling, who were
transported for life; Winterbourne they could not save: he was hung on
11th January, praying to the last that his wife, who was dangerously ill of
typhus, might die before she knew of his fate.
Fifty-six men were sentenced to transportation from Reading—twenty-
three for life, sixteen for fourteen years, seventeen for seven years:
thirty-six were sent to prison for various terms.
The same commissioners went on to Abingdon where proceedings
opened on 6th January. Here there were only forty-seven prisoners, all
but two of whom were agricultural labourers, most of them very young.
The cases resembled those tried at Reading, but it is clear that the
evidence of Mrs. Charlotte Slade, whose conduct we have already
described, and her method of dealing with the rioters, made a great
impression on Mr. Justice Park and his colleagues, and opened their eyes
to the true perspective of the rhetorical language that had assumed such
terrifying importance to other judges. One young labourer, Richard
Kempster by name, who was found guilty of breaking a threshing
machine, had carried a black-and-red flag in the mob, and when arrested
had exclaimed, ‘be damned if I don’t wish it was a revolution, and that
all was a fire together’: it is easy to imagine the grave homily on the
necessity of cutting such a man off for ever from his kind that these
words would have provoked from the judges at Winchester. Mr. Justice
Park and his colleagues sentenced Kempster to twelve months’
imprisonment. At Abingdon only one man was sentenced to be
transported; Thomas Mackrell, an agricultural labourer of forty-three.
Another, Henry Woolridge, had sentence of death commuted to eighteen
months’ imprisonment. Thirty-five others were sent to prison for various
terms.
The same three judges proceeded to Aylesbury to try the
Buckinghamshire rioters. The chief event in this county had been the
destruction of paper-making machinery at Wycombe. The Commission
opened on 11th January: the Duke of Buckingham and Mr. Maurice
Swabey were the local commissioners. There were one hundred and
thirty-six prisoners to be tried, almost all young and illiterate: only
eighteen were forty years of age or over. Forty-four men and boys were
found guilty of the capital charge of destroying paper machinery. Most of
the other prisoners who were charged with breaking threshing machines
were allowed to plead guilty and let off on their own recognisances, or
else the charge was not pressed. An exception was made in a case in
which some members of a mob had been armed with guns. Three men
who had carried guns were sent to transportation for seven years, and
thirteen others involved were sent to prison for two years or eighteen
months. Several men were tried for rioting, and those who had combined
a demand for increased wages with a request for the restoration of parish
buns were sent to prison for six weeks.[481] One more trial is worth
notice, because it suggests that even in Buckinghamshire, where the
general temper was more lenient, individuals who had made themselves
obnoxious were singled out for special treatment. John Crook, a miller,
was indicted with four others for riotously assembling and breaking a
winnowing machine at Mr. Fryer’s at Long Crendon. As Crook was
charged with a misdemeanour his counsel could address the jury, and we
learn from his speech that Crook had been kept in prison since 2nd
December, though £2000 had been offered in bail and many other
prisoners had been allowed out. The explanation, it was argued, was to
be found in the fact that Crook had come into some property which
qualified him to hold a gun licence and to kill game. He was sentenced to
three months’ imprisonment without hard labour, and to pay a fine of
£10.
Thirty-two men in all were sent to prison for the agricultural
disturbances in addition to the three sentenced to transportation. Forty-
two of those concerned in the breaking of paper-making machinery
received sentence of death, but their punishment was commuted to life
transportation for one, seven years’ transportation for twenty-two, and
imprisonment for various terms for the rest. Two men were reserved for
execution. One, Thomas Blizzard, was thirty years old, with a wife and
three children. His character was excellent. At the time of the riots he
was a roundsman, receiving 1s. a day from the overseer’s and 1s. 6d. a
week from a farmer. He told his employer at Little Marlow that he would
take a holiday to go machine-breaking, for he would endure
imprisonment, or even transportation, rather than see his wife and
children cry for bread. John Sarney, the other, was fifty-six years old and
had a wife and six children: he kept a small beer-shop and his character
was irreproachable. Petitions on behalf of the two men were signed
extensively, and the sentence was commuted to transportation for life.
The Aylesbury sentences seem lenient in comparison with those given at
Salisbury and Winchester, but they did not seem lenient to the people in
the district. ‘Pen cannot describe,’ wrote a Times correspondent, ‘the
heart-rending scene of despair, misery and want, prevailing at Flackwell-
Heath, the residence of the families of the major part of the misguided
men now incarcerated at Aylesbury.’ The same correspondent tells of a
benevolent Quaker, who had become rich as a maker of paper, helping
these families by stealth.

The work of the Special Commissions was now over. Melbourne had
explained in Parliament that they had been set up ‘to expound the law’
and to bring home to the ignorant the gravity of their crimes against
social order. In spite of the daily imposition of ferocious punishments on
poachers and thieves, the poor apparently did not know in what letters of
blood the code against rioting and discontent was composed. These three
weeks had brought a lurid enlightenment into their dark homes. In the
riots, as we have seen, the only man who had been killed was a rioter,
killed according to the reports of the time by a yeomanry soldier,
according to local tradition by a farmer, and for that offence he had been
refused Christian burial. On the other side, not a single person had been
killed or seriously wounded. For these riots, apart from the cases of
arson, for which six men or boys were hung, aristocratic justice exacted
three lives, and the transportation of four hundred and fifty-seven men
and boys,[482] in addition to the imprisonment of about four hundred at
home. The shadow of this vengeance still darkens the minds of old men
and women in the villages of Wiltshire, and eighty years have been too
short a time to blot out its train of desolating memories.[483] Nobody who
does not realise what Mr. Hudson has described with his intimate touch,
the effect on the imagination and the character of ‘a life of simple
unchanging action and of habits that are like instincts, of hard labour in
sun and rain and wind from day to day,’ can ever understand what the
breaking of all the ties of life and home and memory meant to the exiles
and to those from whose companionship they were then torn for ever.

We have said that one feature of the rising was the firing of stacks and
ricks and barns. This practice was widespread, and fires broke out even
in counties where the organised rising made little progress. Associations
for the detection of incendiaries were formed at an early stage, and
immense rewards were offered. Yet not a single case of arson was tried
before the Special Commissions, and the labourers kept their secret well.
Many of the governing class in the early days persuaded themselves that
the labourers had no secret to keep, and that the fires were due to any one
except the labourers, and to any cause except distress. Perhaps the wish
was father to the thought, for as the Times observed, persons responsible
for grinding the faces of their labourers preferred to think the outrages
the work of strangers. Sometimes it was smugglers, suffering from the
depression in their trade: sometimes it was foreigners: sometimes it was
mysterious gentlemen in gigs, driving furiously about the country, led by
Captain Swing, scattering fireballs and devastation. These were the
fashionable theories in the House of Lords, although Richmond
reminded his brother peers that there had been a flood of petitions
representing the sufferings of the labourers from the very beginning of
the year, and that the House of Lords had not thought it necessary to give
them the slightest attention. Lord Camden ascribed the outrages to the
French spirit, and argued that the country was enjoying ‘what was
undeniably a genial autumn.’ The Duke of Wellington took the same
view, denying that the troubles were due to distress: the most influential
cause of disturbances was the example, ‘and I will unhesitatingly say the
bad and the mischievous example, afforded by the neighbouring States.’
Eldon remarked that many of the prisoners taken in the riots were
foreigners, a point on which Melbourne undeceived him. The speakers
who regarded the disturbances in the south of England as the overflow of
the Paris Revolution had no positive evidence to produce, but they had a
piece of negative evidence which they thought conclusive. For if the
labourers knew who were the incendiaries, they would surely have given
information. In some cases a reward of £1000 with a free pardon for all
except the actual author was waiting to be claimed, ‘and yet not one of
the miserable beings have availed themselves of the prospect of
becoming rich.’
Some eleven cases of arson were tried at the Assizes in Essex, Kent,
Sussex, and Surrey: all the prisoners were agricultural labourers and
most of them were boys. Eight were convicted, often on very defective
evidence, and six were executed. One of the eight, Thomas Goodman, a
boy of eighteen, saved his life by declaring in prison that the idea had
been put into his head by a lecture of Cobbett’s. Two brothers of the
name of Pakeman, nineteen and twenty years old, were convicted on the
evidence of Bishop, another lad of eighteen, who had prompted them to
set fire to a barn, and later turned king’s evidence ‘after a gentleman in
the gaol had told him of the big reward.’ This fire seems to have been a
piece of bravado, as no doubt many others were, for Bishop remarked, as
the three were sitting under a hedge after lighting the barn, ‘who says we
can’t have a fire too, as well as them at Blean?’ The two boys, who had
never been taught to read or write, scandalised the public by displaying a
painful indifference to the ministrations of the chaplain, and dying
without receiving the sacrament.[484] A half-witted boy of fourteen,
Richard Pennells, was tried at Lewes for setting fire to his master’s
haystack for a promise of sixpence from a man who was not discovered.
His master, who prosecuted, remarked that he was ‘dull of apprehension,
but not so much as not to know right from wrong.’ The boy, who had no
counsel, offered no defence, and stood sobbing in the dock. The jury
found him guilty, with a recommendation to mercy on account of his
youth and imperfect understanding. Sentence of death was recorded, but
he was told that his life would be spared.
These same Lewes Assizes, conducted by Mr. Justice Taunton, afforded
a striking example of the comparative treatment of different crimes.
Thomas Brown, a lad of seventeen, was charged with writing the
following letter to Lord Sheffield, ‘Please, my Lord, I dont wise to hurt
you. This is the case al the world over. If you dont get rid of your foreign
steward and farmer and bailiff in a few days time—less than a month—
we will burn him up, and you along with him. My writing is bad, but my
firing is good my Lord.’ Lord Sheffield gave evidence as to the receipt of
the letter: the prisoner, who had no counsel, was asked by the judge if he
would like to put any questions, and he only replied that he hoped that
his lordship would forgive him. The judge answered that his lordship had
not the power, and sentenced Brown to transportation for life.[485] Later
on in the same Assizes, Captain Winter, a man of sixty, captain of a
coasting vessel, was tried for the murder of his wife, who had been killed
in a most brutal manner. He had been hacking and wounding her for four
hours at night, and she was last seen alive at half past two in the
morning, naked and begging for mercy. Her body was covered with
wounds. The man’s defence was that he came home drunk, that he found
his wife drunk, and that he had no knowledge of what followed. To the
general surprise Captain Winter escaped with a verdict of manslaughter.
‘The prisoner,’ wrote the Times correspondent, ‘is indebted for his life to
the very merciful way in which Mr. Justice Taunton appeared to view the
case, and the hint which he threw out to the jury, that the parties might
have had a quarrel, in which case her death by the prisoner would
amount to manslaughter only.’

When the disturbances began, the Duke of Wellington was Prime

Minister, and Sir Robert Peel Home Secretary. But in November 1830
Wellington, who had made a last effort to rally the old Tories, sulking
over his surrender on Catholic Emancipation, by some sudden thunder
against Reform, had been beaten on the Civil List and resigned. Reform
was inevitable, and with Reform the Whigs. Thus, towards the close of
the year of the Revolution that drove Charles . from France, Lord Grey
became Prime Minister, to carry the measure which as Charles Grey,
lieutenant of Charles Fox, he had proposed in the House of Commons in
1793, a few months after Louis . had lost his head in the Revolution
which had maddened and terrified the English aristocracy. Fortune had
been sparing in her favours to this cold, proud, honourable and
courageous man. She had shut him out from power for twenty-three
years, waiting to make him Prime Minister until he was verging on
seventy, and all the dash and ardour of youth had been chilled by
disappointment and delay. But she had reserved her extreme of malice to
the end, for it was her chief unkindness that having waited so long she
did not wait a little longer. Grey, who had been forty-four years in public
life, and forty-three in opposition, took office at the moment that the
rising passed into Hampshire and Wiltshire, and thus his first act as
Prime Minister was to summon his colleagues to a Cabinet meeting to
discuss, not their plans for Parliamentary Reform, but the measures to be
taken in this alarming emergency. After a lifetime of noble protest
against war, intolerance, and repression, he found himself in the toils and
snares of the consequences of a policy in which war, intolerance, and
repression had been constant and conspicuous features. And those
consequences were especially to be dreaded by such a man at such a
time.
Grey became Prime Minister to carry Reform, and Reform was still
enveloped to many minds in the wild fancies and terrors of a Jacobin
past. To those who knew, conscious as they were of their own modest
purposes and limited aim, that their accession to power boded to many
violence, confusion, and the breaking up of the old ways and life of the
State, it was maddening that these undiscerning peasants should choose
this moment of all others for noise and riot. The struggle for Reform was
certain to lead to strife, and it was hard that before they entered upon it
England should already be in tumult from other causes. Moreover, Grey
had to reckon with William . So long as he could remember, the Court
had been the refuge of all that was base in English politics, and it was a
question whether Liberal ideas had suffered more from the narrow and
darkened mind of George . or the mean and incorrigible perfidy of
George . In comparison with his father, the new king had the wisdom of
a Bentham or an Adam Smith; in comparison with his brother, he had the
generous and loyal heart of a Philip Sidney or a Falkland. But seen in
any less flattering mirror, he was a very ordinary mortal, and Grey had
known this jolly, drinking, sailor prince too long and too well to trust
either his intellect or his character, under too fierce or too continuous a
strain. These riots tried him severely. No sooner was William on his
throne than the labourers came out of their dens, looking like those
sansculottes whose shadows were never far from the imagination of the
English upper classes. The king’s support of Reform was no violent
enthusiasm, and the slightest threat of disorder might disturb the uneasy
equilibrium of his likes and fears. In the long run it depended on the will
of this genial mediocrity—so strangely had Providence mixed caprice
and design in this world of politics—whether or not Reform should be
carried, and carried without bloodshed. Throughout these months then,
the king, always at Melbourne’s elbow, trying to tempt and push the
Government into more drastic measures, was a very formidable enemy to
the cause of moderation and of justice.
These influences were strong, and there was little to counteract them. For
there was nobody in the world which Grey and Melbourne alike
inhabited who could enter into the minds of the labourers. This is readily
seen, if we glance at two men who were regarded as extreme Radicals in
the House of Commons, Hobhouse and Burdett. Each of these men had
served the cause of Reform in prison as well as in Parliament, and each
with rather ridiculous associations; Hobhouse’s imprisonment being
connected with the ballad inspired by the malicious and disloyal wit of
his friend and hero, Byron, and Burdett’s with the ludicrous scene of his
arrest, with his boy spelling out Magna Charta on his knee. It is difficult
for those who have read Hobhouse’s Diaries to divine what play of
reason and feeling ever made him a Radical, but a Radical he was, an
indefatigable critic of the old régime, and in particular of such abuses as
flogging in the army. Burdett was a leader in the same causes. To these
men, if to any, the conduct of the labourers might have seemed to call for
sympathy rather than for violence. But if we turn to Hobhouse’s Diary
we see that he was never betrayed into a solitary expression of pity or
concern for the scenes we have described, and as for Burdett, he was all
for dragooning the discontented counties and placing them under martial
law. And even Radnor, who as a friend of Cobbett was much less
academic in his Radicalism, sat on the Wiltshire Commission without
making any protest that has reached posterity.
All the circumstances then made it easy for Grey and his colleagues to
slip into a policy of violence and repression. They breathed an
atmosphere of panic, and they dreaded the recoil of that panic on their
own schemes. Yet when all allowance is made for this insidious climate,
when we remember that no man is so dangerous as the kind man haunted
by the fear of seeming weak, at a moment when he thinks his power of
doing good depends on his character for strength; when we remember,
too, the tone of Society caught between scare and excitement, the bad
inspiration of the Court, the malevolent influence of an alarmed
Opposition, the absorbing interest of making a ministry, the game apart
from the business of politics, it is still difficult to understand how men
like Grey and Holland and Durham could ever have lent themselves to
the cruelties of this savage retribution. When first there were rumours of
the intention of the Government to put down the riots with severe
measures, Cobbett wrote a passage in which he reviewed the characters
of the chief ministers, Grey with his ‘humane disposition,’ Holland ‘who
never gave his consent to an act of cruelty,’ Althorp ‘who has never
dipped his hand in blood,’ Brougham ‘who with all his half Scotch
crotchets has at any rate no blood about him,’ to show that the new
ministers, unlike many of their Tory predecessors, might be trusted to be
lenient and merciful. Two of these men, Grey and Holland, had made a
noble stand against all the persecutions of which Tory Governments had
been guilty, defending with passion men whose opinions they regarded
with horror; if any record could justify confidence it was theirs.
Unfortunately the politician who was made Home Secretary did not
share in this past. The common talk at the time of Melbourne’s
appointment was that he was too lazy for his office; the real criticism
should have been that he had taken the side of Castlereagh and Sidmouth
in 1817. As Home Secretary he stopped short of the infamous measures
he had then approved; he refused to employ spies, and the Habeas
Corpus was not suspended. But nobody can follow the history of this
rising, and the history of the class that made it, without recognising that
the punishment which exiled these four hundred and fifty labourers is a
stain, and an indelible stain, on the reputation of the Government that
lives in history on the fame of the Reform Bill. It is difficult to believe
that either Fox or Sheridan could have been parties to it. The chief shame
attaches to Melbourne, who let the judges do their worst, and to
Lansdowne, who sat beside the judges on the Salisbury bench, but the
fact that the Prime Minister was immersed in the preparation of a reform,
believed by his contemporaries to be a revolution, does not relieve him
of his share of the odium, which is the due of Governments that are cruel
to the weak, and careless of justice to the poor.
One effort was made, apart from the intercession of public opinion, to
induce the Government to relax its rigours. When the panic had abated
and the last echo of the riots had been stilled by this summary
retribution, a motion was proposed in the House of Commons for a
general amnesty. Unhappily the cause of the labourers was in the hands
of Henry Hunt, a man whose wisdom was not equal to his courage, and
whose egregious vanity demoralised and spoilt his natural eloquence. If
those who were in close sympathy with his general aims could not
tolerate his manners, it is not surprising that his advocacy was a doubtful
recommendation in the unsympathetic atmosphere of the House of
Commons. He was a man of passionate sincerity, and had already been
twice in prison for his opinions, but the ruling class thinking itself on the
brink of a social catastrophe, while very conscious of Hunt’s defects, was
in no mood to take a detached view of this virtue. The debate, which
took place on the 8th of February 1831, reflects little credit on the House
of Commons, and the division still less, for Hume was Hunt’s only
supporter. The chief speakers against the motion were Benett of
Wiltshire, George Lamb, brother of Melbourne and Under-Secretary at
the Home Office, and Denman, the Attorney-General. Lamb amused
himself and the House with jests on the illiterate letter for writing which
the boy Looker was then on the high seas, and Denman threw out a
suggestion that Looker’s father had had a share in the boy’s guilt.
Denman closed his speech by pouring scorn on those who talked
sentimentality, and declaring that he would ever look back with pride on
his part in the scenes of this memorable winter.
So far the Government had had it all their own way. But in their anxiety
to show a resolute front and to reassure those who had suspected that a
reform Government would encourage social disorder by weakness, Lord
Grey and his colleagues were drawn into a scrape in which they burnt
their fingers rather badly. They decided to prosecute two writers for
inciting the labourers to rebel. The two writers were Richard Carlile and
William Cobbett. Carlile was the natural prey for a Government in
search of a victim. He had already spent six or seven years of his lion-
hearted life in prison for publishing the writings of Paine and Hone: his
wife, his sister, and his shopman had all paid a similar penalty for their
association, voluntary or involuntary, with his public-spirited adventures.
The document for which he stood in the dock at the Old Bailey early in
January 1831 was an address to the agricultural labourers, praising them
for what they had done, and reviewing their misfortunes in this sentence:
‘The more tame you have grown, the more you have been oppressed and
despised, the more you have been trampled on.’ Carlile defended himself
in a speech that lasted four hours and a half. The jury disagreed, but after
several hours they united on a verdict of acquittal on the charge of
bringing the Crown into contempt, and of guilty on the charge of
addressing inflammatory language to the labouring classes. He was
sentenced to imprisonment for two years, to pay a fine, and to find
sureties.
Cobbett’s trial was a more important event, for whereas Carlile was the
Don Quixote of liberty of mind, Cobbett was a great political force, and
his acquittal would give a very serious shock to the prestige of the
Government that attacked him. The attention of the authorities had been
called to Cobbett’s speeches very early in the history of the riots, and the
Home Office Papers show that appeals to the Government to prosecute
Cobbett were the most common of all the recommendations and requests
that poured into Whitehall from the country. Some of these letters were
addressed to Sir Robert Peel, and one of them is endorsed with the draft
of a reply: ‘My dear Sir,—If you can give me the name of the person
who heard Cobbett make use of the expression to which you refer you
would probably enable me to render no small public service by the
prosecution of Cobbett for sedition.—Very faithfully Yours, Robert
Peel.’
In an evil moment for themselves, Peel’s successors decided to take
action, not indeed on his speeches, but on his articles in the Political
Register. The character of those articles might perhaps be described as
militant and uncompromising truth. They were inflammatory, because
the truth was inflammatory. Nobody who knew the condition of the
labourers could have found in them a single misstatement or
exaggeration. The only question was whether it was in the public interest
to publish them in a time of disturbance. From this point of view the
position of the Government was seriously weakened by the fact that the
Times had used language on this very subject which was not one whit
less calculated to excite indignation against the rich, and the Times,
though it was the organ of wealthy men, was in point of fact
considerably cheaper to buy than the Register, the price of which
Cobbett had raised to a shilling in the autumn of 1830. But this was not
the only reason why the Government was in danger of exposing itself to
a charge of malice in choosing Cobbett for a prosecution. The unrest in
the southern counties had been due to a special set of economic causes,
but there was unrest due to other causes in other parts of England. It was
not the misery of ploughboys and labourers in Hampshire and Kent that
had made Wellington and Peel decide that it was unsafe for the King to
dine at the Guildhall in the winter of 1830: the Political Unions, which
struck such terror into the Court and the politicians, were not bred in the
villages. There was a general and acute discontent with extravagant
government, with swollen lists and the burden of sinecures, with the
whole system of the control of the boroughs and its mockery of
representation. Now in such a state of opinion every paper on the side of
reform might be charged with spreading unrest. Statistics of sinecures,
and pensions, and the fat revenues of bishopricks, were scattered all over
England, and the facts published in every such sheet were like sparks
thrown about near a powder magazine. The private citizens who wrote to
the Home Office in the winter of 1830 mentioned these papers almost as
often as they mentioned Cobbett’s lectures. Many of these papers were
based on a pamphlet written by Sir James Graham, First Lord of the