A River of Dissent

A River of Dissent: Documenting Lancaster’s Heritage Relating to Political and Religious Dissent

Posted by Robert Poole

Until 1974, Lancashire covered a huge part of the north-west, including what is now the South Lakes, Greater Manchester and Merseyside.

The Tudor Reformation made only limited progress here in the sixteenth century, leaving a strong Roman Catholic presence which generated many martyrs and provoked the authorities into staging a famous show trial of alleged witches in 1612. Protestant dissent from the Church of England was also strong, fuelling the civil wars of the 1640s which led to the birth of the Quaker movement. The peaceable Quaker’ principled pacifism and their refusal to swear oaths brought them into conflict with a state which demanded formal loyalty and military service.

The Jacobite rebellions of 1715 and 1745 in support of the exiled Stuart dynasty found much support in the Catholic parts of Lancashire, and the ’45 indeed passed through Lancaster twice.

The early nineteenth century brought trials of radical reformers and trade unionists. Thirty-eight Luddite workers were tried at a special assizes in 1812 on a charge of having sworn an illegal oath, a secret form of association used at a time when trade unions were banned. They were acquitted and their appearance in court was captured by an unknown artist. Perhaps it was the same one who sketched Hannah Smith of Manchester, sentenced to death for her part in a food riot which involved the theft of a cartload of potatoes – the only food rioter to whom we can put a face.

The organisers of the 1819 reform rally in Manchester, the occasion of the Peterloo massacre when fifteen were killed and hundreds injured by troops, were initially tried in Lancaster, and held in cells which still exist in the King’s Evidence Tower.

In the 1830s and 1840s their successors, the Chartists, also found themselves on trial in Lancaster castle, including their national leader, Feargus O’Connor.

None of these lost their lives; the bloodiest trial of the century was probably that of a group of male homosexuals from Warrington, five of whom were executed in 1806 for the vaguely-defined crime of ‘sodomy’.

In the early twentieth century Lancaster brought forth campaigners for women’s suffrage and, in the Great War of 1914-18, conscientious objectors, both of whom came up against the law.

The coming of Lancaster University in 1964 in time brought with it a wave of student activism, much of it taking root in the city. Students joined forces with local Quakers in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament and other global causes, supporting peace camps at Greenham Common and making links with earlier generations in the person of the veteran pacifist and former Lancaster Labour parliamentary candidate Fenner Brockway. A group of Trident Ploughshares protestors were tried at the castle for attempting to disable nuclear weapons.

In the 1970s Lancaster became a growth point for the nascent green movement, which has developed in many guises since, followed by the movement for global justice, and most recently the anti-capitalist movement of the early twenty-first century.

Lancaster castle may be the symbol of royal authority, but perhaps its greatest historical significance lies in the centuries-long procession of dissenters who passed through its crown court and spent time in its cells.

Their causes were varied and sometimes conflicting, and inevitably not all are represented in this project. It’s hard to find positive principles that unite (for example) the pacifist Quakers of the 1650s, the Jacobite rebels of the 1740s, and the executed homosexuals of 1806. History has not always connected them. Few student activists were aware that their first vice chancellor, Charles Carter, had been imprisoned as a conscientious objector in the Second World War, or that Lancaster’s flourishing gay scene was in part founded on the work of Lancaster’s unconventional conservative MP Humphrey Berkeley, who had introduced the bill which legalised homosexual activity in 1967.

What all these Lancashire activists – or simple victims – had in common was that they were forced to stand up for their rights against the laws of their day. Many of them had their day in court here in Lancaster. Nearly all the causes for which they stood – religious liberty, civil rights, equality, and freedom from persecution – have since been won. Documenting Dissent seeks to bring them together and make their stories better known in an age which is, happily, more willing than their own to pay tribute to them.

THEMES

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•     
•     Conscientious Objectors
•     Religious Dissenters
•     Political Dissenters
•     Peace & Protest
•     Women
•     LGBT