Ballads and songs of Peterloo

Alison Morgan

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781784993122
• eBook ISBN: 9781526132482
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: British History
• Index: History

This is an edited anthology comprising more than seventy poems and songs written in immediate response to Peterloo in 1819. Mainly anonymous, these ballads appears either as broadsides or in the radical press and are collected together for the first time.

1

‘Rise Britons, rise now from your slumber’: the revolutionary call to arms

Rise like lions after slumber

In unvanquishable number –

Shake your chains to earth like dew

Which in sleep had fallen on you –

Ye are many – they are few.¹

Shelley’s famous refrain in The Masque of Anarchy, written furiously and frantically in the ten days following his receipt of news from Manchester, is undoubtedly the most famous piece of poetry associated with Peterloo. Described by Robert Poole as ‘perhaps the most powerful of all political poems’, in Salford this verse can still be seen on Transport House, the former regional headquarters of the Transport and General Workers’ Union.² Echoes of this invocation can also be found in the socialist anthem, ‘The International’, written by a transport worker, Eugene Pottier, after the crushing of the Paris Commune by the French government in 1871:

Arise ye workers from your slumbers

Arise ye prisoners of want

For reason in revolt now thunders

And at last ends the age of cant³

What is less well known is that Shelley and Pottier are, consciously or otherwise, utilising a trope that features in ballads and broadsides dating back to the sixteenth century.⁴ This chapter begins by briefly examining the historical provenance of this trope and its significance within radical culture prior to Peterloo, as well as those written in the immediate aftermath of the massacre, thereby highlighting the intertextual dialogue between the poems which is illustrated not only by an ideological unity but also by the commonality of motifs, forms, styles and even tunes. The urging of the people to wake from their apathy and subjugation to rise against their oppressors became part of the radical discourse in late 1819 and early 1820. The urge to act against the intolerable oppression of the Liverpool administration captured the zeitgeist of the months following Peterloo when, it was truly believed, revolution would occur.⁵ The hoped-for revolution did not come to pass but the poems gathered here evince a powerful sense of collectivity and common purpose with the repeated exhortations to arise and awaken redolent of those turbulent times.

Another famous use of the awakening and arising trope features in Milton’s Paradise Lost, first published in 1667. In the first book, following their expulsion from Heaven, Satan calls upon his Angels to ‘Awake! – arise! – or be forever fallen’, appealing to them with the possibility of re-entering Heaven or founding a new kingdom.⁶ When Richard Carlile pirated Shelley’s 1812 Declaration of Rights, containing Satan’s exhortation, in the Republican on 24 September 1819, its contemporaneous resonance with the readership would not have been missed.⁷

The earliest example of an exhortatory ballad that I have discovered dates to 1557. Arise and Awake was to be sung to the tune of ‘Rogero’:

Aryse and wak, for Christi’s sake,

Aryse, I say again;

Awake, all ye that synfull be,

Awak, for fear of payn.⁸

Here the speaker urgently seeks to awaken the sleeper from the dangers of sleep. The repetition of ‘aryse’ and ‘awak’ creates a sense of desperation and implies that unconscious sleep is dangerous and safety will come with consciousness. The poems in this chapter depict sleep as compliance with tyranny and call on the people to awaken in order to act, as shown in ‘Address to Britons’:

Too long beneath an abject yoke

We basely bowed nor dar’d complain.⁹

During the English Revolution of the 1640s, there are examples of the trope of awakening being used on both sides of the conflict. ‘A New Ballad, Called a Review of the Rebellion, in Three Parts’ to the tune of ‘When the King Enjoys His Rights Again’ was written by the well-known ballad writer, Martin Parker, and published in 1647. As would be expected from a Royalist, Parker calls upon the British to wake from the sleep they have been lulled into by the Parliamentarians and return to an absolute monarchy under Charles I:

Britaines, awake from your six yeares dreame,

And listen to this deare bought theame,

Which shewes how you fast asleep were lulled,

And by what magick spells so gulled.¹⁰

This lengthy ballad narrates an exclusively Royalist view of the revolution before concluding that the only course of action is:

Then must king Charles alone

Be set upon his throne.¹¹

Two years later Charles was dead and Cromwell’s Commonwealth had replaced the monarchy. However, there was still resistance to the landowning gentry, notably by the Diggers, led by Gerrard Winstanley. The Diggers opposed the enclosure of common land and, in 1649, they occupied an area of wasteland at St George’s hill, using it as a platform to argue for the equitable redistribution of land. ‘The Digger’s Song’, written by Winstanley in 1649, exhorts the people to ‘stand up now’ against the Cavaliers and gentry and reclaim the land unjustly taken from them:

With spades and hoes and plowes stand up now,

Your freedom to uphold, seeing Cavaliers are bold

To kill you if they could, and rights from you to hold.

Stand up now, Diggers all.¹²

The command to ‘stand up’ implies that the Diggers needed to assert their presence and, in parallel with the command to rise, suggests emergence from a state of compliance. The reference in the poem above to ‘spades and hoes and plowes’ not only alludes to the agrarian activities of the Diggers but also carries the implication that these farming tools could quickly become weapons in what was rapidly becoming a class war.

The appeal to defend ancient or natural rights permeates the poems of the 1790s and 1810s and can be seen in several of the poems in this chapter, including ‘Patriotic Song’, in which the chorus declaims:

Steady, boys, steady

We claim all our rights and we’ll have them again.¹³

However, calling on the people to rise is not just the province of English radicals. Charles Mackay includes ‘Welcome, Charlie, O’er the Main’ in his 1861 collection, Jacobite Songs and Ballads of Scotland from 1688–1746; the song had also been published in the Scots Magazine in 1817, although its championing of ‘Royal Charlie’ suggests it was written around the time of the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion in which Charles Edward Stuart, the Young Pretender, marched his troops to within a hundred mil...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of illustrations
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 ‘Rise Britons, rise now from your slumber’: the revolutionary call to arms
• 2 ‘Ye English warriors’: radical nationalism and the true patriot
• 3 ‘Base brat of reform’: the victimisation of mother and child
• 4 ‘Your memorials shall survive the grave’: elegy and remembrance
• 5 ‘Those true sons of Mars’: chivalry, cowardice and the power of satire
• 6 ‘Freeman stand, or freeman die’: liberty and slavery
• Appendix
• Select bibliography
• Index of poem titles
• Index