On the Record: The People’s Charter

Chloe Lee: In our previous two episodes of this mini-series, we've seen how ideas about power and representation have echoed throughout British history.

First, the Magna Carta, 1215, 

Second, in the Putney Debates, 1647, Levellers claimed that every ‘freeborn’ man had the right to vote, even if he doesn’t have wealth or property.

These moments, however revolutionary, touched only a tiny fraction of society. Even after the Putney Debates, fewer than one in ten men could vote. Women, of course, had no say at all.

I'm Chloe Lee, a records specialist at The National Archives.

This is On the Record at The National Archives, uncovering the past through stories of everyday people.

This is the final episode of our mini-series, People and Power, exploring how people have challenged ideas about power, and fought for their voices to be heard in Britain.

In this episode, we're looking at Britain's first truly mass political movement: Chartism. In the nineteenth century, the Chartists published newspapers, held massive rallies, and in some cases, took up arms.

The establishment was terrified. Was this the French Revolution coming to Britain?

To guide us through this remarkable movement, I'm joined by Joe Cozens, a historian whose work explores Chartism and working-class politics.

Joe, welcome to the studio.

Joe Cozens: Hi Chloe. Great pleasure to be here.

Chloe: Great. Before we get into the context and history of Chartism, can you first tell me what the Chartists wanted?

Joe: Well, the Chartists wanted six things. We often talk about the six points of the People's Charter, and they are: a vote for every man over 21 (so that's the most important one); the secret ballot; no property qualifications for MPs; and payment for MPs. So you should be paid for going to Parliament; equal-sized constituencies; and annual parliaments, right? So the six points of the People's Charter are in a document. It's a manifesto. It appears in various different forms. So in its simplest form, it's sort of just those six points on a poster or a pamphlet. In its more worked-out form, it's a bill—a parliamentary bill that the Chartists were suggesting that the House of Commons and the Lords pass wholesale into law.

Chloe: Okay, okay, so they're putting pressure on the ruling classes effectively. But let's remind ourselves that in the late 18th century, before Chartism, Joe who was allowed to vote?

Joe: It's a really complicated picture. So it's a very inconsistent system, political system that we have in Britain at that time. So you'll find in some areas, so in Middlesex, Westminster and Bristol, we have quite a large franchise where all sorts of people have the right to vote. So all sorts of men typically have the right to vote. But elsewhere, lots of people are unable to vote altogether.

Chloe: So it's a little bit regional and also I'm noticing no women at all.

Joe: Well, that becomes complicated as well. Some elite women did have the ability to vote in elections in the 18th century, but after the 1832 Reform Act, which tidies up the electoral system, that act explicitly mentions that you have to be a man, so there are no female voters after 1832.

Chloe: Right okay, so there's no kind of linear progress here. It's a bit shuffling forward and shuffling back, and I'm guessing working people like you and me are completely excluded?

Joe: So after 1832 about one in five men could vote. So that means that most working people, almost all working people, don't have the right to vote.

Chloe: So I guess it's this thinking that ordinary people… they weren't educated or clever enough to make political decisions… those matters are kind of over their heads.

Joe: That's absolutely right. And in fact, this is a concept that historians talk about in the 19th century: this idea of virtual representation. So our best educated, wealthiest people have the right to vote.

Chloe: And they can make the best decisions for everybody?

Joe: They will virtually represent us. They will make decisions on behalf of their family, for their daughters or for their sons, but also for the working poor, who, as you say, are considered to not be rational enough and not have the means to understand the complexity of the political decisions that are needed.

Chloe: Right and those six points that you referred to right at the top of the episode, we might think of those demands as fairly reasonable things. Why was this so contentious to ask for them?

Joe: Well, we're already touching on this, aren't we, so there's a certain classist view that working people shouldn't be included in these decisions. And there's also the kind of historical political context of the French Revolution. So in France, in 1789, we have this huge uprising of the peasantry, of the people, of the workers in the towns, and we have what elites in Britain see as social levelling, the overturning of the church, the execution of the monarchy… and they begin to associate the ideas of the French Revolution, which include democracy, with anarchy, political anarchy and with terror and the terror of the French Revolution.

Chloe: I see so they're looking over the channel and they're getting a bit worried, a bit anxious about what might come over.

Joe: I think a bit anxious is putting it lightly. They're really concerned. 

Chloe: Well, especially if guillotines are involved. 

Joe: Exactly, the guillotine might come out in Britain if we let the genie out of the bottle. So there's real concerns in the wake of the French Revolution about altering too dramatically Britain's political system. So this is why we get incremental reforms through the 19th century, rather than dramatic changes like the Chartists are arguing for.

Chloe: Okay, so let's go back to those six demands that were published in the People's Charter in 1838, a version of which we actually do hold in our Home Office records here at The National Archives. So there was the vote for every man over 21—that feels fairly obvious to me. It's all about fairness. But what about… was it the secret ballot that was next?

Joe: Yes, so you've got to remember that in the early 19th century (and in the 18th century), voting is done in public, so you have to go up to the hustings, declare your name, give your vote, and then your name and your vote are recorded in the poll books. So there's a practice called thumbing, which is where employers would put pressure on their workers to vote for a particular candidate that they supported. So the secret ballot, where my vote is kept private to me, means that I don't have to have pressure put on me to vote in a way that my conscience tells me not to. So that's seen as an important demand for working men.

Chloe: Yes, that makes sense. And so the next one, no property qualification. What did this mean? 

Joe: Well, you had to have £100 per year in income from land in order to qualify to be an MP, so this basically means that landed aristocrats traditionally became MPs. But also industrialists who became wealthy would qualify to become MPs. Working men say, well we create the wealth in the country. Why aren't people like us present in Parliament, voting on issues that matter to us?

Chloe: And that kind of follows on to the next one, which is payment for MPs, something we would take for granted in 2025.

Joe: Yeah, even if you were middle class, if you're a shopkeeper, you would have to give up your work to go to Parliament to serve as an MP, and so that would preclude a large section of people from doing that, because they'd have to take time off of work, and there'd be no remuneration for that. So they're saying, again, working people, middle-class people, ought to be paid to do the job of being an MP, and then that will kind of level the playing field.

Chloe: What about the next one? 

Joe: Equal constituencies. Okay, now we have to remember that there was very unequal distribution of representation in Britain at this time. So there were tiny pocket boroughs in the early 19th century, like Old Sarum and Camelford, where there were two MPs, and only, I don't know, 10 men and a goat who could vote in the election. And then there were entire towns like Manchester and Birmingham that had no MPs. So the Great Reform Act of 1832 did away with those pocket boroughs and redistributed seats to towns like Manchester and Birmingham, but the Chartists argued that there was still an unevenness to this. So tiny counties like Rutland might be as well represented as very large manufacturing towns like Manchester or Glasgow. So they argued that we ought to have equal constituencies, right? So the Chartists were arguing that we ought to have equally sized constituencies.

Chloe: I see, I see, and annual parliaments. What's all that about?

Joe: So we're quite used to this idea that every four or five years we have an election. The Chartists were arguing that, wouldn't it be better if our representatives, our MPs, were constantly under our supervision, in some ways, so that they knew an election was coming around the corner in 12 months’ time or less, and then they would represent our interests more closely, rather than developing their own interests and agendas. So annual parliaments were something that they thought would make democracy more representative, more responsive to the will of the people.

Chloe: So Chartism was really about working men being able to have their voice heard, right? But it's not just this published charter, this document. It is a movement. How did it spread?

Joe: Well, yeah, you're quite right. Chartism is quite a complicated, broad movement, and it has various different strands to it. In terms of spreading the message, the press is really, really important here. So there are various Chartist newspapers. The biggest is the Northern Star. Fergus O'Connor, the great Chartist orator, runs this newspaper, and it gains a huge readership, and is actually competing with some of the London national newspapers by the late 1830s/early 1840s. So people are reading about Chartism. And in the Northern Star, we can find all sorts of news items about public meetings that are taking place—debates, discussions, mass monster meetings where thousands of people turn up to hear speakers and to hear about why the Charter is such an important thing to be demanding.

Chloe: We heard from Neil and Erica about the Putney Debates and how a lot of that was about the exchange of ideas, and then they started to write things down too. The press being so prevalent at this time, and ideas being so accessible—what does this mean for Chartism?

Joe: Yeah, so I think Chartism benefits from the changes in the 18th century and the Enlightenment more broadly, I guess, where we have print increasing exponentially. So it's becoming cheaper and cheaper to produce newspapers and so on. And also in England and Wales, at least, we see literacy rates rising. So notwithstanding the fact that we still don't have, at this point, national education—compulsory education—nevertheless, more and more people are learning to read, and this includes Chartists like William Lovett, who grew up poor in Cornwall but learned to read through the help of his grandmother. So working people could read; they could engage with this printed material. And taxes on newspapers, which had been really contentious in the early 1830s, are starting to be reduced at this point as well, because of the War of the Unstamped. So again, Chartists like Henry Hetherington, who was a pressman who edited this newspaper, the Poor Man's Guardian, had fought very hard and been to prison over the issue of taxation on newspapers, and had argued that these were taxes on knowledge. And so through those contentions, we end up with a cheaper press, more people reading, and more people engaging with Chartism. So I think the written word—or the printed word—is quite an important aspect to this.

Chloe: That's so interesting and you know, we talk about this idea of the first truly mass political movement, the six points seem to focus on, well, they focus on men over 21. What about women and also children as well right?

Joe: Well, this is a really important question, so you're quite right. In their published outputs, the Chartists aren't generally arguing for votes for women. They're focusing on manhood suffrage, and actually, they are kind of trapped in that same idea about virtual representation, which we were talking about earlier, that if working men had the right to vote, they could represent their whole family, including their wives and their daughters.

Chloe: So those traditional gender stereotypes values around who can speak for whom?

Joe: Yeah. So sometimes Chartism has been thought of as a masculinist movement, a movement that puts men and men's rights first, and there is something to that. Definitely, having said that, another way in which Chartists spread their message is through petitioning campaigns. And we know through the work of Malcolm Chase and other historians that women and children from working-class communities were involved in canvassing for Chartist petitions to be drawn up, and they were adding their own names to these petitions. 

Chloe: Even though they might not have benefited, or it might have been so clear how they benefited, but we see that across history, right? That's something that is repeated in patterns when it comes to power.

Joe: That's right, so although they might not have benefited from the right to vote directly themselves, they nevertheless supported the broader ideas that the Chartists were putting forward.

Chloe: Yeah, okay, so, so we've got this charter setting out these peaceful demands. But was Chartism always peaceful?

Joe: Well, as I said, Chartism is a broad church, and it contains within it a revolutionary impetus. So one of the famous mottos that the Chartists developed is ‘peaceably, if we may, forcibly if we must’. So they're asking for, like you say, peaceful reforms, largely, but there's that undercurrent of forcibly, if we must, that if the system that they're pushing against refuses to represent them, then that's a tyrannical system, as they see it, and one which they are within their rights to take up arms against. And so at various points in the history of Chartism, we do see a move towards more violent means. So the classic example of this is the Newport rising of 1839.

Chloe: Okay, so I can see you have some of our records there about the moment that this rising came to a head. Can you tell us a bit more about this story?

Joe: This episode sort of unfolds in Newport in South Wales, and there's quite a complicated background to it. But in short, Henry Vincent, a famous Chartist speaker, had written in his newspaper, the Western Vindicator, about the defensible nature of Wales and that Wales would make a great republic. So he'd sort of been implying that a Chartist revolution in Wales would be a good thing.

Chloe: A good place to start. 

Joe: Good place to start. He gets arrested. He gets put in Monmouth jail. And then another Chartist, a local man, John Frost, who was a draper, but also the one-time mayor of Newport, begins to elaborate on this plan. And he brings together thousands of miners from the hillside, and they come up with this plan to invade a number of Welsh towns, to seize arms from soldiers, and to begin this rising—and to free Henry Vincent from prison. So this is the start, the early rumblings, of a sort of Chartist revolution in South Wales. And the climax of this is—well, we have something here, in terms of the records. I have here a kind of illustration from the War Office records, which shows the Chartist attack on the Westgate Hotel in Newport. So this is sometimes called the Newport Rising. So thousands of Chartists, armed with pikes, attack the Westgate Hotel, where there's a party of soldiers who then fire on them and kill over twenty Chartist rebels. So essentially, it ends in farce—you know, they're gunned down by the infantry. The War Office illustration shows where the troops were when they were firing, where the bodies fell. And basically, that's the end of the Newport Rising. The other contingents, who are supposed to be invading other towns like Monmouth, hear news about this and decide to disappear into the shadows, and instead we get Frost, and a couple of his collaborators, arrested and tried for high treason.

Chloe: I see, I see, so it all kind of quickly comes to a head, but then quickly is put down effectively, and you've got pikes against guns. So they're arrested, what happens to them?

Joe: So John Frost, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones are all initially tried for high treason and sentenced to be, you know, hanged, drawn and quartered—executed. But the government’s very concerned about making political martyrs. If they have a big public execution, then these Chartists are going to gain notoriety. So, in the end, they downgrade their punishment to transportation, and they're all sent to Van Diemen's Land, in Australasia.

Chloe: So after Newport, the Chartists continued to argue peacefully and also forcefully for reform. I can see you've got another record there. What's in this next record?

Joe: Yeah, so the next record I have refers to the Great Chartists’ petition of 1842. There were—and they've been writing petitions the whole time, right?—three mass petitions: 1839, 1842 and 1848. And the one in the middle is the biggest—3.3 million signatures.

Chloe: Wow, that's extraordinary, considering, I guess, how people were signing this petition. They weren't just going online and signing it digitally, were they? They were physically signing it?

Joe: Yeah, you're absolutely right. So this is a huge physical document stitched together from pieces of paper, I see that have been compiled all around the country. And just to put it in context, 3.3 million signatures is about a third of the British population, four times the size of the electorate at that time. As I mentioned before, men, women and children would have signed this. And so there was a lot of work that went into it, from local Chartist groups, to try and gather up these signatures.

Chloe: Which just shows how many people were politically engaged at that moment in time.

Joe: It shows how deep support for Chartism was in 1842. You can see that in the document that we have, which is again another illustration of this enormous petition being held aloft by, I would say, about 18 men on this enormous sort of wooden structure. It looks a bit like a sedan chair, but with a massive petition on it, and they're headed towards the House of Commons to deliver this petition.

Chloe: Okay, so this is a huge moment for Chartism as a movement. How did Parliament respond?

Joe: Well, there's a really interesting note in Hansard, the sort of official account of Parliament, where it says that “a great procession consisting of a vast multitude delivered this petition, that it was so wide that the doors of the house had to be taken off their hinges. And when it was spread out, it took over a great part of the floor and rose above the level of the table.” So parliamentarians appreciate the scale of this. This is the biggest petition at that point ever presented, and it remains the biggest petition until the era of the internet and the petitions around the time of Brexit; those are the next largest ones. So it's huge. So parliamentarians can't help but appreciate the novelty of this. On the other hand, what the Chartists are asking for is permission to come to the bar and talk about their arguments and to be listened to. And that is voted down quite heavily by parliamentarians. They have a few supporters who propose this and back it, but the vast majority of MPs refuse to entertain this.

Chloe: And we've kind of spoken a little bit about the resistance from the establishment. But why such resistance? I don't know if you can expand on that for me.

Joe: Well, again, I think this comes back to the French Revolution and fears about what might happen if we tinker with our very venerable and well-established political system: what are the unforeseen consequences of this? So those MPs who vote against hearing the Chartists out, who dismiss the petition, must be concerned about the consequences that would flow from this. So there are real concerns about that. There's also, it must be said, a huge social gap between MPs in the House of Commons and working men in the factories and working on farms and in workshops. They see themselves as a class apart, you know, and they think that working people can't be trusted with this important power of choosing representatives. I think, finally, as well, there's also a party political dynamic to this: it's difficult to predict how voters will vote once we extend the right to all sorts of people who didn't have it before. Will it benefit my party, or will it benefit me?

Chloe: Yeah, it's like Pandora's box could be for someone who's, you know, part of the establishment. 

Joe: That's a great way of thinking of it. 

Chloe: Okay, so the Chartists didn't win. Why do they matter?

Joe: Yeah, they didn't win in their own lifetimes, or most of their own lifetimes, right? So they are dismissed by the House of Commons repeatedly when they come up with these enormous petitions, and gradually, in the 1850s, the movement begins to fade away. But they do set the agenda for the next 100 years, the political points, the six political points that they're arguing for, continue to be discussed. And over the next century, five out of six of them eventually become law.

Chloe: Okay, and so, so what was the one that didn't come into being?

Joe: So that one is annual parliaments. We still don't have annual parliaments. But in 1867, we see more men, including some working-class men, getting the vote—the right to vote in the counties as well as the boroughs. And then by the time of 1918, by which point all the Chartists are long dead and buried, we get one man, one vote. In 1872, we get the secret ballot, so now working people don't have to worry about their votes being scrutinised by their employers. In 1858, we get the abolition of property qualifications for MPs. And from 1911—early 20th century onwards—MPs are also being paid. So if you come from a poorer background and can't afford to support yourself, being an MP now has a salary attached. In terms of equal constituencies, in 1885 we've got the Redistribution of Seats Act, which is an attempt to have a broadly equal number of electors per constituency. And this practice sort of carries on today through what's called the Boundary Commission, which tries to make sure that there's roughly an equal number of electors in each constituency.

Chloe: So there are these changes, albeit very slow and kind of, you know, little, little steps. Why don't the Chartists get more recognition?

Joe: Well, I don't know. I would love them to have more recognition. That's one of the reasons that I've agreed to do this podcast. I think it's a really interesting, rich political movement that deserves more airtime, frankly.

Chloe: And we talk about them winning and losing, so maybe this is seen as a failed movement, but there definitely is some nuance to that.

Joe: Yeah, it depends on the chronological perspective that we adopt, certainly within the timeframe of the movement itself. Yeah, we can, and Chartism has been seen as a failed movement that doesn't manage to get what it's asking for. So I think that certainly contributes to the reason that we don't celebrate it or think about it. And I suppose that contrast to the Suffragettes, you know, sure, many of those women who were fighting those campaigns are around to see 1918 and some women getting the vote, and then all women getting the vote in the 1920s, so there is a difference. There is a qualitative difference, I think the question of gender might also play a role here.

So in the 1980s, feminist historians like Anna Clark were critical of Chartism for not doing more to incorporate women and to argue the case for voting rights for working women as well as for working men. So I think, although that's been nuanced a little bit in more recent times, and the role of women has been kind of re-examined and reincorporated into that history, that may also contribute to why Chartism doesn't necessarily get the recognition that it might.  

So most recently, the work of Matthew Roberts has uncovered how female Chartist associations in Sheffield were actually at the vanguard of arguing for voting rights for women. So in 1851, we get the first women's suffrage petition, and often, historians have dated that to much later in the 1860s and credited middle-class and elite women with the 1866 female suffrage petition as being the first of its kind, but Roberts’ work has shown that actually, female Chartist associations were there first. So it's these working women in industrial towns like Sheffield who were actually making the case for women's suffrage. So although Chartism is largely masculinist, I wouldn't refute that there is space there for discussions to bubble up about women's rights too,

Chloe: Sure, and it also just shows how broadly working-class history gets less attention. Well, thank you, Joe, for being with me in our final episode of our series on People and Power. 

Joe: Thank you very much, Chloe.

Chloe: The Chartists gathered millions of signatures on petitions that Parliament dismissed with contempt. They marched, they organised, and some even died fighting for the right to vote.

In their own time, they were seen as failures, dreamers, troublemakers.

But within decades, their demands started to become reality. The workers who signed those petitions—the ones Parliament dismissed—their great-grandchildren would vote, would serve as MPs, would help shape the nation.

The golden thread we've traced through this mini-series on People and Power—from medieval liberties to revolutionary debates to mass movements—shows us that democratic rights were not easily won. They were fought for, generation after generation, by ordinary people who dared to demand a say in how they were governed.

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Finally, thank you to all our experts who contributed to this episode. This episode was written, edited, and produced by Tash Walker and Adam Zmith of Aunt Nell, for The National Archives.

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