CHAPTER VII 



CHARTIST RISING IN MONMOUTHSHIRE IN 1839 



THE remembrance of the Chartist 1 rising in Monmouth- 

 shire of November, 1839, must have long faded away, except 

 from the minds of the few survivors who were concerned 

 in its suppression, and those of the younger generation 

 who remember it from the anxiety it caused throughout the 

 district. I came among the latter number. My father was 

 an acting magistrate, and at the time alterations were going 

 on in his house at Sedbury Park. I can well remember the 

 surly, disobedient, and generally insubordinate behaviour of 

 the local workmen in the week preceding Sunday, the 

 3rd of November. With the return of the workmen, in the 

 course of the following week, the face of affairs had however 

 changed. The rising had taken place, and had been 

 thoroughly crushed. Receiving a reverse, they were there and 

 then seized with panic, and fled. Their chief leaders by 

 name John Frost, Zephaniah Williams, and William Jones, 

 and others not so deeply implicated were captured, and to 

 us the result was exceedingly satisfactory. The men when 

 they returned were patterns of obedience and as meek as 

 mice. They did not in the least desire the distinction 



1 Chartism was an excited, and, in some instances, violent political 

 movement which occurred in Great Britain consequent upon the 

 dire distress and poverty of the labouring classes in the thirties 

 of the nineteenth century, and their disappointment with the results of 

 the Reform Bill of 1832. In June, 1839, a monster petition was pre- 

 sented to the House of Commons with 1,280,000 names attached. Its 

 unsympathetic reception fanned the rebellious spirit abroad among the 

 working classes and led to an increase of unruly disturbances, and to 

 the outbreak at Newport, here described. The movement collapsed in 

 1848, and with the development of the industrial prosperity of the 

 country, largely due to the use of steam power in manufacturing 

 centres, and the vast improvement of the economic and social 

 condition of the people, together with greater political freedom, any 

 return of the perfectly natural, if not even justifiable, spirit of dis- 

 content became impossible. (ED.). 



47 



