The writings of William Cobbett had great influence upon the working classes, and his incessant cry for reform met with sympathetic response. The Sunday schools had given elementary instruction to the stronger brains, and native shrewdness, tutored by suffering and hardship, had made them into intelligent politicians. They knew where the shoe pinched, and in spite of some errors of judgment had a clearer conception than their “betters” of the remedy. Sam Bamford, the weaver-poet, was the secretary of a political club at Middleton for Parliamentary reform as a means of obtaining the repeal of the Corn Laws and other desirable objects, and similar clubs existed all over the county.
In 1816, the Ministers suspended the Habeas Corpus Act, and took other measures for burking public discussion. At the “blanketeer” meeting, held at St. Peter’s Fields, 10th March, it was decided that the men should march to London to petition, each with a blanket on his shoulder for protection from cold in the night. The meeting was dispersed by the military, many were arrested, and those who had started on their way to the Metropolis were pursued. The “blanketeers” were overtaken on Lancashire Hill, Stockport, where more were arrested, more wounded, and where one cottager was shot at his own door. It is only fair to the military to state that they showed far more moderation than the magistrates. A few of the “blanketeers” reached Derby. The spies were now at work, and Bamford tells how one of these invited him to join in making a “Moscow of Manchester.” The muddle-headed authorities accepted without inquiry all that their infamous agents told them, and after the arrest of Bamford and others at Ardwick, the Rev. W. R. Hay assured his awe-struck hearers that when these men were tried “purposes of the blackest enormity must be disclosed to the public.” After being taken in irons to London—one of them being an old man of seventy-four—and examined by the Secretary of State, they were discharged, and not even put upon their trial. Yet this “plot” was the chief argument used by Sidmouth for a further suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act. Castlereagh cynically avowed that they had sent Oliver the spy “to see what was going on.” The Lancashire men were warned in time, and Oliver, though he tried hard, had no success here. In Derbyshire, however, he fomented an “insurrection,” and those whom he had first incited to sedition he afterwards betrayed to the scaffold. In 1818, the Manchester reformers sent a petition to the House of Commons, in which they asserted that there never had been in this neighbourhood any reason for the suspension of the Habeas Corpus Act, denounced the work of the spies, and asked for an inquiry into the action of the magistrates at Manchester. Bamford and others who had been arrested also petitioned; but Mr. George Philips’s motion for an inquiry by a Committee of the House of Commons was rejected by 162 votes against 69, and the Ministry obtained an Act of indemnity for all their proceedings. Mr. John Greenwood managed to exclude the name of Mr. J. E. Taylor from the list of the Salford assessors because he was a moderate reformer, and asserted that he had written a handbill leading to the destruction at the Exchange in 1812. Mr. Taylor, unable to obtain any retraction or explanation, denounced him as “a liar, a slanderer, and a scoundrel.” For this an action for libel was begun. Mr. Taylor defended himself, and the jury came to the conclusion that the plaintiff was “a liar, a slanderer, and a scoundrel.” Mr. Taylor’s acquittal was chiefly due to the foreman of the jury, Mr. John Rylands, of Warrington, who, resolutely putting aside all legal cobwebs, declined to punish a man for telling the truth.