Newport and after

The revolutionary outbreak that Napier half expected when the weather turned cold ¹ did indeed take place, but it came outside the area over which he was in command. This was the Newport Rising in Wales on 3–4 November. After long preparation and the stockpiling of weapons, seven thousand or so Chartists marched down the industrial valleys of Monmouthshire in converging columns and took the city. Led by the former magistrate John Frost, they attacked the town officials and thirty-one infantrymen who made a stand in the Westgate Hotel. But when they came under fire themselves they were routed and sent off in a panic. Napier’s brother-in-law Henry Bunbury expressed the common view: ‘A pretty rascal this . . . Frost must have been! to get a number of poor devils shot, [while] the fellow’s only assignable object was that of murdering the magistrates and the handful of soldiers.’ ² Afterwards there were trials and death sentences. (After large protests the death sentences were commuted to transportation for life.) Twenty-two people died at Newport, and perhaps fifty were seriously wounded. Historian Malcolm Chase reminds us that this was ‘the largest number of fatalities of any civil disturbance in modern British history’. ³