ABSTRACT
In December 1803, the magistrates of Chester found themselves confronted with a riot they could not control. The affair involved one Daniel Jackson, a stout 46-year-old man, who had enrolled in the Volunteer Artillery during the invasion scare of 1803. According to the regulating officer at Chester, Captain William Birchall, Jackson was technically a seaman, having spent six years of the last war on board HMS Formidable. In Birchall’s estimation, Jackson was ‘in every respect fitt for the service’.1 Having learned from the Admiralty that no impressible man could be protected in a volunteer corps, Birchall had no compunction about taking him up, but Jackson’s friends and fellow volunteers thought otherwise. The citizens of Chester were already angered by the presence of the press gang in their city. Upon the resumption of the war against the French, the Admiralty had recruited such slim pickings in Chester that the local press gang was disbanded.2 But as the threat of invasion loomed, a gang from Liverpool indiscriminately took up all and sundry in the push to man the fleet. As the magistrates reported, the press gang had been impressing farm servants, tradesmen and apprentices quite unconnected to the ‘sea service’.3 It had also been pushing for reinforcements at Parkgate, at the navigable end of the River Dee, which had become a sanctuary for seamen evading the press, making the whole area little more than a ‘thoroughfare of deserters’.4
Impressing Jackson, however, appears to have been the last straw in the deteriorating relations between the Navy and the town. The commanding officer of the volunteer corps had requested that Jackson be lodged in the town gaol while he sought out the lord lieutenant of the county to apply for his release. This was agreed to. But before he was able to petition for Jackson’s release, the volunteer corps and its supporters intervened. On the field day of the corps, a mob of several hundred, including volunteers and ‘other towns people’, assembled at the rendezvous of the press gang, broke the windows and destroyed the gang’s colours.5 They then moved on to Northgate gaol, where they prised open the door with a ‘long stout pole’ and ‘liberated’ Jackson, hurrying him away ‘in Triumph’.6 The commander of the volunteers proved powerless to stop them. Indeed, he suffered the indignity of having one of the ringleaders whom he had seized ‘forcibly rescued from him’.7 The magistrates did not fare much better. It took them over two hours to placate the
crowd. Such was the anger of the populace, they told the Home Secretary, they could not guarantee that other volunteers would not be rescued if they were taken up by the press gang. The Home Secretary was not amused. He was alarmed to hear that members of the volunteer corps were involved in this ‘outrageous Proceeding’ and demanded informations against the main culprits so that a prosecution could be launched.8 His demands were ignored; at least there is no evidence that the magistrates went out of their way to comply with his request. But one of the ringleaders in the riot, Daniel Humphreys, was prosecuted by Lieutenant Dutch, the officer who impressed Jackson. He was convicted at the Chester Quarter Sessions and spent nine weeks in gaol before his case was moved to the Court of King’s Bench for a judgment. During his confinement, Humphreys broke down and was subject to ‘several nervous attacks and hysteric fits’.9 This breakdown, together with strong character references and a recommendation of mercy from the Chester jury, were enough to win him the sympathy of the court. But not before the Attorney General had reduced him to ‘such as state of terror’ that the judges thought it expedient to postpone their judgment to the following day, when Humphreys was allowed to go at large.
