ABSTRACT
First published in The Examiner, IX, 8 December 1816, pp. 769–70. For a further account of the Spa Fields meeting and its aftermath, see, for example, The Examiner, IX, 8 December 1816, pp. 777–81; 15 December 1816, pp. 795–7; 22 December 1816, pp. 812–14; X, 5 January 1817, pp. 12– 13; 12 January 1817, p. 23; 26 January 1817, p. 53, 60–3; and 16 March 1817, pp. 175–6. A report on a later Spa Fields meeting can be found in the 16 February 1817 Examiner, p. 110. Seeking to defend Reform from those who would link it to violent revolt, and reminding his readers of the hypocrisy of those who decry small acts of violence while condoning massive ones, Hunt writes here in response to the demonstrations at Spa Fields that resulted in a riot, the circumstances and meaning of which are somewhat obscure. In London, throughout March 1816, there seem to have been attempts to organize a ‘Jacobin’ or ‘Spencean’ opposition to the government. With unemployment high and demobilized soldiers and sailors filling the capital, the people looked for some way to express their discontent. A committee was created, comprised of Dr James Watson (c. 1766-1838; DNB) and his son, Thomas Preston, Arthur Thistlewood (1770-1820; DNB), later a Cato Street conspirator, Hooper, and John Castle, a government informer. The committee called for a mass demonstration at Spa Fields on 15 November 1816 and invited Henry Hunt, Major Cartwright and William Cobbett to address the gathering. Only Hunt agreed to speak and urged more moderate proposals than the organizers; a huge crowd turned out to hear Hunt, and the meeting was ‘adjourned’ until 2 December (see The Examiner, IX, 17 November 1816, pp. 730–2). Rumours circulated that this next meeting would result in some sort of action. Watson and his son arrived early and apparently drunk, and the son incited the crowd to march on the Tower. Various groups may have headed for the Tower, the Bank and the prisons in an attempt to enact a Bastille-like revolution. Several gun shops were looted. Apparently, either Preston or Thistlewood called upon the troops at the Tower to join the people. Several hours of significant rioting took place in the Minories. However, the government, perhaps forewarned by Castle (who also seems to have been involved in inciting the violence), was ready for the rioters and had large numbers of police on the streets, and the riots were put down. In fact, most of the crowd had remained to hear Hunt, and the meeting was again ‘adjourned’ until 9 December, when an even larger crowd gathered peacefully. As a result of the riots, young Watson went into exile and the rest of the committee, except Castle, was arrested. Dr Watson was brought to trial on 9 June 1817, and when he was acquitted, charges against the others were dropped, but a sailor involved in the riots was hanged. Of these events, E. P. Thompson writes, ‘The riots were not a simple drunken outbreak, nor a carefully-planned provocation, nor yet a definite attempt to simulate the fall of the Bastille, but they partook in some degree of all three’; see Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (New York: Vintage, 1966), p. 635. See also William Hone, The Meeting in Spa Fields (1816) and The Riots in London (1816). These events, occurring as Keats, Hunt and Shelley came together, are an important context for their work. On 20 November 1816, several days after the first Spa Fields meeting, Shelley would write to Byron that the popular party was increasing in strength and that the country would have to accept radical reform or undergo a revolution (see letter to Byron, 20 November 1816, The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1964), vol. i, p. 513). Hunt also uses the occasion to separate his view of politics and poetry from that of what he sees as the apostate Lake School, here Coleridge, Southey, and Landor, with Wordsworth, holding a government position, perhaps present as the egotistical sinecurist of the final paragraph.
