ABSTRACT
Lord George Byron speech accused the government of putting market imperatives before the customs of the trade, and enforcing them by military coercion and the bloody penal code. The machine-breakers were eventually crushed with the help of 12,000 troops, and the execution or transportation of a number of the Luddite leaders. Special commissions were issued for assizes at Chester and Lancaster in May 1812, and for York in January 1813. Byron’s association with the death penalty was not yet at an end. In May 1812 he went to watch the hanging of John Bellingham, the Liverpool timber-merchant who had assassinated Prime Minister Spencer Perceval in the House of Commons. It has been stated that the persons in the temporary possession of Frames connive at their destruction; if this be proved upon enquiry, it were necessary that such material accessories to the crime, should be principals in the punishment.
