The Fight for Scottish Democracy: Rebellion and Reform in 1820. By Murray Armstrong (London, Pluto Press, 2020) 296 pp. $99.00 cloth $19.95 paper

Abstract

On April 1, 1820, a self-styled “provisional government” issued a proclamation from Glasgow, imploring the “inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland” to take up arms. This was no April Fools’ day joke. Striking weavers in the city and surrounding industrial towns, numbering 60,000, provided the insurgents with hope, but the rebellion soon petered out following a botched armed rising. Its leaders were arrested, and at summer’s end, three met their ends in public execution. Armstrong’s engaging account of 1820 begins where his last work on late eighteenth-century radicalism—The Liberty Tree: The Stirring Story of Thomas Muir And Scotland’s Fight for Democracy (Edinburgh, 2014)—ended. It centers on the experience of Scottish weavers, the skilled craftsmen who provided both the industrial strength and dense political organization that made the 1820 rising possible. Their secret societies and oath taking spooked the British state as it recovered from the Napoleonic wars and faced intermittent famines and the crushing effects of industrial business cycles.Armstrong is tactful in his discussion of the complexities that shaped reforming politics, effectively developing biographies to tell the story from the point of view of radicals and bourgeois “volunteer” soldiers alike. Less expectedly, he details weavers’ relationship with the Whig lawyers who repeatedly defended them in the courts. This cross-class alliance harked back to the 1790s but was visible again in 1812 when Francis Jeffrey implored courts to impose wage rates on employers attempting to use slack labor-market conditions to their advantage. These relationships challenge conventional models of the moral economy inspired by Thompson, which assume that liberals were the arch opponents of paternalism. However, political distinctions ultimately crystallized along class lines.1 Jeffrey represented the men who took part in the rising, but he viewed their actions as immature. The radical cause was separated from the liberal one after 1820, becoming more clearly imbued with confrontational class politics. Liberalism, however, became associated with the compromises that led to the limited suffrage extension of 1832.The Fight for Scottish Democracy begins with John Wilson’s family digging up the veteran revolutionary’s body after his execution. In fourteen short chapters, Armstrong runs through the 1812 weavers’ strike, another dispute in 1817, the outbreak of typhus fever in 1819, and the rising. The analysis draws from the radical press, court records, and government archives; together they detail paranoia among government ministers and the turning of Alexander Richmond, the fugitive weavers’ leader who became an informant. Armstrong’s eye for detail is one of the book’s key strengths. He authoritatively concludes that the widespread view of the rising as the work of spies is misplaced. The rising failed because Britain’s “manufacturing districts” were isolated from one another, despite attempts to maintain contact between London, the Midlands, Northern England, and West-Central Scotland. Armstrong’s caution regarding Scottish nationalist assessments of the rising are bolstered when he notes that bands at radical demonstrations played “Rule Britannia” alongside “Scots Wha Hae.” The investigation of songs and poetry written by the uprising’s supporters also reveals their international inspiration and sympathies for abolitionism.The book, however, betrays a lack of analytical depth. Despite its title, it pays insufficient attention to the role that Scottish national consciousness played in the rising and in shaping its memory. The blurb claims that the rebellion is a “little-known chapter of Scottish history.” In 2020 alone, however, Craig and MacAskill have released popular histories of 1820, and a landmark conference on the subject at the University of Glasgow was canceled only because of the coronavirus lockdown.2 Armstrong briefly recognizes the influence of the rising on both the labor movement and Scottish nationalist politics toward the end of the book, detailing that the rising was commemorated as early as the 1840s, but Pentland’s monograph presents a more thorough assessment of the rising’s longer-term impact.3 Nevertheless, Armstrong’s book is a significant contribution to our understanding of 1820. It demonstrates the value of micro-histories constructed through biography and the utility of combining the press and state archives with memoirs, songs, and poetry.