Enemies of the State Read Online Free PDF Page A

Lancashire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire,who in desperation and naivety saw the hated machines as their enemy and used their huge, two-handed lump hammers, made by the firm of Enoch & Co. to shatter their rivals. ‘Great Enoch still shall lead the van; Stop him who dare, stop him who can’. Matters were made worse by the year of Cato Street when the Revd Edmund Cartwright’s power-loom was in widespread use, cutting the ground from under thousands of weavers in the Midlands and the North. Many of the 60,000 who attended the fateful meeting at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, in August 1819 10 were weavers. They had gone to hear speeches about universal suffrage but only because they believed the vote would safeguard their livelihoods.
    As with textiles, so with the iron industry. Swords for the cavalry, bayonets for the infantry, guns for everybody – the demand was huge. John Wilkinson remained the longest-serving supplier of swords for the army, 11 but he was matched in the 1790s by Gill, Osborn and nearly 200 makers and cutlers. Thomas Gill’s sabres for the Light Cavalry had the boast ‘Guaranteed to cut iron’ stamped on their blades. A small firm, that of Underwood, became involved in Cato Street because Hector Morrison, one of the cutlers, was engaged by James Ings to sharpen two sword blades in February 1820.
    â€˜They were made extremely sharp from heel to point’, Morrison told the jury at Ings’ trial. ‘The prisoner directed that they should be made as sharp as a needle at the point and that they should be made to cut both at the back and front.’ 12
    Cannon and wheel rims for the Artillery, shot of all proportions, buckles and hooks and buttons – all of it came under the aegis of iron. The new Hussar jackets for certain regiments of cavalry after 1805 had no less than 97 buttons – only 19 of them actually fastened anything! Much was made at the Cato Street trials of the appalling weapons of mass destruction made by the conspirators in the days and weeks before 23 February. When Samuel Taunton, a Bow Street Runner, searched Richard Tidd’s house in the Holein-the-Wall Passage, he found 965 cartridges, 10 grenades and ‘a great quantity of gunpowder’. There were 434 balls (bullets) along with 69 ball cartridges and 11 bags of gunpowder, each weighing one pound. Sergeant Edward Hanson of the Royal Artillery shocked the jury at Thistlewood’s trial by describing the devastating effect of a hand-grenade:
    The [tin] case contains three ounces and a half of gunpowder. Thepriming in the tube is a composition of salt-petre, powder and brimstone. The tin was pitched and wrapped round with rope-yarn which was cemented with rosin and tar. Round the tin, and in the rope-yarn, twelve pieces of iron were planted. From the lighting of the fusee to the explosion might be about half a minute. If one of them were to be exploded in a room where there were a number of persons, it would produce great destruction. The pieces of iron would fly about like bullets. 13
    Chain-shot, bar-shot, canister shot and grape shot, as well as cannon balls weighing between 9 and 64 pounds, were being produced in their thousands for use against the French, giving the iron masters huge profits and creating work for the new industrial classes lured into the workshops by the promise of high wages. It was dangerous, hot and dirty, but the money was good.
    And demand for iron and textiles did not end there. Britain was rich enough by the 1790s to become the effective paymaster of Europe, supplying cash, cloth, iron and much else to keep the armies of Austria, Prussia and Russia in the field against the French. Four such coalitions were smashed by the combination of luck and zeal that characterized the Revolutionary armies. Under Napoleon, the coalitions collapsed even quicker. So the Austrians, for example, adopted a pattern of British cavalry sword they still used, in essence, up