1800s: No hard feelings over Pentrich affair?

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Maxwell Craven relates how Conservative MPs Gyles Brandreth and William Waldegrave agreed to forgive and forget and how Waldegrave’s ancestor, Lt Col James Waldegrave, arrested Brandreth’s forebear, Jeremiah Brandreth, for leading the Pentrich Revolution nearly 200 years ago – leading to the latter’s hanging and beheading.

I recently turned up some notes I had made about the 1817 Pentrich Revolution – that outburst of popular anger against declining employment and general rural and industrial depression that ended in humiliation, death and defeat for its ringleaders, Jeremiah Brandreth, Isaac Ludlam and Robert Turner.

Readers will, I am sure, know that a Sutton-in-Ashfield framework knitter with big ideas, called Jeremiah Brandreth, was duped into leading a revolt with the aim of bringing about the fall of Lord Liverpool’s unpopular government.

Brandreth, the self-styled “Nottingham Captain”, recruited some 50 of so stockiners, weavers and labourers to march on Nottingham with the aim of a rendezvous with a (non-existent) greater force from elsewhere, scavenging weapons and supplies from farms and great houses en route.

On June 9, 1817, he put his plan into effect, shooting dead a servant of the Wheatcrofts at Wingfield Park House, perhaps to stamp his authority on the enterprise, for the incident cowed his supporters into increased fervour.

This sheet, published in the Derby Reporter, lists the hangings of Brandreth, Ludlam and Turner on November 7, 1817 for high treason

Unfortunately, a subsequent attempt to capture the Butterley works failed which, of course, had the opposite effect.

In fact, the Butterley proprietors had been forewarned and the entire enterprise was known about from the start. But this failure did not seem to alert Brandreth to the likelihood of betrayal.

That came the following day when, having crossed the Erewash en route for Nottingham, the protesters were rounded up and apprehended by a strong detachment of the 15th Hussars, which eight years earlier fought Napoleon in the Peninsular campaign.

Their CO was Lt Col.John James Waldegrave, 6th Earl and 7th Baron Waldegrave of Chewton Mendip, a battle-hardened veteran of Waterloo and later a junior member of the Duke of Wellington’s administration.

The trial of the “revolutionaries” in Derby Shire Hall is an event today enshrined in labour history.

It was the first of two such notable legal contests – the other being the Silk Trades’ lock-out “Black Sheep” murder trial of 1834).

The defence of Brandreth was undertaken by a notable Derbyshire man at the beginning of his career – Thomas Denman, of Stoney Middleton, later Lord Chief Justice.

He was the man who, on retirement in 1850 as 1st Lord Denman, sold the Corporation of Derby his gold collar to be adapted as the Mayor’s insignia.

Although he failed to obtain an acquittal, it was generally thought – given the government’s determination to make an example of Brandreth and his men -– that Denman did well to limit the number found guilty and hanged to three.

One other ringleader, Weightman, was transported, along with a dozen or so others.

In 1834, coincidentally, the appeal defence was led by the young Charles Howard Whitehurst, brother of clockmaker John Whitehurst III of Derby, who later became a notable senior QC.

He, too, failed to get an acquittal, but managed to get all the sentences handed down reduced to what were effectively token ones.

Why Denman and Whitehurst are not up among the panoply of Labour heroes I do not know.

Indeed, the Shire Hall itself should be a place of pilgrimage for those who set great store by such landmarks in the history of the Labour movement. But getting in to see it, except by complex arrangement, is impossible.

Scroll forward to March 2, 1992, when Brandreth’s kinsman, Gyles, then Tory MP for Chester, rose in the House of Commons one dull afternoon to speak as part of Health Secretary William Waldegrave’s Public Service debate.

His subject was on the need to protect British manufacturing industry and the government’s success in reducing the burden of borrowing for industry from 15 to 5.5 per cent.

He began: “A century ago my namesake Jeremiah Brandreth bewailed the state of manufacturing in the Midlands and the job losses that the new technologies of the time brought about.

“That Brandreth was the last man to be beheaded for treason in this country…They called him a hopeless radical. I see myself on the other hand, as a hopeful radical…It is a funny feeling knowing that his soul descendants are arrayed on the opposition benches.”

Afterwards, in the lobby, the Secretary of State (brother of the 13th Earl Waldegrave) tugged at Gyles Brandreth’s jacket to impart some astonishing news.

“Whilst your relative was leading a revolution, Gyles,” he murmured, “my ancestor was commanding the cavalrymen who brought him to justice. No bad feelings, I hope!”

The junior MP later said: “I protest his innocence still. And since William’s forebear (William Waldegrave is actually a descendant of the Hussar Colonel’s brother) was leading the troops, he can’t use the excuse that he was obeying orders.

“But we’ve been friends for years and I am still an ardent admirer of William, his wife, and the Citizens’ Charter, although not necessarily in that order!”

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