The Radical War of 1820

In the first week of April 1820 central Scotland came closer to open rebellion than at any time since the Jacobites. A proclamation calling for a provisional government appeared on the walls of Glasgow, tens of thousands of workers stopped work, small groups of armed men set out to seize weapons, and soldiers poured into the city. Within days it was over. But the events that became known as the Radical War ended with three men hanged and beheaded, nineteen transported to Australia, and a lasting suspicion that the whole affair had been encouraged by the government’s own spies.

The weavers’ grievances

The heart of the Radical movement in the west of Scotland was the handloom weavers. In the eighteenth century weaving had been a respected and relatively well paid trade, practised in towns and villages across Lanarkshire, Renfrewshire and Ayrshire and in Glasgow districts such as the Calton and Anderston. Weavers were often well read and politically engaged, and many had been inspired by the American and French revolutions and by Thomas Paine’s Rights of Man.

The industrial revolution destroyed their prosperity. As the cotton industry grew and power looms arrived, wages collapsed: between 1800 and 1808 weavers’ earnings were halved. A great weavers’ strike in 1812 lasted nine weeks and was defeated. When the Napoleonic Wars ended in 1815, the economic depression that followed brought unemployment and hunger. Very few working people had the vote; in Scotland only around one person in 250 was entitled to vote at all. In 1816 a crowd estimated at 40,000 gathered on Glasgow Green to demand reform of Parliament and the repeal of the Corn Laws, which kept the price of bread high.

Spies and informers

The authorities, frightened by memories of revolution in France and rebellion in Ireland, responded with repression. Volunteer regiments were raised, and the government built up a network of spies and informers within the reform movement. After the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in August 1819, protest meetings and riots spread through the weaving districts of the west of Scotland.

In March 1820 a committee of Radical delegates met in a Glasgow tavern and was arrested. Glasgow’s police chief reported to the Home Secretary that informers had penetrated the movement, and suggested that the disaffected might be lured into the open by making them believe that their day had come. In the days that followed, several men, some of them later suspected of being government agents, went round the Radical societies urging that a rising was imminent and encouraging the making of pikes.

The proclamation

On the night of 1 to 2 April 1820, copies of a printed proclamation appeared on walls throughout Glasgow. Issued in the name of a Committee of Organisation for Forming a Provisional Government, it called on the people to take up arms for the redress of their grievances, to stop work from that day and to remain on strike until they had won their rights. It declared that the Radicals sought equality of rights, not of property.

On Monday 3 April work stopped across a wide area of central Scotland, from Stirlingshire to Ayrshire. Around 60,000 people are thought to have joined the strike, most of them weavers. Rumours spread of armies of Radicals gathering in the hills around Glasgow and even of a French force on its way. Troops, including cavalry, rifles and local volunteers, filled the city.

Bonnymuir and Strathaven

Two small marches became the focus of the rising. On 4 and 5 April a group of around thirty men, led by Andrew Hardie, a Glasgow weaver, and John Baird, a weaver from Condorrat who had served in the army, set out towards the Carron ironworks near Falkirk, believing that they would find weapons and supporters there. At Bonnymuir they were confronted by a party of hussars and yeomanry. After a brief exchange of shots, nineteen of them were taken prisoner.

On 6 April a group of about 25 men set out from Strathaven, in Lanarkshire, to join what they had been told was a great Radical army gathering at Cathkin, south of Glasgow. Among them was an older weaver, James Wilson, known as Purlie. Warned of an ambush at East Kilbride, Wilson turned back. The others found no army at Cathkin and dispersed. Meanwhile in Greenock, an attempt to rescue Radical prisoners led to soldiers firing on a crowd, killing several people.

Treason trials

Some 88 men were charged with high treason, and special courts sat in Glasgow, Stirling and elsewhere. James Wilson was tried in Glasgow in July 1820. The jury acquitted him on most of the charges but found him guilty of one count of treason and recommended mercy. He was sentenced to death. Several other accused were acquitted by juries reluctant to convict.

On 30 August 1820 James Wilson was hanged and then beheaded in Glasgow, before a crowd estimated at 20,000 people. He was in his sixties and had harmed nobody. On 8 September Andrew Hardie and John Baird were hanged and beheaded at Stirling. Nineteen other men were transported to the penal colonies in Australia; they were eventually pardoned in 1835.

Memory and memorials

For a long time the Radical War was little remembered outside the communities it touched. The Glasgow journalist Peter Mackenzie campaigned for the transported men and exposed the role of government spies. As the movement for parliamentary reform succeeded, beginning with the Reform Act of 1832 that gave Glasgow its own members of Parliament for the first time, the men of 1820 came to be seen as martyrs for democracy.

In 1846 a monument to James Wilson was raised in Strathaven. In 1847 the remains of Hardie and Baird were brought from Stirling and reburied in Sighthill Cemetery in Glasgow, beneath a monument that also commemorates Wilson. The story has since been retold in books, songs and drama, including James Kelman’s play Hardie and Baird: The Last Days. The wider history of the city’s radical tradition is told on our Red Clydeside and trade union history pages.

Timeline