“Come hail brothers, hail the shrill sound of the horn
For ages deep wrongs have been hopelessly borne
Despair shall no longer our spirits dismay
Nor wither the arms when upraised for the fray;
The conflict for freedom is gathering nigh:
We live to secure it, or gloriously die.”
— Chartist song of the South Wales miners

UNLIKE our friends across the channel in France, the inhabitants of Britain appear a remarkably supine people in the main, usually preferring well-organised demonstrations to anything that whiffs of pre-planned armed revolt, no matter how righteous the cause.

Yes, there have been mass meetings, marches and spontaneous events that took a wrong turn and descended into riots, but we seem singularly ill-equipped by nature to contemplate anything more serious.

But this would be doing this island race a disservice; to paraphrase the emperor Tiberius, there was a time when the British were not a people “fit to be slaves.”

There’s a long and storied history of the working classes attempting to seek redress from a variety of wrongs, including poll taxes (the Peasants’ Revolt, 1381), government corruption (Jack Cade’s Rebellion, 1450), religion (the Pilgrimage of Grace, 1536) and the later Pentrich Rising in Derbyshire of 1817, a muddled affair which aimed to cancel the national debt and repeal the Corn Laws.

1839’s Newport Rising was a more coherent and dangerous challenge than Pentrich, in possessing both a specific democratic political manifesto and its unprecedented scale.

That’s not to say the revolt was a carefully co-ordinated business that worked to a timetable with a pre-planned outcome, but the numbers involved, the potential for encouraging similar risings and the essential justice of the Chartist cause gave Lord Melbourne’s Whig government a serious jolt.

Newport had its origins in both national and local events.

The House of Commons rejection of the People’s Charter of 1838 calling for universal male suffrage, secret ballots, salaries for MPs, equal constituencies, and the end of the property qualification for voting on July 12 1839, and the following conviction and imprisonment in Monmouth of the Chartist leader Henry Vincent for conspiracy and unlawful assembly, stoked the fires of rebellion in industrial southern Wales, a stronghold for the movement.

Combined with this were reasons that directly concerned the rising’s leader, John Frost (1784-1877), namely his six-month imprisonment resulting from a dispute regarding his uncle’s will with Newport town clerk Thomas Prothero, and the wealthy political enemies he made on the way to becoming mayor of the Monmouthshire burgh.

A sketch of Chartist leader John Frost on trial at Monmouth after the uprising

Despite this, Frost was supposedly reluctant to lead a full-scale armed uprising, and doubtful of its prospects, but the zeal of his supporters forced his hand and preparations were made for the march on Newport.

On Monday November 4 1839, Frost led 4,000 followers to the town, his group including allied coalminers, who armed themselves with home-made pikes, bludgeons, and firearms.

The authorities in Newport got wind of the march and detained several known Chartists at the Westgate Hotel in the town centre. This added impetus to Frost’s mission which was presumably to take over the town in the hope of starting a nationwide insurgency.

At 9.30am, a crowd of anything from 8,000 to 20,000 Chartists (ironically including Allan Pinkerton, later founder of the infamous US strikebreaking detective agency known as “the Pinkertons”) filled the square in front of the hotel, demanding the release of their comrades.

The mayor had gathered a mixed force of around 60 soldiers of the 45th Regiment of Foot and 500 special constables to defend the Westgate, all equipped with weaponry superior to the relatively small number of Chartists possessing guns.

To this day no-one knows for sure who fired the first shot, but a heated exchange between the two sides began, with the engagement lasting approximately half an hour. The result was a total rout for the Chartists.

Up to 24 rebels were slain, with around 50 injured. Four of the defenders were wounded, as was the mayor of Newport Thomas Phillips (later knighted by Queen Victoria), when the attackers briefly succeeded in entering the building. So ended the greatest armed rebellion in 19th-century Britain.

In comparison, the better-known Peterloo Massacre of August 1819 saw 18 people killed and as many as 700 injured when army regulars, special constables and local yeomanry charged peaceful demonstrators calling for parliamentary reform.

Unlike the French, with the storming of the Bastille, the March on Versailles and the Paris Commune, the Newport Chartists appeared to lack the killer instinct of their Gallic counterparts, which may say something of the passive British national character relating to the ruling class.

The leaders of the rising were convicted of treason and were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, the last in England and Wales to be condemned with this ghoulish form of execution.

Their sentences were commuted by Queen Victoria to transportation for life to Tasmania. Frost was given an unconditional pardon in 1856 and returned briefly to Newport, where he received a rapturous welcome.

His two co-conspirators were also pardoned, but both opted to stay in Australia. Watchmaker William Price continued to ply his trade, but without success and died in poverty; in contrast, collier Zephaniah Williams (who at one point had planned to escape) discovered coal in Tasmania and became one of the richest men in the colony.

Note: the last people to be hanged, drawn, and quartered for treason in Britain are said to be David Tyrie in 1782, and in 1798, Father James Coigly; both were convicted of spying for the French (the Bourbon and revolutionary regimes respectively).

In 1977, John Frost Square, in Newport city centre, was named in the Chartist’s honour. But in 2013, Kenneth Budd's mosaic in the square commemorating the Chartists was demolished at the behest of the Labour-run Newport council, prompting widespread outrage (from the likes of actor Michael Sheen and former Archbishop of Canterbury Rowan Williams) and public demonstrations.

Kenneth Budd’s mosaic, sadly demolished in 2013

In November 2019 a new mural by Budd's son Oliver was unveiled, consisting of four panels on the site of the former public toilets on Cefn Road, Rogerstone.

Comedian Jack Whitehall is a descendant of Welsh lawyer Thomas Jones Phillips, one of the chief opponents of the Newport Rising. Taking no pride in this fact, in 2019 he commented on BBC1’s Who Do You Think You Are, “What’s next? I suppose probably go and visit a mine our ancestor shut down or maybe an orphanage he burned to the ground.”

The Newport Rising also features in a graphic novel published in 2019, Newport Rising, written, and illustrated by local artist Josh Cranton; the book was launched at the Westgate Hotel, which unlike Budd’s original mural still stands, recently reincarnated as a “live music, performance, arts and heritage venue.”

Stephen Arnell is a writer and cultural commentator. His book The Great One: The Secret Memoirs of Pompey the Great is out now.