Following Stevens’s arrest, James Johnson, a draper, testified before the magistrates that, in the Leigh marketplace, the speaker had urged the multitude to furnish themselves with arms. The selfsame witness also attributed to him an injunction commanding the crowd to cease firing their pistols. These statements, delivered during the preliminary examination at Manchester, were subsequently tendered as evidence at the Liverpool Assizes, where a jury was summoned to adjudicate the charge of sedition.
Camden Pelham’s account presents Stevens as a former Wesleyan minister who had turned independent preacher. He had been expelled from his Connexion, Pelham writes, on account of his intervention in secular politics, deemed unbecoming in a clergyman. The inhabitants of the manufacturing districts of Ashton, Dukinfield, and Stalybridge had swiftly caused chapels to be erected for his ministry. According to the chronicler, he inveighed principally against the New Poor Law and the prevailing factory conditions—two subjects keenly felt by his congregation. Pelham portrays him as gentle and charitable in his private life, yet violent in his political harangues; this moral portraiture remains the chronicler’s own.
On December 28, 1838, having repeatedly defied the authorities to prefer an indictment against him, he was arrested at Ashton by Goddard and Shackell, Bow Street officers armed with a warrant issued by two Lancashire magistrates. Stevens offered no resistance. The officers conducted him to Manchester under the escort of a troop of the Queen’s Bays; he passed the night in the New Bailey prior to his public examination on the following day.
The warrant concerned a gathering held in the Leigh marketplace on November 13, 1838. It charged Stevens with having participated in a tumultuous assembly attended by banners, flags, and the discharge of firearms, and with having employed inflammatory language calculated to incite those present to commit acts of violence against the persons and property of their neighbors. Prior to the trial proper, the Manchester magistrates were required to hear the depositions of those witnesses who had been present at the assembly.
James Johnson, the draper, estimated the crowd at two or three thousand souls. He affirmed that Stevens had spoken of the factories and the Poor Laws, advised his auditors to procure weapons and pikes, and spoken of an assault upon the mills, to be executed with dagger and torch. In Johnson’s narrative, the orator had likewise spoken of tarring and feathering a certain Mr. Jones, a mill-owner whom he accused of ill-treating an apprentice boy. Such were the declarations the witness swore to have heard; Pelham provides no independent transcript of the address.
Johnson further noted an apparent contradiction. Pistols had been discharged amidst the throng. Stevens reportedly demanded that the firing cease, observing that there was already too much “cracking”; yet he is said to have added immediately that he himself had not yet “cracked,” and that they might resume their shooting at a later hour. The witness stated that he had observed some twenty pistols, as well as a man marching with a pike surmounted by a loaf of bread and a herring. The spectacle thus commingled the street weapon, the emblems of subsistence, and the pageantry of a political gathering. The chronicle records what a witness professed to have seen; it does not establish that every participant was acting under Stevens’s command.
William Coward, constable of Leigh, delivered a more comprehensive narrative. When he came upon the scene, Stevens was expounding on the condescension of Christ; he then turned to divine wrath and the possibility that God had raised up the people to set fire to neighboring edifices, or even to the parish church. Coward accused him of exhorting families to forsake the church and husband their pennies to purchase arms. He recounted as well a nocturnal gathering by torchlight, where Stevens was said to have spoken of the soldiers, the officers, and the Guardians of the Poor Law.
To illustrate the gravity of the peril, Coward described the pikes: fourteen or fifteen inches in length, of steel, fitted with a screw to secure them to a staff, and terminating in an exceedingly sharp point. He affirmed having observed between one and two hundred such weapons in the cottagers’ dwellings, and asserted that local blacksmiths were actively forging them. He spoke of menaces uttered against proprietors and of seditious remarks overheard in bread-shops. Lastly, he remembered a banner bearing the inscription: “The murders of Peterloo shall never be forgot.” The prosecution could thus rely upon the reported harangues, the observed weapons, and the prevailing disquiet of the neighborhood. Yet the causal link between Stevens’s words and each pike discovered remained the constable’s own deduction.
Stevens cross-examined both men with notable dexterity. The examination was adjourned to the following Thursday, and he was admitted to bail. Pelham records that his supporters awaited his liberation with eager impatience and greeted him with fervid enthusiasm. On the following Sunday, he preached at Stalybridge without making any reference to the recent occurrences. That evening, at Ashton, the congregation proved so vast that the sermon was ultimately delivered in the marketplace by moonlight, before some ten thousand persons according to the chronicler.
On the Monday, a tea-party at Hyde brought together approximately one thousand persons. Stevens there declared that the factory system was doomed and that the Poor Law could not endure. Directing their attention to a flag suspended against the wall, he declared that the people ought to rally beneath that banner rather than suffer the law to take root. The chronicle intimates the existence of a motto upon it, yet fails to record its text. On the morrow, in Manchester, Feargus O’Connor and other orators exhorted the populace to come forth in support of Stevens, in great numbers, yet devoid of banners and all manner of disorder.
On the appointed Thursday, no fewer than four thousand persons assembled before the New Bailey in Manchester. Pelham emphasizes their orderly demeanor: Stevens arrived punctually and was warmly cheered, yet no breach of the peace occurred. An additional witness reiterated the accounts furnished by Johnson and Coward. The magistrates committed Stevens for trial at the Liverpool Assizes for the speech delivered at Leigh, and warned him that he might likewise face further charges connected with the establishment of unlawful confederacies. These collateral accusations are not recorded as having resulted in a verdict within this account. Stevens was enlarged from custody that evening upon tendering bail in the amount of two thousand pounds to secure his appearance.
The trial took place on August 15, 1839. The indictment set forth the selfsame occurrence recited in the warrant; Pelham states that Johnson and Coward substantiated the charge in every particular through the testimony already summarized. He reports neither the complete proceedings nor any detailed new line of defense. The jury returned a verdict of guilty. The judge sentenced him to eighteen months’ imprisonment in the Knutsford House of Correction. Upon his discharge, he was required to enter into recognizances in the sum of five hundred pounds, with two sureties of two hundred and fifty pounds each, to keep the peace for a term of five years.
Stevens was subsequently removed to Chester Castle. On February 1, 1841, he was discharged eight days before the expiration of his sentence. Pelham attributes this remission to the demise of his father, the Reverend John Stevens: Lord Normanby is said to have consented to curtail his remaining days of confinement in order that the son might perform the last filial rites. The term of imprisonment thus concluded with an act of executive clemency, after the verdict had duly visited punishment upon the words uttered at Leigh.
The chronicle does not permit a fuller reconstruction of the courtroom beyond these compendious summaries. It nevertheless preserves the essential conflict that made the prosecution possible: Johnson and Coward reported words of violence; the constable forged a link between those speeches and the seized arms, while the multitude assembled in Stevens’s defense demeaned themselves with complete tranquility before the New Bailey. The verdict settled the charge of sedition, not the totality of the region’s political grievances. Between the sermon and the sentence, there intervened witnesses, descriptions of weapons, a cross-examination, and a second hearing. Pelham bequeaths to us their summary, rather than the exhaustive record that would permit us to verify every minute detail.