At Dorchester, on 17 March 1834, six agricultural labourers were brought to the bar of the assizes. The indictment alleged an oath which, according to the prosecution, bound the members of a society to keep its secrets and obey its officers. The jurors were charged with determining whether such an engagement fell within the compass of a statute directed against unlawful oaths.
Camden Pelham’s chronicle designates these men the “Dorchester labourers.” The Tolpuddle Martyrs Museum records their names under the spellings Loveless, Standfield, and Hammett; Pelham prints Lovelace, Stanfield, and Hammet. They were six in all: James and George Loveless, Thomas and John Standfield, James Hammett, and James Brine. They were farm labourers from a Dorset village, banded together in a society formed to uphold the price of their labour and to succour men left without bread. Trade unions were then lawful in England; the trial turned solely upon the oath, and upon the law invoked against such a pledge.
The central scene laid before the court had transpired some months earlier, in December, within Thomas Standfield’s cottage at Tolpuddle. Initiates were brought into a chamber. Legg and others were made to wait blindfolded, kneeling as papers were read aloud above them. When the bandage was withdrawn, they beheld the figure of a skeleton inscribed with the words: “Remember your end.” The deposition set forth that those present swore to observe the rules and never to discover the secrets of the society. James Loveless wore a garment resembling a surplice.
An entrance fee of one shilling and a weekly contribution of one penny were to sustain the common box. The rules produced in evidence bestowed upon the association its title, the Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, appointed its officers and stated times of assembly, and prescribed the collection of funds. Articles twenty and twenty-one contemplated a common response should a master lower wages or discharge a member on account of his activity: the hands might quit the estate together, and the box would maintain them until reinstatement was had. These very articles served the Crown in characterising the society as unlawful; yet the formal charge remained the administration of the oath.
Counsel for the Crown, Mr. Gambier, expounded the text of the law. He relied upon the Act of 1797, framed against oaths and engagements designed to bind their makers to any society deemed unlawful. In his submission, any solemn pledge equivalent to an oath came within the statutory mischief, irrespective of the outward ceremony employed. It lay upon him to demonstrate that the combination in question was illicit, and that its members had sworn to maintain secrecy and obey leaders unsanctioned by law. The question he submitted to the jury was whether these articles, joined to the oath of secrecy and obedience, brought the association within the operation of the Act.
The preamble of the statute recited seditious assemblies; Mr. Gambier contended, however, that its enacting clauses embraced societies instituted for other unlawful ends as well. He cited earlier authority in defence of this construction. The issue of the trial thus hung upon the breadth which judge and jury chose to accord to an enactment passed in 1797.
Counsel for the defence maintained that no crime had been established in proof. In summing up, the learned judge directed the jury as to what must govern their verdict: they were to determine whether the obligation had indeed bound Legg not to disclose the secrets of the society. The exact form of the oath mattered less than the obligation it wrought. It was further to be considered whether the men had submitted to an inward bond of conscience or had merely followed the written regulations of their fellowship. The vestment worn by Loveless and the painted skeleton were recalled: the judge enquired whether these symbols were intended to impart greater solemnity to the rite and to overawe those who took the oath. Having read the articles of the society and the names of those who had contributed to its funds, he left the jury to draw their own conclusion.
After a deliberation of some five minutes, the jury returned a verdict of guilty against all six men. The sentence was seven years’ transportation beyond the seas. The Tolpuddle Museum observes that combinations of workmen were then lawful; here, the conviction rested upon an oath adjudged illicit by the prosecution, in proceedings wherein rules of mutual succour were received in evidence. To these labourers and their kin, the judgment portended exile from Dorset and the sudden destitution of their hearths.
The convicts were transported to Australia. Yet their banishment did not quench the agitation. In the chronicler’s view, friends of the unions held the measure harsh and indefensible, and representations were laid before the government both within Parliament and without. Ministers at first refused any mitigation of the sentence, but in the end granted a free pardon to each man. The Tolpuddle Museum records the formation of a London committee in March 1834 to petition for their release, a great demonstration in the capital the following month, and a petition bearing eight hundred thousand signatures in 1835. Transportation had grown into a national question far transcending the village boundary.
The Tolpuddle Museum dates the full and unconditional pardon to 14 March 1836. Deprived of their husbands’ bread, the wives had sought parish relief. According to the museum records, they were confronted by the very magistrates and gentlemen who had compassed the arrests. Their husbands’ weekly pennies were thrown in their teeth: since they could afford to pay the society, it was alleged, their families might well shift without relief. The London support fund at length relieved their distress with two pounds and three shillings apiece. The men did not return in one company: George Loveless landed on 13 June 1837; four of his fellows touched shore at Plymouth on 17 March 1838. James Hammett returned only in August 1839, his public welcome taking place on 22 September. A pardon, therefore, did not bring instantaneous return, and the paths of the six remained parted for several years.
The chronicle closes with the failure of a public procession in London, which Pelham portrays as a hollow attempt to awaken popular sympathy. Yet beyond his editorial strictures, the assizes had bound together a midnight ceremony, the articles of a society, and an oath under a single indictment. Six labourers stood condemned; a collective pardon, granted two years later, was followed by solitary and scattered homecomings. A fund devised so that working men might not face a fall in wages alone had contributed to link them together before the bar of justice—and the sentence scattered them across the southern seas.