At Dowlais, the muskets were already leveled. Thousands of workmen had assembled upon the road; before them, the soldiers stood waiting. The word of command was uttered with deliberate slowness, Camden Pelham relates, so that every man might weigh the consequence of what was to follow. The final word—“fire”—had no need to be spoken. The concourse dispersed, and many turned their steps homeward. Earlier that week, at Merthyr Tydfil, gunfire had already claimed lives before the Castle Inn. Yet this confrontation had not sprung from any military design, but from a strike and a petition for an advance in wages.
On the 3rd of June, 1831, the magistrates of the town convened at the Castle Inn to concert measures against the threats they apprehended against the ironmasters and their estates. They requisitioned military aid. A detachment of the 93rd Regiment, under Major Folkes, took quarters in the inn, where the magistrates continued their deliberations.
The populace had already assailed the Court of Requests, where disputes between masters and men were adjudicated. The rioters demanded the court registers; these having been conveyed to a place of safety, they vented their fury upon the building and the dwelling of its officer, Mr. Coffin. They dragged forth the books and furniture, piled them in the street, and committed them to the flames. The account states that certain individuals perished in the conflagration they had kindled, though it records neither their names nor their number.
The crowd then marched upon the Castle Inn, numbering upwards of a thousand persons, according to Pelham. A deputation was received, which firmly demanded an increase in wages. The magistrates replied that the workmen must return to their employment, and that authority could not brook dictation from a mob. Several ironmasters addressed them in both English and Welsh; the workmen remained steadfast in their demand.
At the portal of the inn, a handful of soldiers confronted a vastly superior multitude. Men were stationed at the windows, three to each casement, with muskets primed. Mr. Crawshay and Mr. Guest made further endeavors to induce the crowd to disperse. After long and fruitless parley, a sudden rush was made upon the troops, whose weapons appeared to be the object of the assault. Orders to fire were forthwith communicated to the men posted above.
Pelham describes repeated volleys discharged from the windows. He recounts likewise the desperate struggle at the inn door: one man seized the musket of a soldier; the weapon was contested between them until the soldier drove his bayonet into him. Another assailant possessed himself of a drummer’s sword, only to be struck down by a bayonet and dispatched by a shot. Other workmen penetrated the interior of the house, striking at the officers and magistrates, several of whom sustained severe contusions. The narrative depicts the fray from the vantage of the inn’s defenders and the civil authorities; it details the actions of the mob and the military, yet provides neither a comprehensive roll of the dead nor any deposition from the wounded.
When the street was at length cleared, thirteen men lay dead upon the ground, by the chronicle’s reckoning. The workmen had carried off other wounded, some of whom the soldiers believed to have been slain. Near twenty military men were likewise injured, Major Folkes having received a severe blow to the head. Bodies were laid out in the stables of the inn, there to await the coroner’s inquest. For those among the wounded who were taken into custody, medical attendance was provided.
The peril did not cease with the cessation of fire. Men gained the surrounding heights and maintained an irregular discharge upon the Castle Inn with fowling-pieces and arms wrested from the soldiers. The magistrates summoned further aid; by evening, near five hundred cavalry, infantry, and militia were at their disposal. Alarming intelligence arrived of an assemblage of several thousands near Coed-y-Cymmer, and troops were dispatched toward Penydarren House.
On the morrow, the insurgents gathered at Hirwaun. Pelham relates that two red flags were dipped in the blood of a calf, with which the arms of the standard-bearer were likewise smeared. When this body drew near Merthyr and perceived the military reinforcements, it withdrew. The Sunday passed in quiet. For the Monday, the workmen had appointed a great meeting upon Wain Hill, near Dowlais, where they were to be joined by men from the counties of Brecon and Monmouth.
When morning broke, thousands directed their course toward Penydarren, many armed with bludgeons. The military, now comprising regulars, militia, and yeomanry cavalry, advanced alongside the magistrates. At Dowlais, Mr. Guest addressed the multitude, after which the Riot Act was read. The crowd did not immediately disperse. The soldiers received the command to take aim. The deliberate pause between the orders allowed time, Pelham observes, for the terrible consequences to be apprehended. The men began to fall back; a portion, bearing the arms taken from the soldiers, retired into the defile of the Brecon road. As the hours wore on, many cast away their weapons and departed for their homes.
Apprehensions commenced during the ensuing night and morning. Fourteen men were taken from their beds; near forty were soon in custody. The identities of the prisoners become somewhat obscured under the chronicler’s pen: he attributes to Richard Lewis an arrest in the woods, whereas Welsh biographical records assign that capture—in the woods of Hendrebolon—to Lewis Lewis. To comprehend the sentences, the two men and the distinct charges brought against them must be carefully separated.
At the Cardiff Assizes, Richard Lewis was capitally convicted for feloniously wounding Donald Black, a private of the 93rd Regiment, in the thigh with a bayonet during the affray before the inn. Black failed to identify Lewis as his assailant. The biographical notice of Richard Lewis cites the adverse testimonies of James Abbott, a hairdresser, and William Williams, a tailor. Lewis denied the charge, maintaining his innocence unto death. The coroner’s juries inquiring into the deaths of the workmen slain by the military returned verdicts of justifiable homicide. These two courses of judicial determination, recorded in the same chronicle, demonstrate how the legal authorities construed the violence, without providing an independent reconstruction of each shot fired.
A second prisoner bore an almost identical name. Lewis Lewis, a haulier whom Pelham styles “the Huntsman,” was arraigned alongside David Hughes, Thomas Vaughan, and David Thomas for an offense committed on the 2nd of June, the eve of the riot. Pelham recounts that a party restored to a widow a piece of furniture which the court bailiffs had previously distrained and sold for two guineas to another widow. Yet restoring the goods to the original owner deprived the second purchaser of her money. The party repaired to the house of Thomas Lewis to extort the two guineas wherewith to reimburse this buyer, the money being paid over to David Williams. The prosecution connected this act with the broader tumults at Merthyr. At the trial, a witness named John Thomas sought to testify that Lewis Lewis had shielded him from violence before Coffin’s house; the court refused to admit this evidence before the jury, though it was subsequently urged in petitioning for the royal mercy.
Both Richard Lewis and Lewis Lewis received sentence of death. In the cases of Hughes, Vaughan, and Thomas, capital conviction was recorded, the learned judge holding out the expectation of commutation to transportation for life. As to Lewis Lewis, Welsh authorities establish that his sentence was commuted to transportation for life, rather than the term of fourteen years mentioned by Pelham; the chronicle assigns fourteen years to the other three. Richard received a respite of two weeks, but no commutation. Pelham records his steadfast protestations of innocence to the very eve of his execution, as well as a declaration by Lewis Lewis exculpating him from the affray. Such utterances dispute the justice of the verdict, though they do not suffice to reconstruct his exact actions. According to the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, Richard Lewis was executed at Cardiff on the 13th of August, 1831, a date at variance with that given by Pelham.
In this narrative of strike, riot, and assize, the boundary between collective grievance and armed insurrection shifts from one day to the next. The dispersal at Dowlais and the bloodshed at the Castle Inn were distinct occurrences; the convicted workmen answered for entirely different deeds. And the final word of that fateful morning—the command the soldiers were never required to utter—cannot expunge the orders to fire that were given, nor the judicial reckonings that followed in their wake.