At Queen Square, the first arrests transformed an escort into an engagement. Sir Charles Wetherall had just arrived at the Mansion House, conducted through Bristol amidst hooting and volleys of stones. A few minutes after the Recorder and the civic authorities had passed through the doors, special constables dashed into the multitude to seize those who had hurled projectiles. One man was dragged inside, then another. Many believed the captures to be entirely indiscriminate. Camden Pelham, who chronicled the episode in 1891, places at this precise moment the turn when anger, hitherto largely clamorous, changed its very nature.
Wetherall was no unfamiliar visitor. As Recorder of Bristol, he had vehemently opposed the Reform Bill in Parliament, which the legislature had subsequently rejected. The city was well aware that he was arriving to open a judicial commission. The authorities, apprehending turbulence, had requisitioned troops and sworn in numerous special constables. Yet as the disturbance mounted, their presence proved insufficient to allay public temper. Pelham contends that the arrests effected at the Mansion House contributed directly to the general eruption; that explanation remains his own. The topography and the official resolutions he depicts reveal how the day assumed a complexion that all prior measures had failed to prevent.
On October 29, 1831, the carriage-and-four entered by Totterdown at about half-past eleven. Shouts, hisses, and groans attended its progress. Upon Hill’s Bridge, several stones struck the carriage; missiles were flung again in Temple Street and High Street. At the Guildhall, the throng pressed so densely against the approaches that Wetherall could alight only with difficulty. The commission was opened amidst uproar, then adjourned until Monday. When the Recorder reappeared to proceed to the Mansion House, the insults recommenced. At Queen Square, stones shattered a carriage lamp or window-pane, though without injuring Wetherall himself.
Following the charge of the constables, knots of men went to procure bludgeons from a timber-yard and returned to the square. The officers sallied forth in a body; the bludgeons fell, were gathered up, and carried off. Calamity was not averted. As the afternoon wore on, windowpanes were dashed to pieces and cudgels hurled at the constabulary. Toward four o’clock, a detachment of the force was permitted to return home for refreshment, upon a pledge to return at six. Thus the defenders diminished in number at the very juncture when the assaults upon the Mansion House grew bolder.
The Mayor at length appeared and exhorted the populace to disperse. Stones were flung in his direction; one, of considerable size, grazed his head. The Riot Act was read, yet the assembly did not withdraw. On the contrary, they disarmed the constables and beat them. One man was compelled to cast his own stave against the Mayor’s windows to secure his release; another sought refuge in the harbor basin and was hauled forth by means of a boat-hook. Presently the doors of the Mansion House were forced. The ground-floor furnishings were demolished; uprooted iron palisades and curbstones supplied iron bars, saplings were torn up, and combustible materials were brought forward.
Wetherall, disguised, effected his escape over the roofs of adjoining properties. His departure remained unknown until the following day. Two troops of cavalry arrived and the constables secured several men, yet clearing the square remained impossible. Colonel Brereton parleyed with the inhabitants, urging them to return to their homes, and was received with cheers. Toward midnight, a portion of the rioters directed their course toward the Council House and broke its windows. The cavalry thereupon charged through the thoroughfares. Men were pursued and sabered; others fled into the alleys off Wine Street and cast stones. At the Pithay, a soldier struck by a missile turned and fired: a man was killed. Subsequent patrols prevented the crowd from re-forming during the night.
On Sunday morning, the inhabitants returned to Queen Square. The troops withdrew for quarters and sustenance, believing the peril spent. Scarcely had they departed when the pillage resumed in the upper chambers of the Mansion House: furniture was pitched into the square, drawers were rifled, linen and plate carried off or smashed. The wine-cellars were broached. Pelham estimates that a vast portion of the stores was drunk or wasted; he describes staggering crowds in the streets and prostrate bodies, yet his dramatic depictions and figures stem entirely from his own compilation.
The 14th Light Dragoons were recalled in the face of showers of stones and brickbats. No magistrate being present to assume responsibility for directing a return of fire, the commanding officer deemed it prudent to withdraw the regiment and replace it with Captain Warrington’s troop of the 3rd Dragoon Guards. The first horsemen quitted the city by the quay and the drawbridge; the crowd pursued them with sustained attacks. At St Augustine’s Back, the soldiers turned about and fired. Further discharges were reported at College Green and near their quarters at the Boar’s Head Yard. Pelham records one dead and seven or eight wounded. Among the casualties was a passerby who, according to his account, took no part in the disorders.
Brereton returned on horseback to the square toward eleven o’clock. He assured the populace that there would be no further firing, that the 14th would leave the city, and again exhorted the multitude to disperse. During the afternoon, a man climbed upon the statue of William III, fixed a tricolor cap upon the end of a pike, and proclaimed “liberty.” The soldiers remained stationary before the Mansion House. Later, a small band marched upon the Bridewell with sledgehammers procured from a smithy, battered in the gates, and liberated the prisoners; the building was set on fire toward two o’clock.
A far larger concourse then moved against the New Jail. The gates were forced, property was flung into the New River, and over one hundred prisoners were set free, exclusive of debtors. Men and women walked forth stripped of their prison dress; some met their kin outside. A black handkerchief was hoisted atop the structure, and smoke soon appeared from several quarters. The prison treadwheel burned first; the governor’s house and the chapel were next engulfed in flames. Some twenty troopers arrived, but Pelham states that the crowd cheered them and they withdrew almost immediately.
The destruction spread to the toll-houses, then to the Gloucestershire county prison at Lawford’s Gate. Toward nightfall, all three prisons were ablaze. Troops were then protecting the Mansion House and the Bishop’s Palace. When the detachment departed to defend the palace, the incendiaries fired the Mansion House. The troops returned, but the flames had already communicated to the neighboring edifices, to the Custom House, and to the dwellings of Little King Street. Figures were glimpsed at the windows before tumbling into the inferno or leaping below; one woman subsequently died at the infirmary. Other bands gave the residents of an entire row brief warning to remove their effects, then stove in the casements and fired the tenements. By Monday’s dawn, Queen Square was nothing more than a smoking expanse of blackened ruins and collapsed walls.
The authorities recalled the military and organized a civic guard. At the magistrates’ summons, the Bristol General Union assembled; its members patrolled alongside the citizens and maintained pickets within illuminated churches. Ships tolled their bells and guns were prepared, an attack upon the shipping being feared, though it never materialized. Pelham records nearly two hundred arrests in the subsequent week, very few concerning native residents of Bristol. He calculates that the total destruction could scarcely be estimated at less than £300,000. As to the loss of life, he states that a number “scarcely fewer than twenty” corpses were recovered, conjecturing that others perished whose fate remained unknown; these figures represent no independently verified returns.
The Special Commission opened on January 2, 1832. The initial indictment concerned the destruction of the New Jail. Six men stood at the bar: William Clarke, Patrick Kearney, James Williams, Daniel Higgs, James Courtney, and John Mackay. They pleaded not guilty. The Crown maintained that they had participated in the storming of the prison, wherein the gates were battered in and the governor’s house destroyed. Witnesses testified to having observed Clarke with a crowbar, and later with prison keys in a tavern. This constituted the evidence adduced against him; after two days of trial, the jury returned a verdict of guilty against Clarke, Kearney, Higgs, Courtney, and Mackay, whilst Williams was acquitted.
Bendall and Sims were tried separately for the assault upon the Bishop’s Palace. Pelham records that an attempt was made to depict Sims as an idiot; the jury found both guilty. Christopher Davis was subsequently arraigned for his share in the demolition of the New Jail. The prosecution portrayed him as a ringleader seen near several edifices and beside the burning prison. Witnesses were called, and the jury convicted him the following day. Five men were condemned to death: Davis, Clarke, Thomas Gregory, Richard Vines, and Joseph Keys. Vines obtained a respite on the eve of execution. On January 27, within the ruined precincts of the New Jail, Clarke, Davis, Gregory, and Keys were hanged. The remaining capital convicts received a recommendation to mercy, and their sentences were commuted to transportation for life, according to Pelham.
The responsibilities of the military officers pursued a different course. The court-martial of Colonel Brereton convened on January 9 upon charges of neglect of duty and lack of vigor. Witnesses debated his orders, the manner in which the troops had dispersed the crowd, and the occasions on which the colonel had chosen inaction. The inquiry was drawing to its close when, after a day’s sitting, Brereton returned to his home and took his own life. The proceedings terminated without a verdict. Journals cited by Pelham depicted him as a humane officer, convinced that he might pacify the populace without shedding blood; this portrait neither effaces the strictures adduced against him nor supplies the absent judgment.
The military trial of Captain Warrington, his subordinate, was conducted separately. Three charges reproached him in particular with having delayed his intervention against the burning of the Custom House, with having failed to forward an order from the Mayor, and with having left his men without personal command. Warrington defended his conduct by pleading the absence of orders and of magistrates willing to authorize them. An officer testified that terrified magistrates had refused to accompany him on horseback. The court found Warrington guilty and sentenced him to be cashiered. The King confirmed the recommendation to mercy and permitted him to dispose of his commission.
Charles Pinney, the Mayor, was ultimately prosecuted before the Court of King’s Bench for neglect of his magisterial duty. The proceedings retraced the scenes at the Mansion House and Pinney’s escape: a witness recounted having assisted him to scale the leads, then clear a garden wall. A passage of testimony provoked laughter in the courtroom before the judge restored solemnity. The jury acquitted him. These several trials delivered no unified interpretation of the three days. They distinguished the discrete acts imputed to each prisoner, without rendering a verdict in Brereton’s case, and without confounding Warrington’s culpability with the royal prerogative of mercy.
Pelham further notes that a regular police establishment was formed in Bristol, a measure he describes as having been received with satisfaction. The city was left to rebuild its edifices; the courts of law, for their part, had severed into distinct dossiers that which the streets had commingled in anarchy. The question was not merely who had cast a stone or ignited a torch, but at what precise moment command lapsed into dereliction, and what a judicial verdict could still restore amidst the ashes.