William Fitzwilliam, 4th Earl Fitzwilliam

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William Fitzwilliam, 4th Earl Fitzwilliam : biography

30 May 1748 – 8 February 1833

When Lord Liverpool’s government passed the Seditious Meetings Act 1817, Fitzwilliam supported it, although only as a temporary measure: "I shall be sorry indeed should it pass permanently—it will operate an essential alteration in the constitution".Smith, p. 337. After initially supporting it, he also came to think the suspension of habeas corpus in 1817 unnecessary after visiting the West Riding: "I was led to think nothing beyond ordinary powers [of the law] was called for…and therefore (whatever I might have thought before) that the prolongation of the suspension was not then necessary". In May that year intelligence of a planned uprising for June in the manufacturing areas of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Derbyshire and Nottinghamshire was acquired by the authorities and its leaders were arrested. A meeting of delegates planned three days before the uprising was due to start was intercepted by the yeomanry, who arrested the eleven who turned up. Fitzwilliam approved of these measures and said he voted for the suspension of habeas corpus because:

…to my sorrow I considered the power of arbitrary detention absolutely necessary considering the temper in which I found the people, and here I think the case has occurred when mischief may be prevented by the means which that measure affords—if the principal agitators are kept out of the way, and restrained from inflaming the minds of the people, their minds will cool again, and soften down into a state suitable to the social relations of life.Smith, p. 338.

However it was revealed that one of the eleven was a government agent posing as a revolutionary, who appeared to be the ringleader. He was quickly released whilst the others were interrogated. It was further revealed that he was attempting to gain support in the West Riding for an uprising in London. Fitzwilliam claimed these revelations caused a sensation but that he did not believe the government deliberately fostered insurrection. Fitzwilliam also believed no seditious activity would have taken place without the government agent’s activity and that the whole episode had led him to believe in "the insignificant number of those disposed to mischief" and:

…the soundness of all above the few miscreants who are ripe for mischief. …These circumstances must cause a change in my opinion respecting the measures necessary for the occasion. I see no cause for the continuance of greater powers than the ordinary ones, because I see no chance of disturbance if the people are left to themselves.Smith, p. 338.

On 16 August 1819 a crowd had assembled near Manchester to listen to a speech by Henry Hunt and was run down by the yeomanry cavalry, with fifteen dead as a result. Fitzwilliam’s first reaction to "Peterloo" was cautious. He wrote on 24 August: "I see they are making much of what has happened in Manchester, in London. No doubt much may be said against interfering with a legal meeting…but circumstances may arise to call for the intervention of the magistrates even on such occasions, and to be impartial, one must hear what they have to say for themselves".Smith, p. 346. On 5 October Fitzwilliam wrote to Lady Ponsonby: "If we do not set this matter to rights, the military are henceforward the governing power in the British Empire".Smith, p. 349. At the county meeting of Yorkshire held on 14 October, Fitzwilliam was represented by his son Lord Milton, and it adopted the resolutions drafted by Fitzwilliam: the right to public assembly and condemnation of unlawful interference with it, and a demand for an inquiry into Peterloo. Fitzwilliam’s objection, as he wrote on 17 October, was to:

…the approbation given in the name of the crown to the use, in the first instance, of a military body in the execution of a civil process. … Who will engage to restore to the civil authority, powers once exercised by the military? … Its primary interference in civil matters has been approved in that quarter [the regent] to which alone it looks for approbation, the effect of which I cannot contemplate without alarm—it is this that I am anxious to meet in the earliest stage, to prevent its assuming the dangerous form of an acknowledged precedent.Smith, p. 347.