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"The Yeomanry Cavalry made their charge with a most infuriate frenzy; they cut down men, women and children, indiscriminately, and appeared to have commenced a pre-meditated attack with the most insatiable thirst for blood and destruction.

"They merit a medallion, on one side of which should be inscribed 'The Slaughter Men of Manchester', and a reverse bearing a description of their slaughter of defenceless men, women and children, unprovoked and unnecessary.

"As a proof of meditated murder of the part of the magistrates, every stone was gathered from the ground on the Friday and Saturday previous to the meeting, by scavengers sent there by the express command of the magistrates, that the populace might be rendered more defenceless."

Within days, the Register had been closed by the Government. Undaunted, Carlile launched a new publication, The Republican, in which he wrote:

"The massacre of the unoffending inhabitants of Manchester, on the 16th of August, by the Yeomanry Cavalry and Police at the instigation of the Magistrates, should be the daily theme of the Press until the murderers are brought to justice.

Captain Nadin and his banditti of Police, are hourly engaged to plunder and ill-use the peaceable inhabitants; whilst every appeal from those repeated assaults to the Magistrates for redress, is treated by them with derision and insult.

Every man in Manchester who avows his opinions on the necessity of reform, should never go unarmed - retaliation has become a duty, and revenge an act of justice."

Carlile was not the only literary figure to be utterly horrified by the massacre. The romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was living in Italy when he read about the event, was moved to write a poem so angry and so vitriolic that it could not be published during his own lifetime.

It was not until 1832 that The Mask of Anarchy, saw the light of day.

It was a hard-hitting attack on the Government of the time, including Foreign Secretary Castlereagh, who was allegorised as "Murder," Lord Chancellor Lord Eldon ("Fraud") and Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth ("Hypocrisy"). Shelley described a "ghastly masquerade" with "Anarchy" - or Misgovernment - riding a blood-spattered white horse and with a mark on his forehead proclaiming: "I am GOD, AND KING AND LAW."

Ironically, publication of Shelley's poem coincided with the first move by the Government towards the reform for which


CHIEF magistrate William Hulton (top left) ordered in the Yeomanry. Percy Bysshe Shelley (top right) castigated the Government, in particular Lord Castlereagh (bottom left). Thomas 'Orator' Hunt (bottom right) was arrested and gaoled.
those poor Peterloo workers had been campaigning. The first Parliamentary Reform Act of 1832 began the process of dismantling the system of Pocket and Rotten Boroughs and extending the franchise to towns and cities which had never before been represented.

Even then, it was just a hesitant step. Two thirds of the constituencies were still small and rural, and the total electorate had increased from 435,000 to just 813,000.

The workers themselves were left out in the cold for much longer, despite pressure from the Chartists.

Further Reform Acts in 1867 and 1884 gradually extended the vote, property qualifications for MPs were scrapped in 1858 and MPs were paid from 1912, but it was not until much later in the 20th century that that dream of Universal Manhood Suffrage was finally realised.