For the country’s rulers, any working-class meeting was potentially dangerous due to the situation in France. Radical leaders were arrested, put on trial, and condemned to transportation to Australia. The most notorious event was the ‘Peterloo Massacre’ of August 1819. 60,000 people gathered in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, in support of parliamentary reform; the local magistrates, after allowing the meeting, decided to arrest the speakers and sent in first the constabulary, then the Yeomanry, and finally the
Fifteenth Hussars, professional soldiers; the crowd was violently dispersed, eleven killed and many hundreds injured.