RIOTS AND REBELS by Nick Rennison: Why the English LOVE revolting

Throughout history, angry men and women have taken to the streets to express their displeasure about everything from theatre tickets (too expensive) to prayer books (no longer in Latin) by way of brothels (shouldn’t be allowed).

That’s not forgetting the wonderfully named Plug Plot riots (1842), the Brown Dog riots (1907) and the Rebecca riots (1839-43). In this highly accessible book, Nick Rennison walks us through the history of popular protest from the 14th century to the present day. In the process some common themes emerge.

Not only do protesters usually not get the thing they are campaigning for – a longer lunchbreak, the abolition of the monarchy, cheaper potatoes – they also have a high chance of ending up mangled or dead.

One of the earliest examples of how things can escalate was Kett’s Rebellion of 1549, which was fought by East Anglian peasants against the local gentry who were enclosing their common land. During a tense stand-off, a boy dropped his trousers and mooned at the soldiers, whereupon he was despatched with a single bullet.

In one way the lad was lucky.

The punishments meted out to rebels and rioters were generally designed to inflict the maximum pain. Nor was rank any protection.

In 1660, Major-General Thomas Harrison was hung, drawn and quartered for his part in the execution of Charles I 11 years earlier. The grisly procedure involved Harrison being hanged almost to the point of death, before being castrated and then having his bowels cut out of his body and paraded in front of him. Only at the beheading stage did the torture end.

After death, Harrison’s body was cut into quarters and displayed to the crowd as a warning about what awaited anyone tempted to commit high treason. Incredibly, the old soldier seems to have borne his fate with equanimity.

According to the diarist Samuel Pepys who witnessed the horrible spectacle, the condemned prisoner looked ‘as cheerful as any man could in that condition’.

A HUNDRED and fifty years later, the appetite for revenge showed little sign of abating. During the anti-Catholic Gordon riots of 1780, thousands of citizens were brought to boiling point by a wild rumour that hordes of Jesuit priests were hiding in tunnels beneath London, awaiting instructions from the Pope to blow up the banks of the Thames and flood the city.

Taking to the streets, the protesters set buildings on fire, pelted bishops with filth and even roughed up the Lord Chief Justice. In the confusion, hundreds of citizens were trampled underfoot, while others were later condemned to death for public disorder. (As an extra bit of unfairness, the hotheaded leader of the riots, Lord George Gordon, was acquitted of any wrongdoing.)

Just because the forces of law and order usually won in the long run, it didn’t mean that there weren’t some close calls along the way. Rennison reveals that even rocksteady Victorian England teetered on the edge of full-scale insurrection.

In 1842, men disguised as women and calling themselves ‘Rebecca’s Daughters’ roamed South Wales smashing tollgates in protest at the way that poor farming communities were forced to pay to use local roads.

That same year, the Chartists gathered in their thousands to demand a radical overhaul of the status quo, including giving the vote to every man in England.

A political revolution, in other words. In the circumstances you can see why Queen Adelaide, Victoria’s aunt, was convinced that England would go the way of France, and that ‘her fate is to be that of Marie Antoinette’.

She wasn’t the only person to misread the situation.

In 1855, Karl Marx witnessed a riot in Hyde Park held in protest at the proposed ban on Sunday trading. He declared excitedly he was not ‘exaggerating in saying that the English Revolution began yesterday in Hyde Park’. He was, of course, exaggerating.

Throughout this engaging book, Rennison keeps a sharp eye out for themes and patterns that repeat across the centuries. For instance, the riots against Margaret Thatcher’s poll tax in 1990 centred on the unfairness of everyone paying the same, regardless of income. Six hundred years earlier a similar grievance ignited the Peasants’ Revolt when King Richard II imposed a levy of one shilling on poor and rich alike.

Perhaps the most obvious hangover from the past, though, concerns the Just Stop Oil protesters who glued themselves to Constable’s Hay Wain in 2022. The choice of painting was no accident. John Constable’s 200-yearold masterpiece shows a rural landscape in his native Suffolk in which a hay wagon is being pulled through a tranquil millpond.

By targeting this image, the protesters made the point that climate change and fossil fuels threaten to destroy this natural idyll. Indeed, before gluing themselves to the frame, the Just Stop Oilers attached their own version of The Hay Wain, depicting an ‘apocalyptic vision of the future’ complete with a broken washing machine in the hay cart.

This incident achieved maximum publicity around the world, which was exactly what had been intended. Still, it was hardly original.

OVER a hundred years earlier, the suffragette Mary Richardson had chosen another National Gallery treasure to deface.

In 1914, she slashed the priceless Rokeby Venus with a meat cleaver. In Velazquez’s 17th-century masterpiece, a luscious nude female figure reclines languorously on a chaise longue while admiring her reflection in a mirror held by Cupid.

Richardson and her suffragette colleagues saw The Rokeby Venus as a symbol of the objectification and subjugation of women. Specifically, Richardson wanted to draw attention to the way that suffragette hunger-strikers, of whom she had been one, were systematically brutalised by prison doctors. During force-feeding sessions, a tube was shoved down the women’s gullet and into their stomach, resulting in physical and mental trauma that could last a lifetime.

How different from Velazquez’s Venus, whose naked body was the object of veneration – and titillation – for the men who poured into the National Gallery to gawp at her sensuous curves and gleaming skin.

Apart from anything else, the goddess of love seemed entirely unconcerned with bothering her pretty head as to whether or not she had the vote.