Local magistrates, alarmed by the size of the rally demanding parliamentary reform and repeal of the Corn Laws, ordered the arrest of speaker Henry Hunt and sent yeomanry cavalry into the packed crowd. The resulting chaos and sabre charges killed at least 18 people, including a woman and child, and injured 400 to 700 more. The massacre, sardonically named after Waterloo, became a rallying cry for British electoral reform and inspired Percy Shelley's poem 'The Masque of Anarchy.'
By 1819, Manchester had no member of Parliament despite being one of the fastest-growing industrial cities in the world, a glaring symbol of Britain's unreformed electoral system, which still allotted seats to depopulated 'rotten boroughs.' On August 16, roughly 60,000 people—men, women, and children dressed in their Sunday best—gathered peacefully at St Peter's Field to hear the radical orator Henry Hunt call for reform.
Nervous local magistrates, watching from a nearby house, panicked at the sheer size of the crowd and ordered Hunt's arrest. When constables struggled to push through the packed masses, the magistrates called in the Manchester and Salford Yeomanry, a volunteer cavalry force composed largely of local merchants and shopkeepers with scores to settle against the working class. Drunk and poorly trained, the yeomanry charged into the crowd with sabres drawn, and regular hussars soon joined in a botched attempt to extract them.
The field descended into terror—people trampled, slashed, and crushed against walls as they tried to flee. At least 18 people died, including a two-year-old boy knocked from his mother's arms, and hundreds more were wounded. The government initially praised the magistrates, but public outrage grew, radical journalist James Wroe coined the term 'Peterloo' in bitter mockery of Waterloo, and the massacre became a foundational grievance fueling the eventual Reform Act of 1832.
Key people: Henry Hunt