Mr. Rolleston and the Pentrich Rebellion

Before we look at the sad events that would engulf the Watnall Hall Rollestons in the years following the 1817 Pentrich Rebellion, it is worth exploring the rioter’s perspective as the events that engulfed them were far worse.

In 1815 the battle of Waterloo ended 25 years of war against the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies. The relief was immediate. The war was over. Prices fell, but peace brought no plenty. There was a huge war debt and taxation remained high. The Mt. Tambora volcano eruption was causing global climate change. 

1816 was cold and wet, with snow in June in Derbyshire, and no grass till the end of June - a disaster for a rural community. Crops failed and livestock died, resulting in the worst famine of the century. Furthermore, the steady increase in population which began in the mid 18th century was well under way. Trade had not yet expanded sufficiently to provide enough work. The Industrial Revolution caused many craftsmen to lose their livelihood due to the new machines doing their work faster and more economically. They had little means of protest. The working man had no say whatever about who was elected to rule him. Only the landed classes could vote. Nottingham had long been a rebellious town and violence was the inevitable outcome.

The Luddite machine breaking raids of 1811-1817 had only just been suppressed by the anxious East Midlands magistrates. The final Luddite trial was held in Leicester in Februray of 1817. In 1812 prime minister Spencer Perceval had been assassinated and a fear of revolution stalked the British ruling class. This was particularly acute in the decades after the American War of Independence (1775-83) and the French Revolution (1789-99). It was a period which became known as the Age of Revolution, when the existing social order was overthrown in a number of countries. Although some limited reforms had been proposed in England, the experience of France, where modest constitutional reforms in 1789 had become a regicidal reign of terror by 1793, largely blunted any attempt at change. But unrest was still simmering, particularly in the East Midlands. Secret political meetings took place (Hampden Clubs) and Government agents moved round the country, spying on such groups, and testing their loyalty by suggesting rebellion. One of the most notorious of these agents was William Oliver who went to various places in the North and the Midlands, including the Derbyshire village of Pentrich. He had previously tried to stir up trouble in Yorkshire but it was only in Pentrich that desperate men listened to him and walked into the government trap. The government wanted to stage a show trial to come down hard on the rebels and dissuade further insurrection.

The Rebellion Leader - In June 1817 matters had come to a head and the figure of Jeremiah Brandreth appeared on the scene. He was a frame-work knitter, legally settled in Wilford, who was apparently a devout, upright, and independent man. He had been driven by the failure of his trade to seek parish relief, and had been denied it until his family was actually starving. Because there was no room for him in Wilford the parish had made him live in Nottingham, and only after repeated appeals was part relief given. Brandreth was only in Nottingham nine months but in this time he had visited at least one of the radical Hampden Clubs, and here he met a certain Mr. Stevens, who seems to have been one of the more violent reformers. By now Brandreth must have been desperate, so, probably on Stevens's instructions, he went to Pentrich as leader of the group of men who met there at Ann Weightman's alehouse "The White Horse". These men knew him as the Nottingham Captain. The plan which he proposed was that they must rise, collect arms and men in the neighbourhood, if necessary by force, and march to the Forest in Nottingham where they would meet men from the rest of the Midlands. He told them that the north would rise, that a provisional government would be formed and relief would be given to their dependants. 

Thanks to Oliver, the Town Clerk of Nottingham had his confidential clerk watching in Pentrich while the Nottingham authorities sat up waiting for news. They were well aware and well prepared to respond. According to the Nottingham Review... "the town magistrates sat at the Police Office without intermission, to receive communications and act accordingly. Special constables were enrolled in great numbers, and the 15th Hussars, at the Barracks, were ordered to be ready to act at a moment's notice. The county magistrates were also assembled in conclave, and the 95th Regiment of Foot, and the Holme and Newark troops of Yeomanry Cavalry, were on duty close at hand. And as if this formidable force were not sufficient, the Leicestershire Yeomanry were up in readiness to reach Nottingham on s very short notice, by forced marches."

The March – Late on 9th June 1817, the regenerators - as they called themselves - met at a barn in South Wingfield. Brandreth, with three lieutenants Weightman, Turner and preacher Ludlam, led his men off on what seems to 21st century eyes to have started as little more than a protest march, with a little begging and looting on the side, but it should be remembered that they were armed with some weapons and agricultural implements. The rebels split into two parties, going from house to house with varying degrees of success. One farmer, Samuel Hunt, willingly gave them bread and cheese, dressed, and joined them, for which he was sentenced to death, but actually transported. 

At one farm, the widowed owner, Mary Hepworth, refused them admittance, and only surrendered arms to them at gun point after Brandreth had shot through a window and killed one of her servants. They met with extraordinarily little resistance but events soon started to unravel. It started to rain heavily and in the early hours were easily dissuaded from their plan to take Butterley Foundry by the manager Mr. Goodwin. He had planned a defence force of special constables armed with truncheons, but came out and argued with the rebels trying to persuade them to drop their plans. He rescued a couple of their pressed men but failed to stop the rest from marching on. They went through Ripley to Codnor and on to Langley Mill where they met George Weightman who had been sent to Nottingham on a stolen pony as their liaison officer. For some reason he told them that Nottingham was taken. 

At this point one of the marchers let off his gun by mistake hitting a comrade in the leg. Losing men along the way - they were probably tired, hungry, wet and drunk, as they seem to have visited every inn on route - they marched on to Eastwood and The Sun Inn. The expected reinforcements failed to show up and the landlady begged preacher Ludlam to hide in the cellar. He refused. “No. Many of these starving men are out because I am here. It is too late to return. I must and will go on with them”. 

They left at 7am and by 8:30 were at Giltbrook where they sat by the roadside and, according to a witness at their trial, “presented a most forlorn picture”.

It was at this point that Mr. Rolleston, in his capacity as magistrate for the area called out the local militia. According to the weekly Nottingham Review: 

"Information of the entrance of the insurgents into the county was conveyed to the Police Office at an early hour in the morning, by [Magistrate] Rolleston, of Watnall, who, having ridden out on horseback, and ascertained that considerable alarm prevailed at Eastwood, and that men in bodies were out with pikes, thought it his duty to apply spurs to his steed, and gallop over to Nottingham. Securing the assistance of C. G. Mundy, Esq., one of the county justices, and of eighteen Hussars, commanded by Captain Phillips and several officers, he immediately returned, to endeavour to stop the progress of the rebel forces". 

The marchers scattered when they heard that the troops were moving out against them. Rolleston and his men chased and arrested many of them, although others, including Brandreth, were captured later. They were led to Nottingham Gaol. Charles Sutton described in the Nottingham Review: 

“late in the afternoon of the 10th June 1817 a procession entered Nottingham through Chapel Bar. Crossing the Market Place it continued down Bridesmith Gate and onto High Pavement where it stopped at the County Gaol. Led by two magistrates, a party of Hussars guarded a cart and wagon in which lay 28 men tied with ropes, together with a pile of assorted weapons mainly home-made pikes. No man of feeling could behold the lank countenance of the chief character of the mournful cavalcade without sentiments of pity for the deluded prisoners, who exhibited a picture of despair and wretchedness, none of them seeming above rank of labourer or working mechanics”.

The Undersheriff’s report said :

“…I have seen at the Police Office in Nottingham about a dozen of their forks and pikes, the latter manufactured out of old files or chisels, sharpened and both affixed to handles of a considerable length. Only one pistol came in. Mr. Rolleston's soldiers are now in pursuit of the fugitives. I do not find that many of the County have as yet joined these deluded wretches who I apprehend are principally Derbyshire men.”

The Review takes up the story... "Brandreth managed to elude his pursuers longer than most of them. On the desertion of his men, he left the highway, and proceeding over hedge and ditch, secreted his gun in the fence of a field occupied by a Mr. Green, of Kimberley. After a variety of narrow escapes, he was concealed at Bulwell, by an acquaintance named Sansom, until a reward of £50 was offered for his discovery, when it is understood he was betrayed by his treacherous friend, who informed Mr. Rolleston of his place of concealment. The result was, two gamekeepers were sent to Sansom's house, under the pretence of searching for snares, and poor Brandreth was seized."

The Trial - The prisoners were held in the Nottingham and Derby gaols; indicted at the Derby July Assizes, and tried at Derby by a special commission of four judges, sitting from 15-25 October. The charge was treason, which to present-day eyes appears ludicrous, but one should remember the background and anxieties of the times. At the trial, the government was anxious in the extreme not to let Oliver give evidence, for fear of him implicating them - which of course he could. Brandreth with his lieutenants Turner, Ludlam and Weightman were the leading defendants. The verdict was a foregone conclusion, decided before the "trial" had begun. Nineteen men were persuaded to plead guilty, and they were sentenced to death but the sentences were commuted to transportation. Brandreth, Turner, Ludlam and Weightman were sentenced to be hanged, beheaded and quartered. George Weightman's sentence was in fact later commuted to transportation but his three companions were hanged and beheaded. Quartering was remitted. The Government, having made its example, was satisfied. Reactions to their sentences varied but Brandreth remained calm and firm.

He stated that he accepted the verdict which God allowed to be inflicted on him, but that his conduct was for God alone to judge. He expressed no remorse, only his trust in God. The executions of the three condemned men took place as ordered in public at Nun's Green, Derby on the morning of the 7th November. The scaffold was enclosed by special constables for the purpose of checking any disorder. A contemporary account exists and is very gruesome. The executioner’s axe did not fully sever Brandreth’s head and a knife had to be used to finish the job. It is amazing that such a bloodthirsty medieval punishment was still being used in Georgian England. The newspapers and public opinion turned against the government.

The Aftermath - The Times reveals “horrible plot of spies and informer to excite insurrection” naming Oliver. After Edward Baines the owner of the Leeds Mercury created a sensation. He published a series of articles in the Leeds Mercury, giving all the details of what Oliver had done as the government’s agent provocateur. They were read out in Parliament and became the subject of several debates that embarrassed the government. At one point it seemed to be on the edge of falling. Magistrates had used informers to catch the Luddites, but that was during the Napoleonic Wars and in wartime extreme measures can be excused. But this was peacetime and the public were outraged.

The immediate aftermath of the Pentrich Rebellion was also tragic for the families of the prisoners, as well as for the unfortunate men themselves. They had sold everything, even their beds, to finance their defence, so were completely penniless, but to add to this, vengeful landlords in Pentrich destroyed many of the prisoner’s houses, leaving them homeless as well as destitute. One wonders if it was their fate to end their days in the local workhouse. Their family names brought shame for decades to come. 

There is a little known conclusion to the fate of the convicted marchers. 17 years after the trial a group of Derbyshire MP’s and magistrates successfully petitioned the Home Secretary on their behalf. The Pentrich rebels received a full pardon and were free to return home (if they still had one). Most had been transported to Australia and it is unclear if they were afforded a reciprocal free passage back to England.

Though the uprising appeared to achieve little at the time, it is now seen as a major milestone in emancipation, eventually leading to freedom of speech, votes and other rights for ordinary men and women. So perhaps the three men who were executed for their part in the Pentrich Revolution did not die in vain.

Sources : "Watnall Hall and the Rolleston Family" 2000 RA Horton; Pentrich and South Wingfield Revolution Group; "Bravery and Deception" - J Aktinson; Pentrich: from seditions to petitions - National Archive; "The Date-Book of Remarkable and Memorable Events Connected with Nottingham and Its Neighbourhood. 1750-1850" by John Frost Sutton.