Charles
Bradlaugh
Seeds of radicalism
With his childhood and education completed, Charles Bradlaugh was set to work as an errand boy at Lepard & Son, solicitors, at 9 Cloak Lane in the City where his father was employed as a confidential clerk. In 1847, at age 14, he joined the coal merchants Green, Son and Jones at City Road Basin as a wharf clerk and cashier.
Bradlaugh, even at this young age, was taller than his contemporaries and possessed a sharp intellect. He read avidly, walking to his workplace (running, according to his daughter Hypatia) to save the omnibus fare to buy books. He became a Sunday school teacher at his local church, St. Peter’s at Bethnal Green, just yards from where he lived. He had the knowledge and confidence to question the assumptions of the time.
On 10 April 1848, the Chartists organised a mass demonstration at
Kennington in south London to present a petition calling for the reform of
Parliament. The government was terrified that this might be the spark for
revolution. The Queen escaped to the Isle of Wight and thousands of troops and
police were drafted in. They banned the demonstration, set up cannons in Hyde
Park, fortified bridges, and prevented the march crossing Blackfriars Bridge.
Bradlaugh did not attend but made a speech on the same day in support of the Kennington demonstration at Bonner’s Fields, Victoria Park. Although the Kennington demonstration was stopped, protests continued during that summer.
Police occupying Bonner’s Fields on 12 June 1848.
Mass
protests across Britain were planned for Whit Monday, 12 June 1848, including
Bonner’s Fields. The police had orders to prevent processions and arrest
speakers. Bonner’s Fields was occupied by 1600 police, 100 mounted police, 500
former soldiers and Horse Guards. On the day, with heavy rain and the arrest of
the Chartist leader Ernest Jones a few days earlier, the rally did not take
place. A report of Bradlaugh being hit by a police truncheon may have been at
this rally.
Bradlaugh
continued to work diligently for the church. When he turned 15 years old in
September 1848, the Reverend John Graham Packer, the vicar of St. Peter’s, put
him forward for confirmation by the Bishop of London. Bradlaugh prepared for
this by studying the Thirty-nine articles of the Church of England and
the four Gospels. With his already well-developed intellectual
thoroughness, he found discrepancies.
To
reconcile them, he wrote to Mr Packer asking for ‘aid and explanation’. The
response was calamitous. Packer denounced the enquiries as ‘atheistical’ and
suspended Bradlaugh from his duties as a Sunday school teacher.
Bradlaugh
was horrified; he still considered himself a Christian and being banned from
the Sunday school would have been shameful. Unable to attend church services,
on Sundays he would go to open-air meetings at Bonner’s Fields. There he came
across a group of Freethinkers, including Eliza Sharples, the partner of
Richard Carlile.
Carlile
was a radical agitator; he had published pamphlets including Paine’s Rights
of Man and The Age of Reason and distributed the weekly Black Dwarf.
He was one of the scheduled main speakers at the Manchester meeting which
became the Peterloo Massacre. He had been prosecuted for blasphemy, blasphemous
libel and sedition and imprisoned for three years with a fine of £1500. His
wife and sister were also imprisoned. He died in poverty in 1842.
In 1829,
Carlile met Eliza Sharples who became his long-term partner. They never married
and they had three children, Hypatia, Theophila and Julian. In 1848, six years
after Carlile’s death, she was running Eree’s Coffee House at number 1 Warner
Place on behalf of the Freethinkers who met at Bonner’s Fields.
Eliza
Sharples was a radical in her own right. Escaping from the strict religiosity
of Bolton, she went to London in 1832 and started a weekly publication called Isis
dedicated to ‘the young women of England for generations to come or until
superstition is extinct’. She rejected the Church of England but remained a
Deist. She defended her partnership with Carlile, writing: ‘a marriage more
pure and moral was never formed’.
The
Freethinkers built a small hall behind the coffee house. Bradlaugh would attend
their meetings where he would argue for Christian belief. Here came across the
ideas of Carlile and others like Robert Taylor who had been called ‘The Devil’s
Chaplain’. Those who met at the coffee house and hall were considered dangerous
and called ‘infidels’.
Bradlaugh
would return each evening to his home just a hundred yards away, passing the
church, his mind undoubtedly in turmoil. At home, there is no evidence that he
was unwelcome. Although little is known of his father, he was not a churchgoer
and simply followed orthodoxy. Bradlaugh would later speak of his father and
his mother with tenderness and affection. He was protective and caring of his
sisters.
However,
Mr Packer had gained a foothold in the family, insisting that the younger
children attended Sunday school and inveigling the family to hang edifying
religious texts on the walls of their sitting room, including one describing
those who denied God as ‘fools’. This pernicious influence eventually led to an
incident when Bradlaugh Senior took away advertising boards from the Warner
Place Hall and threatened to burn them.
Bradlaugh
wrongly thought that a reasoned argument might help his case. He presented
Packer with a copy of Taylor’s Diegesis, an analysis of Christian
mythology by this former Anglican priest (and blasphemous showman). It was
unlikely to go down well with Packer who Bradlaugh would later describe as
‘mendacious’, a typical understatement.
Packer
was insulted and used his influence over Bradlaugh Senior to threaten to have Bradlaugh
sacked by his coal merchant employer. He was given three days to ‘change his
opinions or lose his situation’. Three days later, Bradlaugh packed his bags,
kissed his sister goodbye, and left home. From then onwards, his enemy would be
religious bigotry.
Bradlaugh moved to the Freethinking milieu of Eliza Sharples' home near what is now Broadway market.