Andrew Hardie and John Baird went to their beheading 200 years ago this week, the 8th of September, 1820, with composure, according to accounts.
Hardie, 28, and Baird, 32, were executed in front of 2,000 and 6,000 members of the public for high treason and sedition following Scotland’s short-lived Radical War. A fellow rebel, James Wilson, had been put to death a week earlier.
Both were arrested after the Battle of Bonnymuir in early April 1820, where around 30 radicals marched to the Carron Iron Works at Falkirk to steal cannons but were seized by troops on the way.
In a letter written in Stirling Castle to his uncle three days before his death, Hardie wrote:
“No person could have induced me to take up arms in the same manner to rob or plunder. No, my dear friends, I took them for the good of my suffering country; and although we were outwitted, yet I protest, as a dying man, that it was with a good intention on my part.”
Paisley around 1820 with the textile town at the heart of the working class unrest as better rights and conditions were demanded by skilled artisans, some who were prepared to use force to secure them.
Archie Henderson, social history research assistant at Paisley Museum working on the Paisley Re-Imagined Project, which is looking at the town’s role in the 1820 Radical War, explained, “The opinion of the people was that they died as martyrs and there was a feeling that they were executed unfairly. They were martyrs.” He said the legacy of the radicals lived lasted. “The right to vote we enjoy today was in part paid for with the blood of John Baird and Andrew Hardie, who from the moment of their execution became martyrs to the suffrage movement. The fight continued after their deaths and lead towards the Chartist movement, the Reform Act of 1832 and, ultimately, the 1928 Representation of the People Act that gave vote to all men and women on equal terms."
Hardie, 28, and Baird, 32, were executed in front of 2,000 and 6,000 members of the public for high treason and sedition following Scotland’s short-lived Radical War. A fellow rebel, James Wilson, had been put to death a week earlier.
Both were arrested after the Battle of Bonnymuir in early April 1820, where around 30 radicals marched to the Carron Iron Works at Falkirk to steal cannons but were seized by troops on the way.
In a letter written in Stirling Castle to his uncle three days before his death, Hardie wrote:
“No person could have induced me to take up arms in the same manner to rob or plunder. No, my dear friends, I took them for the good of my suffering country; and although we were outwitted, yet I protest, as a dying man, that it was with a good intention on my part.”
Paisley around 1820 with the textile town at the heart of the working class unrest as better rights and conditions were demanded by skilled artisans, some who were prepared to use force to secure them.
Archie Henderson, social history research assistant at Paisley Museum working on the Paisley Re-Imagined Project, which is looking at the town’s role in the 1820 Radical War, explained, “The opinion of the people was that they died as martyrs and there was a feeling that they were executed unfairly. They were martyrs.” He said the legacy of the radicals lived lasted. “The right to vote we enjoy today was in part paid for with the blood of John Baird and Andrew Hardie, who from the moment of their execution became martyrs to the suffrage movement. The fight continued after their deaths and lead towards the Chartist movement, the Reform Act of 1832 and, ultimately, the 1928 Representation of the People Act that gave vote to all men and women on equal terms."
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