Britain goes to the polls this week almost exactly 200 years after the last armed uprising in English history, when a group of Derbyshire weavers and miners resorted to pitchforks and muskets in a futile attempt to overthrow by force the government that denied them the vote.



The uprising lasted only the length of one cold, rainy night and ended in public executions and beheadings, but Derbyshire is preparing to commemorate the bicentenary this weekend.



The Pentrich Revolution is little remembered now – certainly not taught in the local schools – and there is little trace of it in the cluster of villages 14 miles north of Nottingham where it occurred. But in 1817 it terrified ministers sufficiently for them to take extreme measures to make sure nothing like it ever happened again. It is a tale of violence and despair far removed from the common and placid image of Jane Austen’s England – the author died six weeks after the uprising.

Michael Parkin, a retired police officer who lives in Swanwick, the village next to Pentrich, and is one of the organisers of a weekend of events, said: “We think we have got a better story than the Tolpuddle Martyrs: more interesting and more devious. The Dorset men came back but ours never did.”

About 300 unemployed labourers – not all willing volunteers – from local villages joined a march on Nottingham on the night of 9 June 1817. They had been told they were part of a national uprising and would join at least 70,000 northerners marching south “like a cloud” to capture London.

More immediately, they were promised food, rum, money and boat trips on the river Trent once they seized Nottingham. Many probably had little idea of politics but were starving and desperate to overthrow Tory ministers indifferent to their hardship. Some apparently believed that talk of a provisional government meant one which would hand out provisions.

Their leader, Jeremiah Brandreth, a former Luddite and, like many of the men, a Methodist, was armed with a musket and shot a servant at a local farmhouse when the owner refused to open up. The manager of a local ironworks also turned them away and many of the men, soaked and hungry, began to slip away in the dark. As they reached the outskirts of Nottingham – where an Ikea store now stands – a detachment of soldiers was waiting and the marchers fled, confused, scared and drenched, back into the arms of waiting magistrates.

An illustration showing the head of the rising’s leader, Jeremiah Brandreth, being shown to the crowds after his execution in Derby. Photograph: Hulton Archive/Getty Images

Determined to secure convictions as a warning to others, Lord Liverpool’s government ensured they were charged with high treason, an unusually savage indictment for penniless workers rather than aristocratic rebels. Forty-seven of the men stood trial before the lord chief justice and a jury of local landowners in Derby over 10 days that autumn. Four were sentenced to death and 23 transported to Australia. None would ever see their home villages again. To make sure all traces of them were expunged, local landowner the Duke of Devonshire had their homes demolished and their families evicted.

“It was like ethnic cleansing,” said Roger Tanner, a retired headteacher who leads walks along the routes the rebels took across the fields and valleys on the edge of the Peak District. “Pentrich was the biggest village in the area but it has never recovered.”

Yet the uprising was probably deliberately provoked by the government. William Richards, known as Oliver the Spy, who was working for the repressive home secretary Lord Sidmouth, probably acted as an agent provocateur – possibly on his own initiative – telling the men they would be part of a national rising.

Richards had been recruited by Sidmouth to travel across the Midlands and northern England to infiltrate meetings of political radicals and report back. By the time of the uprising he was already regarded with suspicion by the activists and would shortly be exposed in sharp investigative reporting by the Leeds Mercury newspaper, but the message did not reach Pentrich. In Huddersfield in West Yorkshire, another planned uprising had swiftly collapsed and the rebels there were all acquitted on lesser charges by juries outraged by the government’s underhand use of spies.

The death penalty for treason still included drawing and quartering but the Prince Regent excused them the full horror: public hanging would be followed by beheading. Brandreth and two others went to the gallows. On the scaffold, one of the condemned men shouted: “This is all Oliver and the government!” The journalist William Cobbett would later write bitterly: “The employers of Oliver might in an hour have put a total stop to [the] preparations and blown them to air. They wished not to prevent but to produce those acts.”

Next weekend’s commemoration is supported by a Heritage Lottery Fund grant. It will include guided walks, an art exhibition, a play, a conference at Derby University and an exhibition at the city’s museum including the block on which the ringleaders’ heads were cut off. The routes the marchers took are known and some of the farmhouses where they stopped to demand food and weapons still stand. Plaques will be unveiled, and some descendants of the transported men are coming over from Australia.

Parkin said: “People round here did not like to speak about the uprising in case they lost their homes and livelihoods but we hope to restore the national memory of what happened that night.”