Agricultural History Review, Volume 45 Part 1 (1997), pp. 34–48

This article attributes a powerful role to political factors in the Captain Swing Revolt during the autumn of 1830. If that rising took place in a context generated by the prolonged post-war agricultural depression, the continental revolutions over the summer were well-known throughout Kent and Sussex not least owing to William Cobbett's journalism and his October south-eastern lecture tour. The latter further fuelled the spectre unleashed by the revolutions, antipathy to WeUington's failure to address agrarian distress, and his refusal to accept public conviction in the necessity for constitutional change. His stance precipitated the collapse of his ministry in November and its replacement by Grey's Whig-dominated Cabinet pledged to reform the Commons. Faced with rural insurrection at the moment of his accession to power, Home Secretary Melbourne intensified the repression of Swing. A complex series of interlocking events, including the conviction of a Sussex arsonist, his alleged motivation through attending a Cobbett lecture, and Cobbett's commentary on the revolt in his Political Register, combined to determine the Cabinet on a prosecution for seditious libel. But others came into that decision-making process, among them Tory politicians anxious to ernbarass the Whigs, Tory Sussex magistrates who encouraged the incendiary's claims and through lobbying William IV at Brighton Pavilion, persuaded the king to exert pressure on his ministers to prosecute. Given Grey's need for royal support over reform, the Cabinet was unable to resist. The trial facilitated a superb self-defence, support from Cobbett's ardent admirers in rural Sussex, and a triumphant acquittal. 

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