"The streets will run with blood!": the uprising that shook Victorian Britain

Summary

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Episode Summary:

Podcast: HistoryExtra
Title: "The streets will run with blood!": the uprising that shook Victorian Britain
Date: February 18, 2026
Host: Spencer Mizzen
Guest: Ian Brecken, novelist, teacher, university lecturer, and historical researcher
Main Theme:
A riveting exploration of the Bossenden Wood uprising of 1838—the last battle fought on English soil—focusing on the enigmatic figure Sir William Courtenay (aka John Nicholls Tom), the social, religious, and political currents that fed his insurrection, and the aftermath that echoed through Victorian Britain.

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Overview

This episode delves into the dramatic but little-known rural uprising of 1838 in Kent, England, where a charismatic and mysterious leader named Sir William Courtenay led laborers in open rebellion. Host Spencer Mizzen and guest Ian Brecken dissect the events, personalities, social tensions, and historical implications, offering fresh insights into a singularly bloody chapter of Victorian England.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. The Bossenden Wood Uprising: What Happened?

• Setting: Late May 1838, Bossenden Wood near Canterbury (01:13).
• Event Summary:
  • Sir William Courtenay (real name John Nicholls Tom) gathered local laborers, preaching both social and religious revolution.
  • Authorities, alarmed by increasing unrest, summoned the army.
  • The “battle” lasted only about three minutes but ended with multiple deaths, including Courtenay, followers, and soldiers.

Quote:
"The two sides met in a clearing in the forest and a battle followed. I mean, it's debatable whether it was a battle or not, how you would define it. It lasted probably no more than about three minutes, but... at the end of it, not only the so-called John Nicholls Tom, but several of his followers and a couple of the military side as well lay dead on the floor."
—Ian Brecken (01:37)

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2. Who Was Sir William Courtenay (John Nicholls Tom)?

• Origins: Born John Nicholls Tom, son of Cornish innkeepers near Truro.
• Transformations:
  • Left home in 1832; re-emerged in Canterbury as various personas: Count Moses Rothschild, then Sir William Percy Honeywood Courtenay.
  • Dressed flamboyantly, boasted of vast wealth, claimed grand titles, adopted an extravagant look—impressive beard, military coat, sword.
• Political Ambitions: Attempted to run for Parliament on a radical, populist platform in the charged context of post-Reform Act Britain.

Quote:
"He was going under a different name, he had a different appearance, different clothing, and seemed to have become or taken on this completely different owner... He was a very big man anyway, six foot tall, very powerfully built, and he had an enormous beard which was very rare at the time."
—Ian Brecken (03:11)

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3. From Political Outsider to Religious Revolutionary

• After Failed Elections:
  • Imprisoned for perjury, spent time in an asylum, later emerged transformed again.
  • Shifted focus to rural Kent, donned laborer's garb, preached apocalyptic and egalitarian visions.
• Religious Reinvention:
  • Cast himself as a lay preacher, then began claiming he was the second coming of Christ.

Quote:
"We've seen it even in our own time... people who've tried to make a go at a political career, it hasn't worked, and then they've suddenly found God, or, in the case of John Nicholstom, actually decided that he was God or the Son of God."
—Ian Brecken (08:03)

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4. Courtenay’s Charisma and the Power of Millenarianism

• Charisma: Able to attract support across social classes, not just among the poorest.
• Religious Context:
  • Early Victorian culture steeped in Christianity, ripe for prophetic or millenarian figures.
  • Belief in the impending Second Coming was common—millenarianism undergirded Courtenay’s revolutionary message.

Quote:
"He was a kind of hellfire preacher and showman combined, and you can see why a lot of people were very taken in by that, because their lives were hard."
—Ian Brecken (10:09)

Quote:
"This belief in the millennium... was very widely held across society... John Nichols Tom did... to slightly change it for his own uses. He turned the idea of the millennium into a revolutionary moment. He said, this is the day of Judgment... the streets will run with blood..."
—Ian Brecken (12:46)

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5. The Authorities Respond

• Slow Official Reaction:
  • Communication slow; officials took time to grasp the seriousness of the threat.
  • Lack of professional police in rural areas; legal protocols hampered immediate action.
• Triggering Event:
  • Courtenay killed the brother of a special constable at Bosenden Farm, heightening the crisis.
  • Following this, he led his followers on a march, attempting to ignite wider rebellion (15:33–17:49).

Quote:
"He comes out of the farmhouse... with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, and murders this constable's brother... stood before his disciples with his bloodied sword raised above his head and this mad look in his eyes, saying, 'I'm one greater than Samson, I am the only true savior of the world and you're all my lambs.'"
—Ian Brecken (16:38)

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6. The Battle and Its Aftermath

• Military Tactics:
  • 45th Regiment, recently returned from Burma, used colonial anti-insurgency tactics.
  • Young and mostly inexperienced recruits faced a band of zealots.
• Ferocity and Fallout:
  • Despite being outnumbered and poorly armed, Courtenay’s group charged the soldiers, resulting in a brief but brutal exchange.
  • Afterward, significant numbers were arrested; a few were transported to Australia or jailed.

Quote:
"One of [the officers] said it was the fiercest fighting he'd ever seen. So it was pretty rough, although brief. And at the end of it... the whole clearing was spattered with blood."
—Ian Brecken (20:48)

Quote:
"They were all liable for first degree murder, even though some of them were only just bystanders, which seems extraordinary to us now. But eventually they whittled down the number to only three who were punished by transportation to Australia."
—Ian Brecken (21:41)

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7. Political and Social Repercussions

• Response in Westminster:
  • Initial political finger-pointing and investigations, but no major policy changes.
  • Chartists initially claimed Courtenay as a martyr but soon focused on more politically-useful incidents (23:03).
• Media and Middle-Class Fascination:
  • The uprising sparked a new, somewhat patronizing curiosity among elites about rural working-class lives.
  • Early echoes of social anthropology and the emergence of the “eye of the state” studying the poor.

Quote:
"It was a sort of anthropological exercise that he was doing... the eye of the controlling elite, looking down at the lower classes, but also trying to look inside... trying to work out what they're thinking and maybe what they're going to do next."
—Ian Brecken (25:13)

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8. Legacy and Historical Memory

• Is it the Last Battle on English Soil?
  • The term is contested, but Brecken defends its use, based on the nature and scale of the conflict (27:31).
• Courtenay’s Relevance Today:
  • His fluid identity and blend of spectacle, religious fervor, and revolt against authority foreshadow many modern themes.

Quote:
"He has this slightly protean feel about him. He's almost too large a character to be constrained by his era and he seems just as fitting in our own than then."
—Ian Brecken (28:43)

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Memorable Moments & Notable Quotes

• Courtenay’s Appearance:
  "This huge black beard, long hair. He's said to look a little bit like Jesus, which I think suggests that very few long haired bearded men were around at the time." (03:41)

• Violent Charisma:
  "They appeared to be possessed by a form of fanaticism that was fairly terrifying... especially when, after firing their first volley, they were then charged by these men in a fury who attacked them with their clubs and sticks." (18:55)

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• [01:13] Introduction to the Bossenden Wood Uprising
• [03:11] Who was John Nicholls Tom/Sir William Courtenay?
• [05:37] Political Context & His Election Campaign
• [07:20] From Failed Politician to Religious Revolutionary
• [09:20] Courtenay’s Charisma and his Appeal
• [11:30] The Era’s Millenarian Religious Climate
• [15:41] Authorities’ Slow Response
• [16:38] The Trigger: Courtenay’s First Killing
• [17:49] The Battle: Military Intervention and Combat
• [21:30] Aftermath: Arrests, Trials, and Punishment
• [23:08] Parliamentary and Political Responses
• [25:13] The Middle-Class Fascination and Social Anthropology
• [27:31] “The Last Battle on English Soil?” Debate
• [28:43] The Modern Relevance of Sir William Courtenay

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Conclusion

The episode paints a vivid, sometimes shocking portrait of a forgotten insurrection, tying together questions of identity, faith, class tension, and the unpredictability of history. Ian Brecken’s research brings immediacy to the 1838 clash, while also pondering why its echoes—of messianic populism, manufactured personas, and religious-political fusion—still ring familiar nearly two centuries later.

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Transcript

[Narrator]

In 1838, a six foot Cornishman going by the name of Sir William Courtney led an insurrection in rural Kent. Courtney claimed he was Jesus Christ and a lot of people believed him. And when those supporters clashed with troops at Bossenden Wood, the result was carnage. In today's episode of the History Extra podcast, Ian Brecken tells Spencer Mizzen about the last battle fought on English soil and considers what it tells us about Victorian Britain. And if you're a fan of military history, don't miss the second season of our History's Greatest Battles series. This time around we're exploring the wars of the Roses. All the details you need are in the description of this episode, but for now it's over to Ian and Spencer.

[Spencer Mizzen]

Ian, your new book is called Mad Tom's the Revolutionary Mystic Sir William Courtney and the Last Battle Fought on English Soil on. I wonder if you could begin by giving our listeners a quick introduction to the Rising referred to in the title. What exactly happened in the spring of 1838?

[Ian Brecken]

Well, this was the last day of May 1838, in a tract of woodland called Bosenden Wood, which is part of the Blean woods between Canterbury and Faversham. A I suppose you could call him Revolutionary Messiah. Other people called him an imposter, a madman, a charlatan, political firebrand who called him himself. Sir William Courtney gathered together a group of local laboring people and essentially started a revolution against the state, really, although he also claimed to be the second coming of Jesus Christ and said that he was going to bring the millennium and the Day of Judgment. A lot of these laboring people that followed him did so for various reasons. But the local authorities, the local magistrates and landowners definitely regarded this as a threat to the established order and an insurrection of the laboring classes, as one local clergyman called. They summoned a detachment of the army who came up from Canterbury. The two sides met in a clearing in the forest and a battle followed. I mean, it's debatable whether it was a battle or not, how you would define it. It lasted probably no more than about three minutes, but in the space of that time there were several volleys of musketry, there was a bayonet charge, there was a melee and at the end of it, not only the so called John Nicholls Tom, but several of his followers and a couple of the military side as well lay dead on the floor. So that was what's called the Batt of Bozenden Wood. But it was the culmination of a strange, dramatic and extremely bloody, in some cases Career that stretched back several years or so into the recent past.

[Spencer Mizzen]

Sure. Now, sort of as you alluded to, there at the center of this story stands the figure of John Nicholls Tom, AKA Sir William Courtenay. Can you tell us a little bit more about this extraordinary character? How did the son of Cornish innkeepers end up leading an insurrection in rural Kent?

[Ian Brecken]

Well, that's one of the fascinating questions about this. I mean, he's really something of an enigma and it's very difficult to pin him down. I think people at the time and generations since have really found it quite difficult to sort of put him into a box and work out who he was and what he was trying to do. I mean, he was born, as you say, John Nichols Tom, down in Cornwall. He grew up down near Truro. He was the son of an innkeeper. He became a wine and spirit merchant and a maltster and lived the first 32 years of his life fairly ordinarily. And then he disappeared in the early spring of 1832. He went off to Liverpool with a cargo of malt and his family didn't hear from him again for many years. What happened to him in the intervening period is really one of the great mysteries of this, because when he reappeared again in Canterbury in the autumn of that same year, 1832, he had transformed himself into an entirely different person. He was going under a different name, he had a different appearance, different clothing, and seemed to have become or taken on this completely different owner. He initially called himself Count Moses Rothschild, claiming that he was possibly Jewish, although nobody really knew. Incredibly rich, very mysterious, probably foreign. Hung around Canterbury for a couple of months, making everybody very curious about what he was doing, and then all of a sudden threw off that identity and reinvented himself again as Sir William Percy Honeywood Courtenay, Earl of Devon, Knight of Malta and King of Jerusalem, amongst other titles, and commenced going around Canterbury just making an exhibition of himself really in the sort of the clearest possible way. He had this amazing costume, all sort of red velvet and gold and a hat and a big epaulettes and a sword he carried around with him. He was a very big man anyway, six foot tall, very powerfully built, and he had an enormous beard which was very rare at the time. Very few people had beards. So this immediately marked him out as being quite peculiar. This huge black beard, long hair. He's said to look a little bit like Jesus, which I think suggests that very few long haired bearded men were around at the time. And that was the only one that people were familiar with. But he hung around Canterbury for two months or so, talking to everybody, going everywhere, making loud boasts about what he'd been doing and about the tremendous riches that he was going to inherit. His travels in eastern lands really kind of talking up a storm. And then in the December of that year, he announced that he was going to stand for Parliament.

[Spencer Mizzen]

So what drove him to that decision? How did the people around him react?

[Ian Brecken]

Well, some of them reacted with ridicule and laughter because some of them just took him as a joke of from the beginning. But an awful lot of other people surprisingly, quite liked him, because the political culture of the day, this is the 1830s. It's immediately after the Great Reform act had slightly enlarged the electorate, but this tremendous three years really, of political turmoil and rioting, which had sort of rocked the country. The political culture of the day was a lot more riotous and colorful and violent than we might think. And these kind of mavericked figures were not so unusual. We might look at him today in his, you know, amazing outfit, standing on the balcony of the Rose in Canterbury, sort of throwing coins down into the crowd and shouting out these extraordinary kind of manifestos that he'd come up with about how he was going to overthrow the. Well, overthrow the state, not really, but kind of reform the tax system, take all the taxes away from the poor, get rid of the established church, change land ownership, kind of really anything he could think of that would appeal to a broad electorate. It was a populist platform, really, a kind of radical populist platform. But that wasn't that unusual. The thing is that he was running at the time against two sitting candidates who were both Whigs, they were both Liberal Whigs, they were both aristocrats. They'd got in in the previous election unopposed. So I think a lot of people in Canterbury were thinking, you know, this guy's going to put on a show. This guy's going to really stir things up. The Whigs are not going to have this all their own way. They're not just going to walk through this election and claim the seat for nothing. This guy's gonna give them a fight, which sure enough, he did.

[Spencer Mizzen]

But standing for Parliament's one thing, leading a violent uprising is quite another. I mean, what drove him to do that? Why did he go from being this sort of would be politician to a leader of a revolution?

[Ian Brecken]

I think it's an established path, actually, because, of course, he did not get elected for Parliament, either for Canterbury or for Kent shortly afterwards. And this seems to have sort of knocked him back a little Bit. And he disappeared for a while into the countryside of Kent, moved around the farming areas, made some friends there, and was then accused of both perjury and swindling. Sent to. First to prison, sentenced to transportation to Australia, that was on the perjury charge. And then declared insane and put in Kent County Lunatic Asylum, where he spent about three years. And it was after his emergence from the asylum, this was in 1837, just after the accession of Queen Victoria, that he seems to have really transformed himself again. He was still using this name, Sir William Courtney. He'd kind of changed his clothing. He dressed now more like a labouring man. He tended to wear a smock and a hat and went around the cottages of the local people, according to the local clergyman, anyway, talking up this rather revolutionary message that they were being oppressed by the poor and they should follow him and find justice and all that sort of thing. But he was doing so in a kind of religious way. His new interpretation of himself was that he was a kind of lay preacher, and this was building up towards actually revealing himself to be Jesus Christ. But I think it's a familiar course because a lot of people who want to get involved in politics and they're knocked back for some reason, they do then turn to religion. You know, they become preachers, they become biblical explainers, perhaps. And we've seen it even in our own time. You know, I don't want to mention any names, but, you know, we can think of certain people who've tried to make a go at a political career, it hasn't worked, and then they've suddenly found God, or, in the case of John Nicholstom, actually decided that he was God or the Son of God.

[Spencer Mizzen]

He must have been quite charismatic, mustn't he? Because, I mean, anyone can claim to be the Messiah. But I guess what makes this episode so fascinating is that some people clearly find his brand of religious fanaticism quite alluring. What was it about him that you've discovered in your research that made him so persuasive to people?

[Ian Brecken]

I think, well, he was very charismatic to start with. And this is, again, I was saying before the mystery of him, how this innkeeper's son from Truro managed to reinvent himself in the space of about six months into this tremendously powerful orator who could just exude confidence and charisma and draw in lots of people. Even in Canterbury, initially when he was running for campaign, and then later on in the countryside areas to the west of Canterbury, he attracted an enormous following. And despite what people said at the time and afterwards, it wasn't just the laboring people, it wasn't just sort of illiterate peasants as they were described at the time. There were an awful lot of people from all levels of society that were very taken in by him. And I think it's partly because he spoke in the language of religion. And religion then had an authority which is kind of almost unimaginable to us today. Religion was the highest authority in the land, particularly to the working people, to the laboring people. They would go to church every Sunday, they would hear passages from the Bible, read out many of them. Afterwards, when their homes were investigated by people who were looking into the causes of the revolt, they found that the only books they possessed, if they had any at all, were religious books. They were prayer books, they were books of psalms. The pictures on their walls were religious pictures. So religion permeated every aspect of their lives, but it wasn't something that they could control themselves, it was something that was given to them. So when this Sir William Courtenay, as he called himself, came amongst them, speaking with the language of the Bible, able to recite huge tracts of biblical text, sort of extempore, and marrying it with this message of social overthrow, social improvement, telling them that their lives were hard and that the Bible offered them a way out of this. He was a kind of hellfire preacher and showman combined, and you can see why a lot of people were very taken in by that, because their lives were hard. You know, he wasn't making that up. These people weren't being entirely deluded as it was described at the time. He was tapping into a genuine sense of grievance, and that was why they decided to follow him, some of them, to their deaths.

[Spencer Mizzen]

And you write in the book that this is a time when a lot of people were genuinely expecting the second coming of Jesus Christ. It's called millenarianism. What was driving that?

[Ian Brecken]

Well, it was a renewed sense of religiosity in England. The strange thing is that people's sense of the religious seems to go in these long waves. And in the 18th century, the church of England had been very sort of powerful, very established. But that changed towards the end of the 18th century, when these various dissenting churches came along, challenging the primacy of the Church of England. The Church of Scotland was around as well, but also at the end of the Napoleonic War, I think, really made people look around them and think, what has given us this victory? What has given us this tremendous primacy in the world? You know, it was the Beginning of, you know, the Pax Britannic or as it's called, the global strength of Britain. And I think a lot of people thought this has come to us from God and we have to give thanks for this. You know, we have to be aware of where we have received this great benefit that's come to us. And so there was a religious transformation in the early decades of the 19th century in England. And this belief in the millennium, as it was called millenarianism, which seems extraordinary to us now, was very widely held across society, across all levels of society. And it was held to be pretty much self evident that Jesus was coming. The second coming was probably going to happen. A lot of people thought it was going to happen in their lifetime. Jesus would come back. People were divided on exactly when or how that was going to happen or exactly what would happen when it did. But Jesus was coming back. He was going to introduce the millennium, which thousand year reign of Christ and his saints. And at the end of that there would be the apocalypse, the end of time and so forth. But what John Nichols Tom did in adopting this is to slightly change it for his own uses. He turned the idea of the millennium, and he wasn't the first person to do it, into a revolutionary moment. He said, this is the day of Judgment. And literally when he was leading these groups of laboring people around the countryside of Kent, he was saying, this is the moment where we will overthrow our oppressors and the streets will run with blood and I will give justice to the laboring man. You know, I mean, so he was really reconfiguring this quite sort of rarefied religious idea of the millennium and turning into a moment of real revolutionary transformation.

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[Spencer Mizzen]

So when did the authorities kind of first get wind of him and how did they react? And I imagine they were a little bit worried about what was going on.

[Ian Brecken]

Yeah, well, they seemed to have taken quite a while actually to figure out what he was doing, because of course there wasn't a lot of communications around at that point. This is long before the telegraph or anything like that. So really it was only the day or two before he sort of triggered this uprising that anybody really caught onto what he was doing. And even then it took a while for them to get started because at the time there were no police in the rural areas. There were parish constables and they could appoint special constables, but otherwise they were just the magistrates. But in order to summon additional assistance from the army, for example, the magistrates had to first write out a warrant. And to do that, they had to have actual proof that a crime had been committed. So you have this period in the couple of days or so running up to this uprising with people running back and forward trying to find witnesses who will attest to this guy, John Nicholls, Tom William Courtney, having actually done crimes. So the magistrates can write a warrant for his arrest, which they finally do just the day before. This is the 30th of May. This local magistrate, Dr. Poore, wrote a warrant for the arrest of Sir William Courtenay, as he called him, and a couple of his supporters. And this was given to one of the local parish constables to take up to a place called Bosenden Farm, where Courtney was staying at the time with his cult, I suppose, his band of disciples. And it was this constable and his brother, who'd been sworn in as a special constable, who approached Courtney, or Tom. On the morning of 31 May, Courtney comes out of the farmhouse where he's staying with a sword in one hand and a pistol in the other, and murders this constable's brother. Nicholas Meares, he was called, shot him once, stabbed him several times with this dagger or sword he was carrying, and then, in what I think is an extraordinary scene, stood before his disciples with his bloodied sword raised above his head and this mad look in his eyes, saying, I'm one greater than Samson, I am the only true savior of the world and you're all my lambs, you know, spattered with blood of the man he just killed. An extraordinary scene. But this only confirmed to them that he was indeed what he said. He'd already demonstrated to them the marks of the crucifixion on his hands and shown that he was immune to gunfire.

[Spencer Mizzen]

Okay, so can you tell us what happened? Can you tell us about the events of that last day and how it came to an end?

[Ian Brecken]

Yeah, well, after this extraordinary killing, Tom or Courtney, as I have to keep on alternating between the names, because my point of view is that he is essentially two different people at this time. John Nicholls, Tom, the man, has become possessed by Sir William Courtenay, the fictional character. So he is two people in one body. So after killing this, the constable's brother, he leads his followers off on a tour of the surrounding districts, intending that this is going to trigger a mass uprising. And several of the local authorities and magistrates did actually believe that this was going to happen. They thought there were thousands of armed men converging from all directions who were going to join this revolt. So after touring around the area for a while, he got into a confrontation with some of these magistrates near a farm called Fairbrook, where he also attempted to shoot somebody in broad daylight, which was definite. They thought, right, he's definitely committing crimes now. So this was really the signal for them to summon a military detachment from nearby Canterbury. So, anyway, so there's the 45th Foot and they marched, or rather travelled in coaches and vans up from Canterbury, deployed in the road near this wood. And at that point, the local magistrate supposedly read the riot act, which was kind of a piece of legal nonsense, because in order to be effected, the riot act is supposed to be read in the hearing of the people to which it's directed. But at that point, John Nichols, Tom and his men were about a mile away in the middle of the woods. There's no way they could possibly have heard them. But this was found to be suitably legal justification for what was going to happen next. So the army went into the wood and this particular military detachment, 45th, had just come back from a long spell in India, where they'd been fighting in Burma. There was a war in Burma. They'd done a lot of fighting in the jungle against what they called at the time, insurgents or rebels or something. And the interesting thing is that when the leader of the detachment, a man called Major Armstrong, wrote his account of what had happened for the investigating magistrates, he describes them marching into the jungle. This is just a woodland in Kent, but what they were doing was using these same anti insurgency tactics that they'd used in Burma. They were split up into two detachments. One of them went around the back, they had a kind of holding detachment just outside the wood. They were intending to herd them towards them. They were sort of skirmishing in the woodland, so you can see the tactics that they were using. The trouble is, a lot of the men that they were leading were very new recruits. They'd only just joined up since the regiment returned from India. A lot of them were Irish actually as well, because a lot of the Irishmen who'd come over for the harvest would then join the army depots afterwards. So a lot of these men were very young, raw recruits. They hadn't had a lot of training, most of them had never seen any kind of action. So as a result, they probably panicked a bit when they were in this woodland and were confronted with this band of armed men who they outnumbered considerably and most of whom, except their leader, were early armed with clubs. But they appeared to be possessed by a form of fanaticism that was fairly terrifying, I would imagine, to a lot of these new recruits confronted with this, especially when, after firing their first volley, they were then charged by these men in a fury who attacked them with their clubs and sticks. And it was quite a ferocious combat that was resulting. Some of these military officers had seen action before in the Peninsular War and in Burma as well. And one of them said it was the fiercest fighting he'd ever seen. So it was pretty rough, although brief. And at the end of it, when the gunsmoke cleared, the whole clearing was spattered with blood. All the trees were shredded by musket balls. And, yeah, there were considerable number of dead bodies lying around.

[Spencer Mizzen]

And what happened to those that weren't killed during the battle? I mean, was the authorities cracked down? Was it quite brutal?

[Ian Brecken]

Initially it was, yeah. Well, initially it was quite thorough. They rounded up an awful lot of people, either they captured at the scene or that they rounded up subsequently, and they tried them for murder, both for the murder of the constable originally and for the military officer that was killed during the battle in the woods. The legal grounds for this are rather peculiar. They ruled that anyone present at the time that a murder was committed of some form of law, officer or soldier, can be tried for murder. So they were all liable for first degree murder, even though some of them were only just bystanders, which seems extraordinary to us now. But eventually they whittled down the number to only three who were punished by transportation to Australia. And there were another handful who were sent to do, I think, one year's imprisonment with hard labour, which was still pretty harsh, but certainly considering what they could have done, they were sentenced to death and then the sentence was immediately commuted. So in that respect there was mercy. I think, in the days that followed this uprising, because it caused such an enormous uproar in the country as a whole and everybody was aware of this. Queen Victoria mentions it in her diaries. There was tremendous shock around the country and a lot of people were asking themselves why this had happened and how this had been allowed to happen and who was at fault. And I think they were actually less inclined to blame the survivors, less inclined to blame these laboring men as they saw them, these sort of hardy English yeomen and peasants and so forth, who appeared to have been deluded by a madman, but also appeared to have been badly let down by the authorities, and particularly the church authorities in their own areas.

[Spencer Mizzen]

So what were the repercussions in Westminster? I mean, did this event elicit a change in government policy in any way?

[Ian Brecken]

Not really, no. It seemed to for a bit. The government at the time was a Whig government run by Lord Melbourne, of course. And for a while the Tory opposition, principally led by Sir Edward Knatchbull, who was the local MP for the area, tried to make political hay with this and claim that, for example, John Nicholstom had been let out of the asylum as a political favor because his former employer was an mp, the Whig MP for Truro. But it didn't really stick. There was a Parliamentary Select Committee that looked into what's this, which provides tremendous evidence for the historian, but didn't actually amount to very much. I think the problem was at the time that A lot of people were quite embarrassed by what had happened, even though initially the Chartists, who were coming around at exactly the same time, only a few months later, they sort of first burst into life and they adopted John Nicholls, Tom initially, as one of their martyrs, if you like. But only the following year, in 1839, there was a great violent episode in Newport where this early Chartist meeting demonstration was crushed by soldiers, ironically, the same military detachment that had shot John Tom and his followers in Bosington Wood, the 45th. And that provided them with some much better martyrs. You know, these are people who were definitely being killed for their beliefs rather than. I think a lot of people had come to see the followers of Sir William Courtney as a bit of an anachronism. They seemed to be something from the past. This weird religious enthusiasm and belief in miracles and fanatical uproar seemed like something that belonged to a different century. People couldn't really do much with it politically. And I think this is one of the reasons that he became fairly forgotten for a long time. You know, he became more of a kind of a local figure, almost a sort of folk hero of a sort, or a folk demon, possibly.

[Spencer Mizzen]

But there's another interesting angle to this, isn't there, Because Tom's Rising drove, as you point out in the book, a kind of fascination among the middle and upper classes in the lives of the peasantry. I mean, how did that fascination manifest itself? And was there, like an element of social anthropology going on here?

[Ian Brecken]

Yeah, I mean, I think that fascination was starting already. I mean, you can definitely trace it in the early decades of the 19th century. This is sort of the era that Dickens was first starting to write about poorer people, and sometimes in what we might think of now as a rather patronizing way. But nevertheless, I think it signals an interest, a popular interest, in what was going on amongst the lower classes of the country. The way that they were experiencing life, the way that they spoke, that kind of thing. And you can see in the reportage of this uprising in Kent, you get these journalists going around and they're trying to kind of do the voices of the local people and they're capturing little kind of phrases of. There was one of them who tried to do an Irish soldier that he'd interviewed afterwards. So you can see that they're really interested in this, and they're trying to do this almost novelistic thing of getting the voices, getting the phrases and the accents right, but also looking into the way that people lived. I think it was actually a barrister called Liarde who went around the areas subsequently on a mission, really, to discover what had driven people to follow Sir William Courtenay. And he looked into their houses and he was the one who looked at what they were reading and the pictures on the walls and all this sort of thing. And it was a sort of anthropological exercise that he was doing, although he didn't really think of it at the time like that, but we can see it like that. We can see it as really the sort of the eye of the state kind of. I mean, he wasn't employed by the government, but it's the eye of the controlling elite, looking down at the lower classes, but also trying to look inside the lower class to see what's going on inside their houses, to try and work out what they're thinking and maybe what they're going to do next. Because there's a slight element of fear about some of this as well. You know, these people have had this crazed uprising in Kent. What might they do next? What might people do in other places? You know, and this was, as I say, a very violent era. So, yeah, you can definitely see this growing interest in the lives of the poor, really, the lives of the rural poor, which was perhaps slightly more rare at the time. There was a lot of interest in the lives of the urban poor because of the rise of the manufacturing towns and sort of, you know, in the north, that kind of thing linked to the Chartist movement. But this was the rural poor. These were the more traditional people that I think people are being inclined to overlook for a long time.

[Spencer Mizzen]

And is this battle widely acknowledged as the last battle on English soil?

[Ian Brecken]

I think there are people who would definitely dispute that. I mean, as I say, it's difficult to distinguish what is and isn't a battle, for a start. And also a lot of people would say that there have been subsequent battles. I would say it still holds that title. I mean, there was a deployment of regular military forces in full battle order. There were two distinct sides. Both of them were armed, there were casualties. I think it counts as a battle. It's just a very short one. As for if it's the last one, I mean, people call it the last on English soil because, of course, the following year there was the one in Newport on Welsh soil, involving the same soldiers and with a much higher body count. It's difficult to determine what these phrases might mean, but I think it's such a dramatic phrase that I couldn't really resist using it in the book.

[Spencer Mizzen]

One last question, Ian. You write in the book of Tom Sir William Courtenay, in his reinventions of identity, his blurring of the real and the fantastical, and his passionate revolt against modernity and order, Mad Tom strides out of the distant past, is a palpably contemporary figure. What? Wait, would you argue that Tom was a contemporary figure?

[Ian Brecken]

I think because we are far more attuned now to people's identities and the way that they present themselves, perhaps as not being innate to themself, but something that they have created because he was a self created man or several different self created men in the same body. And I would say that our previous ideas maybe of how people influence history have been really tested over recent years, over recent decades because of the way that we've seen ideas of truth breaking down, ideas of news and how news is communicated, and ideas of belief, what people believe, how that motivates them to behave, how that motivates them to look at the world around them and try and change the world around them. I think these feel like very contemporary themes and ideas and as a result I think John Nicholls Tom or Sir William Courtney kind of stands outside of history. He's not really a figure from, you know, the 1830s or the early 19th century. He has this slightly protean feel about him. He's almost too large a character to be constrained by his era and he seems just as fitting in our own than then.

[Spencer Mizzen]

Thanks for that, Ian. Now, if you'd like to learn more about working class uprisings in the first half of the 19th century, including articles on the Peterloo Massacre of 1819 and the brutal quashing of the Pentrick Rising of 1817, head over to the History Extra website. You'll find links to both those stories in the podcast description.

[Narrator]

That was Ian Brecken speaking to Spencer Mizzen. Ian is a novelist, teacher, university lecturer and historical researcher. His new book is Mad Tom's Writing Rising. The Revolutionary mystic Sir William Courtney and the last battle fought on English soil.

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