The field of Peterloo

SIR – The Peterloo “massacre” of August 26 1819 should indeed “be on the history curriculum” (Michael Henderson, Comment, August 20).

A crowd of between 20,000 and 60,000 men, women and children arrived at St Peter’s Field’s, outside Manchester, in formations resembling troops on parade. Postponed twice, the meeting had been declared illegal.

The government of Lord Liverpool advised local magistrates, on whom responsibility for law and order rested, to act only if violence threatened. They believed that it did; a later inquiry found that the area had been “in a state little short of actual rebellion”.

The death toll was 11. Privately, the government felt that the Manchester magistrates had acted imprudently, but, as the Duke of Wellington pointed out, if ministers had not backed them “others in future would not act at all” when disorder threatened. Lord Lexden

London SW1