Born on this day in 1796, the Irish Chartist Feargus O'Connor was known as "the lion of freedom"

“Rise like lions after slumber
In unvanquishable number,
Shake your chains to earth like dew
Which in sleep had fallen on you-
Ye are many – they are few.”

So went Percy Bysshe Shelley’s rallying cry to the British working classes after the Peterloo Massacre in 1819.

Shelley died just a few years later, too soon to see the people recover their voice.

The fightback began with the rise of Chartism, the mighty 19 ^th century movement for democracy in Victorian Britain.

One of its great leaders, Feargus O’Connor, was born on this day in 1796.

These inspiring words are taken from Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem 'The Masque of Anarchy'.

Click to view our Percy Bysshe Shelley tea towel

Born in County Cork, O’Connor was a member of the Irish gentry. But his radicalism isn’t so surprising as his class background suggests.

The O’Connors were a rebellious family. Feargus’ father and uncle had been in the United Irishmen, struggling for an independent Irish republic in the 1790s.

And his elder brother, Francis, sailed to South America to fight in Simón Bolívar's Army of Liberation against Spanish rule.

Feargus was involved in politics from a young age. He was speaking against dodgy landlords in Cork during the 1820s, and agitating for the franchise-expanding Reform Bill at the start of the 1830s.

Sounds like a pretty cool guy to me.

Stipple engraving portrait of Feargus O'Connor after an unknown artist.

In 1832, O’Connor was elected an MP for the Irish Repeal movement led by Daniel O’Connell, campaigning for a restoration of the Irish parliament and land reform in favour of Irish peasants.

But O’Connor was always on the radical wing of this movement.

He was discontent with Daniel O’Connell’s excessive compromises with elite British Whigs, and it was partly this discontentment that led to his involvement in the early Chartist movement, which was far more radical in its ambitions than the Repeal cause.

He spoke to workers in favour of the ‘Five Cardinal Points of Radicalism,’ out of which the iconic People’s Charter was made in 1838.

In 1837, he founded the Northern Star newspaper in Leeds, which quickly became the most read provincial paper in England, radical or not.

As with the Repeal movement, O’Connor chafed at Chartist leaders who he found too willing to compromise with the powerful. But he also rejected armed insurrection as a road to democracy.

The Chartists got their name from the People's Charter, which was published in 1838 - a year before the Newport Rising.

Click to view our People's Charter tea towel

This principle came out clearest in the Chartist mass meeting on Kennington Common in 1848, which he helped to organise. O’Connor believed in gathering the massed ranks of the politicised working class to intimidate the establishment into concessions.

But this had to be done without resort to violence:

“I have always been a man of peace…God forbid that I should wish to see my country plunged into horrors of physical revolution. I wish her to win her liberties by peaceful means.” 

Regardless of O’Connor’s avowed commitment to non-violence, the government threw him in jail after the Chartist uprising in Newport, using it as an occasion to repress the entire democratic movement in Britain.

While he was in prison, a poem began to circulate among Chartists:

“The Lion of Freedom is come from his den;
We’ll rally around him, again and again;
We’ll crown him with laurel, our champion to be:
O’Connor the patriot, for sweet Liberty!” 

Twenty years after Shelley called for lions to rise after Peterloo – and as we in England celebrate and commiserate with some extraordinary young Lions of our own – it seems fitting that Feargus O’Connor, the titan of Chartism, should be celebrated like this by his comrades.

As much as it’s linked with kings and aristocrats, the symbol of the lion belongs to the radical tradition of the masses in Britain – and long may that continue!

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