The Pentrich Revolution in 1817
R.J. White analyses the events of the “Derbyshire Insurrection” - otherwise known as the Pentrich Revolution - as an example of local history in its bearing on national history.
Jeremiah Brandreth, the Nottingham Captain, was executed for High Treason on November 7th, 1817. Along with him, on the scaffold on Nun’s Green, in Derby, there died also William Turner and Isaac Ludlam, his principal lieutenants in the Pentrich Revolution of the summer of that year.
All three were poor men. Brandreth was an unemployed stockinger; Turner was a stonemason; Ludlam was a stone-getter. They suffered the penalty of the axe, after hanging, upon a public scaffold; a penalty which had for long been associated in the public mind with aristocratic traitors.
The infliction of this punishment upon poor men caused both indignation and satisfaction. Indignation, because it was widely believed that these poor men would never have run into treasonable courses without the encouragement of the agent provocateur, Oliver the Spy. Satisfaction, because, as Lord Colchester observed, it was high time that the delusion should be dispelled that “High Treason was an offence for which low persons were not punishable.”
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