Major-General Charles Napier, given the task of policing a Chartist rally in Manchester, was alarmed to hear the protestors had brought the big guns - literally.
In 1838, the ‘Chartists’ demanded Parliamentary reforms which gained wide sympathy, especially in the industrial North West. But by the following summer violent radicals who were no friends of liberal democracy were hijacking the movement, as Major-General Charles Napier discovered for himself when keeping the peace at a rally in Manchester in May, 1839.