HOW’S this for a manifesto?

Extirpation of the Fiend Aristocracy

Establishment of a Republic

Democracy by Representatives elected by Universal Suffrage

Extinction of hereditary offices, titles and distinctions

Cheap and rapid administration of justice

Repeal of the diabolical imposts on Newspapers

Emancipation of our fellow-citizens the Jews

Abolition of the Punishment of Death for offences against property

Appropriation of the Revenues of the ‘Fathers in God,’ the Bishops, towards

maintenance of the Poor

Discharge of the Machinery of Despotism.”

(Among other things.)

Such were the demands of the Republican newspaper, founded by Henry Hetherington who died on August 24 1849. He was active in just about every radical cause of his time, but is best remembered as a heroic fighter in what became known as “the War of the Unstamped.”

A tailor’s son, born in Soho in 1792, Hetehrington began his apprenticeship as a printer aged 13. He married in 1811 (nine children, only one of which outlived him), and became involved in pro-democracy campaigns during the 1820s. He was busy in the co-operative movement, the National Union of the Working Classes, and all sorts; gradually, though, Hetherington began to focus on the much-hated “taxes on knowledge.”

This was a time when dissident newspapers were equalling, or even exceeding, the circulation of Establishment titles, and the government’s answer to this problem was to introduce taxes on periodicals, so that papers intended for working-class readers would become too expensive for them to buy — thus, the radical press would go bust.

But some printers, publishers and booksellers — and Hetherington was at the top of the list — responded by putting out their papers “unstamped,” in other words without paying the new taxes. He went to prison three times, but it didn’t stop him. One tactic of these campaigners against the knowledge tax was to use their trials as platforms to put across their ideas; they would then publish transcripts of the speeches they’d given in court.

During the 1830s, Hetherington was responsible for a series of illegal papers, including The Poor Man’s Guardian, The Republican, The “Destructive” and Poor Man’s Conservative, Hetherington’s Twopenny Dispatch and People’s Police Register, The Odd Fellow, and The Penny Papers for the People. He didn't just print them and wait to be arrested; he ran a sophisticated distribution network, and employed various tricks to disguise his papers from the censors, such as sending fake copies out of the front door, for the authorities to pounce on, while the real ones went out the back way.

All the same, he was repeatedly arrested, fined and his printing presses seized. His example was highly influential: hundreds of untaxed journals were published during the War of the Unstamped (and hundreds of people were jailed for writing, printing or selling them). The war ended in victory for Hetherington and his comrades, though: in 1836, the stamp duty on periodicals was reduced by three-quarters. The government had accepted defeat.

As well as for unstamped publications, Hetherington was prosecuted for seditious libel and blasphemy, having printed and sold works which promoted another of his causes: freethought. Hetherington argued for “rational religion,” abandoning “superstition and priestcraft” while retaining the moral teachings of Jesus, and that everyone should be free in law to follow their own religious beliefs.

With the War of the Unstamped over, it was to this fight that Hetherington largely devoted the later part of his life.

Those weren’t his best times; he fell badly into debt, and in 1849 contracted cholera. For reasons which are not entirely clear, it was against his principles to accept medical treatment and the disease killed him.

In his last days he had published a will and testament — more testament than will, given his financial situation — in which he set out his views on religion and his wishes for his funeral:

“I have ever considered that the only religion useful to man consists exclusively of the practice of morality, and in the mutual interchange of kind actions. In such a religion there is no room for priests and when I see them interfering at our births, marriages and deaths pretending to conduct us safely through this state of being to another and happier world, any disinterested person of the least shrewdness and discernment must perceive that their sole aim is to stultify the minds of the people by their incomprehensible doctrines that they may the more effectively fleece the poor deluded sheep who listen to their empty babblings and mystifications.

“I wish my friends, therefore, to deposit my remains in unconsecrated ground, and trust they will allow no priest, or clergyman of any denomination, to interfere in any way whatsoever at my funeral.”

Two-thousand people, in colourful clothing, attended Henry Hetherington’s burial at Kensal Green (conducted by an undertaker who also advertised his services as a pest controller). The hearse carried a quotation from Hetherington: “We ought to endeavour to leave the world better than we found it.”

Legally, someone had to sign the cemetery documents as “Officiating Clergymen.” There being no clergymen in attendance, this task fell to James Watson and George Jacob Holyoake — two of the most famous atheist activists in the country, who had both been prosecuted in the past for blasphemy.

Well done, Henry. We haven’t forgotten you. And I think we all agree that the Fiend Aristocracy should be Extirpated, even those of us who had to look up extirpated.

You can sign up for Mat Coward’s Rebel Britannia Substack at rebelbrit.substack.com for more strange strikes, peculiar protests, bizarre boycotts, unusual uprisings and different demos.