The Peterloo Massacre took place as a peaceful crowd of between 60,000 and 100,000 gathered at St Peter’s Fields, Manchester, to hear Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt demand universal suffrage and annual Parliaments. The local magistrates panicked, ordered a regiment of hussars to assist the yeomanry in dispersing the crowd and eleven people were killed and over 600 injured.

See Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad, and Dangerous People: England 1783-1846 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), p. 252.