They were lightly armed with pikes, scythes and a few guns, which had been hidden in a quarry in Wingfield Park, and had a set of rather unfocused revolutionary demands, including the wiping out of the National Debt.
Subsequently there had been the French Revolution and the Reign of Terror and it appeared that any reform would be accompanied by violence, which Pitt's government set out to pre-empt by increasingly punitive measures.
The one at Nottingham was headed by a needle maker, William Stevens, and its representative from Pentrich was a framework knitter called Thomas Bacon.
[4] Several meetings were held at Pentrich during which Bacon asserted that preparations for an uprising were well advanced, and he had made enquiries at the ironworks and elsewhere about procuring weaponry.
[1] The decision to take action was made when news arrived of a revolutionary force heading from the north—a hoax fabricated by William Oliver, a paid informer under the Home Office's instruction.
Opinion of Brandreth at the time seems to have been somewhat mixed, but he promised the men that they would go to Nottingham, invading Butterley ironworks on the way, where they would kill the three senior managers and ransack it for weapons.
The plan was to assemble at ten o'clock on 9 June, where Ludlam's pikes would be distributed and further weapons would be acquired by requisitioning a man and a gun from each house that they passed.
Order was maintained by the various semi-private armies such as the yeomanry, while intelligence was gathered by the Home Secretary, Lord Sidmouth, from a network formed of local magistrates and paid informers.
The trial was organised by William Lockett, the deputy Clerk of the Peace, who assembled "a group of 'respectable' jurors from the farming community on whom he could depend".
However, Bacon knew of the part that William Oliver had played, which, had he revealed it, would have embarrassed the government and might have prejudiced the jury in favour of the defendants.
His letters to his wife in Ripley are considered of historical importance and kept in the National Library in the Australian Capital Territory, Australia [7] Although the customary quartering was remitted by the Prince Regent, the three were publicly hanged and beheaded at Nuns Green in front of Friar Gate Gaol in Derby.
The hexagonal office, where Goodwin stood his ground, existed in the yard of the Butterley Company's works until it was demolished in 2009/10 along with the rest of the site, and the execution block can be seen by request in Derby Museum.
E. P. Thompson in The Making of the English Working Class sees this rising as a transitional event between the earlier Luddite actions and the later populist Radicalism of 1818–20 and 1830–32.