Rayner Stephens

Joseph Rayner Stephens (8 March 1805 – 18 February 1879) was a Methodist minister who offended the Wesleyan Conference by his support for separating the Church of England from the State.

His district conference attempted to discipline him for engaging in controversial political activity, and for taking a view on Church Establishment contrary to that of Wesleyans and of John Wesley.

In both sermons and speeches he denounced the practices of millowners and the intentions of the new Poor Law as un-Christian and hence doomed to end in social upheaval and bloodshed.

He and Oastler (who saw the younger man as his natural successor) became associated with the Chartists, who also saw the new Poor Law, the rapacity and inhumanity of employers and the poverty of workers as issues requiring urgent attention, but sought to remedy them by fundamental political change.

However, as he later told his congregation, he was never a Radical, let alone a 'five-point man' : "I would rather walk to London on my bare knees, on sharp flint stones to attend an Anti-poor Law meeting, than be carried to London in a coach and six, pillowed with down to present that petition - the "national petition" to the House of Commons"[5] Nor did his advice to followers to arm themselves indicate any support for 'physical force' Chartism or the overthrow of the existing order by violence or by general strike: "My friends, never put your trust in, and never follow after, men who pretend to be able to manufacture a revolution.

[8] It had been successfully argued (to secure the conviction of Orator Hunt in the aftermath of the Peterloo massacre) that to be unlawful a meeting need only be one such that taking all the circumstances into consideration cannot but endanger the public peace, and raise fears and jealousies among the king's subjects.

4. c. 103) (i.e. against the relay system) in 1849, explicitly holding non-compliance and non-enforcement to be responsible for social unrest and the more extreme forms that manifested itself in: "It is the practice of injustice towards the poor which estranges them from the institutions of their country, and leads them into many wild and unreasoning projects to obtain deliverance from the intolerable yoke that has been fastened upon them"[10] He supported opposition to the 'Compromise Act', the Factories Act 1850 (13 & 14 Vict.

In 1857, he looked back on his agitational heyday History would do justice to the memory of the benevolent and heroic men who had first devoted themselves to this great work (factory reform).

[12] Stephens is buried in St John's Church, Dukinfield and commemorated by a blue plaque placed on the remains of the former Stalybridge Town Hall and an obelisk monument in Stamford Park.