Rotunda radicals
He announced that the Rotunda would regain the prestige it had in its days as the Surrey Institution, where Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Hazlitt had spoken, and would become a forum of free speech against political and religious despotism.
[5] Dressed in ecclesiastical clothes, in a room decorated with the signs of the zodiac, Taylor gave theatrical sermons which mocked the rituals of the established church and claimed that Christianity was based on astrological allegory.
Following an MPU meeting at the Rotunda in support of the French July Revolution, several of its leaders claimed that Hetherington, Lovett and others had made seditious speeches and refused to work with them.
[13] Fearing a repetition of such events, the police advised King William IV to cancel a visit to the City of London, planned for the following day.
[15] Other Rotunda speakers at this time included William Cobbett, who gave a series of lectures on the July Revolution, John Gale Jones and Carlile himself, who reviewed parliamentary speeches and expressed sympathy for the Swing Riots.
[16][17] In January 1831 Carlile's support for the rioters led to him being prosecuted for seditious libel and imprisoned for over two years, and for the next few months Taylor's performances provided almost all of the Rotunda's income.
Setting aside his differences with the radical political groups, he allowed a new organisation, the National Union of the Working Classes (NUWC),[19][20] to use the Rotunda free of charge in return for all the entry proceeds.
[21] Many of the NUWC's leaders, including Lovett, Hetherington, Watson and Cleave, had been active in both the RRA and the Owenite British Association for the Promotion of Co-operative Knowledge (BAPCK).
The NUWC combined the RRA's campaign for universal suffrage, ballots and annual parliaments with the BAPCK's support for the unstamped press, as well as other radical causes, such as such as abolition of parish tithes.
On Monday, 13 May 1833, at 2 p.m.,[27] The National Union of the Working Classes organised a public meeting on Thomas Cubitt's Calthorpe Estate[28][29] near Gray's Inn Road in Coldbath Fields in Clerkenwell, Islington against the Reform Act 1832.
[a] The coroner's 17-person jury, mostly bakers from the Grays Inn Road area, hearing from 10 am to 11pm,[35] returned a verdict of justifiable homicide after just half an hour, since the Riot Act had not been read.
[41] Medals commemorated their decision and the jurors were treated to a riverboat cruise, they were celebrated with canons at Twickenham[42] Carlile needed more than just the NUWC to keep the Rotunda solvent and he allowed it to be used for popular entertainment, such as a circus, concerts and a freak show.
John "Zion" Ward, who claimed to be both Jesus and the spiritual heir to Joanna Southcott, delivered millenarian sermons, prophesying the overthrow of the established church.
[47][48] At first, Sharples' novelty value drew the crowds, but her inexperience and diffidence as a speaker soon led to dwindling audiences and in April 1832 Carlile gave up the lease of the Rotunda.
