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Grandison, 5th Baron Goodchild, Justice of the Peace, Lieutenant Colonel of Her Majesty’s 17th Lancers and Master of Foxhounds of the Pembury Hunt, cut an impressive figure. Although almost forty, hardly a squire in the county looking at his sweeping whiskers, slender waist and upright carriage did not envy him. But on this November morning his lordship felt far from self-satisfied. He had already missed the hunt breakfast and would now probably be late for the meet too, a sin which, as Master, he had a punctilious horror of committing . But this sporting discourtesy to the members of the hunt was not at present uppermost in his mind.
    Half-an-hour earlier a letter from the Reverend Francis St Clare, the chief magistrate in Rigton Bridge, had arrived by special courier with a description of a riot which had taken place on the station road the evening before. With his letter, St Clare had enclosed a more deadly communication, originally sent by the Home Secretary to Lord Delamere, the General commanding the Northern District.
    Whitehall 8th November 1852
    My Lord,
    In consequence of acts of outrage and violence which have suspended the employment of labour in the town of Rigton Bridge, I am commanded by Her Majesty to impress upon your lordship the necessity of taking effectual and immediate measures for the repression of tumult during the forthcoming parliamentary election, and for the protection of property. Your lordship is advised to hold in readiness such regiments of regular troops as you may deem necessary….
    There were two cavalry regiments stationed in Manchester: Goodchild’s own 17th Lancers and a regiment of Light Dragoons , and these therefore would be the regiments to be ‘held in readiness’. Goodchild had no sympathy with strikers, but the thought of ordering cavalry to disperse an unarmed mob on polling day was utterly repugnant to him, and this was what he now fully expected to have to do. Various personal considerations would make such a duty particularly invidious. While it was public knowledge that his lordship had supported Joseph Braithwaite’s adoption as Tory candidate, it was less widely appreciated that the grateful manufacturer had subsequently lent the obliging peer twenty thousand pounds on the security of that nobleman’s Belgravia town house. Three years before, Goodchild had lost thirty thousand in the 1849 railway stock fiasco and, with his Irish estates already heavily mortgaged and his racing stud and stables alone costing him four thousand a year, so large a loss had brought him to the verge of bankruptcy. Some land sales had bought time but only Joseph Braithwaite’s interest -free loan had saved him. Joseph’s price had been his lordship ’s political support. Without the votes of Goodchild’s tenant farmers, Braithwaite had known that he could not be sure of winning the poll; with Lord Goodchild’s public support those votes would be safe.
    Goodchild was not an imaginative man, but it was very clear to him that if he had to deploy his regiment to keep the peace on polling day, the mob would be unlikely to enjoy being constrained by men under the command of a lieutenant colonel who was also the unpopular candidate’s proposer. With this thought in mind, Goodchild had resigned himself to missing the huntbreakfast in order to write two letters. The first, addressed to Joseph Braithwaite, had been a plea to do whatever was necessary to end the cotton operatives’ strike, even acceding to some of their demands if need be; the alternative being further acts of violence which might jeopardise his election. Goodchild believed Braithwaite to be incapable of compromise, but for all that had felt bound to try to persuade him. The second letter was to St Clare and in it Lord Goodchild suggested that the magistrate laid charges against as few of the station road rioters as he could conscientiously contrive. Many men committed for trial would merely increase the tensions in the town, as