Author: Ethelston, Charles Wicksted
Biography:
ETHELSTON, Charles Wicksted (1767-1830: Wikipedia)
He was born on 24 Mar. 1767 at Wicksted Hall, Wirswall, Cheshire, and baptised on 5 Apr. at Manchester Cathedral, the son of Rev. Charles Ethelston (1731-95) and Margaret Hart (1726-1831), who had married there the previous year. He went to Manchester Grammar School and proceeded to Trinity, Cambridge in 1787 (BA 1790, MA 1793). From 1794 to 1830 he was Perpetual Curate of St. Mark’s Chapel, Cheetham Hill, Manchester, which his father had built. He was also Rector of Worthenbury, Flintshire, from 1801 and a Fellow of the Collegiate Church, Manchester, from 1804. He was formally ordained deacon (1824) and priest (1825). He was politically conservative: Chaplain to Silvester’s Volunteers, a regiment who were active against Luddites; a member of the Loyal Orange Institution; a magistrate and Justice of the Peace who employed spies and informers against radicals. In 1818 during the weavers’ strike, he ruled that assemblies of workers and the unemployed were a threat to public order. On 16 Aug. 1819 he read the Riot Act to the public meeting in St. Peter’s Field, Manchester, at which Henry “Orator” Hunt and other radicals planned to speak, and summoned the militia to disperse the crowd. Fifteen people died and many more were injured and the “Peterloo Massacre” entered left-wing mythology with denunciations by Shelley, Davonport, Hone, Bamford, Thomas Brown (qq.v.) and many others. His poem Suicide (1803) was dredged up by “An Old Radical” and linked to the “Manchester Tragedy” in a review, Manchester Slaughter! (1819). A short poem, A Pindaric Ode to the Genius of Britain (1820), did little to endear him and Bamford’s sobriquet of “Plotting Parson” seems to have stuck. He married Mary Threlfall (1772-1802) at St. Lawrence, Chorley, on 28 Mar. 1796. (They had a son, Charles Wicksted Ethelston [1801-72], who also became a cleric.) He then married Hannah Edwards (1775-1847) on 4 Sept. 1804, at Northop, Flints. They had three sons. He died after suffering a head injury in a carriage accident on 14 Sept. 1830, and was buried at St. Marks, Cheetham. (Wikipedia 1 Sept. 2022; ancestry.co.uk 1 Sept. 2022; CCEd 1 Sept. 2022; Chester Courant 11 Sept. 1804; Yorkshire Gazette 25 Sept. 1830; GM Oct. 1830, 377-378; Alison Morgan, ed., Ballads and Songs of Peterloo [2018]) AA