Lot 96
Radical War of 1820
'An original autograph letter from Andrew Hardie to his Relations Sept. 5th 1820. Written in Stirling Castle three days before his execution for high treason'
Estimate: £500 - £800
Auction: 19 September 2024 from 10:00 BST
Description
[cover-title]. Single bifolium written on all four sides, 30.5 x 18.5cm, tipped to a card window-mount in early-20th-century maroon morocco presentation album by Sangorski & Sutcliffe, spine and covers decoratively panelled in gilt and blind, front cover with majuscule lettering in gilt and various foliate and floral stamps in gilt and blind, all edges gilt, the album also containing 10 leaves of calligraphic manuscript on japon with decorative initials in opaque red and green watercolour, the text comprising a historical introduction headed ‘The “Radical War of 1820”’, ‘An Elegy to the Memory of R. Baird & Andrew Hardie who were executed for High Treason at Stirling, September 8th, 1820. Printed and published by John Muir, Glasgow, 1820', and a transcription of the letter, housed in a custom red cloth fleece-lined solander box. Pale mottling to covers of album, letter spotted, a few holes and a little thinning along folds
Provenance
Charles J. Sawyer, Catalogue of Books and Manuscripts No. LXV, 1922 (with printed catalogue description laid in); The Library of a Scottish Gentleman.
Footnote
An intriguing survival of unascertainable authenticity but undoubted value. Andrew Hardie (1792-1820), an unemployed weaver from Glasgow, was one of three men executed for their roles in the so-called Radical Uprising of April 1820, a week of strikes and civil unrest across central Scotland, organised as a response to the worsening economic situation which followed the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Hardie was second-in-command of a small group of men intending to march on the Carron ironworks in Falkirk. At nearby Bonnymuir the group encountered soldiers from the Kilsyth Yeomanry and 10th Hussars and a bloody skirmish ensued, after which Hardie was arrested and taken to Stirling Castle, where he was executed in September along with the leader of the Carron expedition John Baird, a Peninsular War veteran.
The document in this album in fact contains two letters by Hardie, the first addressed to ‘My Dear Relations’ and signed Andrew Hardie, Stirling Castle, 5 Sept 1820, the second to ‘My Dear Young Cousins’ signed ‘Andrew Hardie’ but with different letterforms for each of the capitals. In them Hardie places his trust in God and everlasting life, exhorts his family to pious observance, forgives those who have wronged him, defends his actions as motivated by ‘the good of my suffering country'. The first letter contains a postscript accusing ‘Mr Hardie Justice of the peace from Glasgow and Mr Nicol Hugh Baird Civiel Engineire at Kelven-head private in the Kilsyth Yeomanery Cavalery’ of perjury against him, signed ‘Andrew Hardie’ in the same style as the letter itself.
The letter to ‘My Dear Relations’ was printed along with a letter from Hardie to his sweetheart Margaret on an undated Edinburgh broadside, a copy of which survives at the National Library of Scotland (shelfmark Ry.III.a.2(11)). Stirling Archives acquired in 2020 a manuscript copy of the ‘My Dear Relations’ letter, written in a non-cursive hand entirely different from that of the present letter. It is therefore a possibility that copies of Hardie's final letters to his family and any other acquaintances were circulated in print and in manuscript after his execution, and in the absence of a specimen of his handwriting established as his own, the authenticity of the present letter as Hardie's autograph cannot de declared with certainty. An 1833 report on literacy rates among Scottish mill workers reported that 96% could read and 53% could write, so it is possible than any surviving letters from Hardie were in any case dictated (R. A. Houston, Scottish Literacy and the Scottish Identity, 1985, p. 2).
