In the early evening crowds began to assemble in the vicinity of the Warwick Road in the hope of greeting Lovett and Collins, on their release on bail from Warwick Gaol. The two heroes, however, avoided the ovation, and the disappointed crowd rushed into the Bull Ring, where the police were stationed in the Public Office. The Public Office was attacked, and the police, having apparently learned caution, refused to retaliate without express orders. For more than an hour the rioters were undisturbed. They smashed the street lamps, and tore down the iron railings of the Nelson Monument which stands at the lower end of the Bull Ring. With the weapons so obtained they began to force their way into the shops. A tea-warehouse and an upholsterer's shop were sacked and a bonfire made of their contents; other shops shared the like fate. There was no looting; destruction, not plunder, was the order of the day. At a quarter to ten the London police began to act. Their chief, assuming that the Mayor alone could authorise action, had spent over an hour in bringing him and other magistrates on to the scene of the riot. The police, reinforced by infantry and cavalry in considerable numbers, then succeeded in dispersing the crowd, after which their energies were employed in extinguishing the fires which the rioters had started. The two shops first attacked burned till past midnight. What with their careless haste on July 4 and their stupidity on the 15th, the newly appointed Birmingham magistrates had made a very inauspicious start in their official careers.[1]
Such ebullitions as these could hardly be viewed with composure by the Convention. To control such reckless forces was a task which a Convention of Napoleons would have attempted with misgivings, and the Chartist Convention was rapidly losing its nerve. For some time it must have been aware of a gradual secession of the moderate party amongst its followers from those who followed counsels of violence, and this schism was widened by the decision to adopt the general strike. Hitherto this secession had been viewed in the light of a beneficial purge, the moderates being regarded (probably with no good reason) as a minority, but gradually the conviction grew that the division which existed was one which was likely to rend the whole Chartist body in pieces. A curious example of this loss of nerve is afforded by a letter dated July 21, addressed by R. J. Richardson to the Convention.[2] This man, the verbose, pedantic retailer of bad law, the one-
