On November 4, 1839, several thousand men marched through the dark and the rain into Newport in south Wales, carrying home-made weapons and demanding the release of fellow Chartists who had been arrested and held at a hotel in the town, and the soldiers guarding the building opened fire. Between ten and twenty-four of the marchers were killed and many more were wounded, and four soldiers and the mayor of the town were hurt. The shooting lasted minutes.
The men belonged to the Chartist movement, which had been formed in the late 1830s around a petition setting out six demands, among them the vote for every adult man, a secret ballot, and pay for members of parliament. The movement had held huge meetings in the industrial towns of the north and of south Wales, and parliament had refused the petition, and talk of a general strike and of armed action had grown through the summer of 1839. The leaders were arrested. John Frost, a former mayor of Newport, led the march.
After the firing the rising collapsed and the leaders were taken and tried for treason, and three of them were sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, which was the last time that sentence was passed in Britain. The sentence was harsh. The government then commuted it to transportation for life, and the prisoners were sent to Australia, and they were pardoned and allowed home years later.
The rising did not bring the vote, and the petition failed again in 1842 and in 1848, and all six of the demands except one were later made law. The vote came later. It is remembered in Wales as the point where the campaign for the vote turned violent, and a monument to the dead stands in the centre of Newport, and the march is re-enacted each year. Few of the names of the dead are known.