Richard Carlile

Soundcloud.
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Richard Carlile was my several times great grandfather, and was one of the generation of radicals in England during the Chartist movement who bridged the gap between revolutionary republicanism, and early socialism. Carlile worked to make political literature available to the working class by publishing small serialized pamphlets made of sections of larger political works, and got around a ban on selling his texts, by building vending machines that dispensed the texts without him. Carlile was one of the speakers at the Chartist rally in Manchester which became the Peterloo Massacre, a turning point both in the fight for working class suffrage, and in the development of modern police forces to suppress working class movements. Jailed late in life for advising striking agricultural workers to consider themselves at war with the British crown, he was denied the right to buy paper when he was eventually released. He wrote on fabric instead. 

D G
Hello again, your Honor- I think you know me well
D A D
My name is Richard Carlile, and the truth to you I’ll tell
D G
My charge is sedition and libel in the press- 
D G A
I’ve printed no lies, sir, but sedition I’ll confess
G D
for a king is still a man, no less or greater than
Em G Bm
Those who delve the loam and dig the deathly mines
D G
And the station of your birth gives you no claim over the earth
D G Bm
No right over our labor and no right over our minds

Chorus:
D G D
You'll never silence me, with your troops or with your jail
D G A 
you'll never silence me- and let the truth stand for my bail
G D Em Bm
Take my paper, take my pen, and I will come to raise again
G D G A D
And I'll sing your name, Oh Liberty, until every man and woman's speaking free

I know the charge against me, and I'll tell you what it's for- 
for putting books and putting power into the hands of the working poor, 
and for writing these words I know are true: 
There's the servants and there's the masters and there's a war between the two
I've seen men locked into your cells, your priests damn us into hell
your yeomen cut the people down- 
with the gun and saber too on the fields of Peterloo,
and the Corn Law and wage slavery in the slums of London Town 

Chorus


Is there any Earthly power to put King George on the run,
More than the Yankee rebels, more than Boney’s guns? 
But the common folk of Britain, could do with their arms crossed  
What all the arms of Europe had ventured and had lost 
We are co-conspirators, engaging in the war 
Declared on us the day they forged a crown
And put reason into chains, put people in the same 
But people, by refusing, could pull any tyrant down


Chorus

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