This article examines Punch’s 1894 poem ‘Bold Robin Hood’, which recast Sir William Harcourt’s Budget as fiscal outlawry. Rather than celebrating Robin Hood’s moral economy, Edwin James Milliken’s satire made redistributive taxation appear as cant, coercion, and highway robbery in defence of property and middle-class respectability.
“We know great exertions are wanted and we are, at all events, determined to stand or fall by the laws, liberties, and religion of our country.”
The Reform League organised several rallies. At one of the Reform League’s major rallies, held in Trafalgar Square and attended by old-school militant radicals, the speakers began calling on working men to organise a general strike. Another ‘monster meeting’ held in May 1867 was so large that, despite being banned by the government, the police did not dare to intervene. The prospect of violence and armed conflict was rearing its head and it was all beginning to feel like 1848 again.