Dic Penderyn and the Merthyr Rising: Mars, Martyrdom and the Raising of the Red Flag

In June 1831, the industrial town of Merthyr Tydfil erupted. Workers confronted ironmasters, debt collectors, magistrates and soldiers. Furniture seized from indebted families was reclaimed and destroyed, troops opened fire, protesters fought back, and a red flag was raised above the crowd.

The Merthyr Rising lasted only a matter of days, but its symbolism endured. It became one of the defining episodes in the history of Welsh working-class resistance and helped establish the red flag as an emblem of organised protest.

Its most famous figure was not one of the principal leaders. Richard Lewis, better known as Dic Penderyn, was a young miner whose precise involvement remains uncertain. He was convicted of wounding a soldier during the disturbances and publicly hanged in Cardiff on 13 August 1831.

Serious doubts surrounded the evidence even at the time. The wounded soldier could not identify his attacker, thousands petitioned for clemency, and a later deathbed confession appeared to implicate another man. Penderyn consequently entered Welsh memory not simply as a participant in rebellion, but as a martyr created by an unequal system of justice.

The astrological symbolism is unusually concentrated. During the rising, Mars was moving through Cancer, closely joined with Venus and opposing Neptune. At Penderyn’s execution, Mars had entered Virgo and formed an almost exact conjunction with Saturn.

Astrology cannot establish why these events occurred or determine Penderyn’s guilt. It can, however, offer a symbolic language for examining anger, collective pain, state violence and the transformation of one man’s death into a lasting political myth.

Merthyr Before the Rising

By the early nineteenth century, Merthyr Tydfil had been transformed by iron. The expansion of the Cyfarthfa, Dowlais, Plymouth and Penydarren ironworks drew thousands of workers into the area, turning what had once been a relatively small settlement into one of the most important industrial towns in Britain.

Its furnaces produced iron for railways, machinery and weapons. Enormous wealth accumulated around the ironmasters, while the workers who made that wealth possible experienced long hours, dangerous labour, insecure employment and overcrowded living conditions.

The growth of industry had created a new community with considerable collective strength. It had not created an equal distribution of power.

Workers were also vulnerable to the Court of Requests, a system used to recover relatively small debts. Bailiffs could enter homes and seize furniture or possessions that would then be sold. For families already living close to destitution, debt was not an abstract financial problem. It could mean the physical dismantling of the home.

Economic conditions worsened in 1830 and 1831. Falling demand brought wage reductions and unemployment, while the price of basic necessities remained a source of pressure. Political discontent was also growing across Britain as arguments intensified over parliamentary reform and the restricted right to vote.

Merthyr contained all the necessary ingredients for confrontation: economic hardship, concentrated industrial labour, visible inequality and institutions that appeared to protect property more readily than people.

The Breaking Point

The immediate disturbances began on 2 June 1831. A crowd attacked the home of Joseph Coffin, an official connected with the Court of Requests, and destroyed goods that had been seized from debtors.

According to the Dictionary of Welsh Biography, there is no evidence that Dic Penderyn took part in this initial attack. He was, however, present among the crowd when soldiers confronted protesters outside the Castle Inn the following day.

Magistrates had requested military assistance, and soldiers of the 93rd Highland Regiment arrived in Merthyr. As the crowd attempted to seize their weapons, fighting broke out. Soldiers stationed inside the inn fired into the protesters.

Men were killed and many more were injured. The crowd fought back, and soldiers were temporarily forced to withdraw. For a brief period, established authority lost effective control of the town.

Roads were obstructed, weapons were seized and additional troops were intercepted. The authorities within Merthyr found themselves surrounded by a population that no longer appeared willing to accept their commands.

This was not a carefully planned revolution with an agreed programme and central leadership. It grew out of several overlapping grievances and developed rapidly as confrontation produced bloodshed.

Yet something politically significant occurred amid the disorder. A red flag was raised.

The Raising of the Red Flag

Accounts of the Merthyr Rising frequently describe it as the first occasion on which the red flag was used in Britain as a symbol of working-class rebellion.

Later generations would associate the red flag with socialism, communism and the international labour movement. In Merthyr in 1831, its meaning was still being formed.

One tradition holds that a white cloth was stained with the blood of a wounded protester and carried above the crowd. As with many powerful historical symbols, it is difficult to separate the documented event from the story that subsequently grew around it.

What is clear is that the red flag came to represent the workers’ resistance. Its colour condensed a complicated struggle into a single image: bloodshed, anger, danger, courage and collective identity.

A flag transforms individuals into a visible group. Those beneath it are no longer merely separate people with private grievances. They appear as a body capable of acting together.

This gives the image a distinctly Martian quality. In astrological tradition, Mars is associated with conflict, severance, weapons, blood, courage and the force required to resist an opponent.

The red flag did not simply describe the violence already taking place. It gave that violence a shared emblem.

Mars in Cancer and the Defence of Home

Calculations made using the Astrodienst Swiss Ephemeris place Mars at approximately 19 degrees of Cancer during the decisive confrontation of 3 June 1831.

Mars is not traditionally considered comfortable in Cancer. Mars acts directly, while Cancer protects, remembers and responds emotionally. In astrological interpretation, Mars in Cancer can describe anger rooted in threatened security, family loyalty or the defence of home.

This symbolism closely resembles the economic reality behind the rising. The dispute was not only about political theory. It entered workers’ houses. Furniture was seized, wages were cut and families were placed under pressure.

The attack on the property of a Court of Requests official expressed rage at a system that could remove the physical contents of a poor household in order to satisfy a debt.

Mars in Cancer is therefore a more precise symbol than Mars as indiscriminate aggression. The anger emerged from injury to the foundations of ordinary life.

Yet defensive anger can quickly become difficult to contain. Once blood had been shed, the boundary between protection and retaliation became increasingly unstable.

Mars Conjunct Venus

Mars was also closely conjunct Venus in Cancer. Venus is associated with relationship, social cohesion, values and the principles by which people decide what is fair or desirable.

When Mars and Venus meet, attraction and conflict can become intertwined. What a group loves or values may become something it is prepared to fight for.

In Merthyr, economic grievances developed into a form of collective solidarity. People did not respond only as isolated debtors or employees. They acted together against institutions they regarded as unjust.

The conjunction in Cancer emphasises bonds of locality and belonging. The rising was inseparable from the experience of a particular industrial community whose members worked, suffered and raised families within the same valley.

Mars supplied confrontation. Venus supplied the values around which people could unite.

Mars Opposite Neptune

During the rising, Mars in Cancer was also moving through an opposition to Neptune in Capricorn.

Neptune is associated with sacrifice, confusion, idealisation, collective feeling and the dissolution of clear boundaries. Capricorn is connected symbolically with hierarchy, authority and established systems.

An opposition between Mars and Neptune can be interpreted as conflict in which motives, identities and outcomes become obscured. Courage and confusion may exist together. Individuals can be absorbed into the emotional momentum of a crowd, while authorities describe resistance in terms designed to justify suppression.

This does not mean that the protesters lacked genuine grievances. It suggests a situation in which anger moved faster than any single person’s ability to control its direction.

The historical record reflects that ambiguity. The Merthyr Rising contained organised resistance, spontaneous destruction, economic protest and violent confrontation. It cannot be reduced comfortably to either heroic revolution or meaningless riot.

Neptune also enters the story through martyrdom. After Penderyn’s death, the uncertain details of his involvement became less influential than the emotional truth he came to represent.

Who Was Dic Penderyn?

Richard Lewis was born in approximately 1807 or 1808 and came from the Aberavon area. The name by which he became famous, Dic Penderyn, appears to derive from a cottage called Penderyn associated with his family.

By 1831 he was married, living in Merthyr and working as a miner. Beyond these basic facts, much of his early life remains unclear.

This absence of detail is important. The historical Penderyn is less easily recovered than the martyr who later occupied Welsh political memory.

He was present in the crowd outside the Castle Inn on 3 June. During the fighting, Private Donald Black of the 93rd Regiment was wounded in the leg with a bayonet.

Penderyn was arrested and charged with taking part in the riot and attacking Black. He was tried at Cardiff Assizes and convicted on the evidence of two witnesses, James Abbott and William Williams.

Black himself acknowledged that he did not know who had wounded him.

The court nevertheless sentenced Penderyn to death.

A Conviction Surrounded by Doubt

Doubts about Penderyn’s guilt did not emerge only many years after the event. They were present before his execution.

A petition seeking clemency was reportedly signed by around 11,000 people. Joseph Tregelles Price, a Quaker ironmaster and social reformer from Neath, became convinced that Penderyn was innocent and sought the intervention of the Home Secretary, Lord Melbourne.

The execution was postponed for two weeks, but Melbourne ultimately refused to commute the sentence.

The authorities were confronting more than the alleged stabbing of one soldier. They had witnessed a major industrial town escape their control. A sentence could therefore function not only as punishment for an individual offence, but as a warning to an entire population.

Penderyn’s relative obscurity may have made him particularly vulnerable. He could be presented as a participant in the violence without being important enough to command political protection.

In 1874, a Congregational minister reported that a man living in America had confessed on his deathbed to wounding Donald Black. The confession cannot now be tested through a modern judicial process, but it reinforced the longstanding conviction that Penderyn had been executed for another man’s act.

Historical caution remains necessary. It is safer to say that his conviction was profoundly unsafe than to pretend every disputed detail has been conclusively resolved.

What is beyond dispute is that the soldier could not identify his attacker and that considerable public concern preceded the execution.

Mars Meets Saturn at the Gallows

On 13 August 1831, the day of Penderyn’s execution, Mars stood at approximately four degrees of Virgo. Saturn was at approximately three degrees of the same sign.

The conjunction was separated by less than one degree.

This is the most striking astrological correspondence in the story.

Mars represents action, force, injury and the individual will. Saturn represents law, judgement, restriction, punishment and mortality. Their conjunction has traditionally been regarded as severe because movement encounters an immovable boundary.

At its most literal, Mars-Saturn can symbolise the organised force of the state. Violence is no longer spontaneous. It is authorised, scheduled and carried out through an institution.

Penderyn’s death was not another uncontrolled act within the rising. It was a formal execution. The law selected a date, erected a scaffold and transformed punishment into public spectacle.

Virgo adds the symbolism of procedure, evidence and administrative detail. The state did not describe the execution as vengeance. It presented it as the orderly consequence of a legal process.

Yet a procedure can be meticulously followed and still produce injustice. Virgo’s concern with accuracy becomes painfully relevant when the identity of the attacker was itself uncertain.

Mars conjunct Saturn poses an uncomfortable question: what happens when the machinery of law gives permanent form to a doubtful accusation?

“O Arglwydd, Dyma Gamwedd”

Penderyn was publicly hanged outside Cardiff Gaol at eight o’clock on the morning of Saturday, 13 August 1831. He was approximately 23 years old.

His final words are traditionally reported as “O Arglwydd, dyma gamwedd”, usually translated as “Oh Lord, here is injustice”.

As with many famous last words, the exact formulation should be treated with some caution. Its survival nevertheless reveals how Welsh memory has understood the execution.

The statement does not plead for victory or threaten revenge. It names a wrong.

This distinction helped transform Penderyn into a martyr. A defeated rebel can be portrayed as dangerous. A young man calmly declaring his innocence at the scaffold evokes a different moral response.

His body was carried towards Aberavon for burial. The funeral procession grew as it travelled, and a large, emotional crowd gathered at St Mary’s churchyard.

The state had intended the execution as a demonstration of authority. The funeral began the process by which its victim acquired authority of another kind.

How a Person Becomes a Martyr

Martyrdom is not created by death alone. Countless people die violently without becoming symbols. A martyr emerges when a community gives a death continuing meaning.

Several elements contributed to Penderyn’s transformation:

He was young and came from the same working community as the protesters.
The wounded soldier could not identify him as his attacker.
A large petition for clemency was rejected.
The punishment appeared disproportionate and politically useful.
A later confession reinforced belief in his innocence.
His reported final words expressed injustice with memorable simplicity.

Over time, these details formed a story larger than the surviving evidence about Penderyn’s life.

Neptune can be useful in understanding this process. It governs the passage from individual identity into collective imagination. The historical person becomes an image onto which grief, anger and hope are projected.

This does not necessarily make the image false. Myths can preserve moral truths even while simplifying complex events.

The danger comes when symbolic meaning replaces historical enquiry entirely. Penderyn should not become so polished as a national icon that the uncertainty, disorder and human cost of the rising disappear behind him.

The Psychology of Scapegoating

After collective disorder, authorities often seek an identifiable person upon whom responsibility can be placed. A single defendant is easier to punish than a network of economic conditions, political failures and shared resentments.

This is the psychological function of the scapegoat. Anxiety distributed throughout a society is concentrated in one individual, whose removal is presented as a restoration of order.

Penderyn could not possibly have caused the conditions that produced the Merthyr Rising. He did not create unemployment, wage reductions, debt seizures or political exclusion. His execution did nothing to resolve those forces.

It did, however, allow authority to demonstrate that rebellion would have consequences.

Mars-Saturn symbolism captures this transfer. The chaotic aggression of the rising was compressed into the restrained body of one condemned man. The state regained control by deciding where violence would be directed and when it would end.

Psychologically, scapegoating also protects the larger system from examination. Once a culprit has been named and punished, deeper causes can be treated as secondary.

Penderyn’s continuing importance arises partly because Welsh memory refused to accept that conclusion.

The Red Flag After Merthyr

The red flag subsequently became an international emblem of labour organisation, socialism and revolutionary politics. Its later meanings should not all be projected backwards onto the Merthyr protesters, who did not possess a fully developed twentieth-century political ideology.

What they did possess was a visible symbol of common cause.

The flag’s power came from its simplicity. It required no literacy and no elaborate explanation. Against the smoke and iron of an industrial town, red communicated urgency immediately.

Its meaning also changed after the bloodshed. The colour could represent both resistance and those killed while resisting.

This is how political symbols accumulate emotional weight. They gather associations from each occasion on which they are raised, banned, defended or carried in mourning.

The Merthyr red flag therefore belongs to more than the history of one disturbance. It marks an early moment when industrial workers became conscious of themselves as a collective force capable of confronting employers and the state.

Mars, Anger and Moral Courage

Mars is frequently reduced to violence, but this is only one expression of its symbolism. Mars also represents the ability to say no, defend a boundary and act when passive endurance has become intolerable.

A society without healthy Mars would possess no mechanism for resisting exploitation. Anger can reveal that something valuable has been violated.

Yet Mars alone cannot decide whether an action is just. It supplies force, not wisdom. Collective anger may defend the vulnerable, but it may also become destructive, indiscriminate or susceptible to manipulation.

The Merthyr Rising demonstrates both realities. The workers had genuine grievances and confronted institutions that offered them little meaningful power. The resulting violence nevertheless brought death, injury and repression.

The psychological task is not to eliminate anger, but to understand what it protects and how it is directed.

In Cancer, Mars defended home and community. Opposite Neptune, its purpose became entangled with confusion and collective emotion. Joined with Saturn at Penderyn’s execution, force was appropriated by the machinery of the state.

The same planet describes rebellion and repression because both require the exercise of power.

Memory, Justice and a Welsh Martyr

Dic Penderyn remains present in Welsh culture through books, songs, political campaigns, public art and commemorations. Calls for a posthumous pardon have reflected the enduring belief that his conviction represented a miscarriage of justice.

A pardon would possess symbolic rather than practical value. It could not restore his life or reconstruct every missing fact. Its purpose would be to acknowledge that the certainty claimed by the state in 1831 was not justified by the available evidence.

There is an important difference between legal closure and psychological closure. The execution closed the legal case. It did not settle its meaning.

Indeed, the state’s attempt to make an example of Penderyn may have produced the opposite of its intention. Rather than discouraging future resistance, his death supplied Welsh radicalism with a martyr.

Saturn attempted to impose a final boundary. Neptune dissolved it into legend.

Why the Merthyr Rising Still Matters

The Merthyr Rising belongs to a specific industrial and political world, but the tensions within it remain recognisable.

What happens when work produces wealth without security? How long will people accept institutions they experience as punitive rather than protective? When does public order preserve peace, and when does it preserve inequality? Can anger be expressed without becoming destructive? Who is punished when a system itself has failed?

These questions prevent the story from becoming a comfortable piece of local folklore.

The raising of the red flag was an act of collective visibility. Penderyn’s execution was an act of state power. His martyrdom was the community’s refusal to allow that power to determine the final meaning of his life.

At Wilfred Hazelwood Astrology, planetary symbolism can help illuminate these tensions without replacing evidence or historical judgement. Mars does not explain the rising, and Saturn does not prove injustice. Their value lies in the patterns they help us contemplate: anger meeting authority, blood becoming symbol and punishment creating an inheritance that outlives the people who imposed it.

Dic Penderyn entered history as an obscure young miner accused of wielding a weapon. He endured in memory because his death came to represent something much larger.

The soldiers lowered their muskets. The scaffold was dismantled. The furnaces continued to burn.

But the red flag had already been raised.