 For a few months following Peterloo it seemed to the authorities that the country was heading towards an armed rebellion . Encouraging them in that belief were two abortive uprisings , in Huddersfield and Burnley , during the autumn of 1819 , and the discovery and foiling of the Cato Street Conspiracy to blow up the cabinet that winter . By the end of the year , the government had introduced legislation , later known as the Six Acts , to suppress radical meetings and publications , and by the end of 1820 every significant working @-@ class radical reformer was in jail ; civil liberties had declined to an even lower level than they were before Peterloo . Historian Robert Reid has written that " it is not fanciful to compare the restricted freedoms of the British worker in the post @-@ Peterloo period in the early nineteenth century with those of the black South African in the post @-@ Sharpeville period of the late twentieth century " . 
