Charles Bradlaugh

As a Sunday-school teacher he questioned the discrepancies between the Thirty-nine Articles and the Bible, was accused of atheism and suspended, and was thrown out of his home. Taken in by the widow of Richard Carlile, who had been imprisoned for printing Thomas Paine, he gave his first atheist lecture through George Holyoake, who had coined the word “secularism”. After a spell in the army he worked from 1853 as a solicitor’s clerk in London, writing secularist pamphlets; he became president of the London Secular Society in 1858 and editor of the National Reformer in 1860. Prosecuted by the government in 1868 for blasphemy and sedition, he was acquitted on all charges.

In 1877 he and Besant republished Charles Knowlton’s birth-control book Fruits of Philosophy, whose previous publisher, Charles Watts, had been convicted of obscenity. Charles Darwin refused to testify for them, saying he opposed birth control. They were sentenced to heavy fines and six months’ imprisonment, but the Court of Appeal quashed the conviction because the indictment had not set out the precise words alleged to be obscene; the Malthusian League was founded as a result of the trial. He supported trade unionism, republicanism and universal suffrage but opposed socialism, which drove secularists who turned socialist, Besant among them, away from him.

Elected for Northampton in 1880 alongside the Liberal Labouchère, he asked as an atheist to affirm rather than swear, and the House had him confined in the cell under the Clock Tower. Losing his seat, he was re-elected four times in succession, and in 1883 he took his seat and voted, for which he was fined £1,500. Gladstone, Shaw and a petition of hundreds of thousands supported him. He finally took the oath in 1886 and in 1888 carried a new Oaths Act allowing members of both Houses and witnesses in court to affirm. He died on 30 January 1891; 3,000 mourners, among them the 21-year-old Gandhi, attended his funeral.