Charles Dickens Timeline: 1815.

In the Napoleonic Wars, a British-led coalition, under the command of the Duke of Wellington, wins a decisive victory over Napoleon at Waterloo in the United Kingdom of the Netherlands. The battle marked the end of the Napoleonic Wars.

A group of working class men, campaigning for parliamentary reform and an improvement to the state of the Lancashire textile industry, begin a march from Manchester to Westminster in London. The marchers, nicknamed the ‘Blanketeers’ after blankets they carried, were dispersed by troops before they reached Stockport.

An armed uprising by mainly weavers and miners, intent on overthrowing the government, was brutally put down by military forces in Derbyshire.

Over the summer, thousands of spinners in Lancashire protest against a cut in wages, attacking factories.

Eighteen people are killed when cavalry charged into a crowd of around 60,000 people who had gathered to demand the reform of parliamentary representation at St Peter’s Field in Manchester.

George IV becomes king. He had been Regent since 1811, as a result of the mental illness of his father, George III.

A plot to murder all the British cabinet ministers is foiled. Three months later the conspirators are executed at Newgate Prison in London.

A bill to disfranchise the parliamentary borough of Grampound in Cornwall receives Royal Assent. The constituency, which returned two Members to Parliament was symbolic of the need for political reform of the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’ that would come with the Reform Act of 1832.

Caroline of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel dies at her home in Hammersmith. Caroline married her first cousin, George, Prince of Wales, (later George IV) but was abandoned by him the following year, shortly after the birth of their only child. A few weeks before her death, Caroline was refused entry to George’s coronation.