The Many-Headed Hydra

by Peter Linebaugh

  The failure of the motley crew to find a place in the new American nation forced it into broader, more creative forms of identification. One of the phrases often used to capture the unity of the age of revolution was “citizen of the world.” J. Philmore described himself this way, as did others, including Thomas Paine. The real citizens of the world, of course, were the sailors and slaves who instructed Philmore, Paine, Jefferson, and the rest of the middle- and upper-class revolutionaries. This multiethnic proletariat was “cosmopolitan” in the original meaning of the word. Reminded that he had been sentenced to exile, Diogenes, the slave philosopher of antiquity, responded by saying that he sentenced his judges to stay at home. And “asked where he came from, he said, ‘I am a citizen of the world’”—a cosmopolitan. The Irishman Oliver Goldsmith published in 1762 a gentle critique of nationalism entitled Citizen of the World, featuring characters such as a sailor with a wooden leg and a ragged woman ballad singer. Goldsmith praised the “meanest English sailor or soldier,” who endured days of misery without murmur. He was “found guilty of being poor, and sent to Newgate, in order to be transported to the plantations,” where he would work among Africans. He returned to London, was press-ganged, sent to fight in Flanders and India, beaten by the boatswain, imprisoned, taken by pirates. He was a soldier, a slave, a sailor, a prisoner, a cosmopolitan, a citizen of the world. James Howell, historian of the Masaniello Revolt, wrote in the seventeenth century that “every ground may be one’s country—for by birth each man is in this world a cosmopolitan.”64

  A fourth and final vector pointed toward Africa. The African Americans in diaspora after 1783 would originate modern pan-Africanism by settling, with the help of Equiano and Sharp, in Sierra Leone. Their dispersal after the American Revolution, eastward across the Atlantic, was similar to that of radicals after the English Revolution, a century and a half earlier, westward across the Atlantic. Both movements had posed challenges to slavery and been defeated. The earlier defeat permitted the consolidation of the plantation and the slave trade, while the later defeat allowed the slave system to expand and gather new strength. Yet the long-term consequences of the second defeat would be a victory, the ultimate undoing of the slave trade and the plantation system. The theory and practice of antinomian democracy, which had been generalized around the Atlantic in the seventeenth-century diaspora, would be revived and deepened in the eighteenth. What went out in whiteface came back in blackface, to end the pause in the discussion of democratic ideas in England and to give new life to worldwide revolutionary movements. What goes around, comes around, by the circular winds and currents of the Atlantic.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  The Conspiracy of Edward and Catherine Despard

  ACCORDING TO NEWSPAPER accounts of February 22, 1803, Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, “dressed in boots, a dark brown great coat, his hair unpowdered,” ascended the gallows “with great firmness.” He had played an important role in clandestine efforts in England and Ireland to organize a revolutionary army whose goal was to seize power in London and declare a republic. He now faced hanging and beheading as a traitor. The sheriff had warned that the platform would drop instantly if he said anything “inflammatory or improper.” Facing the assembled twenty thousand with “perfect calmness,” Despard spoke these words:

  Fellow Citizens, I come here, as you see, after having served my country,—faithfully, honourably, and usefully served it, for thirty years and upwards, to suffer death upon a scaffold for a crime of which I protest I am not guilty. I solemnly declare that I am no more guilty of it than any of you who may be now hearing me.—But, though his MAJESTY’s Ministers know as well as I do, that I am not guilty, yet they avail themselves of a legal pretext to destroy a man, because he has been a friend to truth, to liberty, and to justice. [At this, one newspaper reported, “the crowd issued forth loud huzzas.”] Because he has been a friend to the poor and the oppressed. But, Citizens, I hope and trust, notwithstanding my fate, and the fate of those who no doubt will soon follow me, that the principles of freedom, of humanity, and of justice, will finally triumph over falsehood, tyranny, and delusion, and every principle inimical to the interests of the human race.

  A hanging at Horsemonger’s Gaol, c. 1805. Robinson, A Pictorial History of the Sea Services. John Hay Library.

  At this significant phrase—“the human race”—the sheriff admonished him for using such incendiary language. “I have little more to add,” Despard continued, “except to wish you all health, happiness, and freedom, which I have endeavoured, as far as was in my power, to procure for you and for mankind in general.” As his fellow conspirator John MacNamara was brought up to the scaffold, he said to Despard, “I am afraid, Colonel, we have got into a bad situation.” Despard’s answer, the newspapers noted, was characteristic of the man: “There are many better, and some worse.” His last words were, “’Tis very cold, I think we shall have some rain.” Undoubtedly, he had looked up hoping to behold that little patch of blue which the prisoner calls the sky.1

  Despard had been arrested on November 16, 1802, as he attended a meeting of forty workingmen in the Oakley Arms tavern. Those arrested included eight carpenters, five laborers, two shoemakers, two hatters, a stonemason, a clockmaker, a “plaisterer not long from the sea,” and “a man who cuts wood and sells it in penny bundles.” Many of them also worked as soldiers. These men had organized among common laborers, dockworkers, soldiers, and sailors—especially soldiers stationed at the Tower and “Irishmen who had served on board the Kings Ships & had been used to Cannon.” Several of the Irish laborers “had been united in Ireland,” a phrase showing that the mass terror of killing, torture, and deportation following the Irish Rebellion of 1798 had not extinguished the oath of the United Irish or the brotherhood of affection and communion of rights it expressed. Five thousand workers recently discharged from the wet docks were expected to join the cause: despite a period of intense shipping, they had been rendered either unemployed, as a direct result of hydraulic civil engineering, or homeless, by neighborhood clearances.

  The Oakley Arms lay only a few yards from William Blake’s residence, Hercules Buildings in Lambeth on the south side of the river Thames. That same year the epic visionary asked the questions

  And did the Countenance Divine

  Shine forth upon our clouded hills?

  And was Jerusalem builded here

  Among these dark Satanic Mills?

  Blake’s “Satanic Mills” were the Albion Mills, the first London steam-powered factory, just down the road from Hercules Buildings. Erected in 1791, this flour mill had been burned to the ground that same year, as part of the anonymous, direct resistance to the industrial revolution. Despard’s conspiracy was a continuation of that resistance, occurring amid widespread machine-breaking in the west of England and martial organizing against starvation and technological redundancy in the north. Blake had left London two years earlier during the famine of 1800. Until then, the visionary and the insurrectionary had walked the same streets. Despard described the revolutionary force as comprising “Soldiers, Sailors, and Individuals.” They had been recruited in the pubs of three parts of London: in St. Giles’-in-the-Fields, virtually an autonomous zone of the motley proletariat; south of the river, where the soldiers were concentrated; and in the East End river parishes, the neighborhood of sailors and dockers. These men had joined the movement in order “to burst the chain of bondage and slavery” and “to recover some of those liberties which we have lost.” They called Parliament the “Den of Thieves” and the government the “Man Eaters.” One thought “Windsor Castle was fit to teach the Gospel and maintain poor people’s Children in.” During their trial, the lord chief justice and presiding judge, Ellenborough, explained that “instead of the ancient limited monarchy of this Realm, its established free and wholesome laws, its approved usages, its useful gradations of rank, its natural and inevitable as well as desirable inequalities of property,” Despard and his fellow revolutionaries had sou
ght “to substitute a wild scheme of impracticable equality.”2

  Despard himself had claimed that “the people were every where ripe and anxious for the moment of attack.” The plan was therefore to fire upon the king’s carriage with cannon shot as he made his annual way to Parliament, then to seize the Tower and the Bank of England, to master Parliament, and to stop the mail coaches at Piccadilly as a signal for the rest of the country to rise. Despard was expert in ordnance and military strategy and tactics. But the scheme was foiled by the arrests at the Oakley Arms. Fifteen men were indicted for treason, on the grounds that they “did conspire, compass, imagine, and intend” the king’s death. Their convictions were the first instances of the prosecution of imagined crimes. Eleven were found guilty. Although the jury recommended mercy, Despard and six others were executed on February 21, 1803.

  Two wings of established authority, chaplain and magistrate, hovered over Despard in his last days. Like a bird of prey, the Reverend Mr. Wirkworth visited Despard to attempt to learn more about the plot, to offer spiritual services, and to urge his “public acknowledgment of God as the supreme governor.” The main purpose was unfulfilled, as Despard said, “Me—no never—I’ll divulge nothing. No, not for all the treasure the King is worth.” To the religious request Despard “replied he had sometimes been at eight different places of worship on the same day, that he believed in a Deity, and that outward forms of worship were useful for political purposes, otherwise he thought the opinions of Churchmen, Dissenters, Quakers, Methodists, Catholics, Savages, or even Atheists, were equally indifferent.” Despard then “offered some criticisms on the words Altar and Ecclesia,” which reminded Wirkworth of Thomas Paine’s Age of Reason. The Reverend “then presented Dr. Dodderidge’s Evidences of Christianity and begged as a favor that he would read it.” Despard “requested that I would not ‘attempt to put shackles on his mind, as on his body (pointing to the iron on his leg) was under so painful a restraint, and said that he had as much right to ask me to read the book he had in his hand (a treatise on Logic) as I had to ask him to read mine,’ and before I could make a reply Mrs Despard and another lady were introduced, and our conversation ended.”3

  The chief magistrate, Sir Richard Ford, wrote to the home secretary the night before the execution to express his concern over the “very considerable Crowds [that] assembled during the Day and this Evening near the Gaol.” He noted the difficulty of procuring workmen to build the scaffold. He mentioned the fears of the gaoler, his own decision to sleep near the prison, and his deployment of one hundred armed soldiers through the night. Since handbills “calling on the People to rise” and to rescue “these unfortunate Men” had been distributed, Ford quite naturally dreaded the possibility of a riot the following day and was prepared to subdue it.4 The public houses were being watched. The lord mayor checked and double-checked the security of Newgate and the prison hulks. Yet amid the continued resistance of the prisoners, threats of armed rescue, and prospects of spontaneous rioting, the chief of police was most troubled by Mrs. Despard. Ford concluded his letter with unconcealed irritation: “Mrs. Despard has been very troublesome, but at last she has gone away.”5 Thus both wings of tyrannical government, chaplain and magistrate, went a-flutter at the presence of Despard’s wife. Who was this woman who so scared the powers-that-be?

  Catherine Despard was an African American woman who had accompanied Edward when he sailed from Central America back to London in 1790. British imperial officers often attached themselves in the Caribbean to women of color, but they usually left them behind when they returned to England. Not Despard. Catherine came along but was shunned by her husband’s family as a “poor black woman, who called herself his wife.”6 She was especially active in the prisoners’-rights movement of the 1790s, later linking Edward and other incarcerated revolutionaries with activists outside the prisons. She was refused a last visit on the eve of Despard’s doom and indignantly expressed a “strong opinion with respect to the cause for which her husband was to suffer.” The word cause has two meanings, physical and moral. There was an efficient cause of which the conspiracy was an effect, and there was an ideal to be struggled for, and to both of them Catherine was as committed as her husband. She had worked tirelessly to expose and improve prison conditions, writing and petitioning for the “common necessaries of life”—warmth, fresh air, food, space, books, pen, ink, and paper and access to family, friends, and comrades. Her work as a courier worried the nation’s attorney general and solicitor general, who believed that “so extensive and Voluminous a correspondence” as she carried out of the prison could have no other purpose than publication. They also feared, however, that any attempt to search Catherine as she left the prison would inspire an outcry. So they recommended to the home secretary that Despard’s writings be seized for inspection and censorship before Catherine was permitted to take them.7

  Catherine also worked boldly at the highest levels of society and government. She approached Lord Nelson, who had spoken generously at the trial, to make “further application to government.” The nation’s hero, victor over Napoleon at the Nile, now testified on behalf of the nation’s villain, noting that twenty-three years earlier, “we went on the Spanish Main together; we slept many nights together in our clothes upon the ground; we measured the height of the enemies wall together. In all that period of time no man could have shewn more zealous attachment to his Sovereign and his Country, than Colonel Despard did.” Nelson in turn had a word with Lord Minto, the former governor of Corsica, who later wrote, “Mrs. Despard was violently in love with her husband, which makes the last scene of the tragedy affecting indeed. Lord Nelson solicited a pension, or some provision for her, and the Government was well disposed to grant it; but the last act on the scaffold [when the Colonel referred to the human race] may have defeated any chance of indulgence to any member of his family.” Catherine also forfeited the pension due her as the widow of an army officer. She assisted Edward in composing his last words, helping to define the “cause,” or “the principles of freedom, of humanity, and of justice.” She was thus more than just an organizer and courier. “Much of his time,” it was noted of his last days, “was employed in writing, some in reading, and the greater part with Mrs. Despard.”8

  The struggles for freedom, humanity, and justice in 1802 were Atlantic: accounts of the conspiracy were quickly published in Paris, Dublin, Edinburgh, and New York. Yet recent historical interpretations have confined their compass to England, Ireland, and France. They have ignored Catherine Despard, who has remained a shadow (a woman) within a shadow (a black woman) within a shadow (a revolutionary black woman)—or, as Blake wrote in “Visions of the Daughters of Albion” (1793), a poem precisely concerned with the liberation inherent in Anglo-American–African unions, “a solitary shadow wailing on the margin of non-entity.” Sexism and racism have kept her in the shadows. The African American slave experience at the end of the eighteenth century was distinguished, as C. L. R. James noted, not by race but by the collective “extensive cultivation of the soil, which eventually made possible the transition to an industrial and urban society.” The mass cultivators of the soil also provided mass experience in the freedom struggle against slavery, and that experience was conveyed to Albion’s industrial and urban society by folks like Catherine Despard. Our view of the conspiracy must be broadened to include Jamaica, Nicaragua, and Belize, where Despard lived and met Catherine, as well as Haiti and mainland America, where the freedom struggle shook the Atlantic mountains. An Atlantic perspective is likewise needed to understand Despard’s own biography, because he passed his childhood, or the first sixteen years of his life, in Ireland; he spent his manhood, or the next twenty-four years, in the Americas; and he lived out his maturity, or his last twelve years, in London. The union and the conspiracy of Catherine and Edward Marcus Despard may stand for a new cycle of rebellion that began in the 1790s, from which emerged not only the race and class themes in the age of revolution but also a new definition
of the human race.

  IRELAND

  Edward Marcus Despard was an Irishman. His conspiracy, as James Connolly correctly insisted, was tied to that of Robert Emmet, also of 1803; and like Emmet, he was an “Irish apostle of a world-wide movement for liberty, equality and fraternity.”9 Born in 1750 on his family’s estate at Donore, near Mountrath, amid the Slieve Bloom Mountains, in what was then Queen’s County, Ireland (now county Laois), he was the youngest of six brothers. Mountrath lay within the pale of the Tudor plantations. In the early seventeenth century, the area had been settled by Emanuel Downing, John Winthrop, and other Puritans before they moved across the Atlantic to Massachusetts Bay, selling out to Sir Charles Coote, a ruthless soldier and entrepreneur who aggressively dominated the plantation, against the claims of the Fitzpatrick sept. Despard’s ancestors planted themselves in Mountrath in the 1640s, as part of the Coote entourage.10 Despard’s secretary, James Bannantine, claimed in a memoir of 1799 that an ancestor had been an engineer at the Battle of the Boyne. By the middle of the eighteenth century, there were clerks, weavers, joiners, and carpenters in Mountrath bearing the name Despard. Edward’s own immediate family produced soldiers, sheriffs, and priests for the established church.11

  Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, c. 1803.

  Courtesy of the National Library of Ireland.

  The subtle landscape of Mountrath today hides the woodlands that once covered it, which now are suggested only by townland names: Derrylahan (“the wide oak-wood”), Ross dorragh (“the dark wood”), and Derrynaseera (“the oak-wood of the freeman”). Large enclosed tracts, drained bogs, several rivers, and the forge and mill of proto-industry were all signs of that capitalist mobilization of collective labor that Arthur Young, the agricultural “improver,” likened to the richness of an English scene.12 This landscape, represented on neat eighteenth-century maps of orderly roads and tracts, concealed the squalid hovels and habitations of the dispossessed peasantry and cotters, whose living conditions during this period were even worse than those of West Indian slaves or Russian serfs. Restrictions on the export of Irish cattle to England were lifted in 1759, moving landlords to enclose the commons, destroy the ancient clachan (the unit of communal agriculture), and turn arable land into pasture. The land was well bounded by quick hawthorne hedges, among the most notable of which were those at the Despard estate at Donore, where they were said to be “extremely neat, with saddle copings.” In 1761 agrarian rebels known as the Whiteboys rose against the “improvers.” A cry went up: “Betwixt landlord and rector the very marrow is screwed out of our bones. . . . They have reduced us to such a deplorable state by such grievous oppressions that the poor is turned black in the face, and the skin parched on their back.”13 Nocturnal bands of hundreds of people, dressed in flowing white frocks and white cockades, pulled down the fences enclosing the commons. They were led by fairies and mythic figures such as “Queen Sieve,” who wrote in 1762,