by M. J. Trow
The success of these three not only encouraged the societies but created new leaders. Irishman John Binns, now a London plumber, became a leading light in the LCS and wrote that many of the members wanted the establishment of a republic. Three of them may have tried to put the theory into practice, although like Cato Street there was an air of farce about it. Higgins, Smith and Lemaitre were held in the early months of 1795 on a charge of trying to kill George III with a poisoned dart fired from an air gun. Since the evidence against them relied solely on the word of an informer,16 the case was dropped.
At around the same time, tracts were disseminated from the British Tree of Liberty at 98 Berwick Street, Soho, with such titles as King Killing and The Happy Reign of George the Last. At the end of October, three days after a huge mass rally, perhaps numbering 100,000, took place at Copenhagen Fields, Islington, parliament opened and the king’s carriage was attacked. The satirists had a field day, with cartoons showing wild-looking ruffians armed with cudgels, blasting the windows of George’s carriage. In fact there was no such assault, the window being broken by a stone, but the reality of 200,000 Londoners chanting ‘No war! No king! No Pitt!’ was enough to cause the wildest rumours. As a precaution when the king went to the theatre the next day, he had 100 infantrymen, 200 cavalry and 500 constables in attendance.
In January 1793, to the tune of ‘God Save the King’, the American Joel Barlow, who had witnessed the execution of Louis XVI, wrote:
And when great George’s poll
Shall in the basket roll,
Let mercy then control
The guillotine.
John Binns toured the country extensively, talking to sailors in Portsmouth where the future Cato Street conspirator James Ings was probably already an apprentice butcher.17 Francis Place, who had a rather well-developed sense of his own importance, said of the LCS:
It induced men to read books instead of spending their time at public houses. It taught them to think, to respect themselves and to desire to educate their children.18
Place was anxious to distance himself from the lunatic fringe of the society and the mob, but he seems to have missed the point. A thinking working class that had respect for its own ideas was the last thing that Pitt’s Establishment wanted. And their numbers were growing. Norwich, a town made rich by the worsted woollen trade, was one centre of Jacobinism. Sheffield, with its cutlery and plate, was another. Spitalfields, long the weaving heart of London, was a third. Jacobinism was not yet to be found in the satanic mills; nor had it focused on Manchester and Birmingham. But there was a hint of revolution in the wind.
At the end of December 1796, international politics appeared to come to the aid of those determined to see reform. Capitalizing on the centuries-old hatred of England by the Irish, a half-baked alliance was concluded between the United Irishmen of Theobald Wolfe Tone and the French government of Paul Barras. Plans for invasion had existed since at least 1789 (before the Revolution), but Ireland would have provided an excellent springboard for invasion from the west and would effectively create a war on two fronts for Pitt. But the French navy had mistimed things and General Hoche’s 14,000 strong army did not leave Brest until 15 December, by which time storms scattered the 43 ships and not one could land at Bantry Bay. One vessel, limping back home, landed by mistake in Fishguard in Pembrokeshire and its crew were ‘routed’ by the arrival of a handful of shrieking fishwives and a troop of the Pembrokeshire Yeomanry. In that same month, Horatio Nelson won a spectacular victory over a Spanish convoy off Cape St Vincent, but elsewhere the news was not so good.
While virtual civil war was breaking out in Ireland with a Catholic population bitterly hostile to its puppet Protestant parliament, an alien church and serious economic problems, the cost of four years of war was laid bare. The country had run up a staggering £19 million of debt. The cartoonist Gilray showed Pitt desperately wooing the Old Lady of Threadneedle Street (the Bank of England) in an attempt to squeeze yet more money out of her. In the Commons Henry Addington, the future Lord Sidmouth, suggested voluntary contributions and pledged £2,000 from his own pocket. While the banks wobbled and crashed and Pitt began to formulate his income tax, at Spithead near Portsmouth, the navy mutinied, to be followed by a similar act of defiance at the Nore, in the Thames estuary in May.
Conditions on board warships were appalling. Captain Thomas Hardy’s19 Victory for example, which became the most famous of the first-rater ships of the line, had a crew (including marines) of nearly 800, all of them crammed into five decks with very little space. Wages had not risen for a century and the semi-legal use of the press gangs to find likely lads in the ports’ taverns had created a class of literate, educated sailors who were prepared to make a stand. What is difficult to say is how important John Binns’s meetings were in Portsmouth in this context. Did he rouse the jolly tars of Old England to query something they had accepted meekly for 200 years?
The ending of the naval mutinies speaks volumes for the Establishment and how it dealt with rebellion. Nominally, the fleet’s behaviour was treason – refusal to fight in time of war. At Spithead, the delegates from the mutinous ships met around a table with kindly old Admiral Howe, drank large quantities of rum and were promised better pay and conditions. At the Nore, delegates were hanged, perhaps because here violence had been offered to ships’ officers. In both cases, the fleets sailed and the country could breathe a sigh of relief.
No sooner was the naval crisis averted however than trouble broke out in Scotland. The Militia Act, by which Pitt hoped to create a serious home defence force, was deeply unpopular, especially in the Celtic fringe. What it meant was that all able-bodied men between 18 and 23 were to be conscripted by ballot. These men could also be raised in the colonies, which led to racial issues and a rather irrational fear of outbreaks of yellow fever and other West Indian diseases. Teachers, whose unenviable job it was to compile ballot lists, had their houses burnt. Tranent in Lothian became the focal point for this unrest, where magistrates looked very closely at the colliers and weavers in the town. Rioting and looting in August was met by the yeomanry cavalry who charged the crowd, killing a 13-year-old boy in the process and leaving the dead in the cornfields ‘like partridges’.
The naval mutinies, ominous rumblings in Scotland and the rebellion of Wolfe Tone’s United Irishmen the following year – ‘they’re hanging men and women there for wearing o’ the green’20 – show how precarious was the hold of authority on a country struggling under the double burden of uncontrolled industrialization and war. Secret societies – possibly the United Englishmen, itself a spinoff of Wolfe Tone’s group – met after dark in places like Furnival’s Inn in Holborn and Richard Fuller was sentenced to death for making inflammatory speeches to soldiers of the Coldstream Guards.
And Richard Parker, the Nore mutiny leader facing the rope, wrote: ‘Remember, never to make yourself the busy body of the lower classes, for they are cowardly, selfish and ungrateful’.21 Parker was talking about the essential divide which existed among the Jacobins. At the heart of their movement, especially as the French Revolution itself led to disappointment and betrayal and the new France of Napoleon Bonaparte looked suspiciously like the old,22 was the need to keep their children fed. Increasingly, men turned to trade unions and friendly societies, advocating change by peaceful means, brought about by the extension of the vote.
Only a few held out for violence – ‘One saying Liberty, the other saying Death’.
Chapter 4
Desperate Men and Desperate Measures
The mood of the nation was ugly as the century turned. The Dissenting millennialists, who had expected some great sign from God, were to be disappointed. The popular general predicted by Robespierre shortly before his execution was Napoleon Bonaparte and he had indeed brought the Revolution to an end, as Robespierre had prophesied, but he had done it with bayonets at his back and few people were in doubt that the Consulate was no more than a trio of military dictators who eventuall
y became one. The unstoppable Corsican was winning battle after battle, smashing yet another alliance against him at Marengo in 1800.
The Act of Union with Ireland was designed by Pitt’s government to pacify the provinces, but it failed and determined Irishmen spent the next century trying to repeal it. The Dublin parliament ceased to exist and Ireland became liable for its share of the national debt, cripplingly high as it was of course by now. No Irishman had forgotten the vicious putting down of Wolfe Tone’s rising of 1798 and the ex-pats who drifted to London and other cities in search of work brought their sense of grievance with them. At home, famine claimed their families and friends. All over the country there were protests against the malt tax and the window tax. Men denied the right to form trade unions by the Anti-Combinations Acts of 1799 and 1800 met after dark behind closed doors. They were probably still discussing hours, working conditions and wages, but since they were secret, Pitt’s government now had no accurate idea what they were talking about. By driving these groups underground, the Establishment had created a potential monster it would be difficult to control.
And there was always an uneasy tension, a sense that some bizarre, brutal act was about to happen. It did, on the night of 15 May 1800, when the king was attending a performance of The Marriage of Figaro at Drury Lane Theatre. James Hadfield stepped out to the orchestra pit and fired a pistol at George, the ball crunching into a pillar to one side of the royal box. Perhaps gambling on the fact that the assassin did not have a second gun and would be grabbed before he could reload, George calmly stood up and inspected the bullet hole. The show’s star, Michael Kelly, was impressed – ‘Never shall I forget his majesty’s coolness’ – while the rest of the audience was, of course, hysterical.
Ever one to capitalize on a situation, the poet, playwright and Whig MP Richard Sheridan, who happened to be in that audience, rattled off a new verse of ‘God Save the King’ –
From every latent foe,
From the assassin’s blow
God save the king!
O’er him thine arm extend,
For Britain’s sake defend,
Our father, prince and friend,
God save the king!
Kelly ended the evening with a rousing version of this which brought the house down.
Hadfield’s behaviour was decidedly odd. Having missed with his pistol, he said to the king, ‘God bless your royal highness; I like you very well. You are a good fellow.’ He stood trial on the inevitable charge of high treason and was defended by the brilliant lawyer Thomas Erskine, himself a supporter of the French Revolution and a member of the Friends of the People, set up in 1792. Erskine’s acceptance of a retainer from Tom Paine cost him the friendship of the Prince of Wales and a possible appointment as Attorney-General. As MP for Portsmouth, he made speeches on behalf of both Thomas Hardy and Horne Tooke and was a natural to defend Hadfield.
It was clear from Hadfield’s demeanour – and indeed, appearance – that Erskine’s best bet would be to plead insanity. Hadfield had been a serving soldier until the battle of Tourcoing in 1794, when he took eight sabre cuts to the head. Although nothing is known of his early life, this battle was fought between Austria and France, so presumably he was serving as a mercenary with the Austrians. Released after capture by the French, he came home and joined a millennialist movement in London. He told Erskine that he believed he (Hadfield) would be instrumental in the second coming of Christ by being executed by the government. Conspiring with fellow millennialist Bannister Truelock, Hadfield hit upon the one crime for which he was certain to be executed – the killing of the king.
Unfortunately for Hadfield, Erskine had other ideas. It would not be until the 1840s that the British judicial system came to a consensus on how to handle criminal insanity.1 The standard definition at the time was that a defendant ‘must be lost to all sense . . . incapable of forming a judgement upon the consequences of the act which he is about to do’. Going head to head with the judge, Lord Kenyon, Erskine argued that delusion ‘unaccompanied by frenzy or raving madness was the true test of insanity’ and produced three doctors to prove that Hadfield’s mania was caused by his head injuries. Kenyon was convinced before the jury had a chance to deliberate and ended the trial with Hadfield acquitted.
There was an immediate outcry as a would-be king-killer walked free and parliament rushed through the Criminal Lunatics Act, which enabled Hadfield to be detained indefinitely because he was regarded as a danger to himself and society at large. He was sent to Bedlam – the Royal Bethlehem Hospital – where he died from gaol fever, probably tuberculosis.
Altogether more dangerous than the clearly deranged James Hadfield was Edward Marcus Despard, an Irish adventurer with a chip on his shoulder. In many ways, Despard’s attempted coup of 1802 was a blueprint for Cato Street. Indeed during the trials of the 1820 conspirators, the name Despard was used disparagingly, as how not to carry out an assassination and revolution.
Despard was born in Queen’s County, Ireland, in 1751. He entered the navy as a midshipman at the age of 15 and was promoted lieutenant in 1772. For the next eighteen years he served in the West Indies, making a name for himself as an administrator with considerable engineering ability. He was stationed in Jamaica at the same time that the father of the future Cato Street conspirator William Davidson was Attorney-General there. He was promoted captain after the San Juan expedition of 1780 and led a successful attack on Spanish-held territory on the Black River two years later. By 1786, Despard was Superintendent of the Crown Colony of Honduras (today’s Belize) on the Mosquito Coast south of Yucatan.
The West Indies were notoriously difficult to police. They had a long history of piracy and running battles between settlers from just about every European state were commonplace. The elder Pitt, adopting a ‘blue-water policy’ in the Seven Years’ War had mounted several campaigns against the French and on the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, his son tried the same thing. By that time, however, Despard had been recalled to London to answer charges of incompetence.
As Superintendent, Despard’s brief was to settle the new territory, which he did without considering race and background. So alongside the exclusively British plantation owners were ex-slaves, smugglers, military volunteers and labourers, anyone in effect who agreed to purchase land and farm it. He did this, he said, because according to English law, there was no distinction in land tenure. A free man with enough money had no bar to ownership of property at home, but the Baymen did not see it that way and petitioned the Home Secretary, Lord Grenville, for redress. Cleverly, Despard stood for election as a magistrate and won a landslide victory. The racist Baymen would have none of it, complaining that the Superintendent had only won because he had the backing of ‘ignorant turtlers and people of colour’.
The people of colour arrived with Despard in London on his return in 1790. One was his wife, Catherine; the other his son, James. A great deal of research has been carried out in recent years on the black history of Britain and Catherine Despard deserves her place in it. Unlike the wives of the Cato Street conspirators, when her husband was accused of high treason, Catherine fought on his behalf. It is highly likely that the Despards were a unique example of a mixed marriage in England at that time. The slave trade would not be abolished for another seventeen years; the ownership of slaves not for another twenty after that. Relatively speaking there was a large number of blacks in the country, especially in London and Bristol, but they were not free (unless they had been enfranchised by liberal owners) and usually appeared in the roles of servants, boxers, prostitutes and menials.
The arrival of the Despards probably filled most whites with horror. It was one thing for British soldiers and administrators of empire to take black mistresses in the colonies and even produce mulatto or half-breed children (William Davidson belongs to this category) but actual marriage was something else. The extraordinary ex-slave Olaudah Equiano had already produced the first edition of his autobiographical The Interest
ing Narrative the previous year and in it he wrote:
Why not establish intermarriage at home and in our colonies? And encourage open, free and generous love, upon Nature’s own wide and extensive plan, subservient only to moral rectitude, without distinction of the colour of a skin?
Two years later, Equiano himself married a white girl from Cambridgeshire.
Race did indeed lie at the heart of Despard’s problems. The government refused to back him, anxious to keep the plantation owners sweet in any colonial sphere and he found himself dragged through any number of claims courts by the Baymen who wanted recompense for what they imagined was criminal mishandling of their affairs. The colonel found himself in the King’s Bench prison for debt in 1792.
The prison itself was new, the old one having been burnt by the mob in the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots twelve years earlier. Long before the attack on the Bastille, the English had a reputation for gaol-wrecking. The King’s Bench had been destroyed three times by the time Despard found himself there. Like most London prisons, it was all things to all men. It had its own ‘Rules’ by which better off prisoners (who would have included Despard) lived relatively comfortably, whereas the poor wallowed in the filth they had known on the outside in the reeking rookeries of St Giles, Wapping and St James. It was here that the disgruntled colonel read the new book by Tom Paine . . .
On his release two years later, Despard joined the London Corresponding Society and shortly after that the United Englishmen, the offshoot of Wolfe Tone’s ‘terrorist’ organization over the Irish Sea. The most common meeting houses for this group were either Furnival’s Inn in Holborn (much was to be made of this place in the Cato Street trials) or Soho Square. Large numbers of Irishmen, like those who lived in Gee’s Court off Oxford Street, met there, as did a hard core of disgruntled soldiers.
