Enemies of the State

by M. J. Trow

  availed themselves of a legal pretext to destroy a man, because he has been a friend to the truth, to liberty and to justice, because he has been a friend to the poor and the oppressed.

  The sheriff moved in to signal that that was enough and Despard wished the mob ‘health, happiness and freedom’. It would be over a century before any of them really had that.

  ‘What an amazing crowd,’ John Francis said to Despard when he had finished. ‘’Tis very cold; I think we shall have some rain.’

  At seven minutes to nine, the sheriff gave the signal and Brunskill went to work, beginning with Despard, ‘and they were all launched into eternity’. The colonel made no sound as he fell, his fists clenching twice before he hung, a dead weight at the end of the creaking rope. The crowd was silent now, the men with their hats off, some unable at the last moment to watch.

  Brunskill let them all hang for half an hour to make sure that life was extinct, then he and his assistants handed Despard down, stripped off his dark blue coat and cream, gold-laced waistcoat (traditionally a hanged man’s clothes became the property of his executioners) and the body was placed on the waiting block, amongst the sawdust strewn there to catch the blood and the head was hacked off ‘by persons engaged on purpose to perform that ceremony’. Then, Brunskill lifted the dripping head skyward by the hair. ‘This is the head of the traitor, Edward Marcus Despard.’ One by one the others followed suit, and the bodies were placed in their shells or coffins and the sawdust swept away.

  The police and the cavalry had not been needed. If Despard hoped for a last-minute rising of the people, it did not happen.

  Again, the redoubtable Catherine came to the fore. Despard, she claimed, had a right, as an honourable man and one of a family of long-serving soldiers, to burial in St Paul’s cathedral. The Lord Mayor of London, responsible after all for the safety of his city, opposed her, but she had her way.

  Three black-draped coaches followed the hearse on 1 March as Colonel Despard’s body was taken to the cathedral and buried near the north door.9 Again there was a police and army presence, just in case the mob rallied to their martyr. Again, there was no need.

  At some point between the execution and the interment in St Paul’s, Madame Tussaud’s services were sought. Marie Tussaud, née Grosholtz, was a brilliant artist who had recently arrived in London. Under the auspices of Dr Phillipe Curtius, she had been modelling wax likenesses of famous – and infamous – Frenchmen since before the Revolution. The fall of the Bastille and the Terror that followed gave her a whole range of grisly experiences as scores of severed heads came her way for modelling purposes. Such was the cult of the guillotine that Parisians mobbed Curtius’s premises to see the head of their hero Marat, murdered in his bath by ex-mistress Charlotte Corday, the heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and ultimately that of Maximilien Robespierre, with its shattered jaw.10

  Taking advantage of the Peace of Amiens which temporarily halted the war against Napoleon, Marie Tussaud (she had married an engineer eight years her junior by this time) arrived in London with her 4-year-old son. She set up a permanent exhibition at the Lyceum Theatre and quickly saw off any opposition, such as Mrs Salmon’s waxworks in Fleet Street and Mrs Bullock’s ‘Beautiful Cabinet of Wax Figures’. Her success was due to the Caverne des Grands Voleurs (Cave of the Great Thieves), the Separate Room, to which Edward Despard would now be added. In the years ahead, of course, it became the Chamber of Horrors.

  Marie Tussaud took the likeness at the undertaker’s premises in Mount Street, Lambeth, working quickly and unobtrusively. Despard was the last celebrity to be modelled by Madame Tussaud herself. The hanged traitor’s likeness travelled as a star exhibit to Edinburgh. Wisely, however, when she toured in Ireland in 1804, Despard’s head remained in storage. Eight men had been hanged for treason in Dublin the previous September and British troops patrolled the uneasy provinces in the aftermath of the Act of Union. Not until she returned to Scotland in the summer of 1808 did Despard appear again. His name remained in the catalogue until 1818, by which time interest was probably waning.11 The head is believed to have been burnt, ironically, during an exhibition in Bristol when the city was partially destroyed by rioters over the Reform Bill agitation of 1831–2.

  What are we to make of Despard’s desperate enterprise? In his sentencing, Lord Ellenborough said

  the objects of your atrocious, abominable and traitorous conspiracy were to overthrow the government and to seize upon and destroy the sacred person of our august and revered Sovereign.

  There was little doubt of that. The Newgate Calendar concluded:

  it was certainly the most vain [futile] and impotent attempt ever engendered in the distracted brain of an enthusiast [fanatic]. Without arms or any probable means, a few dozen men, the very dregs of society, led on by a disappointed and disaffected chief, were to overturn a mighty empire; nor does it appear that any man of their insignificant band of conspirators – Colonel Despard alone excepted – was above the level of the plebeian race. Yet a small party of this description . . . brooding over their vain attempts at a mean public house in St George’s Fields, alarmed the nation.12

  So futile did the whole business seem that many men at the time and several historians since have concluded that Despard was mad. This is patently not true. As we have seen, seducing the London-based garrisons (Wood and Francis were privates in the Grenadier Guards) was the right way to go, especially as these regiments were closest to the king, both physically and in terms of their historical relationship.13 Seizing the Bank of England also made sense. It was after that that the plan fell apart. Many historians have overlooked the importance of the Gordon Riots of 1780 when a charismatic leader, like Despard, had not only incited murder and mayhem but got away with it.

  Incensed at the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which was actually the government’s cynical attempt to raise Catholic troops for the armed forces in the teeth of the American crisis, George Gordon was accompanied by a mob of several thousand to the Commons on 2 June 1780 to demand the Act’s repeal. He broke off from his speech to the House to harangue the crowd from an upstairs balcony and an estimated 60,000 of them went on the rampage, burning down the houses of judges like Lord Mansfield and magistrates like Sir John Fielding before attacking the Bank of England and destroying as many prisons as they could. The gin distilleries in Holborn were blown up and large parts of the city reduced to rubble. As the dust settled, there were 235 dead, 173 wounded and 139 arrested.

  Gordon’s trial was a farce. The authorities deemed, inexplicably, that there was no direct evidence against him as having caused the violence and he was acquitted. Twenty-five others in the dock were found guilty of high treason and executed.

  The key to the whole thing was the ‘dregs of society’, the ‘plebeian race’ who provide the cannon-fodder in any revolution. Today, we tend to dismiss this rank and file as unimportant. We look to the leader of revolt, from Spartacus to Castro, and measure their worth against some rational yardstick that we have invented. But there is little rational about revolution. It plays to the deepest emotions in man. If a mob could terrorize the largest city in the world for six days; if a mob could topple the ancien regime – then anything was possible.

  Where Despard got it wrong was in not gauging the mood of the people properly. George Gordon was a blue-blooded aristocrat, a member of the House of Lords. Edward Despard was merely an ex-officer and an Irishman to boot, made bitter and resentful by the treatment he had received from authority. And he intended to kill a king, never on Gordon’s agenda. In the end, the ‘dregs’ did not rise in his support and he paid the price.

  Chapter 5

  ‘A Plot, a Plot! How they Sigh for a Plot!’

  In the year of Despard’s planned insurrection, the first edition appeared of William Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register. Knowledge was power and one prerequisite of knowledge was literacy. Without an ability to read, a man could not understand the arguments for which he faced the
barricades. Without the ability to write he could not put his name to a petition demanding reform. The government knew this perfectly well and was in no hurry to educate the masses. Education was not only expensive, it was dangerous.

  We know that all the men who faced trial over the Cato Street conspiracy were literate, at least up to a point. Richard Tidd’s letter – ‘Sir I Ham a very Bad Hand at Righting’ – sounds like a Dickensian character’s efforts, but it makes sense and no doubt proved the government’s point; Tidd had murderous designs in his heart but how much of that was fostered by the incitements of the radical press? It is likely that the majority of men among the working class had basic literacy skills (this was far less true of women) because of the increasing number of schools. Sunday schools (like the one where William Davidson briefly taught) were available from 1780, although they did not take everyone. Their founder, Robert Raikes, insisted for example that all children wore shoes. Dame schools, at a penny a day, offered very basic education, but their numbers were growing. In 1810 and 1812 the National Schools were set up by Andrew Bell (for the Anglicans) and Joseph Lancaster (for the Dissenters). ‘Calendar men’, ‘Number men’ and ballad-singers hawked their written wares in working-class areas, including the ‘dying speeches’1 of men like Despard. They sold political tracts too.

  The radical press’s circulation fluctuated with the country’s mood. The years after Despard and before the assassination of Spencer Perceval were relatively quiet. Most eyes were focused on the Channel as Bonaparte prepared the army of Boulogne for an invasion. Nelson effectively destroyed that opportunity at Trafalgar (October 1805) and thereafter, England was safe, at least from invasion. Admiral Earl St Vincent’s boast of 1801 – ‘I do not say they [the French] cannot come. I only say they cannot come by sea’ – was now a proven fact. As the war began in Portugal and dragged on in Spain however and the bite of the Industrial Revolution was felt, the Midlands and the North saw the first outbreaks of Luddism and machine-wrecking. And when the war ended, the radical press had a field day.

  Cobbett’s Twopenny Trash was a clear winner. Between October 1816 and February 1817 it sold up to 60,000 copies a week. London dailies, like The Times and the Observer sold under 7,000 each. Thomas Wooler’s The Black Dwarf had reached 12,000 by 1819. Freedom of the press – what could and could not be published – became a big issue. Fox’s libel law of 1792 meant that juries had to decide on what was libellous and this often ran counter to advice given them by the Bench. One of the victims was the bookseller William Hone who upset Liverpool’s government in 1817 by writing parodies on the Lord’s Prayer, thereby neatly offending both church and state:

  Our Lord who art in the Treasury, whatsoever be thy name, thy power be prolongued, thy will be done throughout the Empire . . . Turn us not out of our places; but keep us in the House of Commons, the Land of Pensions and Plenty; and deliver us from the People. Amen2

  Under Justice Abbott (who would preside over the Cato Street trials) Hone was acquitted. Under Lord Ellenborough (who had tried Despard) it happened again, despite the most appallingly illegal interruptions from the judge and a summing up of disgraceful partiality. This was the last time such a prosecution was brought and it was Ellenborough’s last case. Men said he never recovered from being laughed at. There were 115 prosecutions brought in the two years before Cato Street, but after that, things quietened down. The reason is best summed up by the poet John Keats in a letter to his brother in September 1819:

  He [the bookseller and printer Richard Carlile] has been selling devotional pamphlets, republished Tom Paine and many other works held in superstitious horror. After all they [the authorities] are afraid to prosecute. They are afraid of his defence; it would be published in all the papers all over the empire. They shudder at this. The trials would light a flame they could not extinguish.3

  Even so, men like Cobbett, Carlile, Hone and the rest did serve time in prison, especially during the suspension of habeas corpus when no such trials took place. Joseph Swann, a Macclesfield hat salesman and newsvendor was gaoled for a total of four years and six months for selling seditious literature in 1819:

  Off with your fetters; spurn the slavish yoke;

  Now, now, or never, can your chain be broke;

  Swift then, rise and give the fatal stroke.4

  This was inflammatory material and for every man who read it – or had it read to him – and muttered into his cups in a tavern, there were others (few, maybe – but that was the question) who were prepared to take it seriously and do something.

  What emerged from the trial of Despard – and would emerge again in the Cato Street affair – was the number of radical centres, almost always public houses, where seditious meetings took place. In London, which would, of course, be the recruiting ground for Cato Street, the Two Bells, the Flying Horse, the Ham and Windmill, the Bleeding Heart, the Coach and Horses, the Brown Bear and the Black Horse were all places where like-minded gentlemen could hire a back or upstairs room for whatever purposes they wished. Few if any questions were asked and such pubs were perfect for the cross-pollination of grievances. Here the disaffected Irish could nudge elbows with hard-bitten soldiery, out of work canal ‘navvies’ and anybody else increasingly unhappy with their lot.

  The acceptable face of working-class reform meetings were the Hampden Clubs formed in 1812 by the ‘good, grey Major’, John Cartwright. The clubs themselves were named after John Hampden, Oliver Cromwell’s cousin who had defied the arbitrary government of Charles I by refusing to pay tax called Ship Money in 1637. Cartwright was originally a naval officer with estates in Lincolnshire and his title derived from his post in the county’s militia. A sane and sensible critic, he sided morally with the Americans in the War of Independence and wrote the definitive democratic book Take Your Choice in the year that Thomas Jefferson produced his Declaration of Independence. It advocated parliamentary reform, universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, annual parliaments and a secret ballot – almost everything in fact which the Chartist movement (1836–c.1850) stated as their aims.

  Seen as too much of an extremist, Cartwright failed to get into parliament three times and in 1805 came to London to contact other radicals at both ends of the social spectrum – Francis Burdett, the baronet, and Francis Place, the tailor.

  From 1812 much of Cartwright’s life was spent travelling, establishing Hampden Clubs in the provinces. His insight into welding middle-class ambition and working-class muscle seriously worried the authorities and he was arrested in Huddersfield in 1813. Three years later, the first club outside London was formed by William Fitton at Royden in Shropshire and in Lancashire the weavers Samuel Bamford and John Knight formed others, as did the semi-literate doctor, Joseph Healey, at Oldham and the brush manufacturer Joseph Johnson in Manchester itself. By the year of Cato Street there were at least twenty-five such clubs across the country, all of them talking various shades of revolution.

  The whole question of what happened at Cato Street depends on our definition of three words. Arthur Thistlewood and others at the 1820 trials talked of reformers. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines ‘reform’ as ‘the removal of faults or errors esp. of a moral, political or social kind’.5

  The problem was – how was the removal to take place? Much later in the century, the group of intellectual socialists calling themselves Fabians took their name from the Roman General Quintus Fabius Maximus, who avoided pitched battles but wore down his opposition gradually. This group worked slowly and patiently for change, always through legal means, by discussion and reason rather than violence.

  Radical is the next word we have to understand. Again, the Shorter Oxford says ‘Advocating thorough or far-reaching change, representing or supporting an extreme section of a party’ – and immediately, we must ask another question – how extreme? The Press in 1811–20 is usually termed radical and some men were imprisoned both for writing and reading it. Tom Paine is usually referred to as a radical, so are William Cobb
ett, Francis Burdett and Colonel Despard.

  At what point, then, does radical slide inexorably into the last of the ‘three Rs’ – revolutionary? The Shorter Oxford is downright disappointing here: ‘Pertaining to, characterized by, or of the nature of revolution, involving or constituting radical change.’ In other words, we have been thrown back to the earlier word, as if ‘radicalism’ and ‘revolution’ are interchangeable. If we look up ‘revolution’ itself, we get ‘alteration, change, mutation’. In terms of history, however, there is little doubt that revolution implies something sudden, swift and violent. Reformers may take years to effect change; radicals want to sweep away existing systems; revolutionaries arm themselves with swords, guns, hand-grenades and are prepared to die in a hay-loft or on the gallows.

  The Radical map of London, 1820. Many of the meeting places for the Radicals were along Holborn and the streets adjoining.

  What looked like a revolutionary act took place in May 1812. On that day, John Bellingham walked into the lobby of the Houses of Parliament and shot the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, dead. Perceval remains the only holder of the office to die in this way, despite the efforts of Thistlewood and the men of Cato Street eight years later. ‘If it had not been for that horrid incident,’ wrote George Malcolm Thomson, his tongue firmly in his cheek, ‘Perceval might be remembered today as the smallest Prime Minister . . . or the prime Minister with the record number of children . . . or the one with the prettiest wife . . .’6

  Spencer Perceval was a modest man with much to be modest about. In the portrait by G F Joseph, he has large, kind eyes, a receding hairline and a smirk hovering around his thin lips. He looks like a man a bit too eager to please. The offspring of a second marriage, he had to make a living at the Bar and for a while lived with his young wife above a carpet shop in Bedford Row. As time went on, he veered towards politics and obtained minor posts which boosted his income. Astonishingly, he was ‘reckoned’ by William Pitt, as the man most likely to succeed him and ‘most able to cope with Mr Fox’. This is all the more surprising when his maiden speech was little short of a disaster. He became first Solicitor-General, then Attorney-General in Henry Addington’s misnamed Ministry of All the Talents before moving on to the Exchequer and by 1809 he was First Lord of the Treasury – Prime Minister.