by M. J. Trow
On paper, Perceval was actually a natural target for revolutionaries. ‘An honest little fellow’ he may have been, but he was also deeply reactionary, opposed to Catholic emancipation and any kind of reform. He only agreed to serve under Pitt in 1804 as long as the issue of Catholic emancipation was not raised. When the Luddite unrest broke out across the North, Perceval’s immediate reaction was to send troops to the trouble spots. Parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire were under martial law by the end of May 1812 with arbitrary arrests, threats and even various forms of torture to find the mysterious – and non-existent – organizer of the machine-wrecking, General Ludd. There were bread riots in Leeds, Sheffield, Barnsley, Carlisle and Bristol.
Sydney Smith summed up the problem admirably – and it applied to all those men who should have been around the table at Lord Harrowby’s in February 1820 just as much:
I say I fear he [Perceval] will pursue a policy destructive to the true interests of this country; and then you tell me he is faithful to Mrs Perceval and kind to the Master Percevals . . . I should prefer that he whipped his boys and saved the country.7
On Monday 11 May, a committee of the Commons was in earnest discussion over Orders in Council relating to trade. Napoleon’s Continental System was still in place, although Portugal and Russia had both refused to accept his decrees for port closures and continued to trade with Britain. Lord Brougham realized that Perceval was not present and sent a servant to find him. It was on his way across the lobby that the assassin struck. Accounts differ as to exactly where John Bellingham was hiding, but it was either behind a door or a pillar. He stepped out and fired his pistol at point-blank range into Perceval’s body. The Prime Minister fell backwards, gasping, ‘I am murdered!’ as astonished MPs looked on, unable to grasp what had just happened. Bellingham simply stood there, his one shot spent, and waited to be arrested.
‘My name is Bellingham,’ he said later that day in response to questioning. ‘It’s a private injury. I know what I have done. It was a denial of justice on the part of the Government.’8 In claiming he knew what he had done, Bellingham was signing his own death warrant. As we have seen, it would be nearly another half century before a definition of legal insanity was reached and Bellingham took his place in the dock like any other murderer.
When news of Perceval’s death reached the provinces, there was general jubilation among the working class. ‘A man came running down the street,’ said a witness in the Potteries, ‘waving his hat round his head and shouting with frantic joy “Perceval is shot, hurrah!”’9 In Nottingham, there were flags and drums and street parties. In London, immediately after the outrage, a crowd quickly gathered and some of them cheered as Bellingham was led away. Polite society was appalled, ignoring the fact that in Lancaster that same month eight people were sentenced to death for rioting and thirteen transported to Botany Bay. At Chester, fifteen faced the rope and eight were transported. This was the England Spencer Perceval had governed. In the eyes of many people, his death was entirely justified.
‘This is but the beginning,’ the poet Coleridge heard someone mutter at Bellingham’s execution. But in fact, ironically, the Prime Minister’s murder had nothing to do with politics at all.
John Bellingham was an unstable businessman whose business took him to Russia. It all went wrong for him and he ended up in a Russian prison. With his money gone, he turned to the British ambassador in St Petersburg who was less than helpful. So too was the Consul-General. On his release, Bellingham came home, rented rooms in rundown New Millman Street and began to bombard the government with letters demanding redress. Since Bellingham had brought his disasters on himself and broken Russian law at a time when it was in the government’s interests to keep Russia sweet against the common foe, Napoleon, nothing could be done for him.
At his trial between 13 and 15 May it was decided that Bellingham did indeed know right from wrong and he was sentenced to death. To the government, whatever the specific motivation on Bellingham’s part, the plans of Despard, the riots of the starving, the machine-wrecking of the Luddites and the insanity of John Bellingham were all merely the jutting ugly tips of the same terrifying iceberg and the ship of state was on a collision course with it. No one was in the pardoning mood and Brunskill, the executioner, was sent for again.
Outside Newgate with a large crowd jostling and cat-calling it was clear that the condemned man was a hero. ‘God Bless you!’ they roared and such was the noise it was probably only Brunskill who heard Bellingham’s last words: ‘I thank God for having enabled me to meet my fate with so much fortitude and resignation.’10
At his trial, Edward Despard had referred to the Cabinet of Henry Addington as the ‘man eaters’. As is clear from Sydney Smith’s comment on Perceval the family man versus Perceval the Prime Minister, each of the Cabinet had his soft, loving side. Collectively, they could be said to be guilty of murder.
Essentially, by 1812, the men who would be the targets of the Cato Street conspirators had metaphorically taken their places around that dining table at Lord Harrowby’s. The only conspicuous absentee was Arthur Wellesley, then beginning the second phase of his war in Spain, taking the fortresses of Badajoz and Cuidad Rodrigo. All the others were already there.
Oddly, in the whole of the 430-page account of the Cato Street trial by George Wilkinson, there is scarcely a mention of the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, who took over a nation, at once stunned and euphoric, on the death of Perceval. This is hardly surprising. The politician who would be dubbed years later ‘the arch-mediocrity’ by Benjamin Disraeli hardly emerges as a firebrand. Castlereagh, Sidmouth, Eldon – these were the black, reactionary heart of the Cabinet as far as the men of Cato Street were concerned; Liverpool was almost an irrelevance.
Robert Banks Jenkinson was 50 at the time of Cato Street. The portrait of him by Sir Thomas Lawrence shows a rather bland face with a slight twinkle around the eyes, a large, prominent nose and decidedly thinning hair. He was the son of a Tory country squire and was educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford. It was rather unfortunate that he went on the obligatory Grand Tour (to soak up the classical sites and fleshpots of Europe) in 1789 as all Hell broke out in Paris. He personally witnessed the fall of the Bastille and for him more than most, this was a defining experience of terror that never left him.
At 21, the political borough11 mongers were at work arranging for his seat for the pocket borough of Appleby in Yorkshire. Shy, awkward and rather serious, his maiden speech in the Commons was awful, especially as it was in answer to Samuel Whitbread’s attack on Pitt’s ministry over naval expenditure. Whitbread was a hugely popular Whig MP, as well as a brewer and promoter of ingenious contraptions; his bright yellow curricle was one of the sights of London. As a pacifist, he objected to anything pro-war. Dubbed ‘England’s greatest and most useful citizen’ by the radical editor of The Times, Thomas Barnes, Whitbread was pro-Burdett and parliamentary reform.
Unaccountably, Pitt was impressed with Jenkinson’s speech and gave him a junior post on the India Board. He visited French émigrés in Coblenz and became even more convinced that all things reformist were actually revolutionary and therefore dangerous. When Louis XVI was executed, Jenkinson was all for a declaration of war on France.
When war was actually declared, Jenkinson did his patriotic bit and became colonel of the Cinque Ports Fencible Cavalry, one of the many units raised in the 1790s to protect hearths and homes. In reward for loyalty, Jenkinson was made Master of the Mint and his father, also in politics, the Earl of Liverpool. On Pitt’s resignation over the issue of Catholic emancipation, Jenkinson became Foreign Secretary in Addington’s ministry. His father’s elevation to the peerage made Jenkinson Lord Hawkesbury and when Pitt returned in 1804, he was Home Secretary, still only 33.
Pitt’s death in 1806, largely through overwork and port wine, led to something of a panic to find a replacement. George III, increasingly ailing and out of touch, offered the premiership to Hawkesbury but he
lacked the confidence at that stage to accept. He served under the Duke of Portland however, along with three other men who in various ways are central to the story of Cato Street – Perceval, Castlereagh and George Canning. The last two detested each other and fought an inconclusive duel. Duelling was illegal in England and the incident helped bring down Portland’s government. Spencer Perceval stepped into the breach and Hawkesbury, now the Earl of Liverpool on his father’s death, was made Secretary for War and the Colonies. As such, the war in Spain was his responsibility and to his credit he gave Wellington the free hand and equipment he needed.
Perceval’s death saw Liverpool entering Number Ten. Now, he was ready, with wide experience in key Cabinet posts. A man who twitched under stress – George Canning called him ‘Blinkinson’ – he would be eclipsed by the ‘new’ men of 1822: Robert Peel, William Huskisson, Canning and, a long way behind in terms of ability, Frederick Robinson. Liverpool’s strength was in choosing good men of talent and steering a middle course through turbulent times. Tell that to the men of Cato Street.
‘Shed a tear for Henry Addington!’ wrote George Thomson. ‘There he is, poor man, a thin and not very succulent sliver of premiership between two thick slices of Pitt.’12 The future Lord Sidmouth, whom the Cato Street conspirators loathed, was the son of a doctor, born in London in May 1751. He was at school in Winchester, at university at Brasenose, Oxford, and practised law in London until Pitt persuaded him into politics. In 1783 he became Tory MP for Devizes in Wiltshire and six years later, largely because of his diplomacy and understanding of procedure, Speaker of the House. He was a hard worker, but no orator and had absolutely no sense of humour.
The resignation of Pitt put George III in a difficult situation. He had appointed ‘Master Billy’ way back in 1783 and against all predictions the man had proved to be brilliant. But he would not be shifted over Catholic emancipation. The Act of Union of 1801 was Pitt’s brainchild but a vital clause in it involved giving political parity to Catholics. As a stubborn reactionary who was also head of the Church of England, George could not accept this and Pitt resigned. Addington therefore had greatness thrust upon him. The king had watched the man going through his paces in command of his yeomanry regiment and was impressed by his leadership qualities! ‘Addington, you have saved the country,’ the king told him with rather lofty optimism.
In fact, the new Prime Minister lacked international experience and was a miserable speaker. With Pitt a hard act to follow, Addington had to contend with the waspish Canning – ‘Pitt is to Addington as London is to Paddington’ – as well as the fact that his relatively humble origins did not quite square with the Tory squirearchy. ‘He was not’, wrote William Wilberforce, ‘well fitted for the warfare of St Stephen’s.’ He worked out the Peace of Amiens but must have been well aware that it was only actually a breathing space for Napoleon to manoeuvre himself.13 As always in a peace, the government immediately (and stupidly) slashed income tax and reduced the naval establishment from 130,000 men to 70,000. The army was reduced to 95,000. Not only was this hopelessly short-sighted, but it unleashed on the country bitter ex-servicemen who found their old jobs already gone and themselves surplus to requirements. Such men may have joined Despard as their counterparts in 1820 may have joined Thistlewood.
Addington was a tolerable peace minister, but he was not a war leader. Napoleon’s virtual invasion of Switzerland saw hostilities start again and the Prime Minister’s first speech to rally Parliament was one of his worst ever. His government fell on 10 May 1804 and Pitt was back. In January 1805, Addington himself, now Lord Sidmouth, returned as Lord President of the Council. With Pitt’s death a year later, Sidmouth joined the ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ as Lord Privy Seal and then as Lord President again under Perceval and finally as Home Secretary under Liverpool. By the year of Cato Street, Sidmouth had served for thirty years in six administrations. Canning, as always, had the last word – ‘He is like the smallpox. Everybody is obliged to have him once in their lives.’
As Home Secretary, internal law and order was Sidmouth’s particular concern. In the years that led to Cato Street, he stood out as a grim symbol of repression.
Had the Harrowby dinner actually gone ahead, one of its more dazzling members was George Canning. He was one of those larger-than-life characters who easily outshone most of his colleagues. Like Sidmouth, his origins were not of the blood as far as the Tory party was concerned. His father was an Irish squire who died in debt having tried to make some money out of journalism. His mother was a failed actress who produced a string of half brothers and sisters for little George. Luckily for the boy (the family was now living in London) his uncle, Stratford Canning, was a City financier and he paid the fees for Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. His mother continued to haunt the theatre and the linen drapery business and for the rest of her life he worried about her, swinging a secret pension for her when he took office.
Enormously popular, with a ready wit that often got him into trouble, Canning became head boy at Eton and wrote a school magazine which was so successful he sold it to a publisher for £50! He won Latin prizes at Oxford and played at law in Lincoln’s Inn but his vanity and flamboyance made him a natural for politics. At first pro-Whig and pro-French Revolution, the outbreak of the Revolutionary War saw him change his mind and join Pitt’s Tories. Such turncoats are rarely trusted and Canning carried the stigma of this for the rest of his life. It did not help that he was so proud of being Irish at a time when Ireland was usually regarded as one of the outposts of Hell. By 1792 he was contributing to the fortnightly Anti-Jacobin and, under Pitt’s influence, became MP for Newport, Isle of Wight. His Commons speeches were theatrical and his acerbic wit won him enemies. As one opponent said, Canning was a ‘light, jesting, paragraph-making man’. He would have been at home today among sound-biting politicians. By the late 1790s, he regarded democracy as ‘tyranny and anarchy combined’.
In 1799 he was a member of the India Board, resigned with Pitt over Catholic emancipation in 1801 and delighted in attacking Pittites, like Jenkinson, who had joined Addington’s administration. On Pitt’s return, Canning was made Treasurer of the Navy, a post which bored and disappointed him. Under Portland in 1807 he became Foreign Minister at a time when European affairs were critical. This was the high water mark of Napoleon’s power. He controlled Europe from the English Channel to the river Niemen and his Treaty of Tilsit with the Russian Tsar seemed to make his position unassailable. Well informed as he was by his spies abroad, Canning took a bold decision and ordered troops to Denmark to prevent the fleet from falling into French hands. He did the same with the Portuguese fleet.
It was now that Canning decided that the War Minister, Lord Castlereagh, must go. Wellington’s early victory in Spain was effectively wiped by the interference of a more senior general, Sir Huw Dalrymple and the Walcheren expedition of 1809 was a disaster. Canning blamed Castlereagh for both. Castlereagh grew tired of Canning’s opposition and wrote him a three-page challenge to a duel. As dawn broke on 21 September 1809, two of His Majesty’s Government faced each other in the mists of Putney Heath and aimed pistols at each other. Canning’s ball pinged a button off Castlereagh’s coat; Castlereagh’s ball took a chunk out of Canning’s thigh. Both men had to resign.
Canning refused to serve under Perceval, hoping that he might have been sent for instead. It would also have meant serving with Castlereagh, which he was not prepared to do. In 1812 when he was offered the Foreign Office he again refused because Castlereagh was Leader of the House. In that year of Perceval’s assassination he won the seat for Liverpool on the anti-slave trade vote and briefly, two years later, became ambassador to Portugal. In June 1816 he returned to take up the post of President of the Board of Control, which effectively ran Indian affairs and it was in this capacity he was still serving at the time of Cato Street. Perhaps more than anyone who should have dined with Lord Harrowby, Canning was a mercurial enigma. On the one hand he was a disciple of Burke and
yet saw the need for constitutional change. As perhaps the most dazzling of the ‘Liberal Tories’ in the 1820s, he championed the underdog in foreign affairs, always put England first and outwitted the machinations of the European superpowers. But in 1820, in terms of the rising popular clamour for reform, he was as unrelenting as Sidmouth.
Or as Eldon. John Scott was born in Newcastle in 1751, the son of a coal merchant. As with other Cabinet members, his relatively humble background is perhaps surprising, but, like others, it was overlaid with an Oxford education and a career in the law. His elopement with a banker’s daughter at the age of 21 was the last wild thing he ever did and he was called to the Bar in 1776. True to form, seven years later he became MP for Weobley, a rotten borough in Herefordshire. Scott was virulently anti-French Revolution and watched the growing discontent of the British masses with a mixture of contempt and fear. He was Solicitor-General in 1788 and, as Attorney-General five years later, was able to use all the viciousness of the Bloody Code against sedition of any kind. As Sydney Smith wrote, ‘Lord Eldon and the Court of Chancery sat heavy on mankind.’ In 1801, under Addington, he became Lord Chancellor, the supreme arbiter on matters of law. His take on reform was extreme. Eight years after Cato Street he referred to the Bill to repeal the 300-year-old Test and Corporation Acts (which would enfranchise Catholics) as ‘bad, as mischievous and as revolutionary as the most captious dissenter would wish it to be’.14 His views on education were that learning to read would send ‘a hundred thousand tall fellows with clubs and pikes against Whitehall’. One of his judgements in 1805 meant that certain schools were allowed to teach nothing but Latin and Greek. He and Sidmouth regarded themselves as the ‘last of the old school’ and as long as they dominated the Cabinet (Eldon was a favourite of both George III and George IV) these dinosaurs were unlikely to accept the sort of concessionary changes which would have made Cato Street unnecessary.
