Enemies of the State

by M. J. Trow

  As always, the private man was different. He was cheerful, he was kind, he liked his port (usually two bottles a day) and he did say in one memorable moment, ‘If I were to begin life again, damn my eyes but I would begin as an agitator.’ But Lord Eldon did not begin again as an agitator. He just hanged those who were.

  Of all the men who should have dined with Lord Harrowby, the one that most carried the scorn and contempt of the working class was the strikingly handsome Robert Stewart, Marquis of Londonderry, but always known by his earlier title of Viscount Castlereagh. Shelley’s cold and damning line still hovers over the man’s reputation – ‘I met Murder in the way; he had a mask like Castlereagh.’ It was his head in particular that butcher James Ings wanted to hack off at Lord Harrowby’s and he carried his butcher’s knife for the purpose.

  Stewart was born of a Scottish-Irish family in County Donegal in 1769. A graduate of St John’s College, Cambridge, his Grand Tour enabled him to hear a debate in the Constituent Assembly in Paris. He sat in the Dublin parliament from 1790 and in the Westminster Commons from 1794 to 1797 as MP for the pocket borough of Orford. When the Dublin parliament was disbanded under the Act of Union, Castlereagh was one of the hundred MPs to join Westminster, representing County Down, and refused an English peerage which would have taken him to the Lords.15

  His was the unenviable task of Chief Secretary for Ireland in the year of Wolfe Tone’s rebellion. The vicious handling of this rising was not Castlereagh’s decision; in fact he complained about it bitterly, but the Irishman’s memory is long and he was regarded in the provinces as little short of a monster. They conveniently forgot that he resigned in 1801 along with Pitt over George III’s refusal to accept emancipation for the Catholics.

  In July 1805 Castlereagh was made Secretary for War and the Colonies. With the exception of Pitt, now becoming increasingly ill, he was the only Cabinet minister in the Commons and this was to take its toll on the man’s health and sanity in the years ahead. Out of office during the ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ he was back under Portland in his old job and at a crucially testing time. His reorganization of the appallingly amateurish militia was sensible and creative. His personal choice of Sir John Moore to command the Light Infantry was brilliant and even the decision to land at Walcheren to destroy the French fleet was a perfectly good one. Unfortunately, Moore was killed at Corunna and the commanders on the ground at Walcheren dragged their feet, losing half their command in the process. Not everyone pointed the finger of blame at Castlereagh, but he felt responsible nonetheless.

  He bounced back quicker than Canning after the unfortunate business on Putney Heath and was at the Foreign Office before Perceval’s assassination. It is perhaps a little over the top to accept Geoffrey Treasure’s verdict that Castlereagh was ‘perhaps the greatest foreign minister that this country has ever had’. The diplomatic shenanigans that were the Congress of Vienna of 1814–15 and the subsequent congresses are beyond the scope of this book. Castlereagh, with his wide command of languages, his feel for European attitudes and his personal friendship with Prince Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, made him a natural for all this. But he was also secretive and a difficult man to love. Though he dismissed the ambitions of the Holy Alliance of European superpowers as ‘a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’, it took him eight years to realize that British interests were not being considered by anyone else and had to leave it to his old nemesis Canning to do something about that.

  The average Englishman – and certainly the disgruntled labourer or would-be Jacobin – merely saw Shelley’s Castlereagh, the cold unfeeling supporter of reaction that could cheer the yeomanry’s bloody work at Manchester and frame the Six Acts to muzzle any attempts at reform. The problem was that, from 1812, Castlereagh was the sole Cabinet minister in the Commons, and therefore bore the brunt not only of awkward questions from the Whig opposition, but the uncertainty of some of his own party too. A strike by Glasgow weavers in March 1813; the opening of a Jesuit college in County Kildare in May 1814; Corn Law riots over the price of bread in London, March 1815 – all this and much more came Castlereagh’s way and he was supposed to provide answers. Actually, none of it was his responsibility at all. But James Ings wasn’t listening.

  The other men who should have dined in Grosvenor Square were small fry. Harrowby himself was Lord President of the Council and was elevated to the higher ranks of the peerage as an earl in 1809. Dudley Ryder had been Viscount Sandon and Baron Harrowby before that. His grandfather had been Lord Chief Justice on the King’s Bench in the 1750s and died the day after he had been offered a peerage by George II. The house on the south side of Grosvenor Square was merely the earl’s town house. He also owned considerable estates in the Midlands – it was at Sandon Hall near Stafford that William Davidson, Cato Street’s ‘man of colour’, worked for Harrowby on his furniture and fittings.

  Nicholas Vansittart was 54 at the time of Cato Street and has the distinction of being the longest serving Chancellor of the Exchequer in British history and one of the worst. The son of the governor of Bengal, Vansittart was born in Bloomsbury and educated at Christ Church, Oxford. Called to the Bar, he began his political career as a pamphleteer for Pitt and stood as MP for that most rotten of boroughs, the ‘accursed hill’ of Old Sarum, near Salisbury. He held a succession of posts under Pitt and Addington and was making a name for himself as a financier. He became Liverpool’s Chancellor of the Exchequer in May 1812 and embarked on a series of incredibly convoluted tax reforms to tackle the huge national debt brought about by the long years of war. He became very unpopular in the country at large and by 1820 his financial credibility had come under fire from William Huskisson in his own party, as well as the classical economist David Ricardo.

  Henry Bathurst was the son of a former Lord Chancellor. An MP from 1783, he inherited his father’s earldom eleven years later and was shunted rapidly through a range of government departments including the Treasury, the Admiralty, the Board of Control (India), the Board of Trade and the Foreign Office. Whereas the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes him as a ‘capable minister and a Tory of moderate opinions’,16 it has to be asked how much in-depth experience he actually gained in any of those areas. As Colonial Secretary in 1820 he had little to do with internal events in this country, although he was concerned that transportation to Botany Bay (the fate of the more fortunate Cato Street conspirators) was not really working in any meaningful sense.

  Charles Grimble wrote:

  [Frederick] Robinson is an excellent Minister in days of calm and sunshine, but not endowed with either capacity or experience for these strange times.

  Historian George Thomson goes further: Robinson was a man ‘with a plump, dimpled face, pleasant manners, a vein of unconscious humour and not much else.’17 A contemporary18 said: ‘Why Fred Robinson is in the Cabinet I don’t know.’

  Frederick John Robinson was born to a titled family in Yorkshire, went with the usual monotony to Harrow and Cambridge and was MP for Ripon at the age of 25. As Chancellor of the Exchequer under Liverpool, his name is forever associated with the hated Corn Laws of 1815, the symbol of the greed of the landed interest. To be fair, the man was far from happy about the legislation, but a London mob attacked his house in Old Burlington Street and slashed valuable paintings. There was already a military guard there and two people were killed. In relaying all this to parliament, Robinson broke down in tears and earned the nickname ‘the blubberer’. He was Treasurer of the Navy by the time of Cato Street.

  Nice men, with wives and children, families and friends. Adolf Hitler liked dogs and children and he worried about killing lobsters. The same man (although there is famously no hard evidence for this) advocated the murder of every Jew in Europe.

  It is unfair to link Liverpool’s Tory Ministry of 1820 with the monster of the twentieth century, but we have to see these men from the perspective of the Cato Street conspirators. To them, the Ministry itself was a conspiracy; one bent on
punishing the poor for being poor, of keeping the cost of bread artificially high; of imprisoning, transporting and hanging those who complained.

  And on its part the government saw conspiracies everywhere. ‘A Plot! A Plot!,’ wrote Cobbett of them. ‘How they sigh for a plot!’

  It was on its way.

  Chapter 6

  Pig’s Meat

  If His Majesty’s Government wanted a plot, they needed look no further than the ideas of Thomas Spence. Whereas most members of the London Corresponding Society dreamt of universal suffrage, a free education and some vague notion of a better deal in life, it is likely that some of them were prepared to go further.

  Spence himself seems a straightforward man, but his legacy is confused. Because he operated latterly almost exclusively in London and one of his supporters was the Cato Street conspirator William Davidson, we have to evaluate his contribution to the most brazen assassination plan in British history.

  Spence was born in Quayside, Newcastle, in June 1750. The city was one of the rapidly growing industrial centres of the North, with coal and iron challenging the older, still medieval work of the woollen and worsted weavers. Spence’s family came originally from Scotland and his father was a net and shoemaker who sold hardware in a booth on the Sandhill. Young Spence had eighteen full and half brothers and sisters, and his father taught him to read and write sufficiently well for the boy to become a schoolmaster.

  In his twenties, Spence became fascinated by a land dispute in Newcastle over common rights and he wrote a pamphlet which was hawked around the city, advocating his ideas which, many years later, came to form the basis of Spencean philanthropy. Since land was the currency of conquerors and the symbolic cornerstone of power, Spence decided that it should be distributed in a different way. Based on the parish, long the centre of social life, land must be returned to the people. In fact, his tract of 1800 was called just that – Restorer of Society to its Natural State. Inevitably, Spence’s proposals did not end there and he had a rather rosy, optimistic view of how easily it would all happen:

  The public mind being suitably prepared by reading my little Tracts and conversing on the subject, a few Contingent parishes have only to declare the land to be theirs and . . . other adjacent parishes would immediately follow the example . . . and thus would a beautiful and powerful New Republic instantaneously arise in full vigour.1

  All land would be held in common by each parish and profits from rents would be ploughed back into the parish to build and sustain schools and libraries. Each parish would send a delegate to a national assembly and every adult male would be a member of the militia.

  Spence produced these ideas on paper in 1775, the year that the American colonies broke away, claiming that land which actually belonged to Britain was rightfully theirs. As long as Spence remained in a political backwater like Newcastle, there was little harm done,2 but in 1792 he moved to London.

  Now it was a different place and a different time and phrases like ‘national assembly’ had an alien and terrifying connotation. The Terror began in France that year and war was imminent. Cashing in on the latest bestseller Spence revamped his 1775 pamphlet with the title The Real Rights of Man. He sold Paine’s original alongside his own and let men take their choice.

  Spence first operated out of a shop in Chancery Lane, but found himself arrested almost immediately for selling Paine. Accordingly, he kept on the move, hiring premises in High Holborn, Little Turnstile, Oxford Street and eventually selling from a barrow in the street. He also sold medallions embossed with the scales of justice and saloop, a cheap coffee made from sassafras or medicinal bark. Francis Place, living and working in his tailorshop-cum-lending-library also sold Spence’s tracts and wrote of him:

  He was not more than five feet high, very honest, simple, single-minded, who loved mankind and firmly believed that a time would come when men would be virtuous, wise and happy. He was unpractical in the ways of the world to an extent hardly imaginable.

  Throughout the 1790s Spence continued to write and disseminate his tracts, the best known of which, between 1793 and 1796 was called Pig’s Meat or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude (Burke’s phrase of 1790). Chalked slogans – ‘Spence’s System’ – began to appear on London’s buildings and in December 1794 he was imprisoned in Newgate under the suspension of habeas corpus and once more in 1801 (this time for twelve months) for the release of the Restorer pamphlet which the government regarded as seditious. By now Spence had invented a Utopian state – ‘Spensonia’ – in which not only his land reforms, but his idealized society with its own phonetic language3 would be a reality. On 3 January 1795 Spence wrote to the Morning Chronicle complaining that over a three-year period he had been dragged four times from his door by law officers, three times hauled before grand juries, three times sent to prison and once indicted at the Bar. He put his case in writing – something Despard would never be allowed to do – ‘The case of Thomas Spence, bookseller, who was committed for selling the second part of Paine’s Rights of Man’.

  ‘Spence’s just plan for everlasting peace and happiness, or in fact, the Millennium’ was all rather idyllic and a tiny knot of supporters remained loyal to the strange little man until his death in 1814. Quite large crowds turned out for his funeral and the Jacobin medallions he made were distributed to everyone there.

  The jury is still out on Thomas Spence. He could be regarded as a harmless crank, but in view of what happened two years after his death, this is probably too simplistic a view. It goes without saying that Spence’s ideas, which many see today as forerunners of socialism propounded half a century before Karl Marx, ran totally counter to Britain’s ruling elite at the time and were regarded by them with a mixture of disbelief and horror. Even Spence’s original pamphlet in 1775 led to his being disbarred from the Philosophical Society.

  It did not help that he was likened to the French revolutionary François ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf whose plot was discovered in 1796 and written up extensively in the New Annual Register. Babeuf was a hot-headed ex-servant who ruffled feathers from the time of the Revolution to his execution in 1797. His rallying cry was ‘insurrection, revolt and the constitution of 1793’ and his song – ‘Dying of hunger, dying of cold’ – could be heard in the cafés of Paris by the mid-decade. Probably psychotic, Babeuf believed that the appalling September massacres had not been appalling enough and the only remedy was to destroy the Republic’s government which consisted of ‘starvers, bloodsuckers, tyrants, hangmen, rogues and mountebanks’.

  It all sounded like an incitement for Despard and the men of Cato Street, but was there any link with Thomas Spence? No hard evidence exists, but there were rumours of weapon collecting and drilling in connection with the man’s followers and, after all, Spence himself used underground revolutionary techniques – handbills, pub meetings, possibly the orchestration of bread riots in 1800 and 1801. In 1803 little children were arrested on the orders of Lord Portland, the Home Secretary, for selling Spence’s tracts. Certainly, the government continued to believe that Spence’s was one of the ‘hidden hands’ behind unrest. Francis Place on the other hand believed that Spence and his followers were harmless people ‘next to nobody and nothing’. But Place often misread his contemporaries and was prone to pretend that working-class reform revolved around him alone.

  But whatever the involvement of Thomas Spence himself in plans for revolt, there is no doubt that, after his death, his followers certainly were involved. Calling themselves Spenceans or Spencean Philanthropists they took to the streets of London in 1816 as the nucleus of what was intended – and might have become – open rebellion.

  Meeting in a variety of public houses, they were focusing their thoughts on what might be termed agrarian communism with their slogan ‘The Land is the Peoples’ Farm’. The leading lights of this group were more properly Jacobins or Painites – ‘old Jacks’ – many of them republicans. There was no overall leader, but Dr James Watson and his son Jem (James junior) were p
erhaps most prominent. Watson senior is a shadowy figure, possibly 50 at the time of Spa Fields, ‘a medical man and a chymist’ who had been involved in radical politics for years. He was a friend of fellow surgeon John Gale Jones, a great believer in freedom of the press and of the mass demonstration as a means of squaring up to the authorities, ‘the free and easy’ as it was called. On 4 December 1816, the Lord Mayor of London said, ‘I always considered the Watsons – both of them – the bravest men in England.’ As always, Francis Place had a different view; the elder Watson was ‘a man of loose habits . . . wretchedly poor’, the younger was ‘a wild, profligate fellow’.

  The other father and son team in the Spencean leadership were Thomas Evans and his son, also Thomas, the elder being the group’s librarian. Place paints a picture of an eccentric, wandering from pub to pub with a Bible under his arm. In fact, Evans’s Christian Polity the Salvation of the Empire written in that year advocated socialism in a rural, agricultural setting and proved very popular with London working men, especially the shoemakers (the occupation of two of the five men hanged after Cato Street).

  Thomas Preston, a master shoemaker, said when examined by the Lord Mayor in December 1816:

  I have seen so much distress in Spitalfields that I have prayed to God to swallow me up – I have seen a fine young woman who has not been in a Bed for nine months . . . I have ruined myself. I have not £1 . . .