by M. J. Trow
For nearly three years, Davidson worked as an articled clerk for a Liverpool lawyer. The work was dull (Benjamin Disraeli would tire of it equally quickly a few years later), the hours long and much time was spent laboriously copying legal documents with a quill pen. Born by the sea as he was, Davidson may have had a natural wanderlust and signed as a clerk on board a merchant vessel. Less than a day out from port, however, he found his duties consisted of scrubbing decks with the other hands.
Clearly, sailing in wartime carried its own risks. Davidson’s ship was stopped by a British man of war and the crew impressed. At his trial, the ‘man of colour’ claimed to have ‘ventured my life fifteen times for my country and my King’ and if this was true, his time aboard the warship was the only possible opportunity for this. Six months later, he was back home and somehow managed to get out of the navy, sending begging letters to his father’s friend. The upshot was that Davidson was now apprenticed to a cabinet-maker and all thoughts of the law seem to have gone out of the window.
Davidson rarely seems to have been without female companionship and was on the point of marrying a Liverpool merchant’s daughter when her friends got wind of it and whisked her away. We have already seen the outrage caused by Colonel Despard’s mixed marriage, to the extent that even subsequent generations of his family claimed that the woman was merely a servant. The loss of his bride-to-be was naturally a blow to Davidson, who decided to go back to Kingston on board a West Indiaman.
History repeated itself and Davidson was once again pressed into the navy. This time he deserted at the first opportunity and, cadging from friends, became a journeyman. Wilkinson’s narrative becomes confusing at this point. Technically, desertion in wartime was a hanging offence, but there is no further mention of this and Davidson’s mother now appears on the scene, paying the boy 2 guineas a week through her agent (presumably her husband’s friend from Liverpool).
In Litchfield, Davidson was employed by Mr Bullock, a cabinet-maker who was impressed with the young man’s high levels of skill, earning up to 4 guineas a week. With a total of 6 guineas a week at his disposal, Davidson began to pay court to the 16-year-old Miss Salt, who seems to have been a feisty girl who met the handsome mulatto secretly. Since the girl would come into an inheritance of £7,000 when she came of age, it was clearly worth Davidson’s staying around. Mrs Salt reluctantly agreed to the marriage, keeping her husband in the dark. When Mr Salt discovered the truth, he lay in wait for Davidson in his garden and fired a pistol ball through the suitor’s hat (presumably aiming for his head). Salt summoned a constable and Davidson was charged with attempted robbery.
An unusually upright magistrate believed Davidson’s version of events, set the man free and imprisoned the girl’s father. A deal was struck – Salt would allow the marriage if Davidson brought no charges. So far, so good, but a hidden clause was that Miss Salt could only marry when she came of age. Davidson was prepared to wait; she was not. When her father sent her to ‘a distant part of the country’ she found someone else and married him instead.
Davidson was heart-broken. He bought poison from a chemist in Litchfield and swallowed it. He lost his nerve however and told a friend who provided an antidote, thus saving the man’s life. A kind of pattern develops in the lives of the Cato Street conspirators. Reversals, life’s upheavals, downward paths – all play their part, leaving the men particularly vulnerable and disordered. Davidson let his business slide and had soon spent virtually all of the £1,200 his mother had settled on him in a London bank.
We have no time-line for any of this, but after the collapse of his Midlands business he came to London and worked for Mr Cox, a cabinetmaker in the Haymarket. At the same time he became a Sunday school teacher in a chapel in Walworth and for the first time we have a religious light thrown onto Cato Street. Among those condemned to death in April 1820, only Davidson turned to his God. In Walworth, the cabinet-maker fell foul of the law again. The exact details are unknown and Davidson mentioned them in the Cato Street trial in one of the earliest – and weakest – attempts to play the ‘race card’ on record. He was clearly in the habit of touching up not only his female colleagues in the Walworth Chapel Sunday School, but some of the girls as well. Wilkinson wrote:
He habitually indulged in attempts of a gross and indelicate nature on the persons . . . way-laying them on their return home . . . from divine worship and taking improper liberties with them.
He was not the first or the last Sunday school teacher to abuse his position of trust and for a while, his targets put up with it. One of them finally reported matters to the committee who conducted an enquiry and kicked Davidson out. ‘His habitual lying, prevarication and intrigue’ had become as obvious as his ‘brutal propensities’.
At the Cato Street trial, Davidson claimed that one black man looked very like another; that he had been wrongly accused in the Walworth case; and that he had found the real culprit and forced him to apologize to the young lady concerned. Since, at the time, Davidson was trying to pretend that he was an innocent bystander at Cato Street, a man in the wrong place at the wrong time and there were perfectly innocent explanations for his carrying a sword and carbine that night, it all merely underlines Wilkinson’s obvious contempt for the man.
In 1816, Davidson went into business for himself in Walworth and married a widow, Mrs Lane, who had four small children. The year was a bad one for cabinet-makers as it was for everyone else and he lost trade, moving to Marylebone. It was here and it was then that his political activities began.
The men we have met so far were hanged for their involvement in Cato Street, but six others escaped the drop and a seventh never even appeared in court. The six are notoriously vague. Because they changed their plea to guilty after the trials of the five, they did not directly face the wrath of the court themselves, so our knowledge of them is limited. Usually, they appear as a collective group, huddled in a smoky tap-room muttering mutiny. We have no clear picture of them as individuals.
James Wilson was a tailor; Richard Bradburn a carpenter; James Gilchrist a shoemaker; Charles Cooper a bootmaker; John Monument a shoemaker and John Shaw a carpenter. Together with Ings, Tidd and Davidson, they were all arrested in the hay-loft at Cato Street or the area nearby. Cooper lived in Garden-Court, Baldwin’s Gardens, and most of them were local men whose lodgings could be found in the rabbit warrens off Oxford Street and Holborn. On the warrant issued for arrest on the night of 23 February, in addition to some of the names above6 were Abel Hall, a tailor, and John Palin, a child’s chair-maker and former corporal in the East London Militia.
Not all the Cato Street conspirators were caught. Some got away from the notorious hay-loft and melted into the London underworld. But one who escaped deserved, perhaps, more than anyone to die. And he did not even appear in court, although his name was mentioned by every defendant and most witnesses. Among the 162 potential witnesses listed to attend at the Old Bailey Session House in April, one name stands out – that of George Edwards, modeller of Ranelagh Place.
In the trial of Arthur Thistlewood, the witness Robert Adams, a former conspirator who had turned king’s evidence referred to Edwards sitting in the White Hart on 19 February. It took him a while for his eyes to acclimatize after the glare of the snow outside, but he saw the man there in the company of the others. And it was Edwards who, in the same pub on the next night, announced that a Cabinet dinner was due to be held at Lord Harrowby’s in Grosvenor Square. On the 21st, Edwards was busy making ‘fusees’ (hand-grenades) along with Ings and Abel Hall.
Joseph Hale, Brunt’s teenaged apprentice at Fox Court, remembered Edwards as a regular visitor to his master’s house, more often indeed than Adams. He believed him to be an artist.
For the defence, Mary Barker, the daughter of Richard Tidd, remembered Edwards often visiting her father’s house at Hole-in-the-Wall Passage and that he took away boxes she now knew to be ammunition: ‘I do not know what Edwards was.’ But Thistlewood’s defence coun
sel, Mr Curwood, knew. The jury, he said, had heard of the name of Edwards in this case. This man, who lived at 166, Fleet Street, who afterwards lived at Ranelagh Place, why was this man not called? He was not an accomplice in any criminal degree, as must be inferred from the conduct of the Government in letting him go quite at large. Why was this man not called? They would then have the spy to support the testimony of the informer Adams. He could tell the jury why; because it was remembered what had been the effect of calling a witness of a similar description on a former occasion.
Curwood was of course conjuring up visions of John Castle in the Spa Fields trial of Dr Watson and the result was that he and his testimony were put out of court altogether and had no other effect on the minds of the jury, than to convince them that the whole was a fabrication. Did their Lordships, berobed and bewigged on the High Bench, squirm? Did they feel an atom of remorse? Of guilt? Of shame? Of course not. If they knew – and bearing in mind the fact that they so clearly were the establishment, they must have – then they believed that planting George Edwards in the heart of the Cato Street conspiracy was not only fair and just, but part of their duty. Castle, with his ineptitude in the dock and his long history of crime and misdemeanours, failed to hang Watson. Oliver, altogether cleverer and kept out of court, had helped to hang Brandreth.
Now, their Lordships merely waited to see what Edwards could achieve for the men of Cato Street, all of them, in their different ways, men of colour.
Chapter 10
‘Dreadful Riot and Murder’
The plan was almost certainly Thistlewood’s and it went like this. All the king’s ministers were to be targeted and murdered in their town houses. The Duke of Wellington, as Master-General of the Ordnance, had his famous house at Hyde Park Corner with its grandiose address of 1 London. Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, of course resided at 10 Downing Street. Lord Castlereagh, the Foreign Secretary, lived in St James’s Square, not a stone’s throw from the haunt of prostitutes and gambling ‘hells’. Lord Harrowby, President of the Privy Council, had his house at 39 Grosvenor Square. And so on. In fact, the only prominent address not whispered about in the half-darkness of some radical tavern in the early weeks of 1820 was Carlton House, the private residence of the Prince Regent. Perhaps he was considered such a nonentity that he was not worth killing. Or perhaps, taking a leaf out of the French revolutionaries’ book, they intended to make the heir to the throne some sort of citizen-king.
The next decision to be made was – when? William Harrison, as an ex-Life Guards man, had been talking to one of his old comrades still in the service and gleaned some useful information. For such multiple assassinations to work, there would have to be minimal strike capability from the authorities – the police and the army. The death of George III provided the solution. On the evening of 29 January, the ‘old, mad, blind, despised and dying king’1 as Shelley called him, finally succumbed after years of mental and physical pain. On 31 January, the Prince Regent was proclaimed George IV and troops outside Carlton House cheered dutifully. It was a month of mixed emotions for George. On the one hand, he was king in name as well as deed after effectively ruling the country for nine years. On the other hand, his father had died only six days after his younger brother, the Duke of Kent. And the new king’s mind was already bent to his first royal problem – what to do about his ghastly, estranged wife, Caroline of Brunswick.
The old king’s funeral was scheduled for 15 February and Harrison’s old comrade had assured him, in the course of an innocent conversation, that every London soldier would be at Windsor. Thistlewood reasoned, perhaps bizarrely, that they would be too exhausted to get back to London to handle a revolutionary mob on the rampage.
The killing of the ministers was to be decided by lot. The conspirators would be divided into units, each one led by an assassin. During these discussions, duly debated and voted on, in true democratic fashion, James Brunt seemed to be keener on total, unswerving loyalty than anyone else. ‘Whatever man the lot fall upon’, a witness quoted him at his trial, ‘and fails, I swear by all that is good, that man shall be run through on the spot.’2
While all this slaughter was going on, John Palin’s task would be to disable various army barracks by throwing grenades into the straw. In the case of cavalry barracks, like that of the Life Guards in Knightsbridge, the stables were built below the men’s sleeping quarters so that the rising flames would be easily lit in the first place and would engulf the first storey. Men and horses would die, either from their burns or from choking on the acrid fumes. Whatever the outcome, the troopers would be too busy fighting fires and saving lives to worry about little things like insurrection.
Conspirator Cook’s job was to secure artillery. There were a number of mini-arsenals in London, apart from the Tower and Cook’s remit was to grab them before the authorities did. There were two field pieces at the Artillery Ground and more at the London Light Horse Volunteer barracks, both off Holborn. Thus armed, the revolutionaries and their by now growing cohorts would move east, placing their cannon in the Cornhill and next to the Royal Exchange and would call upon the residents of the Mansion House to surrender. This would become the headquarters of the new provisional government which would be set up under Thistlewood. The next target was the Bank of England and the decision was made to preserve the huge account books so that proof of the government’s financial mismanagement and plain embezzlement could be shown.
Other members of the team were to patrol the routes out of London and still others to disable the telegraph so that the capital was essentially sealed off. Communication during the night would be by the call sign ‘button’. One conspirator would whisper ‘b-u-t’ to another, who would reply ‘t-o-n’ and messages could be sent in this way from street to street.
Part of this plan was lifted directly from the mish-mash of Spa Fields. Part of it smacked of Despard. None of it made any real sense. Unlike Spa Fields, Thistlewood does not seem to have worked on soldiers’ loyalties, so the only reliance was on most troops being out of town for the king’s funeral. In the days before the event, a number of conspirators were buying up weapons – the odd carbine, blunderbuss and sword. The money seemed to come mostly from Edwards who, oddly, went from the poverty of a model-maker with little work, to a man well dressed, able to buy weapons and stand drinks. The equipment obtained, powder and ball shot as well as the makings of hand-grenades, was stored at Brunt’s house in Fox Court and Tidd’s in Hole-in-the-Wall. There had to be a base for operations and this is where Harrison came in. He acquired a hay-loft over a cowshed or stable in Cato Street, off the Edgware Road, and everything seemed ready.
It was now, almost at the last moment, that the plan changed. The king’s funeral idea was dropped, exactly why is unclear and on Tuesday morning, 22 February, Edwards brought news to the committee at Brunt’s that the Cabinet dinners, cancelled in respect of the king’s death, were to be resumed the following night at Lord Harrowby’s in Grosvenor Square. Thistlewood sent out for a paper and sure enough, there it was, listed in the New Times. Brunt was delighted
Now I will be damned if I do not believe there is a God. I have often prayed that those thieves [the Cabinet] may be collected all together, in order to give us a good opportunity to destroy them and now God has answered my prayer.
The new plan was now as follows. The conspirators had the time and place – Grosvenor Square shortly after 7. Everyone would be in the square by then, taking advantage of the buildings and trees as hiding places and Thistlewood would knock on Harrowby’s door with the pretext of an urgent note. The servants would be eliminated first, threatened with pistols. If they refused to obey or showed any signs of fight, hand-grenades were to be lobbed in amongst them while the leaders went for the Cabinet. Ings in particular saw it all very clearly:
I will enter the room first, I will go in with a brace of pistols, a cutlass and a knife in my pocket and after the two swordsmen [the ex-cavalrymen Harrison and Adams] have despatched them, I
will cut every head off that is in the room and Lord Castlereagh’s head and Lord Sidmouth’s I will bring away in a bag . . . As soon as I get into the room I shall say ‘Well, my Lords, I have as good men here as the Manchester Yeomanry. Enter citizens and do your duty.’3
By Wednesday morning, Thistlewood was drawing up last-minute paperwork. Again in Brunt’s house in Fox Court, he was drafting a manifesto when Adams arrived. He had written:
Your tyrants are destroyed. The friends of liberty are called upon to come forward. The provisional government is now sitting.
It had that day’s date, 23 February, and was signed by James Ings, Secretary. And that, as far as anyone knows, is as far as plans for the revolution ever got.
‘Cato Street is rather an obscure street,’ wrote George Wilkinson in his preface to the trial transcripts, ‘and inhabited by persons in an humble class of life.’ It runs parallel with Newnham Street, joining John and Queen Street. It was virtually a cul-de-sac in 1820, open at one end for carriages and almost closed at the other by posts. The conspirators’ headquarters was a dilapidated stable near the open end, belonging to a General Watson, who was away in Europe. Drawings made at the time show a two-storey, flat-roofed building with a set of double doors (for carriages) and a side door on the ground floor with one window covered with a shutter. There were two windows and a door on the first floor, the door presumably to allow hay to be lifted in and out from a wagon in the street below.
A single set of stairs led up to the loft which was divided into three rooms, one large, two small. Only one of the smaller rooms had a fireplace and on the night in question, as well as conspirators and their weaponry in residence for what Thistlewood called ‘the West End job’, there was a hammock, a carpenter’s bench, a chaff cutter, a tool chest, a tub and a corn measure.
On the afternoon of 23 February, various people were seen coming and going into the stable, each time locking the door behind them. Sacking was nailed across the upstairs windows to minimize nosiness, but the conspirators had reckoned without the curiosity of their neighbours. George Kaylock at 22 Cato Street saw Harrison and somebody else going in about 5 o’clock. Kaylock spoke to him, to be told that Harrison had taken two rooms in the building and was going to ‘do them up’. Between 5 and 7 at least twenty ‘decorators’ were seen arriving. Richard Monday, living next door at number 23 saw Davidson standing under an archway at 20 past four. He knew the man, having seen him in company with Firth the cow-keeper, from whom Harrison had hired the premises. Monday had just come home from work. He had his tea and went to the pub (almost certainly the Horse and Groom across the road). On his return, he saw Davidson carrying a bundle into the stable and noticed he now had a pair of pistols and a sword at his belt. Elizabeth Westall, from number 1 (next door to the stable), had already seen a man carrying a sack entering the premises at about 3 o’clock. She was somewhat unnerved when Davidson knocked on her door to ask for a light. We cannot know now whether the woman was alarmed by Davidson’s colour (which she mentions) or his brazen cheek. Nor can we know why Davidson seemed determined to draw attention to himself. The light was to light the candles in the hay-loft, but surely the conspirators could have brought their own.
