by M. J. Trow
On 14 April, the prisoners were transferred from the Tower and Coldbath Fields to Newgate, next door to the Session House where the trials would open the next day. Despite the secrecy which accompanied those plans and the fact that the move happened at 7 in the morning, a huge crowd gathered at the Tower to see the seven coaches with their Life Guard escort make the journey. At Newgate, a similarly vast mob had gathered and the gaolers fanned out, forming a half moon at the entrance to allow the felons in.
In Newgate Thistlewood was given a room of his own, complete with fire and the inevitable armed guard at the door. The other six were lumped together, but at least had a yard for exercise. The four lesser fry from Coldbath arrived in the afternoon without escort and by this time most of the crowd had gone home. The four were locked in one cell.
On the night before the trials began, friends and families of the accused got together to raise subscriptions. Clearly in the majority of cases, the men now in custody were the principal breadwinners and genuine hardship resulted from their removal from the workplace. Mary Brunt had one child; Ann Tidd eight; Amelia Bradburn eight; Mary Shaw had two; Charlotte Preston had three sisters; Susan Thistlewood had one son; Sarah Davidson six children and Caroline Harrison three. The ‘Appeal to the British Nation’ on their behalf was probably written by Mr Harmer, who, as we have seen, specialized in handling contentious radical cases like this.
At last, in the document, the word ‘alleged’ appears for the first time. The families were merely asking for justice and did not enter into the details of the accusations. They did however point out that the word of the Bow Street Runners was by definition from interested parties and that such men have been known to have ‘instigated . . . crime, that they might afterwards betray the delinquents and obtain the promised reward’. And the Press ‘are notoriously guilty of loading their daily columns with the most scandalous falsehoods and misrepresentations’. In a veiled reference to Spa Fields, the Appeal went on that the conspiracy was ‘nothing more than the artful invention of hired spies and secret Agents’.
Anyone who could offer cash for the suffering families should send direct to relatives or to the printer at Duke Street, Spitalfields, Mr Walker of Gun Street, Spitalfields, or Mr Griffin of Middle Row, Holborn.
Barristers Adolphus and Curwood were retained by Thistlewood, Brunt, Davidson, Tidd and Ings; Messrs Walford and Broderick for the rest. It is difficult to gauge the position of these men. By definition the products of a Classical education, graduates of Oxford or Cambridge or one of the London Inns of Court, they were part of the establishment which looked on Cato Street with abject horror. On the other hand, every man had a right to a defence and as the accused was not allowed to speak in his own defence, it was doubly incumbent on defence counsel to do a very difficult and valiant job. It was obvious to Adolphus and Curwood that those accused of murder would be found guilty by the overwhelming evidence against them. For that they would hang anyway. But the crime of high treason carried the ghastly penalty of drawing, quartering and decapitation and perhaps in deference to the families of the accused, they carried out a surprisingly effective damage limitation exercise to avoid that.
The Sessions House was an ugly, flat-roofed building alongside Newgate gaol along Old Bailey. It had a semi-circular wall around the entrance so that witnesses could be separated from the waiting crowds and a separate room so that they no longer had to wait in a pub opposite. Inside the courtroom was an angled mirror that threw light onto the faces of the accused on winter days when the daylight began to fade. With all the pomp and circumstance of the law the trial of Arthur Thistlewood opened at 10 o’clock on Saturday 15 April. As in the Spa Fields trial, it was agreed that each conspirator be tried separately, beginning with the conspirators’ leader. Again, as in Spa Fields – and the Brandreth trial – the legal heavyweights of the day lent their presence to the proceedings, both to underline the gravity of the charges and to ensure that the men of Cato Street suffered the full penalty of the law.
Lord Chief Justice Abbott presided, along with Lord Chief Justice Dallas, Chief Baron Richards and Mr Justice Richardson, all of them pillars of the establishment and all of them with clear memories of Spa Fields and Jeremiah Brandreth.
The prisoners entered, without shackles, led by Thistlewood, who looked pale and dejected. He wore a velvet-collared black coat over a light waistcoat and blue trousers. One by one each man came to the bar, raised his right hand and swore to his name. A complication arose with Wilson who said, ‘That is not my name.’ His counsel, Curwood, explained that he would put in a plea of misnomer for this man, to be told that now was not the time. When it was the time, this quite legitimate complaint was simply ignored by their Lordships on the Bench.5 Each prisoner then pleaded not guilty and answered the question as to how they would be tried ‘By God and my country’. Ings, however, cut to the chase – ‘I will be tried by God and by the laws of reason. The laws of reason are the laws of God.’ Abbot instructed Mr Brown, the gaoler, to tell Ings to plead in the usual way and the butcher eventually agreed. The charges were read and the prisoners returned to Newgate in readiness for Thistlewood’s trial on Monday.
The problem for Adolphus and Curwood was twofold. Thistlewood was a known agitator who had stood trial for high treason before. Because of Peterloo, the mood of the country was even more bitter towards the authorities now, but this was not apparent in the streets of London in the case now being tried. It was as though the men of Cato Street had crossed an invisible line in the struggle for liberty and the whole business left a nasty taste. Counsel for the defence had also to get past what appeared to be a bona fide case of cold feet from two of the conspirators who had turned king’s evidence, to the reality of the situation – the spying of George Edwards on behalf of Lord Sidmouth. They made sure that as many witnesses as possible referred to Edwards, because they knew from discussions with their clients that he was the real instigator of the Cato Street plot. The problem was that Edwards was simply a witness (one, after all, of 162) and could not be found. In fact, he did not need to be, because Thomas Hyden and Robert Adams had come forward voluntarily.
On that Monday morning, the counsel weighed in for both sides. The prosecution consisted of the Attorney-General, the Solicitor-General, Mr Bolland and Mr Littledale. Before the whole thing got under way, a shabbily dressed man placed a hat in front of Thistlewood which was found to contain five oranges. These were removed as possibly containing poison, but later in the trials and again at the execution, oranges were permitted. It was usual for prisoners to stand at the bar but, because of the great length of the proceedings, Thistlewood was allowed to sit.
The 227 jurors were whittled down to twelve. Since Thistlewood’s right was to a jury of his peers, five were called ‘Esquire’ and two more ‘Gent’. The others were: a carpenter, a lighterman, a builder, an iron-plate worker and a cooper. At half past one the Attorney-General opened the case with a statement of events. Inevitably, it referred to all the other prisoners in court as well as Thistlewood and ran to twenty-nine closely printed pages. Then the witnesses were called.
Robert Adams was first and his evidence was damning. He outlined the way he had been inveigled into the plot by Thistlewood and explained the mechanics of how the insurrection was supposed to work. There were a few anomalies, as Adolphus later pointed out. At a meeting the week before 23 February, Thistlewood had told Brunt and Palin to check if a house near Furnival’s Inn was suitable to set fire to. They reported it would ‘make a d— —d good fire’ but as defence counsel made clear, those buildings were brand new and far less likely to catch fire than most others in London.
On the second day, Eleanor Walker explained the odd comings and goings of John Brunt, her lodger at Fox Court, and Brunt’s apprentice, Joseph Hale, told of the weapons that were stashed there and who visited – ‘They used to call Thistlewood sometimes T, his initial’. And on the night in question, a ruffled Brunt came home late, his clothes dirty, telling his
wife that ‘it was all up’.
The watchmen, Thomas Smart and Charles Bissex, told the jury that they had seen four suspicious-looking men hanging around Grosvenor Square on the 23rd. John Morris, the journeyman cutler, remembered Ings arriving to have two swords sharpened. Edward Simpson, Corporal-Major of the Life Guards, explained that Harrison had served with him at the Portman Street barracks which looked out over Cato Street. James Adams, the pawnbroker, told how William Davidson had taken a blunderbuss out of pledge.
But it was the next witness that was the lynchpin of the prosecution’s case, in the absence of the elusive Edwards. Thomas Hyden was a cow-keeper and had been a member of a shoemaker’s club. A few days before 23rd, he met James Wilson who put a proposal to him – ‘He asked me if I would be one of a party to destroy his Majesty’s ministers’ – and made great play of the fact that hand-grenades were ready and the target was probably Lord Harrowby’s house. Hyden, horror-struck by the speed of events and what they meant, contacted Harrowby, who confirmed Hyden’s version of events as the next witness called.
A week before the 23rd, Harrowby was riding alone ‘among the young plantations in Hyde Park’. Near Grosvenor Gate, he was met by ‘a person’ who asked him if he was Lord Harrowby and gave him an urgent note for Lord Castlereagh. On the morning of the 23rd, Hyden met Wilson again and was told to meet him at the Horse and Groom at half past 5. Twenty or thirty men would be there, with others who would assemble at Gray’s Inn Lane, together with the Irish in Gee’s Court along Oxford Street.
When asked by the defence why Hyden had gone to see Harrowby, he explained that he could not contact Lord Castlereagh although he did pass his house three or four times to find him. All this must have struck defence counsel as decidedly ‘fishy’. Even allowing for the fact that Wilson was a little foolhardy in trusting Hyden, a man he can’t have known well, with the plan, how odd it was that Hyden, a cow-keeper, should not only recognize a government minister by sight, but that Harrowby should give the man the time of day and accept a note written to someone else. It was extraordinarily convenient, to say the least, that someone privy to such damning information should come forward in the way that Hyden did. And it was nothing short of bizarre that when Hyden got to Cato Street, at nearly 7 o’clock, he declined entry to the stable on the grounds that he had to buy some cream. Davidson, to whom he spoke, seemed quite happy with this and told him to be back by 8 or, failing that, to follow on to Grosvenor Square. It was Lord Harrowby himself who nearly let the government cat out of the conspiratorial bag when, under cross-examination by Mr Curwood, he told the court:
I had some general knowledge of some conspiracy or something of the kind, going on before this . . . that some plan was in agitation, but we did not know the time at which it was to take place or the particulars . . . I do not know a person named Edwards.
But Lord Sidmouth and his secretary, John Cam Hobhouse, did. They had employed him, urged him almost certainly to act the agent provocateur, gave him cash to buy weapons and made themselves accessible to receive his regular reports. None of this evidence was of course available to the defence counsel and the prosecution did not need it because they had Hyden, Adams and the next king’s evidence witness, John Monument. Thistlewood had approached the shoemaker some weeks before the 23rd in the company of Brunt and told him ‘Great events are now close at hand – the people are every where anxious for a change’ and accordingly, Monument had gone to Cato Street. His next piece of evidence was rather strange. He told the court that, while handcuffed to Thistlewood on their way to the Privy Council, Thistlewood had told him to say that it was Edwards who had been the instigator of the plot. Monument refused, ‘when I had never seen such a man as Edwards in my life’. Thistlewood had gone on to describe Edwards to him.
Curwood’s defence tried to do what Watson’s had in the Spa Fields trial, tear to shreds the testimony of men who had turned king’s evidence:
an accomplice was a necessary witness; but though necessary, he was not of necessity to be believed. The more atrocious the guilt in which he steeped himself, the less worthy he was of credit.
In other words, Adams and Monument should be disregarded – they had bought their lives with their testimony and that alone meant that the testimony was likely to be tainted. And then Curwood turned to the mechanics of the government’s plot against Thistlewood and the men of Cato Street. Thomas Dwyer, an Irish brick-layer from Gee’s Court, was another conspirator who got cold feet. Recruited by Davidson, he told Thistlewood he could raise twenty-seven men for the rebellion. His role on the night in question was to procure the weapons known to be stored (bizarrely) in the same building as the Foundlings Hospital. Dwyer had met virtually all of the conspirators, seen the pikes being tied to handles and the grenades prepared and promptly reported all this to a Major James who told him to report to Lord Sidmouth. On oath, Dwyer claimed he was an honest, hard-working man who had lived in Marylebone for fifteen years – ‘and yet all of a sudden a band of traitors intrusted me with their traitorous designs’.
Curwood effectively destroyed Dwyer by calling Edward Hucklestone, who told the court, ‘I do not think [Dwyer] is to be believed on his oath’. Dwyer made money on the side by blackmailing gentlemen in St James’s Park. His brother had been transported for a similar offence. The scam worked like this; Dwyer would accost a man in the park, get him into as compromising a position as possible and then Hucklestone would ‘catch’ them and the blackmail would ensue. It was a money-spinner throughout the century and one of its unlikely victims was probably the Foreign Secretary, Lord Castlereagh, only months after Cato Street.
But Curwood was on a roll. Questioning Joseph Doane, the Court Papers Reporter, and Andrew Mitchell, printer of the New Times, it became obvious that the report concerning the forthcoming dinner at Lord Harrowby’s appeared only in the New Times and not the other eleven papers it might have appeared in. How pat, then, that it was the New Times that Thistlewood should have sent for. But who had told the conspirators of the Harrowby dinner? Edwards. And how easy for Edwards to suggest that the New Times would carry the relevant details. He may even have volunteered to go out to buy a copy himself.
The third day opened with Curwood’s summation on Thistlewood’s behalf. He was not, he told the jury, going to dispute the fact that his client was a murderer; but that he was guilty of high treason rested heavily on the word of Adams and the fact that at their very first meeting Thistlewood entrusted his entire plan to him. The rest of Curwood’s defence dealt with the implausibility of the plot:
barracks were to be taken, cannons carried away, Ministers assassinated, government subverted, the Mansion House occupied, all by fifteen or twenty men.
Counsel asked where the money was to come from to make it all work. There had been talk among the conspirators of treating their followers and Brunt, though out of work, offered £1 for the purpose. Indeed, hunger had driven these desperate men to do something in the hope of plunder. As for the setting up of a Provisional Government, the conspirators did not even have access to a printing press, as the ‘your tyrants are destroyed’ lines were written by hand. As for the canvas bags carried by Ings for the heads of Castlereagh and Sidmouth, they were far too small for the purpose. ‘Is it possible, gentlemen,’ Curwood asked, ‘to sacrifice human life upon evidence like this?’
Curwood slammed again into Adams, who had heard murder committed and waited for four days and his own arrest, before he ‘disburthened’ his heart. In the witness box, Adams repeatedly used phrases like, ‘No, I have something else to say before I come to that’ and ‘No, I have not come to that yet.’ Where did this arrogance come from? Although Curwood did not have the tangible evidence to prove it, it came from the backing of the Privy Council. With the information unsubstantiated and in some cases invented by Edwards, the Privy Council were able to coach Adams as to what to say. And to make sure it all went swimmingly, who should be directing operations but the two men now leading the prosecution,
the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General.
Next, defence counsel went for Monument, reminding the jury that his evidence and Adams’s did not add up as to meeting times, places and people:
Adams sees not what is done in Cato Street. Monument sees not Adams and is not seen by Adams. Dwyer sees neither Adams nor Monument on any occasion.
Curwood at last, thirty-five pages in, got round to the missing Edwards – ‘Why was this man not called?’ The trial transcript merely reports the dialogue. We cannot see the disapproving faces on the Bench, hear the howls of fury and annoyance from all quarters of the Court, but when Curwood said, ‘They [the Prosecution] would then have the spy to support the testimony of the informer’ we can imagine it would have been pandemonium.
The Solicitor-General followed, claiming that the testimony of Adams, Monument, Hyden and Dwyer was ‘in all respects pure and uncontaminated’ and other witnesses not involved in the conspiracy had reported on meetings, weapons-buying and grenade-making. The Attorney-General then took over, reminding the jury of all that damning, if circumstantial evidence they had heard over three days. And Lord Chief Justice Abbott delivered his summation.
When he had finished the jury retired, only to come back a few minutes later to have the law explained to them (again) on the exact definition of the four counts of high treason. About fifteen minutes later, the verdict was delivered – guilty on all four counts. Thistlewood, who had been totally composed during his trial, remained so now and was returned to his cell. He ate a little during the evening and asked Brown, the gaoler, for some wine.
Wilkinson seems to have believed that Thistlewood expected acquittal, perhaps on the basis of Spa Fields. But he had killed no one at Spa Fields and he was not having to contend with the ‘missing mendaciousness’ of George Edwards.
