They held an inquest on Richard Smithers on Friday 25th. It would be another half century before coroners had their own buildings for inquest purposes and the Horse and Groom, where the Bow Street officer’s body had been laid out, was used instead. With the usual pomp and ceremony, Mr Pyall, the beadle of St Mary-le-bone proclaimed proceedings open and the Middlesex county coroner, James Stirling, took his seat.
The police surgeon, Mr Fisher, talked the jury through Smithers’s wounds. He had not been called until that morning, by which time the dead man would have been stripped and washed and rigor mortis would have come and gone. Smithers was ‘a good-looking man, stout, about thirty three years of age’. The fatal wound, two inches long and half an inch broad, had been made between the fifth and sixth ribs on the right side to a depth of about twelve inches. The ‘sharp instrument’ had grazed the surface of the liver, cut the pericardium and pierced the right ventricle of the heart and the left lobe of the lung. The ribs on the left side had prevented the weapon passing right through the body. Death was caused by loss of blood. Other wounds to the body included a second sword cut under the shoulder blade and a pewter pistol ball imbedded in the shoulder to a depth of six inches. Unless Thistlewood hit him twice, it is likely that these wounds occurred in the chaos of darkness after Smithers fell.
George Ruthven was called next and explained events in the hay-loft, from the time he had received the warrant of arrest from the Marlborough Street magistrate, Mr Baker, to the end of the affray. He was very keen to underline the presence of Thistlewood – ‘I knew him as well as I know my father’ – and the fact that it was Thistlewood alone who offered violence in the hay-loft before the lights went out. This was the first time that the conspirators’ names were used – John Shaw, ‘a man named Blackburn [sic]’, James Wilson, and Tidd, who ‘fired at a sergeant’ as well as at Fitzclarence. It cannot have done the Runners’ credibility much good when Ruthven admitted that, of the twenty-five men in the stable, only nine were taken into custody. He estimated that about twenty shots were fired, but some of these were probably just to cause alarm.
James Ellis gave his evidence next, giving his address as 22 Paradise Row, Palmer’s Village, St Margaret’s, Westminster, confirming that it was Thistlewood who stabbed Smithers and that he, Ellis, had fired at the man and missed. He also lamented that the short cutlasses that the Runners carried were useless against the longer weapons of experts like Thistlewood.
William Westcott came next, his address at 10 Simmons Street, Sloan Square, explaining how he had grappled with Ings, still wearing his butcher’s apron, and how both he and Thistlewood had got away in the confusion.
Giles Moy, of 11 London Court, Marylebone, was a nightwatchman. He assisted Brookes in capturing Ings and took him to the watch house. The butcher had bullets in his pockets, gunpowder and a haversack (for the head of Castlereagh or Sidmouth).
Sergeant Legge of the 2nd Battalion the Coldstream Guards explained the turning out of the piquet ‘usually employed on occasions when the military is required in aid of the civil power’. He showed the jury his ripped jacket sleeve where a pistol ball had torn the cloth, the pistol fired by Richard Tidd. Legge had time to check the hay-loft, find the body of Smithers and to return to Portman Street for reinforcements. Clearly, no one knew the extent of the insurrection or how many more armed killers roamed the streets. He mentioned the names of Monument, Cooper and Gilchrist.
The coroner reminded the jury of the law of joint culpability. It may have been Thistlewood who killed Smithers, but the law held that all his confederates were equally guilty.1 At that point, a note arrived from Magistrate Baker referring to the original warrant he had sworn out. At that point in the inquest, it was still in the hands of the Privy Council.
The next witness has caused confusion. The text clearly calls him William Sarnon and he gives his address as the Edgware Road and his profession as tailor. He appeared to be merely passing Cato Street about 8 o’clock and got caught up in the fighting, being fired on at least twice. On the other hand, Ruthven refers to a Runner called John Surman who was with him that evening. The similarity of surname may be just a coincidence.
All this was enough for the jury, who pronounced Thistlewood and Davidson guilty of murder. They asked the coroner for clarification on the issue of joint culpability and whether surrendering without a struggle carried any weight. Told it did not, a murder verdict was brought against the rest of the prisoners ‘and others unknown’.
During the day, Smithers’s parents arrived to visit the body. They were ‘so decrepit as scarcely to be able to get up the stairs’. Smithers’s body was removed to his lodgings in Carteret Street and the funeral took place at 4 o’clock on Thursday 2 March. It was a moving and well attended ceremony, proof of the shock that Cato Street had caused to London’s people. The Runner’s widow was too distraught to attend, so the principal mourners, walking solemnly in deepest black behind the hearse, were Smithers’s father and brothers and a large body of Bow Street Runners. John Lavender represented Smithers’s earlier police office in Queen Square and Mr Armstrong and his son from Worship Street were there too. The upper windows of the cortege route were full of spectators, as the sad column wound its way from Tothill Street to St Margaret’s church. Here, while the Reverend Rodber held the service, the churchyard was crammed with sympathizers, including magistrates, policemen and a contingent of the Coldstream Guards.
Days before this the machinery of the law swung into motion. Two of the conspirators, Robert Adams, ‘late of the Royal Horse Guards’ and the tailor Abel Hall, offered to turn king’s evidence, a system which we would call a ‘deal’ today; they would live in exchange for all they knew about the others. Hall was not grabbed at Cato Street, but was arrested by Runners at a house in Seward Street. A quantity of weapons, presumed to be part of the conspirators’ stash, was found in an old shed of a house in Regent’s Park. On Monday 28 February, the Privy Council offered a reward of £200 for the apprehension of John Palin. Lavender and Bishop of the Bow Street office received information that he was holed up in the Battle Bridge area. When they reached the house, the bird had flown, but three men and ‘a woman of somewhat suspicious appearance’ were arrested. Since one of the men was lying in bed fully clothed and another was melting lead in a frying pan, police suspicions seem to have been justified, yet Magistrate Birnie let them go on the grounds that they were ‘unknown’.
This issue makes it clear that various members of the radical underground were known to the authorities and were actually being watched. Ruthven testified that the reason he knew Thistlewood so well was that he had ‘followed him for days together’. And since Thistlewood had been involved in Spa Fields, it followed that ‘the notorious Preston, the cobbling politician’ was up to his neck in it too. He was arrested on the 28th, his lodgings at 17 Prince’s Street, Drury Lane, having been searched days earlier. He had told officers that his ‘armoury could not boast of a swan-shot nor his port-folio of a scrap of paper of the slightest political interest’. He accepted arrest cheerfully as he’d been here before, but his daughters were furious at what today would be called an invasion of civil liberties. Moved from one watch house to another, Preston denied all knowledge of Cato Street and appeared before the Privy Council the next day. Here, according to the authorities, he ‘behaved with his usual boldness and low insolence’ in an interview lasting half an hour, before being taken to the Bridewell at Tothill Fields. Before he left the Council Chamber, Lord Castlereagh passed by – ‘Aye, there he goes!’ Preston called after him. ‘I have talked more treason, as they call it, today than ever I did in my whole life before.’
One of the man’s outraged daughters, Ann, wrote to Sidmouth and waited in the lobby of the Home Office for his reply, complaining of the treatment her father had received. Three days later, having been given the cold shoulder by Cam Hobhouse, she was allowed to give her father a change of clothes, but not to talk to him.
Another dissident who was rounded up was Samuel Waddington, known to be a placard-carrying trouble-maker who had tried to set up a rally on Kennington Common. He protested at the seizure of his books ‘with ridiculous effrontery’, claiming that he had done nothing which would merit a charge. All that was actually found was a full-length portrait of himself, blowing a horn and carrying Cobbett’s Twopenny Trash under his arm! George Wilkinson, writing all this at the end of the year, was happy to report that no charges were brought against Waddington and that he had given up politics for the ‘more quiet occupation of porter to a tallow chandler’.
On the day of Smithers’s funeral, the Privy Council were to discuss legal proceedings. The great and the good of national politics were at the Home Office including Robert Peel and William Huskisson, both of whom would become prominent members of the Cabinet in two years time, and Viscount Palmerston, the ‘terrible milord’ who would dominate foreign policy for half a century after this point. The next day, Mr Adkins, Governor of Coldbath Fields, brought the prisoners before their Lordships under heavy guard. Other conspirators, still at this stage including Preston, were brought by Mr Nodder from Tothill Fields. With them was Firth, the Cato Street loft keeper, who was assumed to be part of the conspiracy.
Handcuffed together and facing their accusers, the prisoners had a wretched appearance and some were mere boys. Thistlewood looked ‘jaundiced, nerveless and emaciated’. Davidson was cheerful enough. Preston was annoyed, but clearly enjoying the limelight. Again, a number of influential people trooped through the chamber to gawp at them.
One by one the prisoners were examined by the Council. Thistlewood put his hat on and refused to answer the charges of murder and high treason brought against him. Ings was sullen, but snapped, ‘It is want of food which has brought us here. Death would be a pleasure to me . . . if I had fifty necks, I’d rather have them all broken, one after the other, than see my children starve.’ Preston couldn’t wait – ‘If it is the will of the Author of the World that I should perish in the cause of freedom – his will, and not mine, be done!’ He threw his arms about ‘which savoured strongly of insanity’. Wilson, Davidson and Tidd laughed openly at the distinguished visitors, like Lord Westmoreland, who came to stare at them. Brunt, as Thistlewood’s supposed second-in-command, put his hat on and said nothing.
At the end of the day Thistlewood, Brunt, Monument, Davidson, Harrison, Wilson, Ings and Tidd were sent under cavalry escort to the Tower, where Captain J H Elrington, the fort-major, was waiting for them. As they waited for the carriages to arrive, the conspirators chatted loudly, almost certainly for the benefit of their captors, about the spread of the conspiracy – ‘Aye,’ Harrison laughed, ‘time will show all things.’ As they pulled away in their carriages, Ings called to the crowd, ‘Hurra, boys!’ but the mob was grimly silent in return. They didn’t even giggle at the ludicrous sight of the giant Harrison handcuffed to the diminutive Monument in his wide-awake hat. The mob followed them all the way to the Tower, no one making sympathetic noises at all. And this despite the fact that Ings continued to use the ‘most revolting’ language against the king’s ministers and seemed to know, or pretend to know, various people in the crowd.
At the Tower, each man was accommodated separately and their cells guarded by Yeoman Warders. Thistlewood was placed in the Bloody Tower, possibly in the same cell that was the home of another ‘conspirator’, Walter Ralegh, for fourteen years in the reign of James I. Davidson and Ings were locked in a prison over the waterworks, Monument at the back of the Horse-Armoury, Brunt and Harrison over the Stone-kitchen, Tidd in the Seven-gun Battery and Wilson in the prison over the parade. The number of Yeoman gaolers was increased six-fold to sixty, just in case. After all, the Tower had been a focus of attack three years earlier and no one was taking any chances.
Bradburn, Shaw, Firth, Gilchrist, Hall and Cooper, probably always regarded as second-string conspirators, were taken under cavalry escort to Coldbath Fields. Simmonds the footman and Preston were sent to Tothill Fields and no warrant for murder was ever brought against them.
Sweeping up operations were still going on. Robert George was presumed to be a gang member. He was a haberdasher and tailor of Chapel Street, Paddington, and a little boy playing in the street had lost a marble that rolled into George’s premises. Here, the lad saw guns and a sword and immediately told the authorities. George’s son, who lived opposite, had disappeared on the night of Cato Street and he was traced by Runners Ruthven and Salmon2 to the Dundee Arms, Wapping, where the ex-sailor was waiting for a ship to Gravesend. Despite nothing incriminating being found on him apart from a stick which might be used as a pike handle, he was placed in the House of Correction at Coldbath Fields on a charge of high treason.
The premises of all the conspirators were searched with a fine-tooth comb. Susan Thistlewood, ‘a smart, genteel little woman’, backed her husband’s political stance 100 per cent. She was calm and dignified as officers turned her lodgings over and was patience itself when she visited her husband and was body-searched ‘even to the removal of her stays and cap’.
Preparations for the trials began on 8 March with a Special Commission of Oyer and Terminer3 set for the 27th. On that day, twenty-three gentlemen forming a Grand Jury met at Hicks’ Hall at 9 o’clock. Lord Chief Justice Abbott explained to them the exact meaning of treason, a tedious recitation which would be repeated and argued over several times in the weeks ahead. Very properly, Abbott reminded the jury that they were to reach their conclusions on evidence only, not on the wild rumours which were no doubt flying all over the country by now.
A number of witnesses were called, Robert Adams the conspiratorturned-traitor sitting for three hours in the witness box before being returned to Coldbath Fields. John Monument from the Tower was very uneasy, ‘pale and dejected’, and generally seems to have been of a gloomy disposition. Several women and two boys were examined. The deliberations lasted for two days and at the end of them the Grand Jury decided that ‘true bills’ of high treason be brought against Thistlewood, Davidson, Ings, Brunt, Tidd, Wilson, Harrison, Bradburn, Shaw, Gilchrist and Cooper. These bills were not found for Robert George and Abel Hall. In the case of the Smithers’s murder, true bills were brought against Thistlewood, Brunt, Tidd, Wilson, Harrison and Shaw. At first, Davidson was not included in this, but the oversight was corrected by an emergency session of the Grand Jury in which Davidson was accused of shooting at Runner Gill with the intent to murder him.
On Monday 3 April, a list of 227 potential jurors of the county of Middlesex was drawn up and the four-count indictment drafted. The first count of high treason was that the conspirators
did compass, imagine, invent, devise and intend to deprive and depose our said lord the King of and from the style, honour and kingly name of the imperial crown of this realm.
This would have been achieved by eleven ‘overt acts’, including conspiracy to assassinate the Cabinet, seizure and manufacture of weapons, attacks on barracks and so on. In fact, a reading of the acts implies a great deal of repetition, as though the authorities were determined to bring these men to book by charging them with every crime under the sun.
The second count involved the intent
to move and excite insurrection, rebellion and war against the King . . . and to subvert and alter the legislature, rule and government and to bring and put the King to death.
The same eleven overt acts were cited as proof, even though in the evidence that was to follow there was only one oblique mention of an attack on the life of George IV.
The third count consisted of an intent
to levy war against the King, in order by force and constraint to compel him to change his measures and councils.
The overt acts were cited here, as in the first two.
The fourth and final count makes mention of the fact that the conspirators had made war against the king, which was merely a continuation of the intent in count three. Later discussions explained to a confused jury that ‘war’ in this context meant rebellion.4
An astonishing 162 witnesses were called upon to be in readiness, although in practice only a third of those were actually called. Adams, the cordwainer-conspirator heads the alphabetical list. Several of Ruthven’s Runners are there, as are magistrates like Birnie, Captain Fitzclarence and several of his piquet, Yeoman Warders of the Tower, witnesses to the Cato Street night and a scattering of His Majesty’s Ministers.
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.
As dusk fell on that Thursday, the crowd outside the Sessions House, seen to contain faces familiar from Smithfield, Spa Fields and Finsbury, melted away.