‘This is But the Beginning . . .’
The mob who watched the dispatch of the Cato Street conspirators had gone home by tea-time and the soldiery stood down. It was not all anticlimax however. The masked headsman was held to be a surgeon because of his skill and speed with the knife and a rumour flew that he came from Argyll Street. That could only mean Dr Thomas Wakley and, as night fell, a sinister mob gathered outside his house, smashed his windows and set the place on fire. The police and the army were ordered to restore order and helped the bleeding and disoriented Wakley (who had been kicked by the mob and left for dead) to safety. They did the world a favour – not only was the surgeon unconnected with the executions, he would go on in later years to found that most eminent of medical journals, The Lancet.
The real culprit was probably a ‘resurrectionist’ named Tom Parker, hired for £20 by the Under-Sheriff. Before the law was changed in 1831, there was a vigorous trade in body-snatching, removing corpses from graves to provide ‘subjects’ for the London medical schools. Parker specialized in teeth – a spin-off outlet into the denture business, as he was ‘in the habit of cutting off nobs for the purposes of getting the gnashers’.1
The widows and families who were left – Susan Thistlewood, Mary Tidd, Mary Brunt, Celia Ings and Sarah Davidson – petitioned Lord Sidmouth for the return of their husbands’ bodies. This was, of course, refused, as it was contrary to custom. A channel had been dug alongside an underground passage at Newgate and at 7 that night, the five coffins were filled with quick lime and covered with earth and stones so that ‘no trace of their end remains for any future public observation’.
Susan Thistlewood continued alone, presenting a petition to the Privy Council that was subsequently passed to the king. The official reply was laconic to the point ‘that Thistlewood was buried’.
The next day, Tuesday 2 May, the remaining conspirators who had been sentenced to transportation were escorted in three post-chaises to Portsmouth and placed on a convict ship bound for New South Wales. It is not known whether any of them returned. Gilchrist alone remained in Newgate to serve an unspecified gaol sentence. The following Saturday, six men who had been arrested on suspicion appeared in the dock – Thomas Preston, William Simmons, Abel Hall, Robert George, William Firth and William Hazard. There was no case against them and they were discharged. Preston alone, as loquacious as ever, tried to make a speech and was immediately silenced by the court.
General histories of the period sweep swiftly from Cato Street to the Queen Caroline affair of the following year. At first sight, this is typically British – the public of all classes far more interested in the tittle-tattle of a salacious royal divorce than a people’s revolution. In fact, serious rioting occurred in London between those who backed George IV and those who backed his wife and this was to be repeated on the occasion of her funeral in August 1821. This turned into an anti-police riot in which stones and brickbats were thrown. In the end order was only restored by the Life Guards firing their carbines into the air to disperse the mob. Ironically, most of the violence occurred near to Tyburn turnpike, within a stone’s throw of both the Cato Street stable and Lord Harrowby’s house. Two men died and many more were injured. One modern historian makes the interesting comment that Thistlewood’s timing was poor; had he held off until the Caroline riots he might have succeeded in mounting his revolution.
In fact, there were three risings in 1820 which may or may not have been linked to Cato Street, and these in turn seem to have been part of a wider conspiracy in the weaving heartlands of Scotland, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Carlisle. Two weeks before Thistlewood’s trial, trouble was brewing near Huddersfield. Secret cards labelled ‘democracy’ were distributed among potential revolutionaries whose aim was to establish a free government. Beacons, scythes, pitchforks, guns and the inevitable pikes were all part of the paraphernalia carried at Grange Moor near Barnsley on the night of 11 April. Led by two Waterloo veterans, Comstive and Addy, a 300-strong force marched twelve miles to rendezvous with a Scottish contingent that failed to materialize. There were transportations and a bitter sense of disappointment – ‘I hope’, ran a letter found among the effects of a weaver-conspirator, ‘that we may all meet in one body and one voice yet.’2
More serious was the violence near Glasgow on 5/6 April when weavers clashed with the authorities in what became known as the ‘battle of Bonnymuir’. As with Brandreth’s Pentrich rising, the disaffected marched on local ironworks (at Carron) to grab weapons. For months, there had been strikes in the area (all of them illegal under the Acts of 1799 and 1800) and three armed units converged on the factory to be met by two squadrons of Hussars. Three ring-leaders were hanged.
In the days before he died, Arthur Thistlewood received a visitor in the condemned cell at Newgate. The result of that visit appeared in the Leeds Intelligencer two months later:
Exhibition, Music Hall, Leeds, by Particular Desire, New Addition . . . a likeness of the celebrated notorious Arthur Thistlewood taken from life.
If Thistlewood hoped that his wax image in Madame Tussaud’s ‘special room’ would make him a part of history, he was mistaken. Two years later, neither he nor Colonel Despard was part of the waxworks’ catalogue and the world had moved on.
We have some tantalizing insights into the mindsets of the Cato Street hanged from their writings in Newgate. Thistlewood’s poem is typically anti-government – ‘Oh what a twine of mischief is a Statesman’. There is no introspection here and certainly no remorse. The government is corrupt – that is the only reason for Thistlewood’s death. Richard Tidd, who had difficulty expressing himself on paper, wrote nothing, but James Ings wrote separate letters to his wife, his daughters, his son and the king.
To Celia, at 4 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, 30 April, he lamented the fact that he had to leave his family
in a land full of corruption, where justice and liberty has taken their flight from, to other distant shores . . . I conclude a constant lover to you and your children and all friends. I die the same, but an enemy to all tyrants.
He asked her to give his love to his parents and siblings ‘for I am gone out of a very troublesome world and I hope you will let it pass like a summer cloud over the earth’.
To his (unnamed) daughters, Ings wrote urging them to be kind to their mother and to put all their trust in God. To his son, William, he wrote – ‘My dear boy, I hope you will make a bright man in society.’ The lad should be honest, sober, industrious and upright and should treat all men as he would want to be treated. At the same time he cautioned him to trust no one – ‘for the deception, the corruption and the ingenuity in man I am at a loss to comprehend’.
This was the last thing he wrote, because his petition to the king was almost certainly written first. It forms a mini-autobiography and we have already noted its details. He railed against Edwards the spy and assured his Majesty that should he spare his life, for the sake of his family, he would in future be a ‘true and faithful subject’.
Davidson wrote to his wife and to Lord Harrowby. ‘Death’s countenance is familiar to me,’ he told Sarah. ‘I have had him in view fifteen times and surely he cannot now be terrible. Keep up that noble spirit for the sake of your children . . .’
The Harrowby letter is extraordinary, a mixture of hopeless optimism and downright lies in which Davidson hoped to curry favour by mentioning the fact that he had once been employed by his Lordship and that Edwards knew perfectly well that he was not ‘that man of colour’ in the revolutionary group.
John Brunt was the most poetic of all, even when he was complaining to Sidmouth about the lack of cutlery in Newgate –
Let them eat and drink and sleep,
But knives and forks pray from them keep,
As they’ll commit assassination –
The rogues would overthrow the nation.
As a sort of PS he wrote:
Life’s but a jest and all things show it,
I thought so once, but now I know it!
He placed his poetry in an envelope to his wife, together with a shilling, the last money he had, urging her to keep the coin for as long as she lived.
On 30 April, facing the drop the next day, he finally wrote –
Let Sidmouth and his base colleagues
Cajole and plot their dark intrigues;
Still each Briton’s last words shall be
Oh! Give me death or liberty!
Along with the four others, Sidmouth and his colleagues gave Brunt death.
Of the men who were to dine with Lord Harrowby that bitterly cold night in February 1820, Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, suffered a massive stroke almost exactly seven years later and lingered on, a vegetable, until December 1828. The nebulous Vansittart, Chancellor of the Exchequer, resigned from the Cabinet in 1822 and took a vague interest in education and factory reform thereafter. The Duke of Wellington, who had advised his Cabinet colleagues to let Thistlewood and his company arrive and then shoot it out with them, spent his last days in 1852 surrounded by an adoring family. He was the hero of Waterloo still, the Iron Duke and a legend as large as that could never be diminished by an appalling two years spent as Prime Minister as the Cato Street decade ended. Lord Eldon lived on, as reactionary as ever, until 1838, by which time there were new revolutionaries – the Chartists – baying for change. The hated Sidmouth, who had done so much to bring down the men of Cato Street, lived on until 1844 when Britain was a nation of cities and railways and steel. At a stroke however, the ‘old guard’ of Eldon, Vansittart and Sidmouth were removed from the Cabinet two years after Cato Street. It would be nice to believe that this fall from grace was linked with the conspiracy but that is simply not true. They resigned because of age or for personal reasons and probably never thought consciously of Cato Street again.
The oddest fortunes befell Lord Castlereagh. As the only senior Cabinet member in the Commons, he became the government’s mouthpiece on all sorts of problems, not merely his own Foreign Office, and the strain, shortly after Cato Street, was beginning to tell. Friends and colleagues became increasingly worried about him and an unsavoury scandal may have been at the bottom of it. At the trial of the Cato Street men we saw how low-life like Dwyer made a precarious living by blackmailing gentlemen over homosexual allegations. According to H Montgomery Hyde,3 Castlereagh was in the habit of frequenting prostitutes as he crossed St James’s Park from his home. One of these turned out to be a man in drag and Castlereagh was caught ‘in flagrante’ by the man’s accomplice. Unlikely as all this sounds, the Foreign Secretary made various veiled references to it to Wellington, among others and it is possibly true.
With all this and the cares of the political world on his shoulders, Castlereagh cut his throat in the presence of his own doctor at his country house of Cray’s Farm, Kent, in August 1822. The men of Cato Street would have been delighted.
Of all the shadowy figures stalking the radical night in the Cato Street story, the name that stands out is George Edwards. Documents in the Home Office files prove that Edwards was a spy, that he often used the alias Windsor and that he reported, not only to Magistrate Stafford and his Bow Street Runners, but directly to Sidmouth too. Childish code letters have survived for use by political revolutionaries, signed ‘G.E.’ on the back. A number of sworn statements still exist (not, of course, made available to the court in 1820) which paint Edwards in a damning light. One of the potential ‘Committee of Two Hundred’, Pickard, writes of a plan by Edwards to enter the Houses of Parliament carrying hollowed out books which carried bombs – ‘What bloody destruction it would make,’ Edwards had said.
Alderman Wood who had desperately tried to talk to Thistlewood on the eve and then the morning of his execution, was determined to nail Edwards and raised the issue in the Commons. Denied the right to do this, he approached Sidmouth direct, to stop Edwards from fleeing the country. Sidmouth, of course, refused to help. It was not until 22 May, over three weeks after the execution that a warrant for high treason was eventually raised against Edwards. Harmer, the conspirators’ solicitor, put up a vast reward of 1,000 guineas. By that time, the ever-reliable Home Office stooge, Cam Hobhouse, had spirited Edwards away to Guernsey. Using the alias G E Parker, Edwards complained that he was running out of money, that his model-making tools were still locked away at his lodgings in Fleet Street and that his wife was living separately as Mrs Holmes. He was concerned that his new whereabouts were already known. His last letter, written at the end of July, asks for money to buy a house where he can feel safer. There, the trail stops.
One of the many anonymous threatening letters written to the Home Office in the spring of 1820 is this one:
To Ministers, Privy Councillors, Bloody-minded wretches – Ye are now brooding with hellish delight on the sacrifice ye intend to make of those poor creatures ye took out of Cato Street on pretence of punishing them for what your own horrid spies and agents instigated . . . But know this, ye demons, on an approaching day and in an hour when you least expect it ye yourselves shall fall a sacrifice to the just vengeance of an oppressed and suffering people who shall behold your bloody corpses dragged in Triumph through their streets.
It never happened. Today, astonishingly, the hay-loft of Cato Street has survived. It is the last building on the left along a quiet cul-de-sac which still bears the name. With an irony which would have appalled Arthur Thistlewood, a nearby street is named after Lord Harrowby and a block of flats only feet from the hay-loft is called Sidmouth Court. In Grosvenor Square, in front of the incongruous statues of American generals from the Second World War, Lord Harrowby’s house is now the imposing 5-star Millennium Hotel. Across radical London, Baldwin’s Gardens, where Richard Tidd lived in Hole-in-the-Wall Passage, has a church built in 1863 and new flats and a school. Fox Court, the home of John Brunt, is no longer an alleyway, but a huge office block, symbol of the wealth that Brunt despised. Newgate gaol and its Sessions House have long gone, and the grey of the Old Bailey with its gilded figure of justice, stands over the last resting place of the men of Cato Street, its granite determined still not to turn them into martyrs. By contrast, the conspirators’ would-be targets have found honourable graves. Eldon lies beside his wife in the Old Churchyard in Kingston, Devon. Wellington rests in the crypt of St Paul’s. Castlereagh, despite being a suicide, was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.
Was there ever a chance of the Cato Street conspiracy working? That all depends on the existence of the Committee of Two Hundred and their links with the provinces. When the malcontents of Yorkshire and Scotland marched in the spring of 1820 they did so in the belief that a general rising of the people would occur. Arthur Thistlewood seems to have believed this too. All that was needed was the wholesale slaughter in Grosvenor Square and instinctively London would rise. If London rose, so would the rest of the country. One of those on the edge of the conspiracy had assured Thistlewood that he could bring twenty-six disaffected Irishmen out of Gee’s Court. If all twenty-five men in the hayloft brought the same number, that would make a little over 600 – possibly enough to equal the scattered police forces in the capital but not the soldiery.
Two things are completely missing from the conspirators’ plans; first, the exact mechanics of how London could be taken from the forces that held it; and second, if this could be achieved, what was to follow? Most historians have dismissed the men of Cato Street as lunatics, misguided madmen who had no clue as to how to proceed. But the same could be said – and was said – of the sans-culottes who stormed the Bastille; today, France is a republic run by its people. The same could be said – and was said – of the Irishmen who occupied the British-held Dublin in 1916; today, Dublin is the capital of an independent Eire. The same could be said – and was said – of the men who took power in Russia in the October of 1917; these were the communists who controlled one of the world’s greatest superpowers for nearly three-quarters of a century. It is easy to dismiss plots that fail and British history is full of them.
No doubt Arthur Thistlewood, and the men who stood with him that bright May day in 1820 as they faced the mob and ultimately their God in the yard outside Newgate, felt a sense of failure and of being let down. But what they proved, perhaps once and for all, was that conspiracy, assassination and revolution were no longer the British way. The future, of democracy and justice lay instead with Henry Hunt and William Cobbett, with the men of peace who dealt in moral, not physical force. What 1820 proved at last was that the British way was by the ballot, not the bullet, even if it was to take another hundred years for the ballot to arrive.
In that sense, and in that sense alone, the men of Cato Street deserve their place in history.