Chapter 4

Desperate Men and Desperate Measures

The mood of the nation was ugly as the century turned. The Dissenting millennialists, who had expected some great sign from God, were to be disappointed. The popular general predicted by Robespierre shortly before his execution was Napoleon Bonaparte and he had indeed brought the Revolution to an end, as Robespierre had prophesied, but he had done it with bayonets at his back and few people were in doubt that the Consulate was no more than a trio of military dictators who eventually became one. The unstoppable Corsican was winning battle after battle, smashing yet another alliance against him at Marengo in 1800.

The Act of Union with Ireland was designed by Pitt’s government to pacify the provinces, but it failed and determined Irishmen spent the next century trying to repeal it. The Dublin parliament ceased to exist and Ireland became liable for its share of the national debt, cripplingly high as it was of course by now. No Irishman had forgotten the vicious putting down of Wolfe Tone’s rising of 1798 and the ex-pats who drifted to London and other cities in search of work brought their sense of grievance with them. At home, famine claimed their families and friends. All over the country there were protests against the malt tax and the window tax. Men denied the right to form trade unions by the Anti-Combinations Acts of 1799 and 1800 met after dark behind closed doors. They were probably still discussing hours, working conditions and wages, but since they were secret, Pitt’s government now had no accurate idea what they were talking about. By driving these groups underground, the Establishment had created a potential monster it would be difficult to control.

And there was always an uneasy tension, a sense that some bizarre, brutal act was about to happen. It did, on the night of 15 May 1800, when the king was attending a performance of The Marriage of Figaro at Drury Lane Theatre. James Hadfield stepped out to the orchestra pit and fired a pistol at George, the ball crunching into a pillar to one side of the royal box. Perhaps gambling on the fact that the assassin did not have a second gun and would be grabbed before he could reload, George calmly stood up and inspected the bullet hole. The show’s star, Michael Kelly, was impressed – ‘Never shall I forget his majesty’s coolness’ – while the rest of the audience was, of course, hysterical.

Ever one to capitalize on a situation, the poet, playwright and Whig MP Richard Sheridan, who happened to be in that audience, rattled off a new verse of ‘God Save the King’ –

From every latent foe,
From the assassin’s blow
God save the king!
O’er him thine arm extend,
For Britain’s sake defend,
Our father, prince and friend,
God save the king!

Kelly ended the evening with a rousing version of this which brought the house down.

Hadfield’s behaviour was decidedly odd. Having missed with his pistol, he said to the king, ‘God bless your royal highness; I like you very well. You are a good fellow.’ He stood trial on the inevitable charge of high treason and was defended by the brilliant lawyer Thomas Erskine, himself a supporter of the French Revolution and a member of the Friends of the People, set up in 1792. Erskine’s acceptance of a retainer from Tom Paine cost him the friendship of the Prince of Wales and a possible appointment as Attorney-General. As MP for Portsmouth, he made speeches on behalf of both Thomas Hardy and Horne Tooke and was a natural to defend Hadfield.

It was clear from Hadfield’s demeanour – and indeed, appearance – that Erskine’s best bet would be to plead insanity. Hadfield had been a serving soldier until the battle of Tourcoing in 1794, when he took eight sabre cuts to the head. Although nothing is known of his early life, this battle was fought between Austria and France, so presumably he was serving as a mercenary with the Austrians. Released after capture by the French, he came home and joined a millennialist movement in London. He told Erskine that he believed he (Hadfield) would be instrumental in the second coming of Christ by being executed by the government. Conspiring with fellow millennialist Bannister Truelock, Hadfield hit upon the one crime for which he was certain to be executed – the killing of the king.

Unfortunately for Hadfield, Erskine had other ideas. It would not be until the 1840s that the British judicial system came to a consensus on how to handle criminal insanity.1 The standard definition at the time was that a defendant ‘must be lost to all sense . . . incapable of forming a judgement upon the consequences of the act which he is about to do’. Going head to head with the judge, Lord Kenyon, Erskine argued that delusion ‘unaccompanied by frenzy or raving madness was the true test of insanity’ and produced three doctors to prove that Hadfield’s mania was caused by his head injuries. Kenyon was convinced before the jury had a chance to deliberate and ended the trial with Hadfield acquitted.

There was an immediate outcry as a would-be king-killer walked free and parliament rushed through the Criminal Lunatics Act, which enabled Hadfield to be detained indefinitely because he was regarded as a danger to himself and society at large. He was sent to Bedlam – the Royal Bethlehem Hospital – where he died from gaol fever, probably tuberculosis.

Altogether more dangerous than the clearly deranged James Hadfield was Edward Marcus Despard, an Irish adventurer with a chip on his shoulder. In many ways, Despard’s attempted coup of 1802 was a blueprint for Cato Street. Indeed during the trials of the 1820 conspirators, the name Despard was used disparagingly, as how not to carry out an assassination and revolution.

Despard was born in Queen’s County, Ireland, in 1751. He entered the navy as a midshipman at the age of 15 and was promoted lieutenant in 1772. For the next eighteen years he served in the West Indies, making a name for himself as an administrator with considerable engineering ability. He was stationed in Jamaica at the same time that the father of the future Cato Street conspirator William Davidson was Attorney-General there. He was promoted captain after the San Juan expedition of 1780 and led a successful attack on Spanish-held territory on the Black River two years later. By 1786, Despard was Superintendent of the Crown Colony of Honduras (today’s Belize) on the Mosquito Coast south of Yucatan.

The West Indies were notoriously difficult to police. They had a long history of piracy and running battles between settlers from just about every European state were commonplace. The elder Pitt, adopting a ‘blue-water policy’ in the Seven Years’ War had mounted several campaigns against the French and on the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, his son tried the same thing. By that time, however, Despard had been recalled to London to answer charges of incompetence.

As Superintendent, Despard’s brief was to settle the new territory, which he did without considering race and background. So alongside the exclusively British plantation owners were ex-slaves, smugglers, military volunteers and labourers, anyone in effect who agreed to purchase land and farm it. He did this, he said, because according to English law, there was no distinction in land tenure. A free man with enough money had no bar to ownership of property at home, but the Baymen did not see it that way and petitioned the Home Secretary, Lord Grenville, for redress. Cleverly, Despard stood for election as a magistrate and won a landslide victory. The racist Baymen would have none of it, complaining that the Superintendent had only won because he had the backing of ‘ignorant turtlers and people of colour’.

The people of colour arrived with Despard in London on his return in 1790. One was his wife, Catherine; the other his son, James. A great deal of research has been carried out in recent years on the black history of Britain and Catherine Despard deserves her place in it. Unlike the wives of the Cato Street conspirators, when her husband was accused of high treason, Catherine fought on his behalf. It is highly likely that the Despards were a unique example of a mixed marriage in England at that time. The slave trade would not be abolished for another seventeen years; the ownership of slaves not for another twenty after that. Relatively speaking there was a large number of blacks in the country, especially in London and Bristol, but they were not free (unless they had been enfranchised by liberal owners) and usually appeared in the roles of servants, boxers, prostitutes and menials.

The arrival of the Despards probably filled most whites with horror. It was one thing for British soldiers and administrators of empire to take black mistresses in the colonies and even produce mulatto or half-breed children (William Davidson belongs to this category) but actual marriage was something else. The extraordinary ex-slave Olaudah Equiano had already produced the first edition of his autobiographical The Interesting Narrative the previous year and in it he wrote:

Why not establish intermarriage at home and in our colonies? And encourage open, free and generous love, upon Nature’s own wide and extensive plan, subservient only to moral rectitude, without distinction of the colour of a skin?

Two years later, Equiano himself married a white girl from Cambridgeshire.

Race did indeed lie at the heart of Despard’s problems. The government refused to back him, anxious to keep the plantation owners sweet in any colonial sphere and he found himself dragged through any number of claims courts by the Baymen who wanted recompense for what they imagined was criminal mishandling of their affairs. The colonel found himself in the King’s Bench prison for debt in 1792.

The prison itself was new, the old one having been burnt by the mob in the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots twelve years earlier. Long before the attack on the Bastille, the English had a reputation for gaol-wrecking. The King’s Bench had been destroyed three times by the time Despard found himself there. Like most London prisons, it was all things to all men. It had its own ‘Rules’ by which better off prisoners (who would have included Despard) lived relatively comfortably, whereas the poor wallowed in the filth they had known on the outside in the reeking rookeries of St Giles, Wapping and St James. It was here that the disgruntled colonel read the new book by Tom Paine . . .

On his release two years later, Despard joined the London Corresponding Society and shortly after that the United Englishmen, the offshoot of Wolfe Tone’s ‘terrorist’ organization over the Irish Sea. The most common meeting houses for this group were either Furnival’s Inn in Holborn (much was to be made of this place in the Cato Street trials) or Soho Square. Large numbers of Irishmen, like those who lived in Gee’s Court off Oxford Street, met there, as did a hard core of disgruntled soldiers.

What we have here is the lunatic fringe of the Jacobin movement. We have no idea of their numbers but Despard, like the men of Cato Street, seems to have genuinely believed that there was an army of the dispossessed out there, in London, Sheffield, Leeds and elsewhere, ready to rise at the drop of a cap of liberty. By 1801, the mutinous rumblings had formulated into a plan which has some of the elements of urban guerrilla warfare and a Utopian vision of a rosy future.

Despard’s links with the Irish underground are shadowy. He almost certainly met Wolfe Tone in the mid-1790s and probably Robert Emmett, the son of the viceroy’s doctor who had joined Tone’s United Irishmen in 1789. There is no real evidence in Despard’s case that his plan to seize power in London was linked either to a French invasion or Emmett’s scheme to capture Dublin castle and imprison the viceroy. In fact between 1797 and 1803, the Franco-Irish plans seem to have been totally disjointed, with timings going wrong and Emmett, in 1803, forced to go it alone, with, for him, fatal consequences.

By the year of Wolfe Tone’s rebellion, Catherine Despard was increasingly worried about her husband’s political machinations and he took to using a ‘safe house’ rather than talk sedition with fellow conspirators at their home. Both the LCS and the United Englishmen/Irishmen were hit by the authorities in that year after a traitor was discovered at Margate with plans for an Irish rising he was taking across the Channel to France. Among thirty Jacobins, Despard was arrested and held in Coldbath Fields gaol in Clerkenwell. There was a deep irony here because this prison was known as The Steel (i.e. Bastille) because of its associations with the notorious Parisian gaol. The Jacobin poets Southey and Coleridge wrote of it:

As he went through Coldbath Fields he saw
A solitary cell:
And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint
For improving his prisons in Hell.
2

In fact, when Despard was there, the place was only four years old. It had 232 cells and cost a staggering £65,000 to build.

Tone’s rebellion broke out while Despard was still inside and, since habeas corpus was now suspended, the colonel could, in theory, be held indefinitely.

Enter the feisty Catherine Despard. She contacted the radical MP Sir Francis Burdett who raised the issue of the Coldbath inmates in the Commons. Burdett was a brilliant choice, the respectable face of English Jacobinism, a rebel by temperament who was the darling of the mob. He read out Catherine’s letter to an unruly House, equally divided over their attitudes towards habeas corpus. Colonel Despard, he told them, was being held ‘without either fire or candle, table, knife, fork, a glazed window or even a book to read’. He also read out a second letter, an appeal from a Coldbath prisoner written with a splinter of wood dipped in blood. There were cries of ‘Burdett and no Bastille’ on the one hand, but on the other, the Attorney-General Sir John Scott expressed himself surprised that Catherine Despard wasn’t in prison along with her husband.

Once released, Despard returned to his old haunts and his plans were reformulated. In six articles presented to the United Englishmen’s Committee, the first attack should be on the Tower. Not only was the place a prison along Bastille lines (several of the Cato Street conspirators would be sent there in 1820) but it contained the Royal Mint, a barracks and a sizeable arsenal of guns and powder. In theory, the massive 80 foot thick walls of the White Tower could withstand the shot and shell of any government-ordered artillery attack. Beyond the outer wall was the hell-hole of Tower Hill, a rookery where would-be insurgents could easily be found to join the rising.

The second article referred to the seizure of the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street. It contained gold bullion as well as Pitt’s hated paper money and would provide funds for the revolution. Woolwich was the next target. It was nine miles from London Bridge but the Royal Arsenal there, founded in the seventeenth century, was three and a half miles long and one mile wide. If the rebels could take that, there was nothing that could stand against them. The fourth article, which was rejected, was that parliament should be seized while both houses were sitting. Although attendance was not usually compulsory, at a stroke the political leadership of the country would be in Jacobin hands. The fifth article talked of the pay back for the soldiers who had mounted this revolution. Each man would receive one guinea (£1 1s) per week and to be allowed to retire from the army with 10 acres of land and cash to cultivate it. The final article discussed the idea of winning the many over to the cause. Over London and any other towns that carried out their own coups, flags of liberty were to be flown. ‘Conductors’ (agitators) were to organize such campaigns in the outlying areas, drill ‘soldiers’ and obtain weapons for the purpose.

This was a military plan, broadly accepted or perhaps even proposed by Despard. And in essence it was the right thing to do. Had the army and navy gone over to the revolutionaries, there was every chance of success. This had already been proved by the French experience and would be again in Russia in 1917. Where Despard’s followers seriously miscalculated was the actual mood of the people of 1802. The Tower garrison would not crack and run up a white flag as de Launay’s Bastille men had done. The down-and-outs of Tower Hill could not be relied upon to join the movement and how much use would underfed civilians be against an efficient, well-equipped army?

None of this, of course, was ever put to the test. On 16 November 1802, a large body of Runners from Bow Street descended on the Oakley Arms in Lambeth and arrested nearly forty men, most of them Irish, after a tip-off. The next day they all appeared before a magistrate. Despard, who refused to say a word, was sent to Newgate. This grimmest of London gaols had been totally destroyed by the mob in the Gordon Riots and rebuilt. Only twenty years old when Despard arrived, it was already a slum, with gaol fever claiming large numbers of its shackled inhabitants. Twelve of his followers, six of them soldiers, were sent to the Bridewell at Tothill Fields. Unlike Newgate, this place was well managed by its governor, George Smith, even though it was forced to accommodate extra prisoners after the closure of the Gatehouse Gaol in Westminster in 1777. Twenty others were sent to the New Prison in Clerkenwell, one of the smallest in London after its rebuilding following the Gordon Riots. It was a house of detention with separate male and female wards and specialized in holding people awaiting trial. The remaining ten who had been bundled up in the police raid were found in an adjoining room, had no links with Despard and were released.

The trial opened on Monday 7 February and the Attorney-General went through the motions of his case. In the dock were Edward Marcus Despard, ‘a colonel in the army’ aged 56; John Francis, a soldier, aged 23; John Wood, another soldier, aged 36; Thomas Broughton, a carpenter, aged 26; James Sedgwick Wratton, a shoemaker, aged 35; John McNamara, another carpenter, aged 50; and Arthur Graham, a slater, aged 53. All of them were married men, many with children. In the course of the trial, other members of the gang were acquitted or pardoned, but these seven were held to be at the heart of the conspiracy.

The problem for any group of men bent on such a desperate enterprise was winning other men to their cause. Revolution could only succeed if sufficient numbers took part, but the more in the know, the greater the chance of someone talking, either maliciously to obtain a reward or carelessly in their cups. In an attempt to gauge the trustworthiness of men, John Francis had insisted on ‘administering unlawful oaths’. Such oaths had only been illegal for five years and the relevant law had been rushed through at the time of the naval mutinies. One of the men approached was Thomas Windsor, who, according to the Newgate Calendar which reported the trial, ‘soon became dissatisfied’ and reported what he knew to a Mr Bonus. It is not clear who this man was, but he was certainly Establishment and shrewd enough to suggest to Windsor that he continued in Despard’s company and learn all he could. It was his tip-off that led to the rebels’ arrest.

Windsor’s evidence was that an integral part of the plan was the assassination of the king on his way to the opening of parliament, which was, of course, an exact action replay of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which James I would have been eviscerated in the parliament house along with his entire government. ‘I have weighed the matter well,’ Despard had told Windsor, ‘and my heart is callous.’

Windsor had several meetings with Despard and the others, first meeting the ‘nice man’ as Despard was referred to at the Flying Horse in Newington. He also met him at the Tiger on Tower Hill and was supposed to bring four or five intelligent men (he settled for three soldiers) to discuss the best way to take the Tower. It was at this meeting that John Wood hit upon the idea of grabbing ‘the great gun in the Park’ (St James’s) and blasting the king’s carriage as it passed by. The prosecution trotted out a number of other witnesses – William Campbell, Charles Reed, Joseph Walker and Thomas Blades among them – who testified to other planning meetings that had been held.

Mr Gurney, who would feature in the Cato Street trials eighteen years later, seconded for the defence under Mr Best. The evidence against Despard was overwhelming; in the twelve years since he had returned from Honduras, he had become a marked man, a known opponent of the government and had been in gaol twice, once as a suspected Jacobin. His habit of walking round London with an umbrella and a black wife merely served to draw yet more attention to himself. So Gurney went for the younger Despard, the virtuous, hard-working officer of his early years. Evan Nepean and Alured Clarke from the Admiralty testified to his zeal. But the star witness was undoubtedly Horatio Nelson, the diminutive Vice Admiral who was by now the nation’s hero, with the victories of Cape St Vincent, Aboukir Bay and Copenhagen to his credit.

Nelson testified that he had known Despard well, having met him in Jamaica in 1779. ‘He was, at that time, a lieutenant in what were called the Liverpool Blues.’ The judge, Lord Ellenborough, was a staunch believer in the Bloody Code and interrupted Nelson to remind him that what was needed was a character reference, not a military CV. He did it politely – after all, Nelson was a lord too and a national treasure Ellenborough was not about to offend. The flat trial transcript gives no hint of the scorn with which the Admiral turned his good eye on the judge:

We [Despard and Nelson] were on the Spanish Main together. We slept many nights together in our clothes upon the same ground . . . In all that time, no man could have shown more zealous attachment to his sovereign and his country than Colonel Despard did. I formed the highest opinion of him as a man and an officer.3

In cross-examination, the Attorney-General got Nelson to admit that it was nearly twenty years since he had seen Despard last. That was before the Irishman had become embittered over the Honduras fiasco and before he had read Tom Paine. It came as a surprise to no one when the jury found Despard guilty, but in view of the man’s previous good conduct, recommended mercy. The other conspirators were tried together on Wednesday 9 February where (with the obvious exception of the naval men) the same witnesses gave the same evidence. Nine of the twelve were found guilty, with three more recommendations to mercy.

Ellenborough summed up:

You have been separately indicted for conspiracy against his majesty’s person, his crown and government, for the purposes of subverting the same and changing the government of this realm.

In full flow the judge made sweeping statements which the guilty men, especially Despard, could never have accepted. The constitution, said Ellenborough, had ‘established freedoms’ and ‘just and rational equality of rights’ (neither of which was true for the working class). Despard and his traitors offered instead anarchy and bloodshed, ‘the subversion of all property and the massacre of its proprietors, the annihilation of all legitimate authority and established order’.

He then passed sentence:

Each of you [shall] be taken from the place whence you came and thence you are to be drawn on hurdles to the place of execution, where you are to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead; for while you are still living your bodies are to be taken down, your bowels torn out and burned before your faces, your heads cut off and your bodies divided into four quarters and your heads and quarters to be then at the king’s disposal and may Almighty God have mercy on your souls.4

Three of the prisoners – Newman, Tyndall and Lander – were respited (held in prison ‘until his Majesty’s pleasure be known’). The condemned seven were sent to the New Gaol in the Borough at 6 o’clock on Saturday evening and the keeper, Mr Ives, had the unenviable task of serving the execution warrant. Catherine Despard, who had already fought tooth and nail for her husband in 1798, launched herself again. She petitioned Nelson and this and other appeals led to the remission of part of the sentence. Hanged and beheaded the Jacobins would be, but the disembowelling (drawing) and quartering were dropped. It is just as likely that Henry Addington, the Prime Minister now that Pitt had resigned over the issue of Catholic emancipation,5 was concerned about the crowd’s behaviour. When Robert Catesby and his fellow Gunpowder Plotters were executed in this way in January 1606, the mob was hardened to it. Torture was legal in England at the time and the horror of a gunpowder attack on the Lord’s anointed made any punishment acceptable. Despard’s men, like Catesby’s, would die publicly in front of a vast crowd. Who knew how many of them might turn on the authorities if the execution were too gruesome?

Despard also wrote to Nelson, to ask him to forward a petition to Addington. The Admiral did, without comment, and uncharacteristically Addington had been deeply affected by it, sitting up with his family after supper, weeping over it. Nelson did intercede however, on the part of Catherine Despard, urging that she be given a pension as a result of her husband’s former good service. The Observer reported that Catherine

had almost sunk under the anticipated horror of his fate; her feelings, when the dreadful order [for execution] came, can scarcely be conceived – we cannot pretend to describe them.6

By the time of their last meeting, however, she was composed and waved her handkerchief out of the window as her carriage rattled away.

Daybreak, Sunday 21 February, seventeen years almost to the day before Arthur Thistlewood’s conspirators were arrested in the hay-loft at Cato Street. The entire Bow Street patrol and other constables of the watch had been up all night to guard against any spontaneous and sympathetic uprising. The army ringed London, ready to strike at a moment’s notice. The place of execution was the roof of the Surrey County Gaol, commonly called Horsemonger Lane. The prison was really intended for petty criminals and debtors, but the new gatehouse was low and solid enough to provide an excellent platform for the execution,7 ‘drop, scaffold and gallows’.

It was still dark when the drum sounded at the Horse Guards along Whitehall and a squadron of the Life Guards, in black cocked hats and scarlet coatees, moved off at a jingling walk to take up position at the Obelisk in St George’s Fields. In twos, the troopers peeled off and patrolled the roads that led to Horsemonger Lane.8 In the mean time police officers from stations at Queen Square, Marlborough Street, Hatton Garden, Worship Street, Whitechapel and Shadwell formed cordons around the prison itself.

At half past six, still dark at that time of year, the bell was tolled at Horsemonger Lane and the cells were unlocked. The crowd had been gathering for a while, jostling with the law officers and soldiers for a good view. It would be a full two and a half hours before the condemned men stood at the execution site. The solemn bell of St George’s church tolled as the County Sheriff, an Anglican vicar and a Catholic priest took their places at the head of the sorry little column.

First was the thick-set Irishman John McNamara, who looked at the sea of faces below him and said loudly, ‘Lord Jesus, have mercy on me.’ Arthur Graham came next, the oldest of them, looking ‘pale and ghastly’. The shoemaker James Wratton climbed the gallows steps ‘with much firmness’. Thomas Broughton was next, then the soldiers Wood and Francis. Last came Despard, the man the crowd had really come to see. ‘His countenance underwent not the slightest change’ as they placed the noose around his neck and the cap (actually a hood) on the top of his head. He helped the executioner fix the rope so that the knot was under his left ear to make the job clean. Despard may or may not have known that the hangman was William Brunskill, notoriously inept at what was still an inexact science. Six years earlier, while he was hanging two murderers outside Newgate, the entire scaffold had collapsed and the men died by accident. Two priests who dropped with them were badly hurt.

John McNamara muttered to Despard, ‘I am afraid, Colonel, we have got ourselves into a bad situation.’ Despard replied, ‘There are many better and some worse’, with his usual sangfroid. While Father Griffiths gave McNamara the last rites and five others were similarly interceded for by the prison chaplain, William Winkworth, Despard declined. This atheism appalled Nelson when he read of it, but Despard believed the opinions of Dissenters, Quakers, Methodists, Catholics, savages or even atheists to be equally irrelevant when a man was facing death.

Traditionally men on the scaffold were allowed a last word to the crowd. Indeed, the crowd expected it – it was all part of the Roman holiday of a public execution and Despard was granted permission by the sheriff of Southwark as long as he said nothing ‘inflammatory or improper’, otherwise Brunskill would operate the drop immediately. The colonel’s loud and clear ‘Fellow citizens’ could have been regarded as inflammatory in itself, but the sheriff let it go. Some stood in stunned silence while Despard spoke, others cheered as he said his goodbyes. The poet Robert Southey, himself a Jacobin who had attempted to set up a pseudo-socialistic society or pantisocracy with fellow poet Samuel Coleridge, was in that crowd and it seemed to him that the rowdy element near the front were not Despard sympathizers but agents provocateurs placed there by the authorities to whip the crowd into a frenzy and carry out several arrests. When Despard protested his innocence – ‘I am no more guilty of it than any of you . . .’ – he may have been referring to the now vanished army of English sans-culottes he once hoped would have backed him. He railed against the king’s ministers who had

availed themselves of a legal pretext to destroy a man, because he has been a friend to the truth, to liberty and to justice, because he has been a friend to the poor and the oppressed.

The sheriff moved in to signal that that was enough and Despard wished the mob ‘health, happiness and freedom’. It would be over a century before any of them really had that.

‘What an amazing crowd,’ John Francis said to Despard when he had finished. ‘’Tis very cold; I think we shall have some rain.’

At seven minutes to nine, the sheriff gave the signal and Brunskill went to work, beginning with Despard, ‘and they were all launched into eternity’. The colonel made no sound as he fell, his fists clenching twice before he hung, a dead weight at the end of the creaking rope. The crowd was silent now, the men with their hats off, some unable at the last moment to watch.

Brunskill let them all hang for half an hour to make sure that life was extinct, then he and his assistants handed Despard down, stripped off his dark blue coat and cream, gold-laced waistcoat (traditionally a hanged man’s clothes became the property of his executioners) and the body was placed on the waiting block, amongst the sawdust strewn there to catch the blood and the head was hacked off ‘by persons engaged on purpose to perform that ceremony’. Then, Brunskill lifted the dripping head skyward by the hair. ‘This is the head of the traitor, Edward Marcus Despard.’ One by one the others followed suit, and the bodies were placed in their shells or coffins and the sawdust swept away.

The police and the cavalry had not been needed. If Despard hoped for a last-minute rising of the people, it did not happen.

Again, the redoubtable Catherine came to the fore. Despard, she claimed, had a right, as an honourable man and one of a family of long-serving soldiers, to burial in St Paul’s cathedral. The Lord Mayor of London, responsible after all for the safety of his city, opposed her, but she had her way.

Three black-draped coaches followed the hearse on 1 March as Colonel Despard’s body was taken to the cathedral and buried near the north door.9 Again there was a police and army presence, just in case the mob rallied to their martyr. Again, there was no need.

At some point between the execution and the interment in St Paul’s, Madame Tussaud’s services were sought. Marie Tussaud, née Grosholtz, was a brilliant artist who had recently arrived in London. Under the auspices of Dr Phillipe Curtius, she had been modelling wax likenesses of famous – and infamous – Frenchmen since before the Revolution. The fall of the Bastille and the Terror that followed gave her a whole range of grisly experiences as scores of severed heads came her way for modelling purposes. Such was the cult of the guillotine that Parisians mobbed Curtius’s premises to see the head of their hero Marat, murdered in his bath by ex-mistress Charlotte Corday, the heads of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette and ultimately that of Maximilien Robespierre, with its shattered jaw.10

Taking advantage of the Peace of Amiens which temporarily halted the war against Napoleon, Marie Tussaud (she had married an engineer eight years her junior by this time) arrived in London with her 4-year-old son. She set up a permanent exhibition at the Lyceum Theatre and quickly saw off any opposition, such as Mrs Salmon’s waxworks in Fleet Street and Mrs Bullock’s ‘Beautiful Cabinet of Wax Figures’. Her success was due to the Caverne des Grands Voleurs (Cave of the Great Thieves), the Separate Room, to which Edward Despard would now be added. In the years ahead, of course, it became the Chamber of Horrors.

Marie Tussaud took the likeness at the undertaker’s premises in Mount Street, Lambeth, working quickly and unobtrusively. Despard was the last celebrity to be modelled by Madame Tussaud herself. The hanged traitor’s likeness travelled as a star exhibit to Edinburgh. Wisely, however, when she toured in Ireland in 1804, Despard’s head remained in storage. Eight men had been hanged for treason in Dublin the previous September and British troops patrolled the uneasy provinces in the aftermath of the Act of Union. Not until she returned to Scotland in the summer of 1808 did Despard appear again. His name remained in the catalogue until 1818, by which time interest was probably waning.11 The head is believed to have been burnt, ironically, during an exhibition in Bristol when the city was partially destroyed by rioters over the Reform Bill agitation of 1831–2.

What are we to make of Despard’s desperate enterprise? In his sentencing, Lord Ellenborough said

the objects of your atrocious, abominable and traitorous conspiracy were to overthrow the government and to seize upon and destroy the sacred person of our august and revered Sovereign.

There was little doubt of that. The Newgate Calendar concluded:

it was certainly the most vain [futile] and impotent attempt ever engendered in the distracted brain of an enthusiast [fanatic]. Without arms or any probable means, a few dozen men, the very dregs of society, led on by a disappointed and disaffected chief, were to overturn a mighty empire; nor does it appear that any man of their insignificant band of conspirators – Colonel Despard alone excepted – was above the level of the plebeian race. Yet a small party of this description . . . brooding over their vain attempts at a mean public house in St George’s Fields, alarmed the nation.12

So futile did the whole business seem that many men at the time and several historians since have concluded that Despard was mad. This is patently not true. As we have seen, seducing the London-based garrisons (Wood and Francis were privates in the Grenadier Guards) was the right way to go, especially as these regiments were closest to the king, both physically and in terms of their historical relationship.13 Seizing the Bank of England also made sense. It was after that that the plan fell apart. Many historians have overlooked the importance of the Gordon Riots of 1780 when a charismatic leader, like Despard, had not only incited murder and mayhem but got away with it.

Incensed at the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which was actually the government’s cynical attempt to raise Catholic troops for the armed forces in the teeth of the American crisis, George Gordon was accompanied by a mob of several thousand to the Commons on 2 June 1780 to demand the Act’s repeal. He broke off from his speech to the House to harangue the crowd from an upstairs balcony and an estimated 60,000 of them went on the rampage, burning down the houses of judges like Lord Mansfield and magistrates like Sir John Fielding before attacking the Bank of England and destroying as many prisons as they could. The gin distilleries in Holborn were blown up and large parts of the city reduced to rubble. As the dust settled, there were 235 dead, 173 wounded and 139 arrested.

Gordon’s trial was a farce. The authorities deemed, inexplicably, that there was no direct evidence against him as having caused the violence and he was acquitted. Twenty-five others in the dock were found guilty of high treason and executed.

The key to the whole thing was the ‘dregs of society’, the ‘plebeian race’ who provide the cannon-fodder in any revolution. Today, we tend to dismiss this rank and file as unimportant. We look to the leader of revolt, from Spartacus to Castro, and measure their worth against some rational yardstick that we have invented. But there is little rational about revolution. It plays to the deepest emotions in man. If a mob could terrorize the largest city in the world for six days; if a mob could topple the ancien regime – then anything was possible.

Where Despard got it wrong was in not gauging the mood of the people properly. George Gordon was a blue-blooded aristocrat, a member of the House of Lords. Edward Despard was merely an ex-officer and an Irishman to boot, made bitter and resentful by the treatment he had received from authority. And he intended to kill a king, never on Gordon’s agenda. In the end, the ‘dregs’ did not rise in his support and he paid the price.