‘A Plot, a Plot! How they Sigh for a Plot!’
In the year of Despard’s planned insurrection, the first edition appeared of William Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register. Knowledge was power and one prerequisite of knowledge was literacy. Without an ability to read, a man could not understand the arguments for which he faced the barricades. Without the ability to write he could not put his name to a petition demanding reform. The government knew this perfectly well and was in no hurry to educate the masses. Education was not only expensive, it was dangerous.
We know that all the men who faced trial over the Cato Street conspiracy were literate, at least up to a point. Richard Tidd’s letter – ‘Sir I Ham a very Bad Hand at Righting’ – sounds like a Dickensian character’s efforts, but it makes sense and no doubt proved the government’s point; Tidd had murderous designs in his heart but how much of that was fostered by the incitements of the radical press? It is likely that the majority of men among the working class had basic literacy skills (this was far less true of women) because of the increasing number of schools. Sunday schools (like the one where William Davidson briefly taught) were available from 1780, although they did not take everyone. Their founder, Robert Raikes, insisted for example that all children wore shoes. Dame schools, at a penny a day, offered very basic education, but their numbers were growing. In 1810 and 1812 the National Schools were set up by Andrew Bell (for the Anglicans) and Joseph Lancaster (for the Dissenters). ‘Calendar men’, ‘Number men’ and ballad-singers hawked their written wares in working-class areas, including the ‘dying speeches’1 of men like Despard. They sold political tracts too.
The radical press’s circulation fluctuated with the country’s mood. The years after Despard and before the assassination of Spencer Perceval were relatively quiet. Most eyes were focused on the Channel as Bonaparte prepared the army of Boulogne for an invasion. Nelson effectively destroyed that opportunity at Trafalgar (October 1805) and thereafter, England was safe, at least from invasion. Admiral Earl St Vincent’s boast of 1801 – ‘I do not say they [the French] cannot come. I only say they cannot come by sea’ – was now a proven fact. As the war began in Portugal and dragged on in Spain however and the bite of the Industrial Revolution was felt, the Midlands and the North saw the first outbreaks of Luddism and machine-wrecking. And when the war ended, the radical press had a field day.
Cobbett’s Twopenny Trash was a clear winner. Between October 1816 and February 1817 it sold up to 60,000 copies a week. London dailies, like The Times and the Observer sold under 7,000 each. Thomas Wooler’s The Black Dwarf had reached 12,000 by 1819. Freedom of the press – what could and could not be published – became a big issue. Fox’s libel law of 1792 meant that juries had to decide on what was libellous and this often ran counter to advice given them by the Bench. One of the victims was the bookseller William Hone who upset Liverpool’s government in 1817 by writing parodies on the Lord’s Prayer, thereby neatly offending both church and state:
Our Lord who art in the Treasury, whatsoever be thy name, thy power be prolongued, thy will be done throughout the Empire . . . Turn us not out of our places; but keep us in the House of Commons, the Land of Pensions and Plenty; and deliver us from the People. Amen2
Under Justice Abbott (who would preside over the Cato Street trials) Hone was acquitted. Under Lord Ellenborough (who had tried Despard) it happened again, despite the most appallingly illegal interruptions from the judge and a summing up of disgraceful partiality. This was the last time such a prosecution was brought and it was Ellenborough’s last case. Men said he never recovered from being laughed at. There were 115 prosecutions brought in the two years before Cato Street, but after that, things quietened down. The reason is best summed up by the poet John Keats in a letter to his brother in September 1819:
He [the bookseller and printer Richard Carlile] has been selling devotional pamphlets, republished Tom Paine and many other works held in superstitious horror. After all they [the authorities] are afraid to prosecute. They are afraid of his defence; it would be published in all the papers all over the empire. They shudder at this. The trials would light a flame they could not extinguish.3
Even so, men like Cobbett, Carlile, Hone and the rest did serve time in prison, especially during the suspension of habeas corpus when no such trials took place. Joseph Swann, a Macclesfield hat salesman and newsvendor was gaoled for a total of four years and six months for selling seditious literature in 1819:
Off with your fetters; spurn the slavish yoke;
Now, now, or never, can your chain be broke;
Swift then, rise and give the fatal stroke.4
This was inflammatory material and for every man who read it – or had it read to him – and muttered into his cups in a tavern, there were others (few, maybe – but that was the question) who were prepared to take it seriously and do something.
What emerged from the trial of Despard – and would emerge again in the Cato Street affair – was the number of radical centres, almost always public houses, where seditious meetings took place. In London, which would, of course, be the recruiting ground for Cato Street, the Two Bells, the Flying Horse, the Ham and Windmill, the Bleeding Heart, the Coach and Horses, the Brown Bear and the Black Horse were all places where like-minded gentlemen could hire a back or upstairs room for whatever purposes they wished. Few if any questions were asked and such pubs were perfect for the cross-pollination of grievances. Here the disaffected Irish could nudge elbows with hard-bitten soldiery, out of work canal ‘navvies’ and anybody else increasingly unhappy with their lot.
The acceptable face of working-class reform meetings were the Hampden Clubs formed in 1812 by the ‘good, grey Major’, John Cartwright. The clubs themselves were named after John Hampden, Oliver Cromwell’s cousin who had defied the arbitrary government of Charles I by refusing to pay tax called Ship Money in 1637. Cartwright was originally a naval officer with estates in Lincolnshire and his title derived from his post in the county’s militia. A sane and sensible critic, he sided morally with the Americans in the War of Independence and wrote the definitive democratic book Take Your Choice in the year that Thomas Jefferson produced his Declaration of Independence. It advocated parliamentary reform, universal male suffrage, equal electoral districts, annual parliaments and a secret ballot – almost everything in fact which the Chartist movement (1836–c.1850) stated as their aims.
Seen as too much of an extremist, Cartwright failed to get into parliament three times and in 1805 came to London to contact other radicals at both ends of the social spectrum – Francis Burdett, the baronet, and Francis Place, the tailor.
From 1812 much of Cartwright’s life was spent travelling, establishing Hampden Clubs in the provinces. His insight into welding middle-class ambition and working-class muscle seriously worried the authorities and he was arrested in Huddersfield in 1813. Three years later, the first club outside London was formed by William Fitton at Royden in Shropshire and in Lancashire the weavers Samuel Bamford and John Knight formed others, as did the semi-literate doctor, Joseph Healey, at Oldham and the brush manufacturer Joseph Johnson in Manchester itself. By the year of Cato Street there were at least twenty-five such clubs across the country, all of them talking various shades of revolution.
The whole question of what happened at Cato Street depends on our definition of three words. Arthur Thistlewood and others at the 1820 trials talked of reformers. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines ‘reform’ as ‘the removal of faults or errors esp. of a moral, political or social kind’.5
The problem was – how was the removal to take place? Much later in the century, the group of intellectual socialists calling themselves Fabians took their name from the Roman General Quintus Fabius Maximus, who avoided pitched battles but wore down his opposition gradually. This group worked slowly and patiently for change, always through legal means, by discussion and reason rather than violence.
Radical is the next word we have to understand. Again, the Shorter Oxford says ‘Advocating thorough or far-reaching change, representing or supporting an extreme section of a party’ – and immediately, we must ask another question – how extreme? The Press in 1811–20 is usually termed radical and some men were imprisoned both for writing and reading it. Tom Paine is usually referred to as a radical, so are William Cobbett, Francis Burdett and Colonel Despard.
At what point, then, does radical slide inexorably into the last of the ‘three Rs’ – revolutionary? The Shorter Oxford is downright disappointing here: ‘Pertaining to, characterized by, or of the nature of revolution, involving or constituting radical change.’ In other words, we have been thrown back to the earlier word, as if ‘radicalism’ and ‘revolution’ are interchangeable. If we look up ‘revolution’ itself, we get ‘alteration, change, mutation’. In terms of history, however, there is little doubt that revolution implies something sudden, swift and violent. Reformers may take years to effect change; radicals want to sweep away existing systems; revolutionaries arm themselves with swords, guns, hand-grenades and are prepared to die in a hay-loft or on the gallows.
The Radical map of London, 1820. Many of the meeting places for the Radicals were along Holborn and the streets adjoining.
What looked like a revolutionary act took place in May 1812. On that day, John Bellingham walked into the lobby of the Houses of Parliament and shot the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, dead. Perceval remains the only holder of the office to die in this way, despite the efforts of Thistlewood and the men of Cato Street eight years later. ‘If it had not been for that horrid incident,’ wrote George Malcolm Thomson, his tongue firmly in his cheek, ‘Perceval might be remembered today as the smallest Prime Minister . . . or the prime Minister with the record number of children . . . or the one with the prettiest wife . . .’6
Spencer Perceval was a modest man with much to be modest about. In the portrait by G F Joseph, he has large, kind eyes, a receding hairline and a smirk hovering around his thin lips. He looks like a man a bit too eager to please. The offspring of a second marriage, he had to make a living at the Bar and for a while lived with his young wife above a carpet shop in Bedford Row. As time went on, he veered towards politics and obtained minor posts which boosted his income. Astonishingly, he was ‘reckoned’ by William Pitt, as the man most likely to succeed him and ‘most able to cope with Mr Fox’. This is all the more surprising when his maiden speech was little short of a disaster. He became first Solicitor-General, then Attorney-General in Henry Addington’s misnamed Ministry of All the Talents before moving on to the Exchequer and by 1809 he was First Lord of the Treasury – Prime Minister.
On paper, Perceval was actually a natural target for revolutionaries. ‘An honest little fellow’ he may have been, but he was also deeply reactionary, opposed to Catholic emancipation and any kind of reform. He only agreed to serve under Pitt in 1804 as long as the issue of Catholic emancipation was not raised. When the Luddite unrest broke out across the North, Perceval’s immediate reaction was to send troops to the trouble spots. Parts of Yorkshire and Lancashire were under martial law by the end of May 1812 with arbitrary arrests, threats and even various forms of torture to find the mysterious – and non-existent – organizer of the machine-wrecking, General Ludd. There were bread riots in Leeds, Sheffield, Barnsley, Carlisle and Bristol.
Sydney Smith summed up the problem admirably – and it applied to all those men who should have been around the table at Lord Harrowby’s in February 1820 just as much:
I say I fear he [Perceval] will pursue a policy destructive to the true interests of this country; and then you tell me he is faithful to Mrs Perceval and kind to the Master Percevals . . . I should prefer that he whipped his boys and saved the country.7
On Monday 11 May, a committee of the Commons was in earnest discussion over Orders in Council relating to trade. Napoleon’s Continental System was still in place, although Portugal and Russia had both refused to accept his decrees for port closures and continued to trade with Britain. Lord Brougham realized that Perceval was not present and sent a servant to find him. It was on his way across the lobby that the assassin struck. Accounts differ as to exactly where John Bellingham was hiding, but it was either behind a door or a pillar. He stepped out and fired his pistol at point-blank range into Perceval’s body. The Prime Minister fell backwards, gasping, ‘I am murdered!’ as astonished MPs looked on, unable to grasp what had just happened. Bellingham simply stood there, his one shot spent, and waited to be arrested.
‘My name is Bellingham,’ he said later that day in response to questioning. ‘It’s a private injury. I know what I have done. It was a denial of justice on the part of the Government.’8 In claiming he knew what he had done, Bellingham was signing his own death warrant. As we have seen, it would be nearly another half century before a definition of legal insanity was reached and Bellingham took his place in the dock like any other murderer.
When news of Perceval’s death reached the provinces, there was general jubilation among the working class. ‘A man came running down the street,’ said a witness in the Potteries, ‘waving his hat round his head and shouting with frantic joy “Perceval is shot, hurrah!”’9 In Nottingham, there were flags and drums and street parties. In London, immediately after the outrage, a crowd quickly gathered and some of them cheered as Bellingham was led away. Polite society was appalled, ignoring the fact that in Lancaster that same month eight people were sentenced to death for rioting and thirteen transported to Botany Bay. At Chester, fifteen faced the rope and eight were transported. This was the England Spencer Perceval had governed. In the eyes of many people, his death was entirely justified.
‘This is but the beginning,’ the poet Coleridge heard someone mutter at Bellingham’s execution. But in fact, ironically, the Prime Minister’s murder had nothing to do with politics at all.
John Bellingham was an unstable businessman whose business took him to Russia. It all went wrong for him and he ended up in a Russian prison. With his money gone, he turned to the British ambassador in St Petersburg who was less than helpful. So too was the Consul-General. On his release, Bellingham came home, rented rooms in rundown New Millman Street and began to bombard the government with letters demanding redress. Since Bellingham had brought his disasters on himself and broken Russian law at a time when it was in the government’s interests to keep Russia sweet against the common foe, Napoleon, nothing could be done for him.
At his trial between 13 and 15 May it was decided that Bellingham did indeed know right from wrong and he was sentenced to death. To the government, whatever the specific motivation on Bellingham’s part, the plans of Despard, the riots of the starving, the machine-wrecking of the Luddites and the insanity of John Bellingham were all merely the jutting ugly tips of the same terrifying iceberg and the ship of state was on a collision course with it. No one was in the pardoning mood and Brunskill, the executioner, was sent for again.
Outside Newgate with a large crowd jostling and cat-calling it was clear that the condemned man was a hero. ‘God Bless you!’ they roared and such was the noise it was probably only Brunskill who heard Bellingham’s last words: ‘I thank God for having enabled me to meet my fate with so much fortitude and resignation.’10
At his trial, Edward Despard had referred to the Cabinet of Henry Addington as the ‘man eaters’. As is clear from Sydney Smith’s comment on Perceval the family man versus Perceval the Prime Minister, each of the Cabinet had his soft, loving side. Collectively, they could be said to be guilty of murder.
Essentially, by 1812, the men who would be the targets of the Cato Street conspirators had metaphorically taken their places around that dining table at Lord Harrowby’s. The only conspicuous absentee was Arthur Wellesley, then beginning the second phase of his war in Spain, taking the fortresses of Badajoz and Cuidad Rodrigo. All the others were already there.
Oddly, in the whole of the 430-page account of the Cato Street trial by George Wilkinson, there is scarcely a mention of the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, who took over a nation, at once stunned and euphoric, on the death of Perceval. This is hardly surprising. The politician who would be dubbed years later ‘the arch-mediocrity’ by Benjamin Disraeli hardly emerges as a firebrand. Castlereagh, Sidmouth, Eldon – these were the black, reactionary heart of the Cabinet as far as the men of Cato Street were concerned; Liverpool was almost an irrelevance.
Robert Banks Jenkinson was 50 at the time of Cato Street. The portrait of him by Sir Thomas Lawrence shows a rather bland face with a slight twinkle around the eyes, a large, prominent nose and decidedly thinning hair. He was the son of a Tory country squire and was educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford. It was rather unfortunate that he went on the obligatory Grand Tour (to soak up the classical sites and fleshpots of Europe) in 1789 as all Hell broke out in Paris. He personally witnessed the fall of the Bastille and for him more than most, this was a defining experience of terror that never left him.
At 21, the political borough11 mongers were at work arranging for his seat for the pocket borough of Appleby in Yorkshire. Shy, awkward and rather serious, his maiden speech in the Commons was awful, especially as it was in answer to Samuel Whitbread’s attack on Pitt’s ministry over naval expenditure. Whitbread was a hugely popular Whig MP, as well as a brewer and promoter of ingenious contraptions; his bright yellow curricle was one of the sights of London. As a pacifist, he objected to anything pro-war. Dubbed ‘England’s greatest and most useful citizen’ by the radical editor of The Times, Thomas Barnes, Whitbread was pro-Burdett and parliamentary reform.
Unaccountably, Pitt was impressed with Jenkinson’s speech and gave him a junior post on the India Board. He visited French émigrés in Coblenz and became even more convinced that all things reformist were actually revolutionary and therefore dangerous. When Louis XVI was executed, Jenkinson was all for a declaration of war on France.
When war was actually declared, Jenkinson did his patriotic bit and became colonel of the Cinque Ports Fencible Cavalry, one of the many units raised in the 1790s to protect hearths and homes. In reward for loyalty, Jenkinson was made Master of the Mint and his father, also in politics, the Earl of Liverpool. On Pitt’s resignation over the issue of Catholic emancipation, Jenkinson became Foreign Secretary in Addington’s ministry. His father’s elevation to the peerage made Jenkinson Lord Hawkesbury and when Pitt returned in 1804, he was Home Secretary, still only 33.
Pitt’s death in 1806, largely through overwork and port wine, led to something of a panic to find a replacement. George III, increasingly ailing and out of touch, offered the premiership to Hawkesbury but he lacked the confidence at that stage to accept. He served under the Duke of Portland however, along with three other men who in various ways are central to the story of Cato Street – Perceval, Castlereagh and George Canning. The last two detested each other and fought an inconclusive duel. Duelling was illegal in England and the incident helped bring down Portland’s government. Spencer Perceval stepped into the breach and Hawkesbury, now the Earl of Liverpool on his father’s death, was made Secretary for War and the Colonies. As such, the war in Spain was his responsibility and to his credit he gave Wellington the free hand and equipment he needed.
Perceval’s death saw Liverpool entering Number Ten. Now, he was ready, with wide experience in key Cabinet posts. A man who twitched under stress – George Canning called him ‘Blinkinson’ – he would be eclipsed by the ‘new’ men of 1822: Robert Peel, William Huskisson, Canning and, a long way behind in terms of ability, Frederick Robinson. Liverpool’s strength was in choosing good men of talent and steering a middle course through turbulent times. Tell that to the men of Cato Street.
‘Shed a tear for Henry Addington!’ wrote George Thomson. ‘There he is, poor man, a thin and not very succulent sliver of premiership between two thick slices of Pitt.’12 The future Lord Sidmouth, whom the Cato Street conspirators loathed, was the son of a doctor, born in London in May 1751. He was at school in Winchester, at university at Brasenose, Oxford, and practised law in London until Pitt persuaded him into politics. In 1783 he became Tory MP for Devizes in Wiltshire and six years later, largely because of his diplomacy and understanding of procedure, Speaker of the House. He was a hard worker, but no orator and had absolutely no sense of humour.
The resignation of Pitt put George III in a difficult situation. He had appointed ‘Master Billy’ way back in 1783 and against all predictions the man had proved to be brilliant. But he would not be shifted over Catholic emancipation. The Act of Union of 1801 was Pitt’s brainchild but a vital clause in it involved giving political parity to Catholics. As a stubborn reactionary who was also head of the Church of England, George could not accept this and Pitt resigned. Addington therefore had greatness thrust upon him. The king had watched the man going through his paces in command of his yeomanry regiment and was impressed by his leadership qualities! ‘Addington, you have saved the country,’ the king told him with rather lofty optimism.
In fact, the new Prime Minister lacked international experience and was a miserable speaker. With Pitt a hard act to follow, Addington had to contend with the waspish Canning – ‘Pitt is to Addington as London is to Paddington’ – as well as the fact that his relatively humble origins did not quite square with the Tory squirearchy. ‘He was not’, wrote William Wilberforce, ‘well fitted for the warfare of St Stephen’s.’ He worked out the Peace of Amiens but must have been well aware that it was only actually a breathing space for Napoleon to manoeuvre himself.13 As always in a peace, the government immediately (and stupidly) slashed income tax and reduced the naval establishment from 130,000 men to 70,000. The army was reduced to 95,000. Not only was this hopelessly short-sighted, but it unleashed on the country bitter ex-servicemen who found their old jobs already gone and themselves surplus to requirements. Such men may have joined Despard as their counterparts in 1820 may have joined Thistlewood.
Addington was a tolerable peace minister, but he was not a war leader. Napoleon’s virtual invasion of Switzerland saw hostilities start again and the Prime Minister’s first speech to rally Parliament was one of his worst ever. His government fell on 10 May 1804 and Pitt was back. In January 1805, Addington himself, now Lord Sidmouth, returned as Lord President of the Council. With Pitt’s death a year later, Sidmouth joined the ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ as Lord Privy Seal and then as Lord President again under Perceval and finally as Home Secretary under Liverpool. By the year of Cato Street, Sidmouth had served for thirty years in six administrations. Canning, as always, had the last word – ‘He is like the smallpox. Everybody is obliged to have him once in their lives.’
As Home Secretary, internal law and order was Sidmouth’s particular concern. In the years that led to Cato Street, he stood out as a grim symbol of repression.
Had the Harrowby dinner actually gone ahead, one of its more dazzling members was George Canning. He was one of those larger-than-life characters who easily outshone most of his colleagues. Like Sidmouth, his origins were not of the blood as far as the Tory party was concerned. His father was an Irish squire who died in debt having tried to make some money out of journalism. His mother was a failed actress who produced a string of half brothers and sisters for little George. Luckily for the boy (the family was now living in London) his uncle, Stratford Canning, was a City financier and he paid the fees for Eton and Christ Church, Oxford. His mother continued to haunt the theatre and the linen drapery business and for the rest of her life he worried about her, swinging a secret pension for her when he took office.
Enormously popular, with a ready wit that often got him into trouble, Canning became head boy at Eton and wrote a school magazine which was so successful he sold it to a publisher for £50! He won Latin prizes at Oxford and played at law in Lincoln’s Inn but his vanity and flamboyance made him a natural for politics. At first pro-Whig and pro-French Revolution, the outbreak of the Revolutionary War saw him change his mind and join Pitt’s Tories. Such turncoats are rarely trusted and Canning carried the stigma of this for the rest of his life. It did not help that he was so proud of being Irish at a time when Ireland was usually regarded as one of the outposts of Hell. By 1792 he was contributing to the fortnightly Anti-Jacobin and, under Pitt’s influence, became MP for Newport, Isle of Wight. His Commons speeches were theatrical and his acerbic wit won him enemies. As one opponent said, Canning was a ‘light, jesting, paragraph-making man’. He would have been at home today among sound-biting politicians. By the late 1790s, he regarded democracy as ‘tyranny and anarchy combined’.
In 1799 he was a member of the India Board, resigned with Pitt over Catholic emancipation in 1801 and delighted in attacking Pittites, like Jenkinson, who had joined Addington’s administration. On Pitt’s return, Canning was made Treasurer of the Navy, a post which bored and disappointed him. Under Portland in 1807 he became Foreign Minister at a time when European affairs were critical. This was the high water mark of Napoleon’s power. He controlled Europe from the English Channel to the river Niemen and his Treaty of Tilsit with the Russian Tsar seemed to make his position unassailable. Well informed as he was by his spies abroad, Canning took a bold decision and ordered troops to Denmark to prevent the fleet from falling into French hands. He did the same with the Portuguese fleet.
It was now that Canning decided that the War Minister, Lord Castlereagh, must go. Wellington’s early victory in Spain was effectively wiped by the interference of a more senior general, Sir Huw Dalrymple and the Walcheren expedition of 1809 was a disaster. Canning blamed Castlereagh for both. Castlereagh grew tired of Canning’s opposition and wrote him a three-page challenge to a duel. As dawn broke on 21 September 1809, two of His Majesty’s Government faced each other in the mists of Putney Heath and aimed pistols at each other. Canning’s ball pinged a button off Castlereagh’s coat; Castlereagh’s ball took a chunk out of Canning’s thigh. Both men had to resign.
Canning refused to serve under Perceval, hoping that he might have been sent for instead. It would also have meant serving with Castlereagh, which he was not prepared to do. In 1812 when he was offered the Foreign Office he again refused because Castlereagh was Leader of the House. In that year of Perceval’s assassination he won the seat for Liverpool on the anti-slave trade vote and briefly, two years later, became ambassador to Portugal. In June 1816 he returned to take up the post of President of the Board of Control, which effectively ran Indian affairs and it was in this capacity he was still serving at the time of Cato Street. Perhaps more than anyone who should have dined with Lord Harrowby, Canning was a mercurial enigma. On the one hand he was a disciple of Burke and yet saw the need for constitutional change. As perhaps the most dazzling of the ‘Liberal Tories’ in the 1820s, he championed the underdog in foreign affairs, always put England first and outwitted the machinations of the European superpowers. But in 1820, in terms of the rising popular clamour for reform, he was as unrelenting as Sidmouth.
Or as Eldon. John Scott was born in Newcastle in 1751, the son of a coal merchant. As with other Cabinet members, his relatively humble background is perhaps surprising, but, like others, it was overlaid with an Oxford education and a career in the law. His elopement with a banker’s daughter at the age of 21 was the last wild thing he ever did and he was called to the Bar in 1776. True to form, seven years later he became MP for Weobley, a rotten borough in Herefordshire. Scott was virulently anti-French Revolution and watched the growing discontent of the British masses with a mixture of contempt and fear. He was Solicitor-General in 1788 and, as Attorney-General five years later, was able to use all the viciousness of the Bloody Code against sedition of any kind. As Sydney Smith wrote, ‘Lord Eldon and the Court of Chancery sat heavy on mankind.’ In 1801, under Addington, he became Lord Chancellor, the supreme arbiter on matters of law. His take on reform was extreme. Eight years after Cato Street he referred to the Bill to repeal the 300-year-old Test and Corporation Acts (which would enfranchise Catholics) as ‘bad, as mischievous and as revolutionary as the most captious dissenter would wish it to be’.14 His views on education were that learning to read would send ‘a hundred thousand tall fellows with clubs and pikes against Whitehall’. One of his judgements in 1805 meant that certain schools were allowed to teach nothing but Latin and Greek. He and Sidmouth regarded themselves as the ‘last of the old school’ and as long as they dominated the Cabinet (Eldon was a favourite of both George III and George IV) these dinosaurs were unlikely to accept the sort of concessionary changes which would have made Cato Street unnecessary.
As always, the private man was different. He was cheerful, he was kind, he liked his port (usually two bottles a day) and he did say in one memorable moment, ‘If I were to begin life again, damn my eyes but I would begin as an agitator.’ But Lord Eldon did not begin again as an agitator. He just hanged those who were.
Of all the men who should have dined with Lord Harrowby, the one that most carried the scorn and contempt of the working class was the strikingly handsome Robert Stewart, Marquis of Londonderry, but always known by his earlier title of Viscount Castlereagh. Shelley’s cold and damning line still hovers over the man’s reputation – ‘I met Murder in the way; he had a mask like Castlereagh.’ It was his head in particular that butcher James Ings wanted to hack off at Lord Harrowby’s and he carried his butcher’s knife for the purpose.
Stewart was born of a Scottish-Irish family in County Donegal in 1769. A graduate of St John’s College, Cambridge, his Grand Tour enabled him to hear a debate in the Constituent Assembly in Paris. He sat in the Dublin parliament from 1790 and in the Westminster Commons from 1794 to 1797 as MP for the pocket borough of Orford. When the Dublin parliament was disbanded under the Act of Union, Castlereagh was one of the hundred MPs to join Westminster, representing County Down, and refused an English peerage which would have taken him to the Lords.15
His was the unenviable task of Chief Secretary for Ireland in the year of Wolfe Tone’s rebellion. The vicious handling of this rising was not Castlereagh’s decision; in fact he complained about it bitterly, but the Irishman’s memory is long and he was regarded in the provinces as little short of a monster. They conveniently forgot that he resigned in 1801 along with Pitt over George III’s refusal to accept emancipation for the Catholics.
In July 1805 Castlereagh was made Secretary for War and the Colonies. With the exception of Pitt, now becoming increasingly ill, he was the only Cabinet minister in the Commons and this was to take its toll on the man’s health and sanity in the years ahead. Out of office during the ‘Ministry of All the Talents’ he was back under Portland in his old job and at a crucially testing time. His reorganization of the appallingly amateurish militia was sensible and creative. His personal choice of Sir John Moore to command the Light Infantry was brilliant and even the decision to land at Walcheren to destroy the French fleet was a perfectly good one. Unfortunately, Moore was killed at Corunna and the commanders on the ground at Walcheren dragged their feet, losing half their command in the process. Not everyone pointed the finger of blame at Castlereagh, but he felt responsible nonetheless.
He bounced back quicker than Canning after the unfortunate business on Putney Heath and was at the Foreign Office before Perceval’s assassination. It is perhaps a little over the top to accept Geoffrey Treasure’s verdict that Castlereagh was ‘perhaps the greatest foreign minister that this country has ever had’. The diplomatic shenanigans that were the Congress of Vienna of 1814–15 and the subsequent congresses are beyond the scope of this book. Castlereagh, with his wide command of languages, his feel for European attitudes and his personal friendship with Prince Metternich, the Austrian Chancellor, made him a natural for all this. But he was also secretive and a difficult man to love. Though he dismissed the ambitions of the Holy Alliance of European superpowers as ‘a piece of sublime mysticism and nonsense’, it took him eight years to realize that British interests were not being considered by anyone else and had to leave it to his old nemesis Canning to do something about that.
The average Englishman – and certainly the disgruntled labourer or would-be Jacobin – merely saw Shelley’s Castlereagh, the cold unfeeling supporter of reaction that could cheer the yeomanry’s bloody work at Manchester and frame the Six Acts to muzzle any attempts at reform. The problem was that, from 1812, Castlereagh was the sole Cabinet minister in the Commons, and therefore bore the brunt not only of awkward questions from the Whig opposition, but the uncertainty of some of his own party too. A strike by Glasgow weavers in March 1813; the opening of a Jesuit college in County Kildare in May 1814; Corn Law riots over the price of bread in London, March 1815 – all this and much more came Castlereagh’s way and he was supposed to provide answers. Actually, none of it was his responsibility at all. But James Ings wasn’t listening.
The other men who should have dined in Grosvenor Square were small fry. Harrowby himself was Lord President of the Council and was elevated to the higher ranks of the peerage as an earl in 1809. Dudley Ryder had been Viscount Sandon and Baron Harrowby before that. His grandfather had been Lord Chief Justice on the King’s Bench in the 1750s and died the day after he had been offered a peerage by George II. The house on the south side of Grosvenor Square was merely the earl’s town house. He also owned considerable estates in the Midlands – it was at Sandon Hall near Stafford that William Davidson, Cato Street’s ‘man of colour’, worked for Harrowby on his furniture and fittings.
Nicholas Vansittart was 54 at the time of Cato Street and has the distinction of being the longest serving Chancellor of the Exchequer in British history and one of the worst. The son of the governor of Bengal, Vansittart was born in Bloomsbury and educated at Christ Church, Oxford. Called to the Bar, he began his political career as a pamphleteer for Pitt and stood as MP for that most rotten of boroughs, the ‘accursed hill’ of Old Sarum, near Salisbury. He held a succession of posts under Pitt and Addington and was making a name for himself as a financier. He became Liverpool’s Chancellor of the Exchequer in May 1812 and embarked on a series of incredibly convoluted tax reforms to tackle the huge national debt brought about by the long years of war. He became very unpopular in the country at large and by 1820 his financial credibility had come under fire from William Huskisson in his own party, as well as the classical economist David Ricardo.
Henry Bathurst was the son of a former Lord Chancellor. An MP from 1783, he inherited his father’s earldom eleven years later and was shunted rapidly through a range of government departments including the Treasury, the Admiralty, the Board of Control (India), the Board of Trade and the Foreign Office. Whereas the Australian Dictionary of Biography describes him as a ‘capable minister and a Tory of moderate opinions’,16 it has to be asked how much in-depth experience he actually gained in any of those areas. As Colonial Secretary in 1820 he had little to do with internal events in this country, although he was concerned that transportation to Botany Bay (the fate of the more fortunate Cato Street conspirators) was not really working in any meaningful sense.
Charles Grimble wrote:
[Frederick] Robinson is an excellent Minister in days of calm and sunshine, but not endowed with either capacity or experience for these strange times.
Historian George Thomson goes further: Robinson was a man ‘with a plump, dimpled face, pleasant manners, a vein of unconscious humour and not much else.’17 A contemporary18 said: ‘Why Fred Robinson is in the Cabinet I don’t know.’
Frederick John Robinson was born to a titled family in Yorkshire, went with the usual monotony to Harrow and Cambridge and was MP for Ripon at the age of 25. As Chancellor of the Exchequer under Liverpool, his name is forever associated with the hated Corn Laws of 1815, the symbol of the greed of the landed interest. To be fair, the man was far from happy about the legislation, but a London mob attacked his house in Old Burlington Street and slashed valuable paintings. There was already a military guard there and two people were killed. In relaying all this to parliament, Robinson broke down in tears and earned the nickname ‘the blubberer’. He was Treasurer of the Navy by the time of Cato Street.
Nice men, with wives and children, families and friends. Adolf Hitler liked dogs and children and he worried about killing lobsters. The same man (although there is famously no hard evidence for this) advocated the murder of every Jew in Europe.
It is unfair to link Liverpool’s Tory Ministry of 1820 with the monster of the twentieth century, but we have to see these men from the perspective of the Cato Street conspirators. To them, the Ministry itself was a conspiracy; one bent on punishing the poor for being poor, of keeping the cost of bread artificially high; of imprisoning, transporting and hanging those who complained.
And on its part the government saw conspiracies everywhere. ‘A Plot! A Plot!,’ wrote Cobbett of them. ‘How they sigh for a plot!’
It was on its way.