If His Majesty’s Government wanted a plot, they needed look no further than the ideas of Thomas Spence. Whereas most members of the London Corresponding Society dreamt of universal suffrage, a free education and some vague notion of a better deal in life, it is likely that some of them were prepared to go further.
Spence himself seems a straightforward man, but his legacy is confused. Because he operated latterly almost exclusively in London and one of his supporters was the Cato Street conspirator William Davidson, we have to evaluate his contribution to the most brazen assassination plan in British history.
Spence was born in Quayside, Newcastle, in June 1750. The city was one of the rapidly growing industrial centres of the North, with coal and iron challenging the older, still medieval work of the woollen and worsted weavers. Spence’s family came originally from Scotland and his father was a net and shoemaker who sold hardware in a booth on the Sandhill. Young Spence had eighteen full and half brothers and sisters, and his father taught him to read and write sufficiently well for the boy to become a schoolmaster.
In his twenties, Spence became fascinated by a land dispute in Newcastle over common rights and he wrote a pamphlet which was hawked around the city, advocating his ideas which, many years later, came to form the basis of Spencean philanthropy. Since land was the currency of conquerors and the symbolic cornerstone of power, Spence decided that it should be distributed in a different way. Based on the parish, long the centre of social life, land must be returned to the people. In fact, his tract of 1800 was called just that – Restorer of Society to its Natural State. Inevitably, Spence’s proposals did not end there and he had a rather rosy, optimistic view of how easily it would all happen:
The public mind being suitably prepared by reading my little Tracts and conversing on the subject, a few Contingent parishes have only to declare the land to be theirs and . . . other adjacent parishes would immediately follow the example . . . and thus would a beautiful and powerful New Republic instantaneously arise in full vigour.1
All land would be held in common by each parish and profits from rents would be ploughed back into the parish to build and sustain schools and libraries. Each parish would send a delegate to a national assembly and every adult male would be a member of the militia.
Spence produced these ideas on paper in 1775, the year that the American colonies broke away, claiming that land which actually belonged to Britain was rightfully theirs. As long as Spence remained in a political backwater like Newcastle, there was little harm done,2 but in 1792 he moved to London.
Now it was a different place and a different time and phrases like ‘national assembly’ had an alien and terrifying connotation. The Terror began in France that year and war was imminent. Cashing in on the latest bestseller Spence revamped his 1775 pamphlet with the title The Real Rights of Man. He sold Paine’s original alongside his own and let men take their choice.
Spence first operated out of a shop in Chancery Lane, but found himself arrested almost immediately for selling Paine. Accordingly, he kept on the move, hiring premises in High Holborn, Little Turnstile, Oxford Street and eventually selling from a barrow in the street. He also sold medallions embossed with the scales of justice and saloop, a cheap coffee made from sassafras or medicinal bark. Francis Place, living and working in his tailorshop-cum-lending-library also sold Spence’s tracts and wrote of him:
He was not more than five feet high, very honest, simple, single-minded, who loved mankind and firmly believed that a time would come when men would be virtuous, wise and happy. He was unpractical in the ways of the world to an extent hardly imaginable.
Throughout the 1790s Spence continued to write and disseminate his tracts, the best known of which, between 1793 and 1796 was called Pig’s Meat or Lessons for the Swinish Multitude (Burke’s phrase of 1790). Chalked slogans – ‘Spence’s System’ – began to appear on London’s buildings and in December 1794 he was imprisoned in Newgate under the suspension of habeas corpus and once more in 1801 (this time for twelve months) for the release of the Restorer pamphlet which the government regarded as seditious. By now Spence had invented a Utopian state – ‘Spensonia’ – in which not only his land reforms, but his idealized society with its own phonetic language3 would be a reality. On 3 January 1795 Spence wrote to the Morning Chronicle complaining that over a three-year period he had been dragged four times from his door by law officers, three times hauled before grand juries, three times sent to prison and once indicted at the Bar. He put his case in writing – something Despard would never be allowed to do – ‘The case of Thomas Spence, bookseller, who was committed for selling the second part of Paine’s Rights of Man’.
‘Spence’s just plan for everlasting peace and happiness, or in fact, the Millennium’ was all rather idyllic and a tiny knot of supporters remained loyal to the strange little man until his death in 1814. Quite large crowds turned out for his funeral and the Jacobin medallions he made were distributed to everyone there.
The jury is still out on Thomas Spence. He could be regarded as a harmless crank, but in view of what happened two years after his death, this is probably too simplistic a view. It goes without saying that Spence’s ideas, which many see today as forerunners of socialism propounded half a century before Karl Marx, ran totally counter to Britain’s ruling elite at the time and were regarded by them with a mixture of disbelief and horror. Even Spence’s original pamphlet in 1775 led to his being disbarred from the Philosophical Society.
It did not help that he was likened to the French revolutionary François ‘Gracchus’ Babeuf whose plot was discovered in 1796 and written up extensively in the New Annual Register. Babeuf was a hot-headed ex-servant who ruffled feathers from the time of the Revolution to his execution in 1797. His rallying cry was ‘insurrection, revolt and the constitution of 1793’ and his song – ‘Dying of hunger, dying of cold’ – could be heard in the cafés of Paris by the mid-decade. Probably psychotic, Babeuf believed that the appalling September massacres had not been appalling enough and the only remedy was to destroy the Republic’s government which consisted of ‘starvers, bloodsuckers, tyrants, hangmen, rogues and mountebanks’.
It all sounded like an incitement for Despard and the men of Cato Street, but was there any link with Thomas Spence? No hard evidence exists, but there were rumours of weapon collecting and drilling in connection with the man’s followers and, after all, Spence himself used underground revolutionary techniques – handbills, pub meetings, possibly the orchestration of bread riots in 1800 and 1801. In 1803 little children were arrested on the orders of Lord Portland, the Home Secretary, for selling Spence’s tracts. Certainly, the government continued to believe that Spence’s was one of the ‘hidden hands’ behind unrest. Francis Place on the other hand believed that Spence and his followers were harmless people ‘next to nobody and nothing’. But Place often misread his contemporaries and was prone to pretend that working-class reform revolved around him alone.
But whatever the involvement of Thomas Spence himself in plans for revolt, there is no doubt that, after his death, his followers certainly were involved. Calling themselves Spenceans or Spencean Philanthropists they took to the streets of London in 1816 as the nucleus of what was intended – and might have become – open rebellion.
Meeting in a variety of public houses, they were focusing their thoughts on what might be termed agrarian communism with their slogan ‘The Land is the Peoples’ Farm’. The leading lights of this group were more properly Jacobins or Painites – ‘old Jacks’ – many of them republicans. There was no overall leader, but Dr James Watson and his son Jem (James junior) were perhaps most prominent. Watson senior is a shadowy figure, possibly 50 at the time of Spa Fields, ‘a medical man and a chymist’ who had been involved in radical politics for years. He was a friend of fellow surgeon John Gale Jones, a great believer in freedom of the press and of the mass demonstration as a means of squaring up to the authorities, ‘the free and easy’ as it was called. On 4 December 1816, the Lord Mayor of London said, ‘I always considered the Watsons – both of them – the bravest men in England.’ As always, Francis Place had a different view; the elder Watson was ‘a man of loose habits . . . wretchedly poor’, the younger was ‘a wild, profligate fellow’.
The other father and son team in the Spencean leadership were Thomas Evans and his son, also Thomas, the elder being the group’s librarian. Place paints a picture of an eccentric, wandering from pub to pub with a Bible under his arm. In fact, Evans’s Christian Polity the Salvation of the Empire written in that year advocated socialism in a rural, agricultural setting and proved very popular with London working men, especially the shoemakers (the occupation of two of the five men hanged after Cato Street).
Thomas Preston, a master shoemaker, said when examined by the Lord Mayor in December 1816:
I have seen so much distress in Spitalfields that I have prayed to God to swallow me up – I have seen a fine young woman who has not been in a Bed for nine months . . . I have ruined myself. I have not £1 . . .
Other leading members of the group were the labourers John Hooper and John Keens.
But there is one name that stands out in the context of this book: Arthur Thistlewood. Virtually everything we know about this man, unquestionably the leader of the Cato Street conspirators, comes from the information at his trial in the spring of 1820 and given some additional purple phraseology by George Wilkinson. Thistlewood was born in Horncastle at the foot of the Wolds in Lincolnshire where the Bain and Waring streams meet. The place was best known for its great horse fair, described by George Borrow in The Romany Rye. Borrow was the son of a regular soldier who served in the Napoleonic Wars and he became fascinated with the ‘travelling people’ to be found at fairs like Horncastle.
Thistlewood’s father was a bailiff or steward to ‘an ancient family’ in the area and the boy, probably from the age of 8 (1778), was privately taught with a view to becoming a land-surveyor. At a time of increasing enclosure and when ownership of land was still the cornerstone of wealth, such a career was respectable and potentially lucrative. In his teens however the lad ‘manifested idle and unsettled habits’ and became something of a trial to his family until he obtained a commission in a militia regiment at the age of 21. It was now 1791 and the shock waves of the French Revolution were being widely felt. The militia were on standby in the event of war and invasion, but Thistlewood had other conquests in mind. Even in the militia, an officer had to purchase his commission and was expected to live a certain lifestyle, with expensive uniforms and an indulgence in the social round of balls, soirees, point to point races, drinking and gambling. Where and how he met ‘a young lady of the name of Bruce’ is not recorded, but she was worth £300 a year on account of the property she owned in Bawtry in the West Riding of Yorkshire, a little south-west of the Great North Road.
Thistlewood promptly resigned his militia commission and settled down to the life of a kept man, but he hadn’t read the small print. The financial deal, in an age when men dominated the world of money and inheritance, was that the new Mrs Thistlewood received the interest on her fortune for her lifetime only. When she died sixteen months later in child-bed, the cash reverted and Thistlewood was broke. It seems from later events that the baby died too, so an unencumbered Thistlewood obtained a second commission in a ‘marching’, i.e. regular regiment. How he was able to do this without a purchase price is unclear, but it was 1793 and Pitt’s government was desperate for officers and men to fight the ‘blue-water’ colonial war he believed would beat the French.
Because there is no record of Thistlewood’s regiment, we cannot trace his whereabouts in these months. General Carey’s tiny army of 7,000 men took Martinique, St Lucia and Guadeloupe, as well as Tobago, but large numbers of men became ill and died from dysentery and yellow fever without even seeing a Frenchman and Thistlewood quickly grew bored with this, resigned his commission and sailed to America.
The United States was a new nation with no love for the British and Thistlewood did not stay long. We have no idea exactly where he was although of course, at that stage, the westward extent of white settlement was still effectively the Allegheny mountains. Thistlewood then obtained a passport for France and reached Paris soon after the overthrow of Robespierre. By now, it was the end of July, Thermidor in the new Revolutionary calendar, and France was licking her internal wounds after two years of the Terror. If relations may have been strained for Thistlewood in America, they must have been doubly difficult in France for an Englishman whose country was at war. ‘In France,’ says Wilkinson, ‘his evil genius still followed him.’ There were irregularities in his passport and, despite the fact that ‘he became initiated in all the doctrines and sentiments of the French Revolutionists’,4 found himself imprisoned by the French police. This was clearly not in Paris, but exactly where is unrecorded. Eventually an order for Thistlewood’s release arrived from the capital along with that for a fellow Englishman called Heeley, who had been imprisoned for the same reason. When Heeley was cheeky to a gaoler, the officer hit him with his cane and Thistlewood retaliated with a fist. Both men were placed in solitary confinement as a result.
The storyline now becomes even more improbable. Professing himself a ‘hater of oppression and injustice’, Thistlewood finally obtained a real passport and went to Paris where he ‘entered the French service [i.e. army] and was present during the perpetration of numberless atrocities by the French troops’. It seems odd that the man should stay in the only country that had so far shown any oppression or injustice to him, but it does confirm the general opinion that Thistlewood was at best a dangerous sociopath and may even have been deranged. ‘He had considerable knowledge of military tactics,’ wrote Wilkinson, ‘was an excellent swordsman and always fearless of death.’
The atrocities referred to can only mean in 1795 the control of bread riots in Paris. If that is so, then Thistlewood, the wannabe sans-culotte, was on the wrong side. The fall of Robespierre saw a general sigh of relief across the country, with moderation creeping back and even the church gaining some renewed acceptance. By May, however, the old disorder returned among a starving population and the mob invaded a meeting of the Convention and stuck the head of a deputy on a pole. Elsewhere in the country the White Terror began, a counter-revolution by royalists hell-bent on restoring the Bourbons.
At some point, probably in 1797, Thistlewood joined a French grenadier regiment. The Revolution had effectively swept away the titled officer class and there was no purchase system in the army. By now Lazare Carnot’s reforms were having some effect and the ragged army of the Republic was winning victories against the massed ranks of the ancien regime. Wilkinson also tells us that Thistlewood fought at Zurich, but he clearly did not know the name of the French commander. It was André Massena, later to become a Marshal of France and one of the ‘souls of iron’ under Napoleon. There were actually two battles of Zurich and it is possible that Thistlewood fought them both.
In the first, between 4 and 7 June 1799 Massena was driven out of the city by an Austrian force under Archduke Charles, but he pulled back to the river Limmat and fortified his position on the Zurichberg, settling down to a stalemate. By the end of September, the Austrians had been replaced by their Second Coalition allies, the Russians, under General Korsakov. Massena’s attack was masterly. Outnumbered two to one, with a second Russian army and an Austrian force arrayed against him, he smashed first one army, then the next, in true Napoleonic style. It helped that his wing commanders were Generals Oudinot and Soult, both brilliant men in their own right. So Arthur Thistlewood could say, in all modesty, that he had saved France from invasion and helped destroy the Second Coalition as Russia withdrew days later.
Infuriatingly, Wilkinson refers to ‘a variety of adventures in France and on different parts of the Continent’ for Thistlewood but gives no more details. By the Peace of Amiens, however, it was time for the adventurer to come home. Returning to Horncastle where his father and brother ran farms, Thistlewood courted a local girl, Miss Wilkinson. The impoverished soldier was in funds again, not this time because of his new wife but because he had inherited ‘a considerable estate’ from a relative. He sold this for £10,000, a vast sum at the time, to a gentleman from Durham, but not outright. Instead, he took an annuity bond which gave him an annual income of £850. This was a risky venture and in eighteen months the purchaser went bankrupt, leaving Thistlewood relatively high and dry.
The narrative now gets confusing. The Thistlewoods moved to London along with a son, James, ‘a natural child’ (who the boy’s mother was is not recorded). An attempt by Thistlewood’s family to get Arthur settled on a Horncastle farm failed – he was paying more in rent and tax than the farm earned – and with what remained of his legacy he went south. He either got in with a bad crowd – ‘all the vices and dissipation of the metropolis’ – composed mostly of army officers richer than he was or he drifted into radical politics. Perhaps it was both. He lost over £2,000 to a card-sharping ring in a ‘Hell’ in St James’s and was unable to recover the loss. Bitter and broke, he found the Spenceans, especially the Evanses, and still seems to have had enough cash to travel with the younger Evans to France where the pair stayed for almost a year.
From this moment, George Wilkinson believed, Thistlewood’s only goal was to overthrow the constitution. Certainly when the adventurer reached London the place must have been buzzing with talks of Despard and Thistlewood had seen for himself in France how dangerous a mob could be. Get the London mob on your side, arm them, give them a leader and a cause and the rest would be history.
The end of 1816 was the perfect time, although we have no clear idea of what Thistlewood was doing in the fourteen years preceding it. Distress had reached an all-time high and the London Corresponding Society in particular was galvanized into action. The Spenceans wrote to possible national leaders to front a mass meeting on 15 November at Spa Fields. Today, Spa Fields in Islington is easy to miss. It is a small park bisected by a path and when I visited it the major concern was what sort of adventure playground locals wanted for their children. What would the revolutionaries of 1816 have made of that? To be fair, it was always a place for the people. Known as Ducking Pond Fields in the mid-eighteenth century, crowds came from all over London to watch bull-baiting and duck-hunting, to wager on the outcome of bare-knuckle prize fights, like the female match won by Bruising Peg in 1768. At Whitsuntide, it was the scene of Welsh or Gooseberry Fair with donkey races, cudgel play and gurning5 competitions. In the 1770s the Methodist Lady Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, had a chapel built and by the time of the 1816 disturbances, a large graveyard occupied the two acres behind the building. It remained a notorious haunt of footpads however and only slowly did respectable streets develop across it. When the Spencean letter arrived, William Cobbett, in one of his more timid moments, declined, but Henry ‘Orator’ Hunt accepted.
Hunt would go to the opening of an envelope. Easily the greatest demagogue of the radicals, he was powerfully built, a crack shot, excellent boxer and fine horseman. He had a knack for public speaking and the crowd loved him. When speaking, the weaver Samuel Bamford noted, Hunt’s grey-blue eyes became
blood-streaked and almost started from their sockets . . . His voice was bellowing, his face swollen and flushed; his griped hand beat as if it were to pulverise.
He loved danger, he loved attention – and wore a white wideawake hat to make sure he got it in a crowd. If anyone could rouse the London mob, it was Henry Hunt.
What made Hunt so successful was his gentlemanly pedigree and conduct. Despard was popular for the same reason. Across the Channel in the early days of the Revolution, so was the Marquis de la Fayette. The radicals may have railed against privilege and power, but they were delighted when someone with those qualities agreed to lead them. They were, after all, part of a centuries-old hierarchy; actual equality was unknown to them. So Hunt was a loyalist, raising a troop of militia in his native Wiltshire, but man-of-the-people enough to challenge a colonel of yeomanry to a duel and to assault a gamekeeper; both gave him a prison record.
By 1806 Hunt had joined the radicals, standing unsuccessfully as MP for Bristol in that year. He also had a reputation as a ‘bit of a lad’, living in sin with a Mrs Vince in Brighton in open emulation of the Prince of Wales at the Pavilion up the road. The rather more scrupulous Cobbett had his doubts – ‘Beware of him; he rides the country with a whore.’ Hunt would write later of a letter from Arthur Thistlewood, ‘requesting me, when I came to town, to favour him with a call, as he had to communicate to me matters of the highest importance connected with the welfare and happiness of the people’.
Hunt did not reply, but a second letter from Thomas Preston, specifically inviting him to address a mass meeting, had the desired effect.
It was not possible, or intended, to keep the Spa Fields meeting a secret. And the government was scared. A note in Sidmouth’s Home Office read:
The meeting in Spa Fields is aware of the Collection of Soldiers in this vicinity. The appearance of Troops will occasion the destruction of London. Twenty thousand Englishmen can set any city in such flames as no Engines can extinguish.6
The basic Spencean plan for Spa Fields was not particularly revolutionary. The idea was to hear prominent radical views and for a show of hands (the only means of voting until 1872) to elect Hunt and Sir Francis Burdett to take a petition to the Prince Regent. The petition asked for relief from distress and the reform of parliament.
Sir Nathaniel Conant had other ideas. He was a magistrate of Bow Street and as such, in command of the most dynamic police force in London.7 But his men were not prepared for the size of the crowd. Some 10,000 people jostled in the open space outside the Merlin’s Cave pub to listen to Henry Hunt. Some of them had just witnessed a hanging, so they were in jovial mood and Hunt was on fine form. His own white hat was prominent on that November day, but so too were the older symbols of revolution waved from the window behind him – the French tricolour and a cap of Liberty; perhaps one of those was waved by Thistlewood.
Hunt’s speech was measured, demanding reform while at the same time not condoning violence. He spoke of mental rather than physical force, aware as he must have been of the Bow Street patrols and the scarlet-coated troops ringing the Field, but he did tease the authorities –
Those who resist the just demands of the people are the real friends of confusion and bloodshed . . . but if the fatal day should be destined to arrive, I assure you that if I know anything of myself, I will not be found concealed behind a counter or sheltering myself in the rear.8
Conant cannot have missed the fact that the greatest cheer came from Hunt’s ‘fatal day’ reference. Thistlewood would have caught that too.
Large numbers signed the petition, demanding universal male suffrage, annual general elections and a secret ballot. It was voted unanimously that Hunt and Burdett should present it to the Regent, but Burdett turned the proposal down. This led to a quarrel between the radical leaders which weakened the movement and delighted the authorities. While Hunt’s accusations of cowardice flew, he twice begged an audience at Carlton House and was twice refused.
Accordingly, a second meeting was called at Spa Fields on 2 December, to protest at the arrogant disdain shown to Hunt. It is difficult to imagine a less impressive figurehead than the Prince Regent. A gambler, a womanizer and spender of other people’s money, George had no real understanding of the political issues of his day and lived in such a cloud-cuckoo land that he talked in military circles as if he had been present on the field of Waterloo.
Hunt was late for the second meeting and was told while rattling along Cheapside in his carriage that a riot had broken out and that the mob had taken control of the Tower of London. At Spa Fields, the hustings wagon in the centre was draped with tricolours and a banner reading ‘The brave soldiers are our friends’ – precisely the sort of notion that makes revolutions happen. On the wagon stood the Watsons, Thistlewood, Hooper and the other leading Spenceans of the Cock and the Mulberry Tree.
As far as the authorities were concerned, the last straw came when Jem Watson quoted the speech made by Camille Desmoulins before the storming of the Bastille:
If they will not give us what we want, shall we not take it? Are you willing to take it? Will you go and take it? If I jump down amongst you, will you come and take it?
This was clearly incitement, each sentence punctuated by ever louder cheers and John Stafford, Conant’s number two, ordered the arrest of the leaders and the confiscation of their flags. From now on, everything became chaotic. There were at least as many people at Spa Fields at this second meeting as at the first and Jem Watson jumped down from the wagon and snatched up a tricolour. In the symbolism of the day, the flags meant everything. On a field of battle, for centuries, the flag was a sacred token; it must not be allowed to fall into enemy hands. On the other hand, the tricolour on London’s streets must have been to the authorities like a red rag to a bull.
With a vague, Despard-like plan in the leaders’ heads, the mob marched towards Newgate with the probable intention of destroying the place for the second time in forty years and freeing the prisoners. Some of them broke off in the direction of the Royal Exchange to grab whatever gold lay there and the bulk moved against the Tower of London. On the way, to give them a fighting chance against the garrison, they looted gunsmiths’ shops on Snow Hill. There is no doubt that for many of the mob, looting was the sole aim of the day (the crime would resurface, oddly, in the Cato Street trials) and when a looter got into a row with Jem Watson, the radical shot him in the stomach at point blank range.
Then, it all fell apart. At the Exchange Alderman Shaw and a mere seven constables staged a showdown with the mob, arrested three leaders and the rest went home. At the Tower, disappointed to discover that the soldiers were not after all their friends, a rioter climbed onto the railings below the walls, brandishing a cutlass, urging the garrison to join the mob. There is every likelihood that that rioter was Arthur Thistlewood. The garrison didn’t move and, again, everyone went home.
In some ways, Spa Fields was the British equivalent of the attack on the Bastille and the differences are blinding. In one case, a desperate mob destroyed an object of tyranny and went on to overturn the world order, at least in Europe. In the other, the mob tired of the game, got bored and melted away into the alleys of London. This was partly because of how the second Spa Fields, in particular, was organized. When a man met Henry Hunt in Cheapside to tell him the Tower had been taken, he was not just spreading one of those aspirational rumours that flies at events like Spa Fields, he was deliberately making it up.
His name was John Castle and he was a spy.