At 8.30 p.m. on 23 February 1820, a picquet from the 2nd Battalion Coldstream Regiment was ordered to a halt by their commanding officer, Captain Lord Frederick FitzClarence, in a street just off the Edgware Road in north London. They had been called out from their Portman Road barracks to give support to a police operation that was taking place here. It was a ten-minute march through the dark streets in their famous scarlet uniforms, armed with pikes and muskets. Some of the troops were ‘Waterloo Men’, veterans of the Battle – Sergeant James Lott was in Sir William Gomm’s company at Waterloo, Sergeant William Legg was in the company of Colonel Daniel Mackinnon, the Coldstreams’ historian, who reinforced Hougoumont during the siege, and Sergeant James Graham, who had been dubbed ‘the Bravest Man in England’ for his courage in helping to close the north gate at Hougoumont during the siege, allegedly was there.
Captain FitzClarence had been commissioned in 1814 when he was just 14 but he had missed the great victory at Waterloo, possibly for his own safety. He was the third son – one of ten illegitimate children – by the Prince Regent’s younger brother, William, the Duke of Clarence, and his mistress, a beautiful Irish actress Dorothea Bland, who was famous under her stage name of ‘Mrs Jordan’ – a name chosen because she had ‘crossed the water’ to England. In the days before the contraceptive pill, such affairs with multiple births were tolerated by the aristocratic elite, providing they were carried out with due decorum. William, later crowned as William IV, openly lived with ‘Mrs Jordan’ for twenty years until 1811 when his brother George became Prince Regent. ‘Mrs Jordon’ was paid off and William eventually married Princess Adelaide of Saxe-Meiningen in 1818. He recognised his illegitimate offspring but he had no legitimate heirs when he died.
Captain FitzClarence, 20, ordered his men to wait in John Street (now Crawford Place) about 60yds from the entrance to a Mews called Cato Street, where the horses and carriages for the big houses were stabled, while he went to check with a senior police officer who was waiting for them at the Horse and Groom pub. The pub was just across the road from the arched entrance to Cato Street and George Ruthven, an experienced Bow Street undercover police officer, had been keeping the entrance to the Mews under surveillance for several hours. He watched unseen as a gang of men slipped into the Mews carrying sacks. The sacks contained a small arsenal of weapons including knives, swords, nail bombs, fire bombs, pistols and a blunderbuss. The men were members of a desperate gang led by the revolutionary hothead, Arthur Thistlewood, who was bent on the assassination of the Cabinet and the overthrow of the government. As soon as he stepped inside the warmth of the pub, FitzClarence discovered he was too late. A few minutes earlier, the police had gone in.
Ruthven had been joined by Richard Birnie, a Scot who was a hard-headed magistrate in charge of police at Bow Street, with a force of twelve police officers. Birnie was in overall command of the operation and he feared he would miss the chance to grab the gang red-handed.
Birnie decided not to wait any longer for the Coldstream Guards to arrive with FitzClarence. He ordered his men to raid the stables where Thistlewood and his gang were preparing to carry out their attack on the Cabinet.
Birnie had intelligence that Thistlewood, having failed to pull off his plan for an uprising after the Spa Fields Riot, was now planning to start the English Revolution by assassinating the Duke of Wellington and the Cabinet while they sat down to their regular Wednesday night dinner at Lord Harrowby’s house at 39 Grosvenor Square. Thistlewood, a down-at-heel former farmer turned revolutionary firebrand, planned to knock on the door of Lord Harrowby’s house under the pretence of having a note for Harrowby; the gang would rush into the hall and overpower the servants. Armed with knives, blunderbusses, pistols and hand grenades, Thistlewood and his gang would march into the dining room in which the Cabinet ministers were sitting down to dinner and the bloody executions would begin. It was the same room in which, only five years before, the dust-covered Major Percy had excitedly delivered to the Cabinet the first news of Wellington’s great victory at Waterloo with cheering crowds outside.1
And it could so easily have worked, but for the undercover intelligence unit at Bow Street police office.
Thistlewood had singled out two members of the Cabinet to be beheaded: Lord Castlereagh, the Leader of the Commons, and Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary. He planned to stick their heads on spikes and parade them around the East End of London as trophies. They were hate figures because they were held personally responsible for a second wave of repressive legislation known as the Six Acts that had been passed by Parliament in response to the ‘Peterloo’ outrage. Dismissing calls for a public inquiry into the ‘murders’ at Manchester, Sidmouth and Castlereagh had seen the ringleaders jailed and introduced a series of measure to suppress further civil unrest, including the Seditious Meetings Prevention Act, banning gatherings of more than fifty people, and an attack on freedom of speech by imposing punitive taxes to close down news sheets that called for protests.
Sidmouth had led a crackdown on the campaigners for constitutional change after Peterloo. The great orator, Henry Hunt, who had addressed the crowd at Manchester before the Peterloo Massacre, had been imprisoned for two and a half years; and Richard Carlile, the publisher of cheap tracts, including Tom Paine’s books such as The Age of Reason and radical pamphlets like Black Dwarf, was sentenced to over three years in prison. His crime was publishing another radical sheet, The Republican, with calls for the murderers of the Peterloo victims to be brought to justice. If Britain was going to be tipped into revolution, Thistlewood believed now was the moment. He was convinced by taking off the heads of the Cabinet, he would literally decapitate the government. His action would cause chaos and open the way for an English Revolution. He believed the sight of Castlereagh’s aristocratic head on a spike would make the Irish community in London rise up, because the Dublin-born Unionist was hated by the Irish for the way, as Secretary of State for Ireland, he had brutally put down the Irish rebellion in 1798. In a particularly grisly detail, he also planned to cut off Castlereagh’s* hand, which had signed the orders for the repressive acts.
The array of weapons that were laid out on a rough carpenter’s bench in the hay loft at Cato Street included the iron spikes on which Thistlewood planned to fix their heads. The nail bombs were home-made from fist-sized iron balls containing 3oz of gunpowder and nails used to fix the metal rims to cartwheels. The firebombs were to be used to set on fire the army barracks to increase the confusion after the decapitation of the government.
Thistlewood, despite the Spa Fields setback, remained convinced the disgruntled lower ranks of the army – the men Wellington regarded as the ‘scum of the earth’ – would join the revolution. Thistlewood felt he would succeed where he had failed after Spa Fields because at last, the injustice felt after the Manchester massacre had made the masses ready to rise up for their rights; England was ripe for revolution. And just as he had after Spa Fields, he planned to appeal to Wellington’s common soldiers to support him and seize some cannon to blow apart any attempt to stop them. He had carefully pulled together a group of up to fifty men who were prepared to risk their lives for their cause in secret meetings in the back rooms of pubs. They waited for orders once the revolution was underway.
The gang that gathered at Cato Street were his most trusted men. They included John Harrison, who had rented the stable with a Jamaican man, William Davidson, three weeks earlier for 5s a week for six months. John Firth, a cow keeper of nearby Bryanston Street, off the Edgware Road, said Harrison told him it was to keep a horse and cart. Harrison was a member of the Marylebone Union Reading Society, where for two-pence a week hard-up would-be revolutionaries could read radical newspapers such as the Republican and the Manchester Observer and the radical books of Tom Paine, such as the Rights of Man. It was at the Marylebone Union that Harrison, a member of the Spencean Philanthropists, who had caused the Spa Fields riot, recruited Davison, the 33-year-old illegitimate son of the Attorney General of Jamaica and a black Jamaican mother. Davidson was educated – he had been sent by his father to Aberdeen to study mathematics – but became a cabinet maker and did some work for Lord Harrowby fitting up his house. He got to know Harrowby’s servants and Thistlewood believed his contacts with the servants inside Harrowby’s house would be a vital aid to his plan’s success. Davidson had become embittered after a love affair with the white daughter of a rich merchant in Lichfield was ended by her father, probably because he was black. He turned to the Wesleyan Methodist Church but was accused of sexual abuse of girls at a Sunday school; he lost his faith in God and embraced revolutionary politics instead of the Bible. Thistlewood was so impressed by Davidson that he appointed him to the Executive of Five who were to organise the assassinations. Davidson was asked by Thistlewood to use his contacts with Harrowby’s servants in the Grosvenor-Square house to gain intelligence for their attack.
Another member of the gang was John Adams, who had been a soldier in the Oxford Blues around 1801 and had learned a trade as a shoemaker while he was in the army. He was discharged due to ill health and scratched a living in the shoe trade, but he was heavily in debt. He was introduced to Thistlewood at his lodgings in Stanhope Street, near Clare Market, by two other members of the gang: John Thomas Brunt, 38, also a shoemaker of Fox Court in Gray’s Inn Lane, and James Ings, who had been a prosperous butcher in Hampshire until the post-war slump killed his business. Ings was between 30 and 40, rather stout and fierce-looking, with fiery eyes. He had left his family to run a radical coffee shop in Whitechapel, selling political pamphlets for Richard Carlile, who went on the run after the Peterloo Massacre. Thistlewood was interested in Adams’s army past. ‘I presume you can use a sword?’ he asked Adams, who replied, ‘I could use it to defend myself if it ever became necessary.’
They kept their weapons at a place Thistlewood called ‘the depot’. Adams discovered the ‘depot’ was the lodgings of another member of the gang called William Tidd, who lived next door to Adams in Hole-in-the-Wall passage. Tidd, a 45-year-old shoemaker born in Grantham, had been a serial deserter from the army, joining for the bounty money and then escaping.
In secret gatherings before the attack, Thistlewood criticised Henry Hunt, the orator who had spoken at Spa Fields, calling him a coward for opposing revolution, and said that he was probably a government spy paid to infiltrate the group. Thistlewood was nearly right – but the spy was not Hunt. George Edwards, whom Thistlewood trusted and had made his ADC, was an undercover agent for John Stafford, the ‘spymaster’ at Bow Street, who had been trying to catch Thistlewood since he slipped off his hook in the Spa Fields trial.
Thistlewood had been planning to use the funeral of George III, when most of the troops would be drawn out of London to Windsor Castle, as the moment to strike. He planned to attack Parliament and still nursed the ambition of taking over London by seizing the Bank of England and the Tower of London, just as he had at Spa Fields. But at one of their secret planning meetings Edwards said he had seen in the paper that the Cabinet was to meet for dinner at Lord Harrowby’s house on 23 February 1820. Thistlewood did not believe him but sent out for the paper and when it was brought to Thistlewood, he confirmed Edwards was right. Brunt jumped around the room shouting for joy, and saying: ‘I believe now there is a God.’ Ings said, ‘Now we shall have an opportunity of cutting off Lord Castlereagh’s head.’
Thistlewood told Edwards:
The destruction of the Cabinet ministers would be a most excellent thing and be sure to rouse the whole country. The death of Lord Castlereagh would rouse the Irish and the whole country would be in confusion, the great People would all run away and there would be no-one to give directions. All would be Anarchy and Alarm and Confusion.
The assassination of the Cabinet at Lord Harrowby’s house then became the focus for their attack. A watch was kept on Harrowby’s house overnight on 22 February and the next afternoon, Wednesday 23 February, they gathered in Brunt’s lodgings at Gray’s Inn Lane, where they prepared pistols, fixing flints to the firearms. There were cutlasses, pistols and a blunderbuss with a brass barrel. Adams said: ‘Edwards was there preparing fuses for hand grenades.’
Thistlewood wrote out some proclamations for the revolution to the people of England. I found copies of the hand-written notes in the Cato Street files at the National Archives: ‘Englishmen! Justice is at last triumphant. Your tyrants are destroyed. The friends of liberty are called on to come forward as the provisional government is now sitting. J. Ings, secretary.’
Ings was eager to use his expertise with a butcher’s knife to cut off the heads of Castlereagh and Sidmouth. He was busy preparing for action: he put a black belt round his waist, which was to hold two pistols; round his shoulder he had another belt for a cutlass; on each shoulder he had a large bag, in the form of a soldier’s haversack, to carry their heads; and he drew a great knife, brandishing it about – this was the knife with which he would cut off their heads.
They arrived in the Edgware Road after 6 p.m. and slipped into Cato Street about an hour after sunset. Cato Street was a twenty-minute walk to Lord Harrowby’s house at Grosvenor Square in Mayfair. Sacks had been nailed over the two grimy sash windows looking onto Cato Street to stop prying eyes from the backs of the big houses across the mews from seeing what they were doing. Thistlewood posted Ings and Davidson downstairs as sentries. Davidson was armed with two pistols in a belt, a blunderbuss and a cutlass.
Thistlewood, 46, was a vigorous man, thickset, clean-shaven with long black sideboards and short cropped black hair. He had long nurtured the dream of overthrowing the British Government by beheading its leaders, like the Jacobins, and now, after the Peterloo Massacre, he felt he had his chance to fulfill his ambitions. Unfortunately for Thistlewood and his co-conspirators, he was hopelessly out of touch with reality. The number who supported outright revolution in Britain was small; the vast majority of protestors supported men like Hunt, who believed in peacefully agitating for constitutional reform. Thistlewood had also underestimated the strong popular loyalty of the working classes to the Crown, even one worn by a fourth-generation German prince who was lampooned in the press as a sexually incontinent spendthrift, glutton and buffoon.
Future would-be revolutionaries would be wise to study the files in the National Archives on the Cato Street Conspiracy. They are stuffed with anonymous letters from informers. The notes were written by ordinary members of the public, informing Lord Sidmouth and other ministers about the meetings Thistlewood and members of his gang had been organising in London pubs. The informants had overheard scraps of conversation and had their suspicions raised by meeting in pubs including a room in a yard at the White Hart in Brook’s Market and the Scotch Arms, a regular meeting place for agitators in Round Court on the Strand.
A few days before the plot was carried out, a man called Hiden, who kept cows in Manchester Mews, Manchester Street, Marylebone, to supply houses with fresh milk and cream, had written a letter to Castlereagh warning him of the plan but had been unable to deliver it without being seen. He said he was a friend of a man called Wilson, one of the conspirators, who told him the details and tried to recruit him into the plot. On the day before their planned coup, Hiden, desperate to pass on the information, ran in front of Lord Harrowby’s horse when he was riding in the park and handed him the letter he had addressed to Castlereagh, warning of the plan to assassinate the Cabinet at Harrowby’s home.*
The informers kept writing long after the event, and some were clearly intended to settle private scores. I discovered a note from an informer signing himself ‘Veritas’ to the Home Secretary saying: ‘I have every reason to believe that Bamber Beaumont, a clerk in the county fire office, Regent Street, has long been a supporter of the Cato Street Gang.’ It is not known whether the unfortunate Bamber Beaumont was pursued for this smear, but it is likely.
The Cabinet had been having regular dinners at Lord Harrowby’s house in Grosvenor Square for years. The dinners had been suspended for some weeks because of the mourning period for the late King George III, so the resumption of the dinners reported in the Morning Post was exciting news indeed for Thistlewood. Lord Harrowby, the President of the Council, had put around invitation cards to sixteen members of the Cabinet for supper that night. Those who were to dine at Lord Harrowby’s that night included: the Duke of Wellington; Lord Liverpool, the prime minister; Nicholas Vansittart, the Chancellor; Lord Bathurst, the Secretary of State for War and the Colonies; Lord Castlereagh, the Leader of the House and Foreign Secretary; Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary; Canning, the future prime minister; and half a dozen others. Thistlewood could have wiped out most of the ruling political elite of Britain. It would have been more shocking than the Brighton bombing by the IRA on Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet in 1984. But after being tipped off, Harrowby cancelled the dinner and went to Lord Liverpool’s Fife House for supper. To avoid tipping off Thistlewood and his co-plotters, Harrowby did not tell his servants and they prepared for the dinner for sixteen, unaware they were about to be attacked by a ruthless armed gang.
Stafford had already set in train his own plan finally to bring Thistlewood to justice and catch his cell red-handed at Cato Street. Birnie was in overall command but it was Stafford who was the instigator. He was going to lead the police raid and had prepared his pistols when, just as he was about to join the officers and proceed to the Cato Street, a message from the Home Office requiring his immediate attendance compelled Stafford to change his plan. He gave his pistols to a policeman, Richard Smithers.2 Stafford sent George Ruthven, a police constable and former spy who had infiltrated Thistlewood’s associates in the Spenceans, to the Horse and Groom pub to keep watch on Thistlewood’s gang. When Captain FitzClarence discovered the police had gone in without them, he ran back to his men and ordered them to advance at the double. As they entered the archway in their scarlet uniforms to Cato Street, Sergeant Legg heard a pistol shot. A police constable shouted – ‘Soldiers, soldiers – the doorway!’ Captain FitzClarence told his men: ‘Coldstreams – Do you duty.’
As Sergeant Legg turned to his right inside the gateway leading into Cato Street, he saw a man with his back against the wall and a pistol in his hand. It was levelled straight at Captain FitzClarence. ‘I knocked it aside with my pike and seized it on the muzzle with my hand,’ said Legg. ‘I scuffled with the man for the pistol and he pulled the trigger. The pistol went off and tore my right coat arm. I then secured the man and the pistol with the assistance of the picquet.’3
Sergeant James Lott said Davidson fired the first shot: ‘The man who stood near the door, a black man (Davidson), fired a pistol, the ball of which passed straight though my cap.’ Davidson then slashed at FitzClarence with a sword and ran into the stable. Lott said it was Tidd who then fired at FitzClarence. He said: ‘I saw the prisoner Tidd fire another pistol nearly at the same time, the ball of which tore the sleeve of Sergeant Legg’s coat. I went for a light and when I returned I found two men secured in the stable.’ Sergeant Legg handed Tidd to the police and climbed the ladder to the loft. He found one of the policemen lying on the floor in a pool of blood at the top of the ladder. It was Richard Smithers.
A few moments before, Ruthven had led his team of police officers up the ladder into the loft followed by a police officer called Ellis, then Richard Smithers. They found about twenty-four men in the loft, grouped around the carpenter’s bench, where the weapons were laid out. Ruthven shouted: ‘We are peace officers. Lay down your arms.’ Thistlewood looked up, caught up a sword and backed into a small room to the right of the bench with three or four others. Ruthven knew Thistlewood from the earlier trials and approached him cautiously. Thistlewood began fencing with the sword at him but Smithers, who was on Ruthven’s right, rushed forward. Thistlewood lunged with sword, stabbing Smithers in the right side of his chest. Smithers said, ‘Oh my God.’ Then he staggered back, and collapsed to the floor.
Almost instantly, someone fired a pistol and put out the lights. Then someone shouted: ‘Kill the buggers! Throw them down the stairs.’ There were flashes in the dark as pistols flared and shots rang out. The gang scattered. There was a rush in the dark for the ladder and the hay shutes downstairs. Thistlewood followed close behind them, fired a pistol as he climbed down, and then in the darkness ran through the open stable door, past the squad of Coldstream Guards and escaped into the night. Brunt, Adams and Harrison escaped, but the gang leaders were all rounded up in the following days.
Statement by Sergeant William Legg; he saved the life of Captain FitzClarence. (National Archives)
Davidson was captured at the stable door. One of the police officers, Benjamin Gill, said he hit Davidson on the wrist with his truncheon and he dropped a blunderbuss before he could fire it.
Ruthven rushed down the stairs – the stable was pitch black – and ran out into John Street, where he met the soldiers. He returned to the stables and saw Tidd coming out of the door; Tidd pulled a pistol on Ruthven, but Ruthven grappled with Tidd and they both fell into a dung-heap. Sergeant Legg pulled them out and took Tidd to the Horse and Groom under guard. A few of the others were rounded up, including Davidson, who was brought into the pub, and, according to Ruthven, began to sing, ‘Scots wha ha wi Wallace bled’. The Scottish rebel ballad March to Bannockburn by Robbie Burns continues:
Scots, wham Bruce has aften led,
Welcome to your gory bed,
Or to Victorie!
Now’s the day and now’s the hour
See the front o’ battle lour;
See approach proud Edward’s power
Chains and slavery!
Richardson may have learned the ballad written in 1793 when he was in Aberdeen. He told Ruthven: ‘Damn any man that would not die in liberty’s cause.’
The Home Secretary Lord Sidmouth offered a £1,000 reward in the London Gazette for Thistlewood, describing him as:
about 48 years of age, five feet ten inches high, with a sallow complexion, long visage, dark hair (a little grey), dark hazel eyes and arched eye-brows, a wide mouth and a good set of teeth, has a scar under his right jaw, and slender build.
Thistlewood was captured the next day in bed at the house of a friend called Harris in a street near Moorfields. He was still partly clothed with his breeches on and did not put up a fight. It is alleged the police were acting on a tip-off by Edwards, who claimed the reward.
Today, from the outside, the ‘stable’ in Cato Street is largely unchanged and just as Thistlewood would have seen it. The outside is covered by a preservation order and the black stable door is still there, with two windows for the hayloft above. The only change is that a hay-loft door between the windows has been bricked up and there is a blue plaque there now to tell tourists this is where the Cato Street conspiracy took place. Cato Street today is a sought-after mews where small houses can fetch at least £2.5 million. The owners kindly allowed me inside the Cato Street ‘barn’, which has been knocked through to an adjoining cottage next door. The ladder has gone and the stable where Tidd fired his pistol at FitzClarence is now a white-walled study with a partner’s desk, where the ladder would have been. The hay loft where Richard Smithers died has been converted in a bedroom. ‘We get groups of tourists with guides outside, but that’s fine,’ I was told. ‘It’s quite nice living in such an historic place. We haven’t noticed any ghosts.’
After the raid, the Coldstreams marched their prisoners to Bow Street, where they made the witness statements that are still in the Cato Street files at the National Archives. Reading them is like touching history. The United Service Gazette later said that FitzClarence’s life was saved by Sergeant Graham, the hero of Hougoumont:
He was one of that party of the Guards headed by Lord FitzClarence which attacked the Cato Street gang. On that memorable occasion Graham was one of the instruments by which under Divine Providence, the life of the noble lord was saved. Graham and a brother soldier pulled the noble lord down the ladder at the instant the fellow in the loft had their arms leveled to shoot him. Lord FitzClarence met Graham some time back in Dublin and greeted him most cordially and begged his acceptance of a pension which he has ever since enjoyed.
The raw evidence in the hand-written depositions, however, suggests this is one more of the myths surrounding the hero of Hougoumont. Sergeant Graham may well have been there, but I could find no reference to him in the soldiers’ statements. The witness statements I uncovered at the National Archives show it was Sergeant Legg, not Graham, who saved FitzClarence’s life. Coldstream Guards including FitzClarence, Legg and Lott were called to give evidence at the trial but Graham was not in the list of witnesses.
The prisoners were held in the Tower of London before being transferred to Newgate prison. In all, eleven men were put on trial for Treason at the Old Bailey. The cases were heard in batches. The trial of Davidson and Richard Tidd was presided over by Baron Garrow, the outstanding criminal lawyer, who was the subject of a BBC series Garrow’s Law. The Jamaican Davidson complained Garrow in his summing up was ‘inveterate against me’. Davidson’s pleas were confused – at one moment saying he was a victim of mistaken identity, the next that merely because he was caught with a sword in his hand was not proof he intended to overthrow the government. Davidson told the jury ‘you may suppose that because I am a man of colour I am without any understanding or feeling and would act the brute; I am not one of that sort …’ Garrow was clearly anxious to deny Davidson’s allegation the court was colour-prejudiced against him. Garrow said: ‘You may rest most perfectly assured that with respect to the colour of your countenance, no prejudice either has or will exist in any part of this Court against you; a man of colour is entitled to British justice as much as the fairest British subject.’ The fact that Davidson was a ‘man of colour’ has been highlighted by the National Archives as part of their ‘Black Presence’ theme. There is no evidence that Garrow was prejudiced. It was Garrow who successfully prosecuted, Sir Thomas Picton – the dead hero of Waterloo – for torturing a young free mulatto girl when he was governor-general of Trinidad.* Garrow was a reformer and was credited with the phrase ‘innocent until proven guilty’, but there was nothing he could do to save Davidson or Tidd.
Davidson, swearing his innocence and claiming that he was set up, said: ‘The only regret left is that I have a large family of small children and when I think of that, it unmans me …’
Edwards’ lengthy deposition – it is in clear flowing handwriting – is in marked contrast to the soldiers’ statements taken down by clerks. The faded pages of Edwards’ deposition at the National Archives sent Thistlewood and his cohorts to a bloody end on the gallows. The uncomfortable question remains to what extent Edwards was an agent provocateur in the Cato Street conspiracy.
As recent trials have shown, it is a question that is still being asked of undercover policemen, and it is likely that a court today would seriously question the prosecution case. Indeed, a case could be made that having failed to secure a conviction against Thistlewood in the Spa Fields trial, Stafford used Edwards to pursue Thistlewood to the Old Bailey for a second time as an act of vengeance. Edwards was, by all accounts, little more than a down-and-out when he came under the wing of Stafford, who clearly saw he would be a useful spy in the criminal underworld of Regency London.
The judge at the first hearing, Lord Justice Dallas, said in his summing up it was Edwards who had drawn Thistlewood’s attention to the dinner at Lord Harrowby’s in The Morning Post. This was denied by Edwards in his written evidence. Edwards said it was Thistlewood who had seen the article in The Morning Post and told him ‘the ministers may then be attacked and murdered while at dinner’. But if Judge Dallas is right, it suggests Edwards was the instigator of the plot. Stafford, the Bow Street spymaster, a Londoner hardened to the ways of the criminal world, was clearly determined that after the botched prosecution of Thistlewood in the trial for treason after the Spa Fields riot, he was not going to let Thistlewood off the hook again. To avoid the jury refusing to convict on Edwards’ evidence alone, he chose not to call Edwards as the main prosecution witness. Instead, he used Edwards’ statement to break the gang by persuading another member to give king’s evidence against the others.
Stafford targeted Adams. It was claimed Adams too was one of his agents, but the documents I found in the National Archives do not back that up. I found a short note in the Cato Street files that showed Stafford went to work on Adams shortly after their arrests. He addressed it to ‘H Hobhouse’ – Henry Hobhouse, a lawyer and civil servant, and permanent minister of state at the Home Office:
I saw Adams last night but what he said was not very material. If I find myself equal to it, I will see him again this evening and tomorrow morning you shall have the result. Mr E (Edwards) conjectures that this man, seen near the premises, must have been one of the Marylebone Union.4
Stafford got what he wanted. Adams turned against his co-conspirators and gave king’s evidence against them, in return for being freed. Once he did so, the result of the trials was a foregone conclusion. Thistlewood did not deny planning to assassinate Wellington and the Cabinet. In a bravura performance at the end of his trial, Thistlewood denounced Edwards, saying he had been the instigator – he claimed Edwards had suggested blowing up Parliament, he proposed assassinating ministers at a fete for the Spanish ambassador, and finally had been behind the attack on the Cabinet dinner. But Thistlewood was not complaining about his own fate. He said he knew he would be walking on the scaffold soon, and appeared to accept it, and said that by holding back Edwards the prosecution prevented Thistlewood from proving he was a spy and that Adams, Hiden and another man called Dwyer were Edwards’s agents. Far from denying the plot, Thistlewood justified it: ‘With respect to the immorality of our project,’ said Thistlewood, ‘I will just observe that the assassination of a tyrant has always been deemed meritorious action; Brutus and Cassius were lauded to the very skies for slaying Caesar …’ The judge intervened and told him he could not let him justify murder and high treason, but Thistlewood continued:
High treason was committed against the people of Manchester … but the Prince Regent thanked the murderers … if one spark of honour or independence still glimmered in the breast of Englishmen, they would have rose to a man; insurrection then became a duty …
Ings said if Edwards had not befriended him when Ings ran a coffee shop, he would not be in the dock facing death: ‘Murdering His Majesty’s ministers I admit was a disgrace to nature, but those ministers meet and conspire together and pass laws to starve me and my family and my fellow countrymen …’
On 28 April 1820 Davidson, Ings, Tidd, Brunt and Thistlewood were found guilty of high treason. The judge said that the newly passed Treason Act applied:
The judgment is that each of you shall be drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, and there be hanged by the neck until you be dead; and that afterwards your heads be severed from your bodies, and your bodies divided into four quarters, be disposed of as His Majesty shall direct …
Five others were also sentenced to death but their sentences were commuted to transportation for life. Edwards did not appear. Instead, like a modern-day supergrass, he was given a new identity and went into hiding for the rest of his life, first to Guernsey in the Channel Islands and then to South Africa. The new King George IV commuted the sentences of the five who were to die to being hanged and beheaded, saving their corpses the further indignity of being quartered. The death penalty was imposed for over 200 offences in Georgian Britain but beheading was extraordinary. It was clearly intended as a warning to others but the authorities may have been concerned that quartering would cause revulsion and unrest – they made arrangements to read the Riot Act and disperse the crowd if there was any sign of a riot breaking out around the scaffold. The Life Guards were called out, just in case, with six field guns.
On the day of their public execution, 1 May 1820, a great crowd gathered outside the debtors’ gate at Newgate Prison at the corner of Newgate Street and the Old Bailey to see the sentence carried out on the men who plotted to murder Wellington and the Cabinet. Graphic accounts of the public execution were published for an avid public and it was witnessed by several writers. Byron’s travelling partner for Childe Harold and radical writer John Cam Hobhouse wrote: ‘The men died like heroes. Ings, perhaps, was too obstreperous in singing “Death or Liberty”.’ They stepped up onto the scaffold in turn, Thistlewood ‘eyes fixed as if in abstract thought’, Tidd ‘collected, manly’, Ings ‘laughing without reserve’, Brunt ‘in fixed and hardened obduracy of mind’, Davidson last ‘with clasped hands, uplifted eyes, praying most devoutly’. Ings made a show, ‘rushed to the platform, leaped and bounded in a most desperate manner’. Turning towards Ludgate Hill, he cried out: ‘This is going to be the last remains of James Ings.’ Thistlewood told him: ‘Don’t Ings. There is no use in all this noise. We can die without making a noise.’ As the executioner put the rope round his neck, Ings said: ‘Do it well – pull it tight!’ Then the executioner threw the rope over the scaffold beam above their heads. They were hooded, and ‘turned off’ together when the executioner dropped the trap door for all five men. Thistlewood ‘struggled slightly for a few minutes, but each effort was more faint than that which preceded; and the body soon turned round slowly, as if upon the motion of the hand of death’.5 Tidd, whose size gave cause to suppose that he would ‘pass’ with little comparative pain, scarcely moved after the fall. Ings, who was lighter, struggled at the end of the rope. ‘The assistants of the executioner pulled his legs with all their might; and even then the reluctance of the soul to part from its native seat was to be observed in the vehement efforts of every part of the body.’ Davidson, ‘after three or four heaves, became motionless; but Brunt suffered extremely, and considerable exertions were made by the executioners and others to shorten his agonies by pulling and hanging upon his legs. However, in the course of five minutes all was still’.6
The Cato Street plaque.
But that was not the end. Five coffins were laid side by side on the scaffold. Thistlewood’s body was cut down and laid on his back in a coffin, with his head extended by the neck onto a block. An executioner wearing a black mask climbed onto the scaffold with a small knife like those used by surgeons in amputations and then severed Thistlewood’s head from his body. A cry went up when the crowd saw the blade cutting into Thistlewood’s throat. Thistlewood’s head was held high by the hair on the Newgate side of the scaffold and the executioner shouted: ‘This is the head of Arthur Thistlewood – traitor.’7
This performance – for that is what it was – was repeated four more times for Ings, Davidson, Tidd and Brunt. The executioner’s assistant had to hold Tidd’s head with both hands by the cheeks because he was bald. He dropped Brunt’s head with its purple strangled hue on the scaffold, causing ‘howlings and groans’ from the spectators. Rooms overlooking the gallows were rented out to VIPs to see the spectacle and I think it inconceivable that they did not include some of their intended victims, including Lord Sidmouth and perhaps the Duke of Wellington. Wellington was certainly in London – he later sat for a new Waterloo portrait wearing the cloak he used at Waterloo. There is little doubt he would have felt well-satisfied by the Cato Street trial. Despite the stench of a government conspiracy surrounding the case to get Thistlewood who had escaped the noose once before, the Cato Street Conspiracy put back the cause of reform by years. It demonstrated that some of the radicals like Thistlewood were indeed set on bloody revolution as Sidmouth, Liverpool and Castlereagh claimed. Ministers privately described the discovery of the plot as a ‘windfall’ for the Tories. They were returned to power in the elections of March and April 1820 that were called after the death of George III. Lord Liverpool, who was returned as prime minister, wrote to Canning declaring that the repressive Six Acts were ‘popular’ with the public:
The public feeling has certainly been much more strongly with us than at the last general election [1818]. The … [Six Acts] are decidedly popular and scarcely any of the opposition have ventured to bring them forward as a ground of attack, whilst they have been most serviceable to many of our friends …8
Wellington used his authority, which had never been greater, to dismiss the calls for reform. The resistance to change was reinforced by many of the Duke’s senior officers who had seats in Parliament, either in the Lords as the sons of hereditary peers, or in the Commons as local landowners, who held Parliamentary constituencies in their pockets.
Some estimates suggest that 20 per cent of MPs between1790 and 1820 had served in the regular army with another 100 in the Royal Navy. In the period from 1793 to 1815, 135 army officers were elected as MPs. A total of twenty-five MPs fought at Waterloo and two of Wellington’s senior officers, Ponsonby and Picton, were serving MPs (for Londonderry and Pembroke) when they were killed. Wellington was surrounded by his most senior former officers in the House of Lords.
Wellington’s former army officers in Parliament undoubtedly helped Wellington and the Tory government to maintain a substantial blocking majority against constitutional reform.
One of the rare exceptions was Sir John Byng, commander of the 2nd Brigade of Guards, who stood as a Whig MP in Poole and supported reform in 1832; he was rewarded by Lord Melbourne – husband of Lady Caroline Lamb – with an hereditary peerage as Lord Strafford, giving him a seat in the Lords. More typical was Sir Hussey Vivian, who commanded the Sixth Brigade of Cavalry at Waterloo and became the MP for Truro – a seat also held by Lord FitzRoy Somerset, Wellington’s military secretary at Waterloo. On the annual renewal of the Mutiny Bill in 1820, establishing the army strength at 92,000 men, Sir Hussey told the Commons that a large standing army was necessary to put down insurrection, such as they had seen at Manchester (Peterloo). Hobhouse, a reforming MP, chided him: ‘At Manchester, 100,000 men were put to the rout by 40 flushed, not to say drunken, yeomen. What then do we want 35,000 soldiers for?’ Hobhouse said the move towards martial law was against Magna Carta. It is a debate that is still going on today. The summer riots of 2011 that left city centres burning ruins raised again the question that faced Wellington and his government – how does the civil power maintain order on the streets if the mobs resort to such violence? At least today, the mobs have the vote. In 1820, the vast majority of Wellington’s ‘scum of the earth’ were disenfranchised.
The case for reform would not go away and public support for change grew as a result of an extraordinary event – the trial of Queen Caroline. Caroline of Brunswick had married George, Prince of Wales, on 8 April 1795 but it was a disaster. He had secretly married the widow, Mrs Maria Fitzherbert in 1785 but as she was a Catholic it was illegal. He openly had a string of mistresses, including Lady Melbourne and Countess Conyngham. When he succeeded his father as king in 1820 as George IV, he sought a divorce from Caroline, and publicly accused her of adultery. A Bill of Pains and Penalties was introduced in the Lords to divorce her on the grounds of her ‘licentious, disgraceful and adulterous intercourse’ with an Italian servant, Bartolomeo Pergami ‘a foreigner of low station’. It began in the House of Lords in August 1820 and turned into a show trial of Caroline’s sexual behaviour. Newspapers had a field day, reporting the salacious allegations against the queen while the trial ploughed on, day after scandalous day. There had never been such a public washing of the queen’s dirty laundry. The House of Lords had never heard anything like it.
On 25 August, the Attorney General, Robert Gifford, questioned Barbara Kress from the Post-Inn Karlsruhe, where Caroline had stayed with Pergami, in the most intimate, salacious detail: ‘Did you at any time see anything on the sheets?’ asked the Attorney General. Frau Kress politely replied the sheets were ‘wuste’. There was some dispute about the interpretation, but it was agreed she meant ‘stained’. The Attorney General would not be deflected from the truth. What sort of stains were they? he demanded. ‘White,’ said Frau Kress, who broke down in tears at the intimate nature of the questioning. Were they wet or dry? asked the Attorney General. ‘Wet,’ said the tearful Frau.
The nation was gripped by the trial and Caroline won massive public support as ‘the wronged wife’. Thomas Creevey, the Radical MP, compared the great demonstrations in support of the queen to the crowds at ‘Peterloo’:
Every Wednesday the scene which caused such alarm at Manchester is repeated under the very nose of Parliament and in a tenfold degree more alarming. A certain number of regiments of the efficient population of the town march on each of those days in a regular lock step, four or five abreast – banners flying – music playing … I should like anyone to tell me what is to come next if this organised army loses its temper.
Wellington drew hisses from the crowds on 17 August as he rode to the opening of the trial on Copenhagen. Creevey noted:
Near the House of Lords there is a fence of railing put across the street from the Exchequer coffee-house to the enclosed garden ground joining to St Margaret’s churchyard, through which members of both Houses were alone permitted to pass. A minute after I passed, I heard an uproar, with hissing and shouting. On turning round, I saw it was Wellington on horseback. His horse made a little start, and he looked round with some surprise. He caught my eye as he passed, and nodded, but was evidently annoyed.9
The queen arrived in an episcopal black-and-white dress with a white veil so thick it was difficult to see her face, but Creevey compared her manner to a toy doll with jerky movements. It was the main subject of conversation at Brooks’s club in St James’s Street that was founded by Whigs, and renowned for gambling. Lord Grey offered odds of 10 to 1 that the bill would be withdrawn in a fortnight. It is not clear if anyone took him up, but Grey would have lost his bet. The government persisted with it until 10 November when on the third reading it could only muster a majority of nine with ninety-nine peers voting against it, including the Archbishop of York, the Right Reverend Edward Venables Vernon.
Wellington voted for it, but the prime minister, Lord Liverpool, adjourned further progress and the government abandoned the measure. Grey said by introducing the bill, the government ‘had betrayed their King, insulted their Queen, and had given a shock to the morals of society by the promulgation of the detestable and disgusting evidence’. The Radical writer William Cobbett used the queen’s trial to attack the House of Lords in a pamphlet called A Peep At The Peers.
But the government’s embarrassment was not over. King George barred the queen from his side at his Coronation at Westminster Abbey on 19 July 1821. There is a myth that she went to the doors of the Abbey, banged on the doors and screamed: ‘Let me in – I am your Queen.’ It is true she was denied her place by the king’s side, but the government was not so stupid as to shut her out altogether. The authorities had allocated Caroline a place in the Abbey among the peeresses with instructions for the door-keepers to let her in and lead her to her place, but she insisted on a place next to the king as her right as the queen. Wellington said: ‘She went to two or three doors (of the Abbey) and received the same answer at each. This quite disconcerted her, and she retired. The mob too, as soon as they found she came to spoil the ceremony, began hissing and hooting.’ She already had one of the twenty-six tickets issued to the Duke of Wellington as High Constable. He denied he gave it to the queen and told a dinner party at Walmer Castle in 1836 that he suspected it was given to Caroline by Lady Jersey, one of her intimate friends.
Caroline – conveniently for the government and the king – died mysteriously less than a year later on 7 August 1821, aged 53. There were suspicions that she had been poisoned but the symptoms suggested she died from cancer of the stomach. Even in death she proved troublesome. Like the public mood after the death of Diana, Princess of Wales in 1997, the dead queen became a lightning conductor for public anger at the Establishment. Mobs protested that her body was being ‘smuggled’ out of London via Harwich for burial in her native Brunswick. They wanted to show their support for her – and opposition to George IV – by insisting that her coffin should be put on board a ship in the port of London. There were such violent demonstrations in London when Caroline’s body was being carried for embarkation at Harwich that there were scenes reminiscent of the Peterloo Massacre: the Life Guards, who formed an honour guard, fired some rounds, drew sabres, and two members of the public were killed.
Seven years later, the civil unrest was as great as ever when Wellington was called on by George IV to take over as prime minister. The Duke rode Copenhagen to 10 Downing Street to show the smack of firm government. They became a familiar site around Westminster. He was returned as prime minister at the General Election caused by the death of George IV in 1830 and the accession to the throne of George’s youngest brother, William (Prince Frederick had died in 1827). But the Duke’s popularity had been completely spent, and for Wellington it all went horribly wrong. In the same month he kissed hands with the king, he received a letter posted in Oxford Street saying: ‘Parliamentary reform … or death!’ The writer added: ‘Mark this thou despot.’ It was signed ‘Swing’ . The ‘Swing’ riots were a protest at the hardship of farm workers. But they need not have threatened murder by the mob. The Duke committed political suicide at the opening of the new Parliament. Wellington utterly dismayed his own side by declaring, at the end of his remarks on the King’s Speech opening Parliament in the Lords on 2 November 1830, he would never surrender the vote to the common man. He said Britain had the best Parliamentary system in the world and then in the closing words of speech, he said he would go further:
Under these circumstances, I am not prepared to bring forward any measure [of Parliamentary reform] … I am not only not prepared to bring forward any measure of this nature but I will at once declare that as long as I hold any station in the government of the country, I shall always feel it my duty to resist such measures when proposed by others.
It was a suicidal comment to make for a prime minister reliant on shifting alliances. Diarist and senior civil servant Charles Greville noted: ‘The Duke of Wellington made a violent and uncalled-for declaration against Reform, which has without doubt sealed his fate. Never was there an act of more egregious folly, or one so universally condemned by friends and foes.’ A fortnight later, on 16 November, the Duke announced in the Lords he had gone to the king and resigned after losing a vote of no confidence in the Commons.
There are arguments over why he said it. Elizabeth Longford persuasively argues Wellington – though he showed acute imagination on the battlefield – lacked political nous. Others say he was trying to use his authority – enhanced by the memory of his stunning victory at Waterloo – to kill reform stone dead.
In one respect, it was surprising that Wellington stoically refused to budge on the issue of reform. Wellington was not an idealist – he was an arch-pragmatist. He had conceded Irish emancipation when the Catholic Irish nationalist Daniel O’Connell won a Parliamentary by-election for County Clare; an Irish rebellion was threatened if O’Connell was barred from taking his seat in Parliament by the Oath of Supremacy, which was incompatible with his Catholicism. Backed by Robert Peel and reinforced by threats to bring down the government, Wellington persuaded George IV to drop his own personal deep opposition to Catholic Emancipation and allow Irish Catholics to sit in Parliament for the first time (and it led to his duel with Lord Winchelsea). Wellington also showed his pragmatism when he was later used by Peel to persuade the House of Lords to allow the bill to repeal the hated Corn Laws to go through, even though the Duke was against repeal. Croker claims Wellington privately did propose adopting a ‘large measure of reform’ as a compromise when he tried to form a Cabinet in 1831 and Croker walked out in protest. ‘The Duke afterwards sent for me alone and was seriously angry that I was still obstinate,’ said Croker.10
Having failed to form a Cabinet to offer a compromise, Wellington gave up the effort. From then on, he was vehemently opposed to reform. Elizabeth Longford conceded that his belief that ‘the scum of the earth’ had to be controlled ultimately by iron discipline, including flogging, was a ‘pitifully static view of human nature’. But, she added, that for the Duke, it had a ‘superficial realism’ which influenced Wellington for many a long year to come. In other words, Wellington believed that ‘the scum of the earth’ had to be kept in their place or there would be chaos.
Some of the Duke’s arguments sound ludicrous today. Wellington argued that if there were elections in Manchester, the mobs would riot and bring pressure to bear on the candidates, whereas under the present system, a Manchester merchant sitting for a county seat would be free to vote as his conscience and judgment dictated because he had so few voters. Charles Lennox, the uncle of Wellington’s friend, the 4th Duke of Richmond, put the alternative case perfectly when he introduced a reform bill for universal men’s suffrage in 1780: ‘The poor man has equal right but more need to have representation than the rich one …’ Richmond’s reform bill was reprinted as a pamphlet in 1817 by campaigners for reform. However, Wellington appeared as implacable and immovable as if he was being attacked by the Imperial Guard; he went from national hero to hate figure.
Three attempts to pass the Reform Bill were made before it finally went through. The pro-reform Whigs under Earl Grey were returned with a majority in the Commons and a clear mandate to pass the Reform Bill in April 1831, but Wellington led peers in blocking it in the House of Lords. Wellington told the Lords: ‘From the period of the adoption of that measure will date the downfall of the Constitution.’
Wellington’s refusal to bow to public opinion triggered Reform Riots across England and caused a constitutional crisis. Bristol was occupied by the rioters for three days. Wellington’s London home, Apsley House, was attacked by the mob while the body of his wife Kitty lay on her death bed. On 28 April 1831 Wellington wrote to Harriet Arbuthnot: ‘I learn from John [his housekeeper] that the mob attacked my house and broke about thirty windows. He fired two blunderbusses in the air from the top of the house, and they went off.’ Wellington regarded the London mob as more dangerous than the Paris mob because it was indisciplined: ‘Our mob is not trained nor accustomed to regular direction as the French was; once let it loose, and you will see what it will do!’ He resorted to putting iron shutters across the windows, and he was ridiculed for it as ‘The Iron Duke’ – the name by which his troops had proudly known him.
In desperation Prime Minister Grey asked the king, William IV, to create more peers to allow the measure through; when the king refused, Grey resigned as prime minister and the king asked Wellington to form a government. It was then, according to Croker, that the Duke was tempted to dabble in a compromise but with loyal allies like Croker walking out on him, Wellington could never find sufficient support and the king had no option but to summon Grey again. Britain tottered on the brink of anarchy and revolution, the protestors called for a run on the Bank of England and the overthrow of the monarchy. In the midst of a constitutional crisis, William IV secretly wrote to peers without the knowledge of the Cabinet, pleading with them to back down. Erskine May, the constitutional expert, said it was constitutionally highly improper for the king to interfere in this way, but Wellington conceded defeat and the Tory peers relented.
It was not as if the lower classes – the ‘scum of the earth’ – were being offered the vote as they had in Richmond’s bill. The vote was extended merely from 478,000 men to 813,000 men in a population of 24 million, about 4 men in every 100. The vote was limited in the 1832 Reform Act to the new middle classes – the businessmen, professional classes and journalists agitating for change – who were £10 householders in the boroughs and £10 leaseholders in the shires. Even so, when the Bill was presented by Lord John Russell, the Postmaster General, it surprised even its supporters by the sweeping nature of its reform of the rotten boroughs. The 1832 Reform bill marked a watershed that turned Britain from a fundamentally medieval system of privilege for a few aristocrats towards a modern democracy. It abolished 143 smaller borough seats, and replaced them with 130 seats, including two for each of the industrial towns that had led the fight for reform – Birmingham, Manchester, Leeds, Halifax and Bradford and Oldham.
The first MP for Oldham was the veteran campaigner for humble folk in the countryside, William Cobbett, though by then he had returned from America decidedly odd, attacking Jews, rather than the outrage of Peterloo. Hunt became the MP for Preston in 1831 and opposed the Reform Act because it did not go far enough; he lost his seat in 1833 and having turned his back on public life, died in 1835 in Hampshire.
The aristocratic elite held on to most of their ‘pocket boroughs’. The Duke of Norfolk still controlled eleven seats – including Creevey’s – and the Earl of Lonsdale had nine in his pocket, while the Duke of Devonshire and Lord Darlington each had seven Parliamentary seats in their gift. This not only gave a few aristocratic landowners great influence over the government, but it also gave unelected peers control over the elected Commons until they were swept away in the Reform Act of 1867.
The crisis ended but the campaign for more reform went on. All men over 21 were given a vote in 1918 but it was not until 1928 that women were finally granted equal voting rights with men. The Whig historian Thomas Macaulay was jubilant after the vote on 7 June 1832:
It was like seeing Caesar stabbed in the Senate House, or seeing Oliver [Cromwell] taking the mace from the table … We set up a shout that you might have heard in Charing Cross - waving our hats – stamping against the floor and clapping our hands. The tellers scarcely got through the crowd. But you might have heard a pin drop as Duncannon read the numbers. Then again the shouts broke out – and many of us shed tears – I could scarcely refrain. And the jaw of Peel fell; and the face of Twiss was as the face of a damned soul. We shook hands and clapped each other on the back, and went out laughing, crying, and huzzaing into the lobby.
A painting of the Commons to celebrate the passage of the Act was started in 1833 by Sir George Hayter (a year before the old chamber in St Stephens Chapel was destroyed by fire). It shows Wellington standing by the opposition benches (as a peer, he could not sit in the Commons) – he is silver-haired and handsome, turning and smiling to his friends as if saying ‘they are fools’; and some of the protagonists for reform including Grey, Cobbett, William Lamb the 2nd Viscount Melbourne (who became Queen Victoria’s first prime minister) and the Irish nationalist O’Connell. Thomas Creevey saw the Great Reform Act of 1832 as the salvation of the nation:
The conqueror of Waterloo had great luck on that day; so he had when Marmont made a false move at Salamanca; but at last comes his own false move, which has destroyed himself and his Tory high-flying association for ever, which has passed the Reform Bill without opposition. That has saved the country from confusion and perhaps the monarch and monarchy from destruction.11
Wellington’s great victory in 1815 was so complete that Waterloo entered the English language as a simile for a crushing defeat. The Great Reform Act of 1832 was Wellington’s ‘Waterloo’. Wellington lived long enough for the reform battles to be forgotten and for the Duke to be celebrated as the elder statesman of the Victorian Age.
In retirement, Copenhagen was put out to grass at Stratfield Saye, the stately home granted to the Duke by a grateful nation on the Hampshire-Berkshire border, and Copenhagen became a family favourite when old age had dulled his skittishness. Kitty, the Duchess of Wellington, who wore a bracelet of Copenhagen’s hair, said: ‘He trots after me eating bread out of my hand and wagging his tail like a little dog.’ Copenhagen died aged 28 in 1836 and was buried with military honours; he was also honoured with an obituary in The Times:
On the 12th of February died at Stratfield Saye, of old age, Copenhagen, the horse which carried the Duke of Wellington so nobly on the field of Waterloo … He lost an eye some years before his death and has not been used by the noble owner for any purpose during the last ten years. By orders of his grace a salute was fired over his grave and thus he was buried as he had lived, with military honours …
He was buried under the Turkey Oak in the Ice House Paddock at Stratfield Saye, marked by a gravestone put up by the second Duke. The Duke made sure Copenhagen avoided suffering the indignity of Marengo, Napoleon’s favourite horse, which had its skeleton mounted after its death in old age. Marengo’s bones are still on show at the National Army Museum in London. It was going to be stuffed but the taxidermist lost the hide.
In the outpouring of pride over Waterloo, the Wellington Arch was built at Green Park near Apsley House. It was encouraged by George IV as a triumphal arch as part of a great processional way from Constitution Hill, and in 1848 a giant equestrian statue of the Duke mounted on Copenhagen was commissioned – thanks to a pro-Wellington clique led by his ally John Wilson Croker. It was huge. The equestrian monster weighed 40 tons and was 28 feet high, and immediately became the source of ridicule and acute embarrassment to the government. When the statue of the horse and rider – the biggest equestrian statute ever constructed in Britain – was erected on top of the arch as a trial, it became clear that the scale was far too great for even that grand pedestal. It loomed over Buckingham Palace, upsetting the young Queen Victoria, and caused a row. A campaign was started to remove it before it had settled into place. Wellington wrote to Croker on 19 November 1846 saying: ‘My Dear Croker, It appears that the Queen (Victoria) and Prince Albert came to London from Windsor on Saturday morning, the 7th, and her Majesty ordered that it should be removed …’
It would have been doubly galling to Wellington that Nelson had a vast square and a column dedicated to his memory and the Prince of Orange had the Lion Mound, but the young queen objected to an equestrian statue of Wellington, whose victory was more complete. Because of the Duke’s prestige, it was left in place for the next thirty-five years. It was finally taken down in 1883 when the arch was moved and, after an outcry by Waterloo veterans to stop it being melted down, it was removed 41 miles west to the garrison town of Aldershot – probably the longest retreat the Duke had made since the Peninsular War. It now sits largely forgotten by the nation on a grassy knoll by the A325. Instead of towering over Buckingham Palace and the traffic entering London on the Victory Way, Wellington and Copenhagen look down over a suburban roundabout by the Premier Inn.
* Castlereagh died by his own hand on 12 August 1822, slashing his throat with a penknife while he was having a mental breakdown.
* This doubly historic house was demolished in 1967 despite a building preservation order, and a furious planning row, by the Duke of Westminster’s Grosvenor Estates to make way for a block of mansion flats. It is now incorporated in the Millennium Hotel, Mayfair.
* There were recent demands for Picton’s portrait to be removed from a courthouse in his native Carmarthen, Wales, but it is still there. ‘I think we have to accept Picton warts and all and not judge him by today’s standards,’ I was told.
1. The Trials of Arthur Thistlewood, James Ings, John Thomas Brunt, Richard Tidd, William Davidson and Others (London: J. Butterworth and Son, 1820), p. 10.
2. Obituary, John Stafford, The Times, September 1837.
3. HO 44/4 207 Cato Street files, National Archives.
4. HO 44/4 Cato Street files, National Archives.
5. George Theodore Wilkinson, An Authentic History of the Cato Street Conspiracy <openlibrary.org> (London: Thomas Kelly, 1820), p. 383.
6. Ibid.
7. Wilkinson, An Authentic History.
8. Lord Liverpool to Canning, 23 March 1820, Harewood mss. West Yorkshire Archive Service, Leeds.
9. Rt Hon. Sir Herbert Maxwell, Creevey Papers, 17 August 1820 (London: John Murray, 1904), p. 142.
10. Louise J. Jennings (ed.), The Croker Papers of John Wilson Croker, Secretary to the Admiralty 1809 to 1830 (London: John Murrary, 1884), p. 137.
11. Ibid., 26 May 1832.