The Scum of the Earth

by Colin Brown

  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.