by Colin Brown
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.