by M. J. Trow
What happened next was a frenzy of killing. There was no time to reload and Davidson hacked about him with the carbine butt, clubbing anyone who stood in his way, flunkey or lord, it made no difference. This was a new world and he was removing the old order to make way for it. The guns of the killers crashed again and again and the dining room was full of screams and curses. Wellington, true to form, downed Harrison with a candelabra and was ready to tackle the next man, if Thistlewood hadn’t shattered that famous nose with his third pistol.
No one knew how long the slaughter lasted. No one knew how many windows were broken or how the sounds of the killings had travelled through the West End night. They stood there, the men who had come from Cato Street, breathing hard, flushed, covered in blood and soup. There was a sob from a corner – a servant still alive, whimpering. The last thing he saw was Brunt’s solid frame, shutting out the candle-light. The last thing he felt was Brunt’s boot, one he had made himself, in his face.
Now was Ings’s moment, the one he’d planned, the one he’d rehearsed. He tore off his greatcoat and stood there in his butcher’s apron, drawing the long, steel cleaver from its sheath. Out of his pocket he pulled two canvas bags and laid them on the sideboard. Then he squatted on the other side of the table. No one else moved, sharing in that weird stillness, the moment of triumph. There was a ripping sound and the twisting of muscle and sinew and bone. Then Ings stood upright, the cleaver still dripping in his right hand. In his left were the no longer handsome features of the head of the Foreign Secretary. His eyes were half closed and the hair gripped in the butcher’s hand was matted with blood. His throat had been slashed at an angle and a piece of vertebra gleamed white in the bloody mess.
‘Behold,’ gasped Ings, eyes shining in the slaughter. ‘The head of a traitor.’ And he stuffed it into one of the sacks.
Thistlewood didn’t wait to see more. He spun on his heel and left the killing room, almost colliding with Edwards on the landing.
‘All well, T?’ the man asked.
‘Well,’ said Thistlewood. ‘You?’
‘I think we can say the servants are with us. They’re all but singing Ça Ira down there.’
Thistlewood clapped the man on the shoulder. ‘Ings has taken Castlereagh’s head. Now he’s after Sidmouth’s. Keep them close. I want them on poles on the bridge come morning.’
And he made for the stairs.
Out on the leads of Lord Harrowby’s, high over Grosvenor Square, Arthur Thistlewood looked across London. He could hear the shouts and the singing as the new world began. There was no gunfire, so the Committee must have got their cannon from the Artillery Ground without a fight. He could see the fires already flaring where John Palin and his men had fired the barracks – to his left in Portman Street, to his right in Knightsbridge and beyond that to Birdcage Walk. He could imagine the horror and the disbelief on the faces of the well-to-do as the ragged masses smashed in their doors and windows, helping themselves to food and valuables. But, above all, to food.
There would be chaos for a while, perhaps for days, perhaps for weeks. But then, a calm would descend and order would be restored. Thistlewood would have the king brought to him at the Mansion House and the Archbishop of Canterbury. As he stood there, unaware of the biting cold and watching the magic of the fires, he knew the new world was at hand.
The Government of the People of Great Britain had begun.
*
The account you have just read never happened. But it, or something like it, was supposed to. We do not know how Thistlewood’s conspirators would actually have coped at Lord Harrowby’s dinner because they never got there. Instead, they were arrested in the early evening of 23 February 1820, in a dilapidated hay-loft of a stable in Cato Street, ten minutes walk away, arming themselves for what would have been the most devastating assassination in British history.
This is the story of that conspiracy, of what might have been and what was not. It is a story of hopes and dreams, of cruelty and kindness, of high drama and of farce. It is a tale of one injustice heaped on another. The men who should have dined – and died – with Lord Harrowby that winter’s night long ago have all found honourable graves and have won their places in the pantheon of history. The men who tried to kill them have vanished, their bodies indistinguishable from the clay under what today is the Central Criminal Court of the Old Bailey.
This is their story.
Chapter 2
The Winter of Discontent
‘Merde!’1
The famous shout of defiance from General Cambronne as he stood with the shattered remnants of the Old Guard near Hougoumont as dusk fell on 18 June symbolized in so many ways the days of ‘la gloire’, the extraordinary military adventure on which France had embarked after 1791.
The battle of Waterloo has passed into legend, destroying forever the French domination of Europe that had lasted for one and a half centuries. From now on, the language of diplomacy, the currency of power, was English and Britain was on her way to becoming the mightiest power the world has known.
But there were casualties along the way and never more so than in the months and years following that famous victory in the fields on the road to Charleroi. At first, of course, all was well. Britain celebrated the end of a gruelling twenty-two years of war, first against Revolutionary France, then Napoleon. The bells rang out, there were services of thanksgiving. And gentlemen in England, then-abed, read over and over, to their families and servants, the words of Wellington’s despatch to The Times.2
Wellington’s army would stay in France for a further three years, just to make sure that the restoration of the Bourbons was not a last flicker of monarchy and that Bonapartism would not raise its head again. The Emperor of the French – known to most Englishmen as Boney – was sent on board the Northumberland, bound for the grim, black rock that was St Helena. He would leave it as a partially mummified corpse twenty-five years later.
John Thomas Brunt, the Cato Street conspirator, supplied boots to the cavalry regiment the Blues, soon after Waterloo, and would have heard grumblings about the regiment’s quota sailing home. These men had served their country and in the months to come, at the insistence of the Duke of Wellington, they would receive their Waterloo medal, the first of its kind ever awarded to ordinary soldiers. Brunt’s co-conspirator James Ings might have attended street parties in his town of Portsmouth, jostling the crowded alleyways of the harbour with the sailors who had won their battle honours at Cape St Vincent, Copenhagen, the Nile and Trafalgar. He would have been stood rounds of drinks in the port’s taverns, hearing over and over again, ‘with advantages’, the deeds the Tars carried out on those days.
But by the late summer of 1815, James Ings was already in London, and would have read the signs in the London parks – ‘No dogs – and no soldiers in uniform’.
The euphoria of victory soon gave way to reality and to despair. What kind of England did men of the Blues come home to that summer? For all the nineteenth century was ‘the age of the cities’, we would be struck by how rural everything was. Britain was not yet the workshop of the world and if the ‘dark Satanic mills’ were increasing in number and London was the largest city in the world, England still had ‘mountains green’ and the metropolis was ringed with fields. The hay-loft in Cato Street, from which the conspirators planned to launch their revolution, was on the edge of civilization. Beyond the Edgware Road were pastures (the Cato Street building was a cow shed) and Hyde Park much more countrified than it is today. In the 1830s, Princess Victoria, writing her diary from the perspective of a 13 year old, talked of Kensington where she was born as ‘our dear village’. And from exactly the same vantage point, but many years older and of a more bitter disposition, the radical pamphleteer William Cobbett watched with revulsion the ‘great Wen’ that was London creeping inexorably across the fields towards him.
Most men and women worked on the land and were slaves of the seasons. In the summer, they toiled at the back-breaking
work of the harvest, with sickle and scythe – it would be half a century before steam-driven threshing machines did some of the work for them. They rose with the sun and crawled home in the darkness, ready to sing lustily in church on Sunday of the harvest home. ‘Come, ye thankful people, come.’ In the winter, before the spring sowing, they huddled around peat fires in the tied cottages and prayed the squire for whom they worked would not evict them before the next harvest.
The fields themselves were still new in some places. The enclosure movement, which cleared woodland and drained marsh, was two generations old, but the trend had been speeded up in recent years by desperation. Britain had been a fortress on the edge of French-dominated Europe and had had to become self-sufficient or surrender. In 1801 parliament had passed the General Enclosure Act which cut through much of the red-tape surrounding the lengthy mechanics of enclosure. So now, in the south, hedges and fences surrounded the old common land. In the north, dry-stone walls criss-crossed the moors. There was still the need to prove land ownership. Without an actual written deed, a man whose great-grandfather had owned the land was forced to see it bought up by the local squire.
The law arrests the man or woman,
Who steals the goose from off the Common,
But lets the greater thief go loose,
Who steals the Common from the goose.
His choice then was to leave, to find work elsewhere or to stay put as a ‘landless labourer’. Most took the latter road and carried on as before. But not quite as before. In the long, dark nights of winter such men huddled around their fires and puffed on their pipes. The firewood that crackled in their hearths was no longer free. The tobacco they smoked had a duty on it. Even the rabbit stewing in the pot belonged to somebody else and they risked gaol by trapping it. Most men muttered, shrugged, stirred the fire in the grate. But some men ‘knew no harm of Bonaparte and plenty of the squire’ and perhaps, as the fire died and their children cried with hunger, they plotted murder and revolution.
Fifty years ago, social historians believed that the effects of change on the land – the combination of enclosures and the patenting of labour-saving devices like the horse-hoe and the seed-drill – drove thousands to the towns in a mass exodus. We now know that this was not the case. There was movement, certainly, but it was localized and piecemeal. Landless labourers moved to the next parish or the one beyond that and they continued to work the land. Even when the second generation3 did reach the towns, they tried to find work with animals or delivering foodstuffs. Thomas Hyden, one of the key witnesses in the trials of the Cato Street conspirators, was a cow-keeper. Edward Hucklestone, who gave evidence at Thistlewood’s trial, had become a shoemaker, but was ‘now articled to a cow-doctor in Newman Mews’.4 It was not until the 1770s that we see the first appearance of industrial mills and not until the decade of Cato Street that machinery began to be steam-driven.
In the long term of course, the complex series of interlocking events we call by shorthand convenience the Industrial Revolution was beneficial to everyone. The kind of poverty which the Cato Street conspirators believed, naively, could be laid at the door of Lord Liverpool’s Cabinet, has long vanished and it takes an extraordinary leap of imagination for us to see the world as Arthur Thistlewood saw it. The massive changes in British society from a rural way of life in which men lived in villages, were born and died in the same parish, to an urban existence, where the flotsam of society moved to the thud and grind of the machines, had no precedent. There was no blueprint and when mistakes were made – and they were, in large measure – it was because no nation in the world had experienced such changes before.
The new men of the Industrial Revolution – Josiah Wedgwood, Jedediah Strutt, James Watt, Jethro Tull and countless others – were men of vision driven by a thirst for knowledge or a thirst for profit or both. Improving landlords like Tull, ‘Turnip’ Townshend and Coke of Holkham, had the money, the time and the leisure to try out revolutionary new techniques on sections of their estates. Tull’s seed-drill, for example, made nonsense of the New Testament parable of the sower. No longer would seeds fall on stony ground or among weeds; neither could the wind blow them away, because the machine dug a hole for each seed and buried it. The result would be a massive increase in productivity and in food to fill hungry mouths in the long winters ahead. In the short term, however, it saw the laying off of labour and angry farm workers tried to smash the drill and beat Tull to a pulp.
Josiah Wedgwood built his Etruria factory along the banks of the Trent so that the water could power his machinery. He saw that the rising middle classes wanted to emulate their betters. The aristocracy and the gentry might eat off porcelain imported from China; Wedgwood could make the stuff in Staffordshire at a fraction of the cost. It was probably not his intention, but in creating a quality product at a cheap price, Wedgwood was obeying every rule in the capitalist book (some would say he wrote the book) and he was, incidentally, helping to narrow the vast poverty gap that existed in his day.
Other manufacturers and industrialists got the point and followed suit. Since machinery was made largely of timber and ran on water, whole forests disappeared and mills, with their distinctive rows of windows, sprang up along river banks, especially in the Midlands and the North. Obtaining money in the increasingly prosperous eighteenth century was not difficult. Until the wartime-engendered collapse of finance houses in 1797 there were over 300 banks in Britain, all of them operating under the shadow of a powerful financial system that was already over a century old. Interest rates for most of the century ran between 3 and 4 per cent. Without the need for planning permission, an entrepreneur could build on a fast-flowing river bank (for his power) as close as possible to an existing town (for his raw materials and a ready market) and he would advertise his goods in the increasingly widespread newspaper and printing businesses springing up everywhere.5 By the 1790s, Britain was indeed the nation of shopkeepers described as such nearly twenty years before by Adam Smith.6 But we were above all a nation of manufacturers. If we look at the nine men arrested by the Bow Street Runners on the night of 23 February 1820: James Ings and James Wilson were butchers; Richard Bradburn and John Shaw were carpenters; James Gilchrist and John Monument were shoemakers; Charles Cooper and Richard Tidd were bootmakers; William Davidson, always a little apart, had the highest status of them all – he was a cabinet-maker.
But the entrepreneurs of the eighteenth century had fixed costs which they could not avoid. They had to buy land and build suitable premises. They had to pay for their raw materials and their machinery. They had to pay the going rate for transport costs, both for raw materials and finished goods. They had to pay to advertise and if they were sensible, they would insure all they had. Where they could save money – and virtually all of them did – was in the paying of wages to their workforce. Here, there were no fixed costs, no going rate. Each hiring was a private transaction between the employer – always, and until the 1870s legally, known as the Master – and the employee – the Servant. The terminology spoke volumes for the great poverty divide of the time. It was not until twenty-five years after Cato Street that Benjamin Disraeli used as the subtitle of his novel Sybil, the Two Nations, by which he meant the rich and the poor in England. It would be another three years after that, that Karl Marx and Frederick Engels wrote the Communist Manifesto, a blueprint for doing something about that monstrous inequality.
So the entrepreneurs of the first phase of the Industrial Revolution built cheap houses for their workers as close as possible to the factory. That way, time would not be lost in travelling to and from work. They built them quickly so that profits would grow from the first day and they built them in terraces to save space. These ‘back-to-back’ tenements formed the nucleus of cities in the last decade of the eighteenth century, built haphazardly by individual industrialists with no recourse to civic planning, so that street upon street and alley upon alley became warrens of overcrowding and despair.
In the 1830s w
hen the Whig government commissioned Edwin Chadwick and his team of civil servants to investigate the problem, a house built for a single family was home to sixty individuals, of both sexes and all ages. Typically, the attic, with no fireplace, a single window and a sloping ceiling, housed eight. The only means to the ground was via the floors below. The upper storey, intended of course as a bedroom, had perhaps two windows and a fireplace, but it routinely housed up to twenty people. The ground floor was identical, with two extra people crammed in here somehow. Below ground, steps led down to the cellars, often inches deep in water, where ten miserable souls had no view but other people’s shoes clattering at street level. The walls of every storey were wringing wet and every house was awash with vermin. People slept eight to a bed, children tucked into every conceivable angle and corner.
Water for these first- and second-generation industrial families came from stand-pipes that were owned by private water companies and these taps were usually turned on for two hours a day. Children queued to fill buckets and the water collected had to last for twenty-four hours, to be used for drinking, cooking, washing bodies and clothes. The toilet was a privy, a single shed on the ground next to the terrace. Its door was often hanging off and there would be no flush mechanism until the 1850s.7 The human waste was carried away into a neighbouring sewer (in effect an open drain) or merely collected in a pit until it was removed – and dumped nearby – by the euphemistically named night soil men.
Landlords were under no obligation to repair or maintain these premises and no tenant had the time or money to turn to law for redress. The overcrowding was appalling because tenants continually sublet in an effort to be able to pay their rent. And of course the bitterest pill of all was that the landlord was very often the factory master too. If a man lost his job, he would lose the roof over his head. There was no such thing as a fair rents tribunal and, like the wages he paid, the rent was fixed by the Master/landlord without any external control whatever. If a labourer would not work for the money offered, if he would not pay the rent demanded, there were plenty who would.