Enemies of the State

by M. J. Trow

  What we have here is the lunatic fringe of the Jacobin movement. We have no idea of their numbers but Despard, like the men of Cato Street, seems to have genuinely believed that there was an army of the dispossessed out there, in London, Sheffield, Leeds and elsewhere, ready to rise at the drop of a cap of liberty. By 1801, the mutinous rumblings had formulated into a plan which has some of the elements of urban guerrilla warfare and a Utopian vision of a rosy future.

  Despard’s links with the Irish underground are shadowy. He almost certainly met Wolfe Tone in the mid-1790s and probably Robert Emmett, the son of the viceroy’s doctor who had joined Tone’s United Irishmen in 1789. There is no real evidence in Despard’s case that his plan to seize power in London was linked either to a French invasion or Emmett’s scheme to capture Dublin castle and imprison the viceroy. In fact between 1797 and 1803, the Franco-Irish plans seem to have been totally disjointed, with timings going wrong and Emmett, in 1803, forced to go it alone, with, for him, fatal consequences.

  By the year of Wolfe Tone’s rebellion, Catherine Despard was increasingly worried about her husband’s political machinations and he took to using a ‘safe house’ rather than talk sedition with fellow conspirators at their home. Both the LCS and the United Englishmen/Irishmen were hit by the authorities in that year after a traitor was discovered at Margate with plans for an Irish rising he was taking across the Channel to France. Among thirty Jacobins, Despard was arrested and held in Coldbath Fields gaol in Clerkenwell. There was a deep irony here because this prison was known as The Steel (i.e. Bastille) because of its associations with the notorious Parisian gaol. The Jacobin poets Southey and Coleridge wrote of it:

  As he went through Coldbath Fields he saw

  A solitary cell:

  And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint

  For improving his prisons in Hell.2

  In fact, when Despard was there, the place was only four years old. It had 232 cells and cost a staggering £65,000 to build.

  Tone’s rebellion broke out while Despard was still inside and, since habeas corpus was now suspended, the colonel could, in theory, be held indefinitely.

  Enter the feisty Catherine Despard. She contacted the radical MP Sir Francis Burdett who raised the issue of the Coldbath inmates in the Commons. Burdett was a brilliant choice, the respectable face of English Jacobinism, a rebel by temperament who was the darling of the mob. He read out Catherine’s letter to an unruly House, equally divided over their attitudes towards habeas corpus. Colonel Despard, he told them, was being held ‘without either fire or candle, table, knife, fork, a glazed window or even a book to read’. He also read out a second letter, an appeal from a Coldbath prisoner written with a splinter of wood dipped in blood. There were cries of ‘Burdett and no Bastille’ on the one hand, but on the other, the Attorney-General Sir John Scott expressed himself surprised that Catherine Despard wasn’t in prison along with her husband.

  Once released, Despard returned to his old haunts and his plans were reformulated. In six articles presented to the United Englishmen’s Committee, the first attack should be on the Tower. Not only was the place a prison along Bastille lines (several of the Cato Street conspirators would be sent there in 1820) but it contained the Royal Mint, a barracks and a sizeable arsenal of guns and powder. In theory, the massive 80 foot thick walls of the White Tower could withstand the shot and shell of any government-ordered artillery attack. Beyond the outer wall was the hell-hole of Tower Hill, a rookery where would-be insurgents could easily be found to join the rising.

  The second article referred to the seizure of the Bank of England in Threadneedle Street. It contained gold bullion as well as Pitt’s hated paper money and would provide funds for the revolution. Woolwich was the next target. It was nine miles from London Bridge but the Royal Arsenal there, founded in the seventeenth century, was three and a half miles long and one mile wide. If the rebels could take that, there was nothing that could stand against them. The fourth article, which was rejected, was that parliament should be seized while both houses were sitting. Although attendance was not usually compulsory, at a stroke the political leadership of the country would be in Jacobin hands. The fifth article talked of the pay back for the soldiers who had mounted this revolution. Each man would receive one guinea (£1 1s) per week and to be allowed to retire from the army with 10 acres of land and cash to cultivate it. The final article discussed the idea of winning the many over to the cause. Over London and any other towns that carried out their own coups, flags of liberty were to be flown. ‘Conductors’ (agitators) were to organize such campaigns in the outlying areas, drill ‘soldiers’ and obtain weapons for the purpose.

  This was a military plan, broadly accepted or perhaps even proposed by Despard. And in essence it was the right thing to do. Had the army and navy gone over to the revolutionaries, there was every chance of success. This had already been proved by the French experience and would be again in Russia in 1917. Where Despard’s followers seriously miscalculated was the actual mood of the people of 1802. The Tower garrison would not crack and run up a white flag as de Launay’s Bastille men had done. The down-and-outs of Tower Hill could not be relied upon to join the movement and how much use would underfed civilians be against an efficient, well-equipped army?

  None of this, of course, was ever put to the test. On 16 November 1802, a large body of Runners from Bow Street descended on the Oakley Arms in Lambeth and arrested nearly forty men, most of them Irish, after a tip-off. The next day they all appeared before a magistrate. Despard, who refused to say a word, was sent to Newgate. This grimmest of London gaols had been totally destroyed by the mob in the Gordon Riots and rebuilt. Only twenty years old when Despard arrived, it was already a slum, with gaol fever claiming large numbers of its shackled inhabitants. Twelve of his followers, six of them soldiers, were sent to the Bridewell at Tothill Fields. Unlike Newgate, this place was well managed by its governor, George Smith, even though it was forced to accommodate extra prisoners after the closure of the Gatehouse Gaol in Westminster in 1777. Twenty others were sent to the New Prison in Clerkenwell, one of the smallest in London after its rebuilding following the Gordon Riots. It was a house of detention with separate male and female wards and specialized in holding people awaiting trial. The remaining ten who had been bundled up in the police raid were found in an adjoining room, had no links with Despard and were released.

  The trial opened on Monday 7 February and the Attorney-General went through the motions of his case. In the dock were Edward Marcus Despard, ‘a colonel in the army’ aged 56; John Francis, a soldier, aged 23; John Wood, another soldier, aged 36; Thomas Broughton, a carpenter, aged 26; James Sedgwick Wratton, a shoemaker, aged 35; John McNamara, another carpenter, aged 50; and Arthur Graham, a slater, aged 53. All of them were married men, many with children. In the course of the trial, other members of the gang were acquitted or pardoned, but these seven were held to be at the heart of the conspiracy.

  The problem for any group of men bent on such a desperate enterprise was winning other men to their cause. Revolution could only succeed if sufficient numbers took part, but the more in the know, the greater the chance of someone talking, either maliciously to obtain a reward or carelessly in their cups. In an attempt to gauge the trustworthiness of men, John Francis had insisted on ‘administering unlawful oaths’. Such oaths had only been illegal for five years and the relevant law had been rushed through at the time of the naval mutinies. One of the men approached was Thomas Windsor, who, according to the Newgate Calendar which reported the trial, ‘soon became dissatisfied’ and reported what he knew to a Mr Bonus. It is not clear who this man was, but he was certainly Establishment and shrewd enough to suggest to Windsor that he continued in Despard’s company and learn all he could. It was his tip-off that led to the rebels’ arrest.

  Windsor’s evidence was that an integral part of the plan was the assassination of the king on his way to the opening of parliament, which was, of course,
an exact action replay of the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, in which James I would have been eviscerated in the parliament house along with his entire government. ‘I have weighed the matter well,’ Despard had told Windsor, ‘and my heart is callous.’

  Windsor had several meetings with Despard and the others, first meeting the ‘nice man’ as Despard was referred to at the Flying Horse in Newington. He also met him at the Tiger on Tower Hill and was supposed to bring four or five intelligent men (he settled for three soldiers) to discuss the best way to take the Tower. It was at this meeting that John Wood hit upon the idea of grabbing ‘the great gun in the Park’ (St James’s) and blasting the king’s carriage as it passed by. The prosecution trotted out a number of other witnesses – William Campbell, Charles Reed, Joseph Walker and Thomas Blades among them – who testified to other planning meetings that had been held.

  Mr Gurney, who would feature in the Cato Street trials eighteen years later, seconded for the defence under Mr Best. The evidence against Despard was overwhelming; in the twelve years since he had returned from Honduras, he had become a marked man, a known opponent of the government and had been in gaol twice, once as a suspected Jacobin. His habit of walking round London with an umbrella and a black wife merely served to draw yet more attention to himself. So Gurney went for the younger Despard, the virtuous, hard-working officer of his early years. Evan Nepean and Alured Clarke from the Admiralty testified to his zeal. But the star witness was undoubtedly Horatio Nelson, the diminutive Vice Admiral who was by now the nation’s hero, with the victories of Cape St Vincent, Aboukir Bay and Copenhagen to his credit.

  Nelson testified that he had known Despard well, having met him in Jamaica in 1779. ‘He was, at that time, a lieutenant in what were called the Liverpool Blues.’ The judge, Lord Ellenborough, was a staunch believer in the Bloody Code and interrupted Nelson to remind him that what was needed was a character reference, not a military CV. He did it politely – after all, Nelson was a lord too and a national treasure Ellenborough was not about to offend. The flat trial transcript gives no hint of the scorn with which the Admiral turned his good eye on the judge:

  We [Despard and Nelson] were on the Spanish Main together. We slept many nights together in our clothes upon the same ground . . . In all that time, no man could have shown more zealous attachment to his sovereign and his country than Colonel Despard did. I formed the highest opinion of him as a man and an officer.3

  In cross-examination, the Attorney-General got Nelson to admit that it was nearly twenty years since he had seen Despard last. That was before the Irishman had become embittered over the Honduras fiasco and before he had read Tom Paine. It came as a surprise to no one when the jury found Despard guilty, but in view of the man’s previous good conduct, recommended mercy. The other conspirators were tried together on Wednesday 9 February where (with the obvious exception of the naval men) the same witnesses gave the same evidence. Nine of the twelve were found guilty, with three more recommendations to mercy.

  Ellenborough summed up:

  You have been separately indicted for conspiracy against his majesty’s person, his crown and government, for the purposes of subverting the same and changing the government of this realm.

  In full flow the judge made sweeping statements which the guilty men, especially Despard, could never have accepted. The constitution, said Ellenborough, had ‘established freedoms’ and ‘just and rational equality of rights’ (neither of which was true for the working class). Despard and his traitors offered instead anarchy and bloodshed, ‘the subversion of all property and the massacre of its proprietors, the annihilation of all legitimate authority and established order’.

  He then passed sentence:

  Each of you [shall] be taken from the place whence you came and thence you are to be drawn on hurdles to the place of execution, where you are to be hanged by the neck, but not until you are dead; for while you are still living your bodies are to be taken down, your bowels torn out and burned before your faces, your heads cut off and your bodies divided into four quarters and your heads and quarters to be then at the king’s disposal and may Almighty God have mercy on your souls.4

  Three of the prisoners – Newman, Tyndall and Lander – were respited (held in prison ‘until his Majesty’s pleasure be known’). The condemned seven were sent to the New Gaol in the Borough at 6 o’clock on Saturday evening and the keeper, Mr Ives, had the unenviable task of serving the execution warrant. Catherine Despard, who had already fought tooth and nail for her husband in 1798, launched herself again. She petitioned Nelson and this and other appeals led to the remission of part of the sentence. Hanged and beheaded the Jacobins would be, but the disembowelling (drawing) and quartering were dropped. It is just as likely that Henry Addington, the Prime Minister now that Pitt had resigned over the issue of Catholic emancipation,5 was concerned about the crowd’s behaviour. When Robert Catesby and his fellow Gunpowder Plotters were executed in this way in January 1606, the mob was hardened to it. Torture was legal in England at the time and the horror of a gunpowder attack on the Lord’s anointed made any punishment acceptable. Despard’s men, like Catesby’s, would die publicly in front of a vast crowd. Who knew how many of them might turn on the authorities if the execution were too gruesome?

  Despard also wrote to Nelson, to ask him to forward a petition to Addington. The Admiral did, without comment, and uncharacteristically Addington had been deeply affected by it, sitting up with his family after supper, weeping over it. Nelson did intercede however, on the part of Catherine Despard, urging that she be given a pension as a result of her husband’s former good service. The Observer reported that Catherine

  had almost sunk under the anticipated horror of his fate; her feelings, when the dreadful order [for execution] came, can scarcely be conceived – we cannot pretend to describe them.6

  By the time of their last meeting, however, she was composed and waved her handkerchief out of the window as her carriage rattled away.

  Daybreak, Sunday 21 February, seventeen years almost to the day before Arthur Thistlewood’s conspirators were arrested in the hay-loft at Cato Street. The entire Bow Street patrol and other constables of the watch had been up all night to guard against any spontaneous and sympathetic uprising. The army ringed London, ready to strike at a moment’s notice. The place of execution was the roof of the Surrey County Gaol, commonly called Horsemonger Lane. The prison was really intended for petty criminals and debtors, but the new gatehouse was low and solid enough to provide an excellent platform for the execution,7 ‘drop, scaffold and gallows’.

  It was still dark when the drum sounded at the Horse Guards along Whitehall and a squadron of the Life Guards, in black cocked hats and scarlet coatees, moved off at a jingling walk to take up position at the Obelisk in St George’s Fields. In twos, the troopers peeled off and patrolled the roads that led to Horsemonger Lane.8 In the mean time police officers from stations at Queen Square, Marlborough Street, Hatton Garden, Worship Street, Whitechapel and Shadwell formed cordons around the prison itself.

  At half past six, still dark at that time of year, the bell was tolled at Horsemonger Lane and the cells were unlocked. The crowd had been gathering for a while, jostling with the law officers and soldiers for a good view. It would be a full two and a half hours before the condemned men stood at the execution site. The solemn bell of St George’s church tolled as the County Sheriff, an Anglican vicar and a Catholic priest took their places at the head of the sorry little column.

  First was the thick-set Irishman John McNamara, who looked at the sea of faces below him and said loudly, ‘Lord Jesus, have mercy on me.’ Arthur Graham came next, the oldest of them, looking ‘pale and ghastly’. The shoemaker James Wratton climbed the gallows steps ‘with much firmness’. Thomas Broughton was next, then the soldiers Wood and Francis. Last came Despard, the man the crowd had really come to see. ‘His countenance underwent not the slightest change’ as they placed the noose around his neck and the cap (actually
a hood) on the top of his head. He helped the executioner fix the rope so that the knot was under his left ear to make the job clean. Despard may or may not have known that the hangman was William Brunskill, notoriously inept at what was still an inexact science. Six years earlier, while he was hanging two murderers outside Newgate, the entire scaffold had collapsed and the men died by accident. Two priests who dropped with them were badly hurt.

  John McNamara muttered to Despard, ‘I am afraid, Colonel, we have got ourselves into a bad situation.’ Despard replied, ‘There are many better and some worse’, with his usual sangfroid. While Father Griffiths gave McNamara the last rites and five others were similarly interceded for by the prison chaplain, William Winkworth, Despard declined. This atheism appalled Nelson when he read of it, but Despard believed the opinions of Dissenters, Quakers, Methodists, Catholics, savages or even atheists to be equally irrelevant when a man was facing death.

  Traditionally men on the scaffold were allowed a last word to the crowd. Indeed, the crowd expected it – it was all part of the Roman holiday of a public execution and Despard was granted permission by the sheriff of Southwark as long as he said nothing ‘inflammatory or improper’, otherwise Brunskill would operate the drop immediately. The colonel’s loud and clear ‘Fellow citizens’ could have been regarded as inflammatory in itself, but the sheriff let it go. Some stood in stunned silence while Despard spoke, others cheered as he said his goodbyes. The poet Robert Southey, himself a Jacobin who had attempted to set up a pseudo-socialistic society or pantisocracy with fellow poet Samuel Coleridge, was in that crowd and it seemed to him that the rowdy element near the front were not Despard sympathizers but agents provocateurs placed there by the authorities to whip the crowd into a frenzy and carry out several arrests. When Despard protested his innocence – ‘I am no more guilty of it than any of you . . .’ – he may have been referring to the now vanished army of English sans-culottes he once hoped would have backed him. He railed against the king’s ministers who had