by M. J. Trow
Author and broadcaster Richard Belfield wrote:
Should [the crowd] choose to march in any direction the only way they could be stopped would be to bring the army out of its barracks, an unthinkable act in peacetime, which would also result in heavy loss of life. An anxious civil servant asked if there was a precedent and was told ‘Yes, Paris 1789.’1
It sounds incredible that such a mood and such a scenario could exist in the late twentieth century, but the royal family in particular had totally misunderstood the nation’s mood. How was that possible? For ‘crowd’ read ‘mob’, for ‘death of Diana’ read ‘Corn Laws’ and we have an action replay of the decade after 1810. Today, because of the intrusion of the mass media, we know what our politicians look like. Up to a point we know what they say and do. They, in turn, with opinion polls and think tanks and MPs’ surgeries, do their best to keep in tune with voters’ needs and concerns.
In the early part of the nineteenth century, Cabinet ministers only appeared as crude cartoons, if, in the opinion of a Gilray or a Cruikshank, they deserved to be lampooned. The vast majority of politicians were faceless. They only appeared to their constituents (the equivalent of less than an eighth of the population) every seven years on election day. Their anonymity may have been a strength, but it contributed to the frustration of the people in that they had no peaceful and acceptable means of redress. This again was a two-way street; the government and the politicians had no way of knowing the mood of the nation, especially its unenfranchised elements, unless someone told them.
That job was given to the agent provocateur, the spy. Arguably, the creator of a secret service in Britain was Francis Walsingham, the devoted servant of Elizabeth I and a member of her Privy Council. At a time of religious and political upheaval, when a rampant Spain was threatening the stability of Europe, there were at least five assassination plots against the queen. Walsingham’s job was to keep the woman – and the country – safe by whatever means at his disposal. To this end, he employed a number of ‘intelligencers’ and ‘projectioners’, including university men like playwright Christopher Marlowe, to listen at keyholes and report to superiors. Robert Cecil, who effectively became the queen’s first minister on the death of his father, Lord Burghley, continued the practice and not only foiled the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, but orchestrated it throughout.2 With the help of his informer, Cecil knew exactly how far the plot had progressed, almost on a daily basis, and made life easier for the conspirators in order to catch them red-handed. Such Machiavellianism continued into the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and beyond.
The debonair fiction of the spy rests today on the suave figure of James Bond. Shaken but never stirred, Bond is a creation of the Cold War of the late twentieth century, even if he is partially based on Sidney Reilly (Sigmund Rosenblum) who was a triple and possible even quadruple agent for the British shortly before and during the First World War. The spies who operated in Georgian England were of a very different character. They were usually, but not always, literate and came from varied walks of life. They rarely reported direct to anyone in the corridors of power in Whitehall, but to magistrates, police officers and mill owners at a local level. The case of Colonel Despard and the case of Cato Street were different.
There is no doubt that William Pitt used a spy network and there is equally no doubt that, in liberal society and among the labouring poor, the use of such men was detested and smacked of the French Terror at its worst. There, neighbours were encouraged to inform on neighbours. Tittle-tattle and old grievances led directly to the guillotine. This policy extended right through from the Jacobin 1790s to the bread-deprived years two decades later. Committees of Secrecy met in the lobby rooms of the Commons in 1801, 1812 and 1817, turning pale as they heard anecdotal evidence of insurrection. In the 1790s, it was French agents working for the good of the Revolution across the Channel; twenty years later it was the work of Luddites and unbridled democrats. In both instances, the target was the same: the reactionary, retrenched and uncaring government.
E P Thompson sums up the situation superbly:
The line between the spy and the agent provocateur was indistinct. The informer was paid by piece-rate; the more alarmist his information, the more lucrative his trade . . . At a certain stage, it is impossible to know how far they [the government] were themselves deluded by conspiracies which their own informers engendered . . . These years reveal such a foul pattern of faked evidence, intimidation and double agents . . . If the Cato Street conspirators had achieved their object in the assassination of the Cabinet, the Cabinet would have been slain by conspirators whom their own repressive policies had engendered and their own spies armed.3
The problem lies in the value of the evidence provided by agents provocateurs. Moderate reformers, like Burdett and Whitbread, poured scorn on the wilder stories. The social historians the Hammonds, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, tended to believe the bulk of what they read. E P Thompson, ever the defender of the forming working class, veered towards Burdett and Whitbread. Our dilemma, 200 years after the events is that we cannot know the extent of planned insurrection. All we can do is to see it in action.
In July 1817, five months after somebody threw a stone at the Prince Regent’s carriage as he rattled past towards Westminster, the satirical cartoonist George Cruikshank drew a piece which encapsulated the honest man’s view. Around a table littered with radical threats, Castlereagh, Canning and Sidmouth, conspirators against the people, are plotting to give titles and honours to the best known spies of the day – John Castle and W J Richards, who usually used the alias Oliver. In the background, John Bull, the upright, working Englishman, looks on appalled. ‘Poor starving John’, said the caption, ‘is to be ensnared into Criminal Acts and then the Projectors and Perpetrators are brought forward as principal evidences.’
It was one of those projectors and perpetrators who met Henry Hunt along Cheapside on 2 December 1816. John Castle was a shady character, very much part of London’s criminal fraternity. He was a ‘bully’, as pimps were called, and met some of the reformers while serving time in the Fleet prison. E P Thompson analyses the two types of informer and Castle fits both. He could have done his work at Spa Fields in exchange for immunity from arrest and punishment; or he could have been working just for cash. Can we therefore trust the word of men like Castle? No, but again we cannot dismiss his evidence out of hand. Employers, magistrates and the government employed several men in the same area, so Castle would have no way of knowing whether he himself was being spied on, a sort of quality control of what he had to sell.
In his semi-literate hand, he wrote to Mr Litchfield, solicitor for the Treasury at the trial of James Watson in March 1817:
sir thear is one thing that I am not certain weather I menshened but I have thought it most properest to cumenecate to you thear was to have been small Detachments plased at Diferant Enterenses in and out of London to prevent Government for sending despatches to haney part of the Cuntrey as thear was only one hors soulger sent with them . . . proposed by young watson and thisilwood and a greed to by all.4
We cannot be sure exactly when Castle joined the Spenceans but by October 1816 he was on the committee of six with the Watsons, the Evanses and Thistlewood. The report above has the ring of truth because working-class meetings (even secret, underground ones that plotted revolution) had formal proceedings, including a revolving chairman, proposals, seconders and so on. It also makes sense because it proves a degree of planning not actually apparent from the events of the day.
In his memoir of 1822, Hunt wrote that, at the first rally, on 15 November, Castle had loudly proposed a toast over dinner at the Bouverie Hotel – ‘May the last of Kings be strangled with the guts of the last priest’. Watson and Thistlewood were appalled by this and visited Hunt the next day to apologize. Neither of them seems to have realized that Castle was going over the top in an attempt to seem at one with the cause. At the meeting on 2 December, Castle was seen sta
shing weapons into one of the hustings wagons on its way to Spa Fields and told the court at Watson’s trial that he had been tasked with making pikes.
The agent provocateur had done his job well. Sidmouth at the Home Office could now move against the reformers. The charge was treason and Jem Watson made a run for it, shooting his way out of trouble with police officers at Highgate before boarding a ship in London docks disguised as a Quaker, his face disfigured with caustic, according to the Independent Whig of 27 July 1817. His destination? America, a safe haven where nearly everyone had committed treason forty years before.
The others were caught and Watson senior, Thistlewood, Preston and Hooper were put on trial at the King’s Bench on 9 June. Previously the grand jury of Middlesex had decided there was a case to answer and Mr Justice Bayley told them they were to deliberate on ‘the highest crime that can be committed – the crime of high treason’. There were four counts (which were to be repeated three years later in the Cato Street trials) and fourteen ‘overt acts’ mostly perpetrated on the second Spa Fields meeting on 2 December. A vast 228 possible jurors were whittled down to twelve men and true. One was a gentleman (Thistlewood’s status); the others variously a buttonmaker, woollen draper, lottery office keeper, anchor-smith, carpenter/undertaker, capillary maker, ironmonger, shoemaker, carrier and druggist. What no one appears to have asked these men was their take on radical politics. We can, perhaps, draw our own conclusions, because after five days of evidence, another biased summation by Lord Ellenborough, the principal judge and a bottle of wine and some sandwiches, they found James Watson not guilty.
Ellenborough, Bayley and the other two judges, Abbott and Holroyd, must have been appalled. The prosecution decided to try each of the four Spa Fields leaders separately. This was a risk because if the first was acquitted, as was the case, then all of them would walk. On paper, the evidence against Watson senior looks strong, but the authorities made the mistake of relying on John Castle and his evidence occupied the whole of the third day. He was at the Bar for between eight and nine hours in which he outlined in great detail the insurrecting plans of the Spenceans and how he, Watson and Thistlewood had spent days talking to discontents in pubs across London to persuade them to join the rising. This was nothing to the next day however, when he was mauled by Mr Wetherell for the defence.
‘Your memory was very good yesterday,’ said the lawyer, ‘. . . seemed as good as an almanac, but today you do not recollect anything.’ He ripped into his man, forcing him to admit that he had previously betrayed fellow criminals which resulted in those men’s deaths; that he had done time for attempting to smuggle French prisoners-of-war out of the country, for money; that he was a forger; that he had committed bigamy; and that he was a ‘bully’ for a lodging house in King Street, Soho, where Mother Thoms hired out her rooms for half an hour at a time – or even, something the jury found amusing, for five or six minutes.
In his summation, Wetherell went further than the actual evidence would allow by implying that Castle was a government spy. The Attorney-General and the judges were outraged, but there is little doubt that Wetherell was right. Despite this, there is a sense that the Spa Fields four got off lightly. There were parties in London to celebrate their victory, with flags flown and toasts drunk. Perhaps it gave Arthur Thistlewood a sense of immortality, an optimism, which overcame his disappointment at how easily his revolutionary army had collapsed. It also meant that, for the rest of his life, he was a marked man.
But if the authorities had fallen down badly in placing their faith in Castle, worse was to come that year of 1817 and many miles to the north. E P Thompson makes the point that, if the weavers of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire had bought their banners to Spa Fields, then Watson’s and Thistlewood’s revolution might have worked.
On 1 March, Liverpool’s government again suspended habeas corpus in the face of a growing number of riots across the country. On the 10th, starving spinners and weavers set off from Manchester to walk the 165 miles to London to see the Prince Regent. It was all part of the working man’s naive faith in the hierarchy of Old England. However wicked, corrupt and uncaring the king’s ministers were, the man himself (or in this case, because of George III’s increasing infirmity, his son) was somehow approachable, fair and kind. Men believed the same of Charles I before, during and even after the Civil War. So did the Russian peasants who marched behind Father Gapon (another spy) to the Winter Palace in 1905. The spinners were called Blanketeers because they carried blankets over their shoulders to use as sleeping bags. In the event, after eleven miles, they were halted at Stockport by the army, who arrested the leaders and dispersed the rest.
One of the great question marks over this period of British history is the links between London and the provinces. Some provincial leaders, like Joseph Mitchell, a journeyman printer from Lancashire, visited the Spenceans in the Cock along Grafton Street and, as we shall see, events in Manchester in the summer of 1819 had a direct bearing on Cato Street. It was on one of his visits to London that Mitchell met William Oliver, who sometimes called himself Oliver Williams and who had just been released from debtors’ prison at the Fleet. Oliver’s freedom had been arranged by the Jacobin shoemaker Charles Pendrill, who had been an associate of Colonel Despard.
Like many agents provocateurs, Oliver’s exact occupation is uncertain. He has been described as a carpenter, builder, surveyor or clerk, but by the March of 1817 he suddenly became involved in radical politics, pestering Pendrill and others about the existence of Associations in London. On the surface, Oliver appeared to have the right credentials. Portraits of Cobbett, Burdett, Horne Tooke and Charles James Fox hung in his rooms, but relative country bumpkins like Mitchell didn’t think to ask where the money had come from to buy such artwork. It came, in fact, from Sidmouth, whom Oliver had gone to see on 28 March.
No written evidence exists from the meeting, but it seems likely that Oliver’s brief was to gauge the extent of planned insurrection in the North and if there was none, to do something about it. With a completely trusting Mitchell in tow, the spy set off on a whirlwind twenty-three-day tour that took in the majority of the Midlands and North’s industrial centres and most of the working-class leaders there, pretending that the London societies were just waiting for the word. A provincial rising was mooted for 26 May. Oliver’s reports to Sidmouth made it clear that it stood no chance of success. In the event, Mitchell was arrested on 4 May, travelling in disguise as a weaver and under an assumed name and Oliver returned to London.
With Watson and Thistlewood still awaiting trial at that point, there were an unknown number of scattered provincial leaders waiting for the green light from a government spy. The rumours grew wilder. There were plans afoot, Sidmouth was told, ‘to make a Moscow out of Manchester’5 but the ‘fatal day’ was postponed until 9 June (by coincidence the last day of the Watson trial) on the advice of Oliver. The nights would be darker because of the moon’s phase and the authorities of course had all the more time to be ready. Sheffield was poised; so was Nottingham. Oliver was sent north again.
Cleverly pretending that the next county was already well ahead in its preparations (essentially the same ploy Castle had used when he told Hunt that the Tower was already taken) he spurred on the others. He laced the information with plausible detail. Thomas Wooler’s Black Dwarf, he said, was printing the proclamations of a Provisional Government; in Wolverhampton the working men were poised to take Weedon barracks.
Nottingham was one of those areas with a long reputation of rebellion. The leading light in the spring of 1817 was Thomas Bacon, a framework knitter who had been known since 1791 as a Painite. He also had land reform ideas on the lines of the Spenceans. Another informer, Henry Sampson of Bulwell (probably unaware of Oliver’s real identity) reported that ‘a London delegate’ (Oliver) had told local leaders that 70,000 men were poised in the capital and that Birmingham was ripe for rebellion too. Among the men Oliver spoke to was Jeremiah Bra
ndreth, a newcomer to the area who may have hailed originally from Exeter and who lived with his wife Ann and three children in Sutton-in-Ashfield. An unemployed stocking frame knitter, it is likely that Brandreth had been involved in Luddite activity in the years before 1817.
Happy to leave the area in the hands of the ‘Nottingham Captain’, Oliver rode to Yorkshire and was there between 1 and 6 June. On the 4th, he held a secret meeting with Major-General John Byng who commanded troops in the area and tipped him off about a radical meeting at Thornhill Lees near Dewsbury that was scheduled for the 6th. Byng’s soldiers arrested those present with the aid of a magistrate and Oliver conveniently escaped.
But it was now that Oliver’s luck deserted him. He was spotted talking to one of Byng’s servants in a hotel in Wakefield and received a tough grilling from the revolutionaries back in Nottingham, from which he was lucky to escape with his life. All this, however, was too late for Brandreth who had left two days earlier to raise the men of Pentrich and to collect others on their way to Nottingham.
Together with William Turner, a stonemason, George Weightman whose mother ran the White Horse pub in Pentrich, Isaac Ludlam, a stonegetter and about fifty others, the Captain went from village to village and house to house, demanding weapons and followers. Anyone who refused was threatened with violence. By 9 June, Brandreth had perhaps 300 followers. He wore an apron like a belt, was known to almost everyone as ‘the Captain’ and Turner was his ‘Lieutenant’. At his trial, the Attorney-General built up Brandreth’s military role even more by calling him ‘generalissimo’. The plain fact is that when an officer and eighteen troopers of the 15th Hussars stationed at Nottingham faced the mob, the Captain-General was among those who threw down their weapons and fled.