by M. J. Trow
As dusk fell on that Thursday, the crowd outside the Sessions House, seen to contain faces familiar from Smithfield, Spa Fields and Finsbury, melted away.
Chapter 12
The Hand of Death
James Ings wore black for his trial that opened on Friday 21 April. They were probably the only clothes he owned, other than his butcher’s apron, but it also spoke of a sense of foreboding. Like all the conspirators he had sat in court throughout Thistlewood’s trial and unless there were to be extensive mitigating circumstances, it seemed likely that the guilty verdict would follow for them all.
After various challenges by both counsel, twelve men and true were sworn in as jurymen and the Solicitor-General outlined the case and explained the meaning of high treason as he had previously. He spoke for one hour and ten minutes before calling his witnesses. The published version of the trials that followed is no more than a summary, in the interests of space and tedium. The same witnesses were called and delivered the same testimony, although Robert Adams must have surprised the court by admitting that when the Prince Regent last attended parliament, Ings had gone to St James’s Park, armed with a pistol intending to shoot him. Of all the conspirators, James Ings seems the most volatile and unstable.
The witness Robert Hyden cut a forlorn figure, explaining that he had been a gentleman’s servant, but was now in the Marshalsea Prison with a debt of £18 hanging over him. John and Thomas Monument both stated that they went to Cato Street out of fear and intended to run away (from Lord Harrowby’s) once the shooting started.
Throughout the day, Ings’s behaviour was erratic. He followed the evidence closely at times, but at others seemed suddenly gloomy. The next day when his butcher’s knife was shown to the jury, Ings called out as a reminder, ‘It was not found upon me, my Lord.’
Curwood, in defence, also reiterated the meaning of high treason, but was rebuked by Sir Robert Dallas on the Bench for referring to Thistlewood’s trial (of which, of course, the Ings jury had no direct knowledge). He delivered the same attack on Adams and Hyden that he had made previously and lamented the fact that Palin and Cook had not been found because they might well have made excellent defence witnesses. Curwood’s first witness was Thomas Chambers, a radical who had attended a number of meetings with Ings, Adams and Edwards. He spoke of the Black Dwarf and Medusa and admitted that he had carried banners at Smithfield with the legend ‘The Manchester Massacre’ and, when Hunt arrived in triumph, another marked ‘Trial by Jury’ (which of course was what was going on now). Before Adolphus’s summation, Ings requested a convenience break and returned sucking an orange ‘with great composure’.
Following the same track as before, Adolphus discredited the king’s evidence men but was clutching at straws when he tried to claim that because the Bank of England and the Mansion House were not the property of the king that no high treason had been committed.
Ings was then allowed to address the jury and most of the biographical details we have already heard came from this moment in the trial. He claimed to have been duped by Edwards and burst into tears when he said:
I am like a bullock drove into Smithfield market to be sold. The Attorney-General knew the man [Edwards]. He knew all their plans for two months before I was acquainted with it . . . When I was before Lord Sidmouth, a gentleman said, Lord Sidmouth knew all about this for about two months.
As for Adams –
That man . . . who has got out of the halter himself by accusing others falsely, would hang his God.
In a few sentences, the ‘man of no education and very humble abilities’ had summed up the crux of the problem of the Cato Street period. Sidmouth knew perfectly well about the conspiracy because he had installed George Edwards to stir things up and make it happen. And the practice of accepting evidence in terms of a plea bargain, where a man could spout any rubbish in the sure knowledge that he would walk free, speaks volumes for the corruption of the legal system and the government of the day. The jury however were in no mood to listen. It took them just twenty minutes to find James Ings guilty on the first and third counts.
John Brunt faced justice two days later, on Monday 24th. He was soberly dressed, pale and composed, with a sheaf of papers on which he had scribbled notes. The jury was sworn, eight of them having already served in Thistlewood’s trial.1 Bolland and the Attorney-General went through the motions as before, but when Adams appeared in the witness box, Brunt yelled, ‘My Lords, can the witness look me in the face and look at those gentlemen (pointing to the jury) and say that I said this?’ Adams assured him that he could. ‘Then,’ shouted Brunt,’ you are a bigger villain than even I took you for.’ The court, of course, immediately clamped down on what was fast becoming a circus. Adams, in fact, came across as a born-again reactionary – ‘my mind was perverted by Paine’s Age of Reason and Carlile’s publication’.
The same prosecution witnesses trooped through the court throughout this day and the next and it was noticeable that the prosecution were becoming blasé. At one point, when a juror stood up and pointed out that there was no actual evidence that Brunt had ever had any ammunition in his house, the Chief Baron was forced to concede that that was true. To balance that, Adolphus had been ‘unavoidably absent’ during part of the trial and that ‘might have led to some inaccuracies’. The reason for his absence is not given.
Brunt then spoke on his own behalf, denying that he had any knowledge of ‘another Despard job’ in Grosvenor Square. He poured scorn on Adams’s testimony – ‘Is it upon such evidence as this, that you will deprive a son of a father and a wife of a husband?’ Clearly, he and Adams had issues going all the way back to Cambrai four years earlier, but Brunt slammed the treacherous John Monument too and spends four pages focusing on the mysteriously absent Edwards – ‘Should I die, by this case, I have been seduced by a villain, who, I have no doubt, has been employed by Government.’
This time, the jury took half an hour to find John Brunt guilty, on the third and fourth counts. His composure did not slip. He bowed to the court and was taken away.
Richard Tidd and William Davidson elected to be tried together and the proceedings opened on Wednesday 26 April. Four of the jury had served already and the wranglings of the exact definition of high treason and the events of Cato Street must by now have been trickling out of their ears. It was noticeable that Adams was embellishing his testimony with every trial. Bradburn, for instance, was ready to make a box to send Castlereagh’s head to Ireland; and Adams swore he had never told anybody he intended to have ‘wine and blood for supper’. Throughout the day, Davidson took careful notes and asked if he may have his wife visit him that night. The court, quite correctly, said it had no power to grant that request.
On the Thursday, Davidson had seen the light and carried a Bible with various passages marked. It was essentially the book of the establishment, in marked contrast to the godless literature of Paine and the radicals. A number of character witnesses for both men were introduced by the defence, but against the charges of Cato Street, they cut little ice.
Davidson’s appeal to the court was the most grovelling of all the conspirators. He claimed never to mix with other blacks – ‘because I always found them very ignorant’ – as though being an honorary white man might save his neck. He was merely walking past Cato Street on the night in question when a man he knew named George Goldworthy (from Liverpool) ‘an accomplice of Edwards’, thrust a sword into his hand and was as astonished as anyone when the shooting started and he found himself under arrest. Contrary to the Runner’s evidence, he swore he never offered any violence ‘but gave myself up quietly’. He then trotted out the ‘wrong man’ story over the sexual harassment charges on account of his colour. Reaching for a glass of water, he said, ‘My colour may be against me, but I have as good and as fair a heart as if I were white.’ He gave the jury his family history. He quoted from scripture. He quoted from Alexander Pope, the eighteenth-century poet. And he ended, ‘I hope my death may prove u
seful to my country – for still England, I call thee so.’
By comparison, Tidd’s defence was short and to the point. Edwards had inveigled him into attending the Cato Street meeting and he even produced the spy’s note of the address – the Horse and Groom, John Street – to prove it. He knew nothing of any plan in Grosvenor Square and ten minutes after his arrival at the hay-loft, found himself under arrest. The jury took forty minutes to find Davidson and Tidd guilty on the third count of high treason.
James Wilson now withdrew his misnomer plea and entered another of guilty. The five remaining prisoners – Bradburn, Shaw, Harrison, Gilchrist and Cooper – all appeared in court with the same plea. Their counsel, Walford and Broderick, had watched the previous trials and realized there was no effective defence left.
At 9.15 on Friday 28 April, eleven conspirators, all double-ironed,2 shuffled before their Lordships in the Sessions House of the Old Bailey. Thistlewood, resigned to his fate and ill-looking, was allowed to address the court. He was very eloquent, contending that not even a Cicero3 could deflect Sidmouth and Castlereagh from their vengeance.
‘Justice I demand,’ he roared at the Bench. ‘If I am denied it, your pity is no equivalent.’ He accused the court of inhuman treatment, of bending the rules to achieve a guilty verdict –
A few hours hence and I shall be no more . . . [I] died when liberty and justice had been driven from [this country’s] confines by a set of villains, whose thirst for blood is only to be equalled by their activity in plunder.
He slammed Hyden, he slammed Dwyer; above all he slammed Edwards. And he said he had vowed vengeance on the heads of those who had caused Peterloo – ‘when infants were sabred in their mothers’ arms and the breast, from which they drew the tide of life, was severed from the parent’s body’. The conspiracy against him, against all radicals, was perfect because it was carried out by the highest in the land, which included the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General, with vast resources at their disposal. As for assassination, Thistlewood reminded the classically taught bench that Brutus and Cassius were praised for the murder of the tyrannical Julius Caesar and ‘High treason was committed against the people at Manchester’.
The court was horrified and disgusted. They had expected Thistlewood to beg for mercy. Instead he attacked them, their corruption, their malice.
Davidson spoke next. Intriguingly, he brought up (although he didn’t use the term itself) diffidatio, the medieval law enshrined in Magna Carta which allowed the citizenry to overthrow a corrupt government. This was not treason, he rightly claimed, but weakened his case by repeating his whinge about his being led astray by Edwards and Goldworthy.
James Ings also blamed Edwards, but, like Thistlewood, he wanted to go out in a blaze of glory. He was not part of a plan to assassinate ministers, but if he had been, assassination was not as appalling as the starvation men of his class faced every day. He cited Peterloo.
These yeomen had their swords ground beforehand and I had a sword ground also . . . I hope my children will live to see justice done to their bleeding country.
Brunt bounded forward, complaining he was given neither ink nor paper to make any notes. He pointed to the sword of justice on the wall and felt his ‘blood boil in his veins’ at the way justice was perverted and ‘her sacred name prostituted to the basest and vilest purposes’. He was a Deist4 and looking at the whole course of the trial, asked: ‘Is this, then, Christianity?’ He harangued the king’s ministers – Castlereagh and Sidmouth had an antipathy against the people – ‘is that high treason?’ He had no ill-will against the king, but the king was ruled by a lawless faction, the robber-barons who made up the government. He was more than ready to die, a martyr for the good of his country.
Richard Tidd denied any involvement in the conspiracy. James Wilson said he had been dragged into the whole thing by Adams. William Harrison said everybody was lying. Richard Bradburn and John Shaw accused Adams of lying. Charles Cooper said there was no evidence of high treason against him. James Gilchrist, in floods of tears, went to Cato Street on the promise of food – he had not eaten all day – and continued to cry until the prisoners left the court.
They placed the black cap on the head of Chief Justice Abbott and one by one, he sentenced Thistlewood, Ings, Brunt, Davidson and Tidd to death.
You and each of you, be taken from hence to the gaol from whence you came and from thence that you be drawn upon a hurdle to a place of execution and there be hanged by the neck until you be dead; and that afterwards your heads shall be severed from your bodies and your bodies be divided into four quarters to be disposed of as his majesty shall think fit. And may God in his infinite goodness have mercy on your souls!
The court crier intoned ‘Amen’ and the prisoners did not flinch. Thistlewood, with the sangfroid which never deserted him, took a little snuff and looked around the court ‘as if he were entering a theatre’.
Over the next two days, events moved fast. The radical press went into overdrive, countered by the loyalist papers. There was no Court of Appeal for the condemned men – that would be set up in 1907 – and the Privy Council met the day after the passing of sentence to decide the execution date. Thistlewood, Brunt, Ings, Davidson and Tidd would hang and be decapitated, but the quartering of their bodies was remitted as it had been for Despard and Brandreth. The death sentence for the others was commuted to transportation for life and that meant Botany Bay.
That night, Brown, the governor of Newgate, broke the bad, but hardly unexpected news to the five marked for death. It was to be Monday morning, 1 May, a day that would live on in the annals of working-class freedom for ever. There was a silence, then Thistlewood said, ‘The sooner we go, sir, the better.’
That Saturday, the five had been visited by the ordinary or chaplain of Newgate, the Revd Cotton, who begged them to make their peace with God. He tried again on Sunday, talking to each man in his separate cell and Davidson cracked. He asked for the services of a Wesleyan minister, a journeyman tailor called Rennett. In the event, the man was unavailable but a replacement was found in the ‘person of Mr Cotton himself ’. ‘The rays of Christianity burst, as it were, through his dungeon’s gloom’ on the Sunday and Davidson wrote a letter to Lord Harrowby, to be delivered by the Under-Sheriff.
Sunday was the last day that the condemned men would see their families. Susan Thistlewood came with her son and the other wives and children. The gaolers themselves, long hardened to such gallows-side scenes, were very moved by the whole experience. Brunt alone remained stoical, claiming that his execution day would be the happiest of his life. Because all except Davidson called themselves Deists, the usual final service at Newgate was dispensed with. Apart from the families, the only person trying to see the prisoners was the radical Alderman and MP Mr Wood, who wanted the answers to three specific questions. He would have to wait.
Of all of them, Ings spent the worst night. Terrified of the morning, he rambled on to the others through the stone walls of his cell, expressing the hope that his body be sent to the king to make turtle-soup out of it. At 5 on Monday morning, Cotton tried for one last time to offer the last rites. Davidson prayed with him, but the others still refused. He and Brunt were the only two who drank a toast to the king’s health. The contents of their last breakfast is not recorded, but their request to eat together was denied.
Outside Newgate, all was bustle. The day dawned bright and since Saturday, Sheriff Rothwell had been working with Sidmouth to finalize details. The Home Secretary was too well aware of the vast mob that would gather and dispensed with the idea of dragging the five to the scaffold on hurdles as per the death sentence. Throughout Sunday, carpenters’ saws and hammers could be heard extending the platform outside the Sessions House to house all the prisoners and allow room for decapitation. A crowd had gathered and had to be dispersed by the police so that work could continue. Posts and rails were strung along the Bailey to prevent a repetition of the scenes that accompanied the hanging of Holl
oway and Haggerty in 1807 when the crowd panicked due to overcrowding and over thirty people were trampled to death.5 Every approach to the prison, along Newgate Street, Giltspur Street, Skinner Street and Fleet Lane was, in effect, cordoned off. None of this deterred the crowd that had assembled as darkness fell on Sunday night. They stayed there, without food or shelter, waiting for the morning.
As always in cases of execution, but especially for the ‘poor deluded wretches’ of Cato Street, those with windows overlooking the yard charged a fortune for their views, but even with prices as high as two guineas6 there were plenty of takers. People crowded against the barriers and young men dangled precariously from lamp posts and the top of the Newgate pump. A shout went up between 5 and 6 as quantities of sawdust were strewn on the scaffold platform and swathes of black cloth were tied around the uprights.
At 6.20, a detachment of Foot Guards took up position opposite Newgate and a second further east, towards the City, ready for any eventuality. Six light field guns were placed by the Royal Horse Artillery outside the livery stables near Christ Church and more Life Guard units picqueted Ludgate Hill and Bridge Street. The City Light Horse, whose guns John Palin and others were to have grabbed on the 23 February, were dispersed to key positions throughout the city. When John Bellingham was hanged, the authorities had posted placards warning the crowd not to push, but no such precaution was used now.
While Sheriff Rothwell inspected the gallows and the crowd were moved ever further back by a wall of constables, Alderman Wood was inside the gaol demanding to see the prisoners. He was told this was impossible, that Newgate was now under the control of Lord Sidmouth and not the City of London. That argument would not have surprised Thistlewood.
The crowd remained quiet and well behaved. Any rescue attempt of the five was probably impossible because the authorities had planned this day well. There were no banners, no weapons, no apparent politics at all, just a low murmur when something new happened. Just in case, however, and to prevent another Peterloo, a number of placards were ready outside the debtors’ door with the legend ‘The Riot Act has been read. Disperse immediately’. While the Life Guards, saddled and waiting outside St Sepulchre’s church, helped police drag a bystander down from a roof by his heels, the crowd roared with delight. This, to the authorities, was all to the good – a happy crowd was less likely to go on the rampage.