by M. J. Trow
Shortly after 7, the hangman appeared. This was the repellent illiterate James (Jemmy) Botting, who probably hanged 175 people during his time in the job. He was constantly complaining about the pay and working conditions, signing the letters that someone else wrote for him with a cross. He had been in post for two years by this time and was the first hangman to receive a regular wage (£1 a week) in addition to perks, such as handouts from undertakers and selling off bits of rope which were believed by some to have magical properties.
Botting supervised the bringing out of the coffins, assisted (although Wilkinson’s account does not mention him) by James Foxen. The only difference between the pair was that Botting called his victims ‘parties’, whereas Foxen preferred ‘gentlemen’. More sawdust was then thrown into the black caskets.
While the reprieved six jabbered their gratitude in another part of the prison – only Wilson and Harrison felt a sense of guilt – the procession of the great and bad out onto the scaffold began. Thistlewood emerged from the condemned cell first and bowed to the Sheriffs. He looked up at the sky. ‘It appears fine,’ he said and waited while his irons were knocked off. At last, Alderman Wood reached him to ask his questions and an unseemly quarrel broke out between Sheriff Rothwell, who claimed he did not want Thistlewood’s peace of mind to be disturbed and Sheriff Parkins who insisted Wood be allowed to talk to him. Parkins and Wood won the day and the Alderman asked Thistlewood when and where he had met George Edwards. ‘At Preston’s,’ Thistlewood told him. ‘About June last.’ Wood wrote the answers down.
Tidd emerged next, smiling, and when his anklets were smashed off darted across to Thistlewood. The pair shook hands. ‘Well, Mr Thistlewood,’ Tidd said. ‘How do you do?’ ‘I was never better,’ his leader replied. Ings positively danced across the yard, dressed once more in his rough pepper-and-salt butcher’s jacket and a dirty cap. His hysteria grew as the moments ticked by, laughing and shouting as he sat on the bench with the others. Brunt was composed as they tied his hands and removed his shackles. ‘All will soon be well,’ he told the others. Davidson, who had taken the sacrament at 6 (it was now 7.30) prayed fervently along with the chaplain. Cotton was still desperately trying to get the others to show remorse and repentance, but they still refused, each of them about to face their God in their own way.
When everything was ready, the five men shook hands and the ‘yeoman of the halter’ secured the pinioning. Cotton’s voice could be heard across the silent crowd. ‘I am the resurrection and the life’ and St Sepulchre’s bell in the morning tolled.
The chaplain climbed the scaffold steps first – the only one in that grim little procession who would come back down of his own accord. Thistlewood, an orange in his hand, looked out over the vast crowd, a sea of uplifted faces in the middle distance. Someone shouted ‘God Almighty bless you’. The conspirator did not flinch. As Wilkinson put it – ‘Thistlewood with the rope around his neck was the same Thistlewood that appeared so conspicuous at Smithfield.’ He sucked the orange and assured anyone who could hear him that he died a friend to liberty.
Ings in the mean time was going to pieces. He tried to sing the old radical song, an inversion of the American revolutionary Patrick Henry’s ‘Give me Death or Liberty’. ‘Aye,’ Brunt shouted. ‘It is better to die free than live slaves.’ Tidd was brought forward next and with difficulty shook Ings’s hand. The Lincolnshire man’s eyes filled with tears – ‘My wife and I . . .’ but he could not go on. ‘Come, my old cock o’wax’ – astonishingly it was the crumbling Ings who spoke. ‘Keep up your spirits; it will all be over soon.’ When Tidd reached the scaffold, three cheers broke out from the crowd, impressed by the bold way in which he approached the drop. He bowed to the crowd on Snow Hill; he bowed to the faces towards Ludgate Hill. The people, briefly, loved him and more so when he angled his neck to make Botting’s job easier, with the knot to the right so he would die quicker. Like Thistlewood, he refused a hood over his face.
When Ings was roped, he shouted, ‘Remember me to King George IV; God bless him and may he have a long reign.’ He also asked that his other clothes go to his wife, so that ‘Jack Ketch7 should have no coat of his’. In a moment of gallows philosophy, he turned to one of the gaolers – ‘Well, Mr Davis, I am going to find out this great secret.’ He bounded onto the scaffold, ‘Goodbye, gentlemen. Here go the remains of an unfortunate man.’ The cheers he roared out to the crowd however fell hollow on the silent watchers. To Wilkinson, they were ‘nothing but the ravings of a disordered mind’. By the time he turned to Ludgate Hill, he was jabbering a string of unrelated nonsense, still intermittently trying to sing the Death or Liberty song. Tidd quietly reproached him. ‘Don’t, Ings. There is no use in all this noise. We can die without making a noise.’
Ings refused Botting’s hood and asked that his own cap be pulled over his eyes, but only at the last moment. ‘Ah ha!’ were his last shouted words. ‘I see a good many of my friends are on the houses.’ Davidson reached the platform, muttering prayers with Cotton. For the last few minutes he had stood apart from the others, divided by race, by colour, by prejudices that were entirely his own.
Brunt was last – and he complained about this. He looked terrible. His cheeks were sunk, giving a weird prominence to his chin, forehead and eyebrow ridge. When he saw the weak sun dancing on the breastplates of the Life Guards, he shouted, ‘I see nothing but a military government will do for this country.’ He nodded to people in the crowd. He took one last pinch of snuff.
‘God bless you, Thistlewood!’ a voice shouted and Botting went along the line, fitting the hoods. ‘Now, old gentleman,’ Ings said to the hangman. ‘Finish me tidily . . . Pull the rope tighter; it may slip.’ And, with the cloth over his eyes, called out to the chaplain, ‘I hope, Mr. Cotton, you will give me a good character.’ Davidson finally shook Cotton’s hand and for a moment the chaplain stood alone with the condemned, intoning ‘those awful sentences which have sounded last in the ears of so many unhappy men’.
The trapdoors fell with a crash. As the horrified spectators looked along the line from left to right, they saw Thistlewood’s body writhe for moment, each kick fainter than the last and then twirl slowly on the creaking rope ‘as if upon the motion of the hand of death’. Tidd thudded into eternity and scarcely moved. By sheer chance, his neck must have snapped in accordance with the scientific principles of hanging which were not yet established. Ings, in keeping with his ravings of moments before, twisted and leapt in the air, Botting and Foxen grabbing his legs to finish him quicker. Davidson, after three or four heaves, hung silent and still. Brunt, like Ings, did not go quietly and the hangman had to wrestle with him too.
The crowd who had watched all this showed no sign of unease, which must have been a relief to the titled people watching from upstairs windows and to the cordons of police and cavalry. But worse was to come. It was one thing to hang a man – even five men – in public. That was the norm and for most it was ‘bread and circuses’, the organized butchery of a ‘Roman holiday’. But hacking off a villain’s head was something else and it was rare. Botting let the bodies hang for half an hour to ensure that life was extinct, then drew them up into a bizarre sitting position, taking off the hoods and ropes and one by one placing the rope-burned necks on the sloping edge of the block.
Thistlewood’s face was mauve, but otherwise peaceful and the crowd expected Botting to wield the axe that was propped on the scaffold. In fact, he didn’t move. What the mob did not know was that decapitation was a skill too far for Jemmy Botting and a second figure, with a small knife in his hand ‘similar to what is used by surgeons in amputation’ moved towards Thistlewood’s corpse. Later commentators have assumed the headsman was dressed as a sailor, but in fact he wore a dark blue jacket, grey trousers and a slouch hat. His face was completely obscured by a black mask and a coloured handkerchief and from contemporary illustrations he is clearly a civilian.
The crowd at last reacted and shouted as the blade hit the neck.
For a moment, the headsman hesitated, then hacked through muscle and bone to hand Thistlewood’s head to Foxen. The mob hooted as the hangman’s assistant held the trophy aloft to all four points of the compass and shouted, ‘This is the head of Arthur Thistlewood, the traitor.’ The howls of the mob grew louder. Botting and Foxen then ‘reassembled’ the head and placed it with the body in the coffin, sliding the block along for Richard Tidd. There is little doubt that, apart from the charisma of Thistlewood, the Lincolnshire man had won the hearts of the crowd and the sight of his purple, dead face galvanized the crowd – ‘shoot that bloody murderer!’ someone shouted. ‘Bring out Edwards’, and the cry was taken up. The headsman worked quickly, disappearing briefly as rubbish was hurled at him by the nearest spectators. Foxen held Tidd’s head in both hands and went through the process once more. ‘This is the head of Richard Tidd, the traitor.’ The same followed for James Ings. And then for William Davidson, whose mouth was slightly open, but whose features otherwise showed no change. When Foxen held the head up however, blood dripped profusely from the severed neck, to the hisses and groans of the crowd.
Brunt’s clothing had become trapped in the platform doors and there was a grisly struggle as Botting and Foxen wrestled to release the corpse. Brunt’s face was bright purple with his hair hanging over his forehead in a terrifying manner. To make matters worse, the headsman fumbled this one, dropping the head on the sawdust. An hour and eight minutes after Thistlewood had walked up the scaffold steps, Foxen called out for the last time, ‘This is the head of John Thomas Brunt, the traitor.’
The Cato Street conspiracy was over . . . wasn’t it?
Chapter 13
‘This is But the Beginning . . .’
The mob who watched the dispatch of the Cato Street conspirators had gone home by tea-time and the soldiery stood down. It was not all anticlimax however. The masked headsman was held to be a surgeon because of his skill and speed with the knife and a rumour flew that he came from Argyll Street. That could only mean Dr Thomas Wakley and, as night fell, a sinister mob gathered outside his house, smashed his windows and set the place on fire. The police and the army were ordered to restore order and helped the bleeding and disoriented Wakley (who had been kicked by the mob and left for dead) to safety. They did the world a favour – not only was the surgeon unconnected with the executions, he would go on in later years to found that most eminent of medical journals, The Lancet.
The real culprit was probably a ‘resurrectionist’ named Tom Parker, hired for £20 by the Under-Sheriff. Before the law was changed in 1831, there was a vigorous trade in body-snatching, removing corpses from graves to provide ‘subjects’ for the London medical schools. Parker specialized in teeth – a spin-off outlet into the denture business, as he was ‘in the habit of cutting off nobs for the purposes of getting the gnashers’.1
The widows and families who were left – Susan Thistlewood, Mary Tidd, Mary Brunt, Celia Ings and Sarah Davidson – petitioned Lord Sidmouth for the return of their husbands’ bodies. This was, of course, refused, as it was contrary to custom. A channel had been dug alongside an underground passage at Newgate and at 7 that night, the five coffins were filled with quick lime and covered with earth and stones so that ‘no trace of their end remains for any future public observation’.
Susan Thistlewood continued alone, presenting a petition to the Privy Council that was subsequently passed to the king. The official reply was laconic to the point ‘that Thistlewood was buried’.
The next day, Tuesday 2 May, the remaining conspirators who had been sentenced to transportation were escorted in three post-chaises to Portsmouth and placed on a convict ship bound for New South Wales. It is not known whether any of them returned. Gilchrist alone remained in Newgate to serve an unspecified gaol sentence. The following Saturday, six men who had been arrested on suspicion appeared in the dock – Thomas Preston, William Simmons, Abel Hall, Robert George, William Firth and William Hazard. There was no case against them and they were discharged. Preston alone, as loquacious as ever, tried to make a speech and was immediately silenced by the court.
General histories of the period sweep swiftly from Cato Street to the Queen Caroline affair of the following year. At first sight, this is typically British – the public of all classes far more interested in the tittle-tattle of a salacious royal divorce than a people’s revolution. In fact, serious rioting occurred in London between those who backed George IV and those who backed his wife and this was to be repeated on the occasion of her funeral in August 1821. This turned into an anti-police riot in which stones and brickbats were thrown. In the end order was only restored by the Life Guards firing their carbines into the air to disperse the mob. Ironically, most of the violence occurred near to Tyburn turnpike, within a stone’s throw of both the Cato Street stable and Lord Harrowby’s house. Two men died and many more were injured. One modern historian makes the interesting comment that Thistlewood’s timing was poor; had he held off until the Caroline riots he might have succeeded in mounting his revolution.
In fact, there were three risings in 1820 which may or may not have been linked to Cato Street, and these in turn seem to have been part of a wider conspiracy in the weaving heartlands of Scotland, Yorkshire, Lancashire and Carlisle. Two weeks before Thistlewood’s trial, trouble was brewing near Huddersfield. Secret cards labelled ‘democracy’ were distributed among potential revolutionaries whose aim was to establish a free government. Beacons, scythes, pitchforks, guns and the inevitable pikes were all part of the paraphernalia carried at Grange Moor near Barnsley on the night of 11 April. Led by two Waterloo veterans, Comstive and Addy, a 300-strong force marched twelve miles to rendezvous with a Scottish contingent that failed to materialize. There were transportations and a bitter sense of disappointment – ‘I hope’, ran a letter found among the effects of a weaver-conspirator, ‘that we may all meet in one body and one voice yet.’2
More serious was the violence near Glasgow on 5/6 April when weavers clashed with the authorities in what became known as the ‘battle of Bonnymuir’. As with Brandreth’s Pentrich rising, the disaffected marched on local ironworks (at Carron) to grab weapons. For months, there had been strikes in the area (all of them illegal under the Acts of 1799 and 1800) and three armed units converged on the factory to be met by two squadrons of Hussars. Three ring-leaders were hanged.
In the days before he died, Arthur Thistlewood received a visitor in the condemned cell at Newgate. The result of that visit appeared in the Leeds Intelligencer two months later:
Exhibition, Music Hall, Leeds, by Particular Desire, New Addition . . . a likeness of the celebrated notorious Arthur Thistlewood taken from life.
If Thistlewood hoped that his wax image in Madame Tussaud’s ‘special room’ would make him a part of history, he was mistaken. Two years later, neither he nor Colonel Despard was part of the waxworks’ catalogue and the world had moved on.
We have some tantalizing insights into the mindsets of the Cato Street hanged from their writings in Newgate. Thistlewood’s poem is typically anti-government – ‘Oh what a twine of mischief is a Statesman’. There is no introspection here and certainly no remorse. The government is corrupt – that is the only reason for Thistlewood’s death. Richard Tidd, who had difficulty expressing himself on paper, wrote nothing, but James Ings wrote separate letters to his wife, his daughters, his son and the king.
To Celia, at 4 o’clock on Sunday afternoon, 30 April, he lamented the fact that he had to leave his family
in a land full of corruption, where justice and liberty has taken their flight from, to other distant shores . . . I conclude a constant lover to you and your children and all friends. I die the same, but an enemy to all tyrants.
He asked her to give his love to his parents and siblings ‘for I am gone out of a very troublesome world and I hope you will let it pass like a summer cloud over the earth’.
To his (unnamed) daughters, Ings wrote urging them to be kind to their mother and
to put all their trust in God. To his son, William, he wrote – ‘My dear boy, I hope you will make a bright man in society.’ The lad should be honest, sober, industrious and upright and should treat all men as he would want to be treated. At the same time he cautioned him to trust no one – ‘for the deception, the corruption and the ingenuity in man I am at a loss to comprehend’.
This was the last thing he wrote, because his petition to the king was almost certainly written first. It forms a mini-autobiography and we have already noted its details. He railed against Edwards the spy and assured his Majesty that should he spare his life, for the sake of his family, he would in future be a ‘true and faithful subject’.
Davidson wrote to his wife and to Lord Harrowby. ‘Death’s countenance is familiar to me,’ he told Sarah. ‘I have had him in view fifteen times and surely he cannot now be terrible. Keep up that noble spirit for the sake of your children . . .’
The Harrowby letter is extraordinary, a mixture of hopeless optimism and downright lies in which Davidson hoped to curry favour by mentioning the fact that he had once been employed by his Lordship and that Edwards knew perfectly well that he was not ‘that man of colour’ in the revolutionary group.
John Brunt was the most poetic of all, even when he was complaining to Sidmouth about the lack of cutlery in Newgate –
Let them eat and drink and sleep,