by M. J. Trow
But knives and forks pray from them keep,
As they’ll commit assassination –
The rogues would overthrow the nation.
As a sort of PS he wrote:
Life’s but a jest and all things show it,
I thought so once, but now I know it!
He placed his poetry in an envelope to his wife, together with a shilling, the last money he had, urging her to keep the coin for as long as she lived.
On 30 April, facing the drop the next day, he finally wrote –
Let Sidmouth and his base colleagues
Cajole and plot their dark intrigues;
Still each Briton’s last words shall be
Oh! Give me death or liberty!
Along with the four others, Sidmouth and his colleagues gave Brunt death.
Of the men who were to dine with Lord Harrowby that bitterly cold night in February 1820, Lord Liverpool, the Prime Minister, suffered a massive stroke almost exactly seven years later and lingered on, a vegetable, until December 1828. The nebulous Vansittart, Chancellor of the Exchequer, resigned from the Cabinet in 1822 and took a vague interest in education and factory reform thereafter. The Duke of Wellington, who had advised his Cabinet colleagues to let Thistlewood and his company arrive and then shoot it out with them, spent his last days in 1852 surrounded by an adoring family. He was the hero of Waterloo still, the Iron Duke and a legend as large as that could never be diminished by an appalling two years spent as Prime Minister as the Cato Street decade ended. Lord Eldon lived on, as reactionary as ever, until 1838, by which time there were new revolutionaries – the Chartists – baying for change. The hated Sidmouth, who had done so much to bring down the men of Cato Street, lived on until 1844 when Britain was a nation of cities and railways and steel. At a stroke however, the ‘old guard’ of Eldon, Vansittart and Sidmouth were removed from the Cabinet two years after Cato Street. It would be nice to believe that this fall from grace was linked with the conspiracy but that is simply not true. They resigned because of age or for personal reasons and probably never thought consciously of Cato Street again.
The oddest fortunes befell Lord Castlereagh. As the only senior Cabinet member in the Commons, he became the government’s mouthpiece on all sorts of problems, not merely his own Foreign Office, and the strain, shortly after Cato Street, was beginning to tell. Friends and colleagues became increasingly worried about him and an unsavoury scandal may have been at the bottom of it. At the trial of the Cato Street men we saw how low-life like Dwyer made a precarious living by blackmailing gentlemen over homosexual allegations. According to H Montgomery Hyde,3 Castlereagh was in the habit of frequenting prostitutes as he crossed St James’s Park from his home. One of these turned out to be a man in drag and Castlereagh was caught ‘in flagrante’ by the man’s accomplice. Unlikely as all this sounds, the Foreign Secretary made various veiled references to it to Wellington, among others and it is possibly true.
With all this and the cares of the political world on his shoulders, Castlereagh cut his throat in the presence of his own doctor at his country house of Cray’s Farm, Kent, in August 1822. The men of Cato Street would have been delighted.
Of all the shadowy figures stalking the radical night in the Cato Street story, the name that stands out is George Edwards. Documents in the Home Office files prove that Edwards was a spy, that he often used the alias Windsor and that he reported, not only to Magistrate Stafford and his Bow Street Runners, but directly to Sidmouth too. Childish code letters have survived for use by political revolutionaries, signed ‘G.E.’ on the back. A number of sworn statements still exist (not, of course, made available to the court in 1820) which paint Edwards in a damning light. One of the potential ‘Committee of Two Hundred’, Pickard, writes of a plan by Edwards to enter the Houses of Parliament carrying hollowed out books which carried bombs – ‘What bloody destruction it would make,’ Edwards had said.
Alderman Wood who had desperately tried to talk to Thistlewood on the eve and then the morning of his execution, was determined to nail Edwards and raised the issue in the Commons. Denied the right to do this, he approached Sidmouth direct, to stop Edwards from fleeing the country. Sidmouth, of course, refused to help. It was not until 22 May, over three weeks after the execution that a warrant for high treason was eventually raised against Edwards. Harmer, the conspirators’ solicitor, put up a vast reward of 1,000 guineas. By that time, the ever-reliable Home Office stooge, Cam Hobhouse, had spirited Edwards away to Guernsey. Using the alias G E Parker, Edwards complained that he was running out of money, that his model-making tools were still locked away at his lodgings in Fleet Street and that his wife was living separately as Mrs Holmes. He was concerned that his new whereabouts were already known. His last letter, written at the end of July, asks for money to buy a house where he can feel safer. There, the trail stops.
One of the many anonymous threatening letters written to the Home Office in the spring of 1820 is this one:
To Ministers, Privy Councillors, Bloody-minded wretches – Ye are now brooding with hellish delight on the sacrifice ye intend to make of those poor creatures ye took out of Cato Street on pretence of punishing them for what your own horrid spies and agents instigated . . . But know this, ye demons, on an approaching day and in an hour when you least expect it ye yourselves shall fall a sacrifice to the just vengeance of an oppressed and suffering people who shall behold your bloody corpses dragged in Triumph through their streets.
It never happened. Today, astonishingly, the hay-loft of Cato Street has survived. It is the last building on the left along a quiet cul-de-sac which still bears the name. With an irony which would have appalled Arthur Thistlewood, a nearby street is named after Lord Harrowby and a block of flats only feet from the hay-loft is called Sidmouth Court. In Grosvenor Square, in front of the incongruous statues of American generals from the Second World War, Lord Harrowby’s house is now the imposing 5-star Millennium Hotel. Across radical London, Baldwin’s Gardens, where Richard Tidd lived in Hole-in-the-Wall Passage, has a church built in 1863 and new flats and a school. Fox Court, the home of John Brunt, is no longer an alleyway, but a huge office block, symbol of the wealth that Brunt despised. Newgate gaol and its Sessions House have long gone, and the grey of the Old Bailey with its gilded figure of justice, stands over the last resting place of the men of Cato Street, its granite determined still not to turn them into martyrs. By contrast, the conspirators’ would-be targets have found honourable graves. Eldon lies beside his wife in the Old Churchyard in Kingston, Devon. Wellington rests in the crypt of St Paul’s. Castlereagh, despite being a suicide, was laid to rest in Westminster Abbey.
Was there ever a chance of the Cato Street conspiracy working? That all depends on the existence of the Committee of Two Hundred and their links with the provinces. When the malcontents of Yorkshire and Scotland marched in the spring of 1820 they did so in the belief that a general rising of the people would occur. Arthur Thistlewood seems to have believed this too. All that was needed was the wholesale slaughter in Grosvenor Square and instinctively London would rise. If London rose, so would the rest of the country. One of those on the edge of the conspiracy had assured Thistlewood that he could bring twenty-six disaffected Irishmen out of Gee’s Court. If all twenty-five men in the hayloft brought the same number, that would make a little over 600 – possibly enough to equal the scattered police forces in the capital but not the soldiery.
Two things are completely missing from the conspirators’ plans; first, the exact mechanics of how London could be taken from the forces that held it; and second, if this could be achieved, what was to follow? Most historians have dismissed the men of Cato Street as lunatics, misguided madmen who had no clue as to how to proceed. But the same could be said – and was said – of the sans-culottes who stormed the Bastille; today, France is a republic run by its people. The same could be said – and was said – of the Irishmen who occupied the British-held Dublin in 1916; today, Dublin is the capit
al of an independent Eire. The same could be said – and was said – of the men who took power in Russia in the October of 1917; these were the communists who controlled one of the world’s greatest superpowers for nearly three-quarters of a century. It is easy to dismiss plots that fail and British history is full of them.
No doubt Arthur Thistlewood, and the men who stood with him that bright May day in 1820 as they faced the mob and ultimately their God in the yard outside Newgate, felt a sense of failure and of being let down. But what they proved, perhaps once and for all, was that conspiracy, assassination and revolution were no longer the British way. The future, of democracy and justice lay instead with Henry Hunt and William Cobbett, with the men of peace who dealt in moral, not physical force. What 1820 proved at last was that the British way was by the ballot, not the bullet, even if it was to take another hundred years for the ballot to arrive.
In that sense, and in that sense alone, the men of Cato Street deserve their place in history.
Arthur Thistlewood, ‘on the day sentence of death was passed’. Was T deranged or a hero of the people?
James Ings, the Portsmouth butcher, promised to cut off the heads of Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth.
Richard Tidd, radical and conman, endeared himself to the crowd watching his execution.
William Davidson, the ‘man of colour’ who stood guard outside the Cato St stable with a carbine. He tried to play the race card by claiming that, to whites, all black men looked alike.
John Thomas Brunt, the conspirator who took a pinch of snuff before he died.
Robert Adams, the ex-cavalryman who betrayed the men of Cato St by turning king’s evidence.
Thomas Hyden, the cow-keeper who claimed to have approached Lord Harrowby with a warning.
John Monument, the diminutive waverer whose evidence helped to hang the conspirators.
Robert Stewart, Lord Castlereagh, was the most handsome, and the most hated, cabinet minister of his day. Taken from a contemporary portrait by Thomas Lawrence.
Henry Addington, Lord Sidmouth, was the Home Secretary who ran a network of agents provocateurs to infiltrate radical groups. Taken from a bust by William Behnes, 1831.
John Scott, Lord Eldon, Chancellor of England and a sworn enemy of reform. Taken from a bust by Frederick Tatham, 1830.
The Cato St stable as it looked in May 1820. The double doors to the left were to house a carriage. Note the grille over the centre door for ventilation for cattle. Huge crowds of sightseers visited here in the days and weeks after the conspiracy was uncovered. (Photo: Author)
The stable today, a private house to the right of a new block of flats, ironically named Sidmouth Court. (Photo: Author)
The plan of the hay-loft in Cato St marking the spot where Smithers, the Bow St Runner, died.
The old Session House and Newgate Gaol: the Cato Street conspirators were executed on the flat roof.
The Central Criminal Court now stands on the site of the Session House and Newgate Gaol. (Photo: Author)
Excavations into the Victorian drains outside the Central Criminal Court. The Cato St conspirators are buried some feet way to the right of the picture. (Photo: Author)
Execution day, 1 May 1820. On the scaffold, the hangman’s assistant, James Foxen, holds up the first head — ‘this is the head of Arthur Thistlewood!’ The masked headsman, probably Tom Parker, is moving on to the second victim for decapitation.
NOTES
Chapter 2
1. Literally, ‘shit!’. Cambronne had been called on to surrender by the pursuing British and this was his reply. The more polite version is ‘La Garde meurt, elle ne se rend pas’ (the Guard dies, but does not surrender). Perhaps he said both.
2. The first news in England of the victory had actually been received at Harrowby’s house in Grosvenor Square.
3. See below.
4. George Wilkinson, An Authentic History of the Cato Street Conspiracy (London, Thomas Kelly, 1820), p. 192.
5. It is noticeable that even in an historic edition of The Times, such as that which featured Wellington’s Waterloo dispatch, the first page was always given over to advertisements – For Sale and Wanted.
6. The Wealth of Nations (1776).
7. In fact, it was well into the twentieth century that such systems became a de rigueur part of domestic arrangements.
8. The Health and Morals of Apprentices Act which affected pauper children only and was widely ignored by industrialists.
9. The conversion of money is complicated. Some economic historians assume a multiplying factor of 40. On that basis, however, we run into difficulties. A better yardstick is in comparison with the poorest working wage – that of a farm labourer at 7 or 8 shillings a week.
10. See Ch. 8.
11. This finally came to an end in 2006.
12. Hector Morrison’s testimony from the Trial of James Ings – Wilkinson, Cato Street, p. 264.
13. Wilkinson, Cato Street, p. 183.
14. See Ch. 8.
15. Thomas Malthus, an Anglican vicar, wrote An Essay on Population in 1798. Nauseatingly moral, he was over-pessimistic for his time, predicting that population would soon completely outstrip food supply and the result would be disaster of biblical proportions.
16. For the importance of radical literature, see below.
17. See Ch. 8
Chapter 3
1. Almost certainly the metabolic illness porphyria.
2. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790).
3. Quoted in Lord John Russell, The Life and Times of Charles James Fox (1859), vol. 2, p. 361.
4. Wordsworth,The Prelude, bk 2.
5. Customs officer.
6. Paine, The Rights of Man (1791), p. 260.
7. Ibid.
8. Paine is a more visionary version of Cobbett in some ways. In the end he managed to alienate almost everybody, falling out with the French and the Americans.
9. Ironically, the Revolution’s ideology did not take this up. De Gouges herself was guillotined in Nov. 1793 and French women did not get the vote for another 143 years!
10. Astonishingly, he was rescued on the way by a French ship and went to live in France.
11. The Chronique de Paris for 26 April said ‘Yesterday, at half past three, there was . . . used for the first time a machine destined to cut off the heads of criminals condemned to death. This machine was rightfully preferred to other forms of execution. It in no way soils the hands of the man who murders his fellow man and the promptness with which it strikes . . . is more in the print of the law, which may often be stern, but must never be cruel.’
12. Jacques-Pierre Brissot de Warville wrote ‘Each soldier will say to his enemy: brother, I am not going to cut your throat, I am going to free you from the yoke which burdens you; I am going to show you the road to happiness. Like you, I was once a slave; I took up arms and the tyrant vanished.’
13. Although Fox famously lost his, twice, on the turn of a card!
14. The Trial of Joseph Gerrald (Edinburgh, 1794), pp. 197–9.
15. Edmund Burke, Two Letters addressed to a Member of the Present Parliament (1796).
16. The importance of informers, spies and agents provocateurs will be dealt with elsewhere.
17. We do not have Ings’s age. He had four children by 1820 and I have made the assumption he was born about 1780.
18. Quoted in Graham Wallas, Francis Place (1895).
19. No relation to the shoemaker Jacobin.
20. ‘The Wearing of the Green’ was a folk ballad from the time. The Green referred to the shamrock, the visible symbol of the rebels.
21. Quoted in G Manning and B Dobré, The Floating Republic (London), p. 200.
22. At one point, Bonaparte actually referred to the long-dead Louis XVI as ‘my poor uncle’.
Chapter 4
1. The McNaghten Rules, named after Daniel McNaghten who tried to assassinate the Prime Minister, Robert Peel, in 1843.
2. Southey a
nd Coleridge, The Devil’s Thoughts, 1829.
3. Quoted in Christopher Hibbert, Nelson: A Personal History (London, Viking, 1994), p. 316.
4. All quotations from the Despard trial from The Newgate Calendar, vol. 3.
5. As part of the Act of Union with Ireland in 1801, Pitt proposed that Irish Catholics be given equality with Protestants. As head of the Church of England, George III could not accept that and the Prime Minister was forced to resign.
6. Observer (Feb. 1803).
7. Charles Dickens watched Mr and Mrs Manning hanged here in 1849, for their part in the Bermondsey Horror.
8. The Bow Street Horse Patrol, which might otherwise have carried out this duty, was not formed for another two years.
9. The actual whereabouts of Despard’s grave are shrouded in mystery. One account says that he was buried in the medieval church of St Faith’s, long demolished, which stood within the precincts of St Paul’s.
10. Condemned to death by his own system, Robespierre tried to commit suicide the night before his execution but he was interrupted by guards and only succeeded in shooting himself in the jaw.
11. Ironically of course, the Revolutionary exhibits are among the most popular in the Chamber of Horrors today. It would be fascinating to see Despard and even more Arthur Thistlewood in wax.
12. The Newgate Calendar (1802), vol. 3.
13. The Foot Guards, like their mounted counterpart the Life Guards and Royals, were raised in 1660 as a personal bodyguard for the king.
Chapter 5
1. Waiting in the wings was James Catnatch, the doyen of the dying speech. Operating his own printing press in London, Catnatch made a fortune in the 1820s with blood and guts confessions (totally spurious). He sold 500,000 copies of the trial of William Thurtell in 1823 and 1,166,000 of the confession and execution of William Corder in the Red Barn Murder of 1828.