Enemies of the State (6 page)

Only a few held out for violence – ‘One saying Liberty, the other saying Death'.

Chapter 4

Desperate Men and Desperate Measures

The mood of the nation was ugly as the century turned. The Dissenting millennialists, who had expected some great sign from God, were to be disappointed. The popular general predicted by Robespierre shortly before his execution was Napoleon Bonaparte and he had indeed brought the Revolution to an end, as Robespierre had prophesied, but he had done it with bayonets at his back and few people were in doubt that the Consulate was no more than a trio of military dictators who eventually became one. The unstoppable Corsican was winning battle after battle, smashing yet another alliance against him at Marengo in 1800.

The Act of Union with Ireland was designed by Pitt's government to pacify the provinces, but it failed and determined Irishmen spent the next century trying to repeal it. The Dublin parliament ceased to exist and Ireland became liable for its share of the national debt, cripplingly high as it was of course by now. No Irishman had forgotten the vicious putting down of Wolfe Tone's rising of 1798 and the ex-pats who drifted to London and other cities in search of work brought their sense of grievance with them. At home, famine claimed their families and friends. All over the country there were protests against the malt tax and the window tax. Men denied the right to form trade unions by the Anti-Combinations Acts of 1799 and 1800 met after dark behind closed doors. They were probably still discussing hours, working conditions and wages, but since they were secret, Pitt's government now had no accurate idea what they were talking about. By driving these groups underground, the Establishment had created a potential monster it would be difficult to control.

And there was always an uneasy tension, a sense that some bizarre, brutal act was about to happen. It did, on the night of 15 May 1800, when the king was attending a performance of
The Marriage of Figaro
at Drury Lane Theatre. James Hadfield stepped out to the orchestra pit and fired a pistol at
George, the ball crunching into a pillar to one side of the royal box. Perhaps gambling on the fact that the assassin did not have a second gun and would be grabbed before he could reload, George calmly stood up and inspected the bullet hole. The show's star, Michael Kelly, was impressed – ‘Never shall I forget his majesty's coolness' – while the rest of the audience was, of course, hysterical.

Ever one to capitalize on a situation, the poet, playwright and Whig MP Richard Sheridan, who happened to be in that audience, rattled off a new verse of ‘God Save the King' –

From every latent foe,
From the assassin's blow
God save the king!
O'er him thine arm extend,
For Britain's sake defend,
Our father, prince and friend,
God save the king!

Kelly ended the evening with a rousing version of this which brought the house down.

Hadfield's behaviour was decidedly odd. Having missed with his pistol, he said to the king, ‘God bless your royal highness; I like you very well. You are a good fellow.' He stood trial on the inevitable charge of high treason and was defended by the brilliant lawyer Thomas Erskine, himself a supporter of the French Revolution and a member of the Friends of the People, set up in 1792. Erskine's acceptance of a retainer from Tom Paine cost him the friendship of the Prince of Wales and a possible appointment as Attorney-General. As MP for Portsmouth, he made speeches on behalf of both Thomas Hardy and Horne Tooke and was a natural to defend Hadfield.

It was clear from Hadfield's demeanour – and indeed, appearance – that Erskine's best bet would be to plead insanity. Hadfield had been a serving soldier until the battle of Tourcoing in 1794, when he took eight sabre cuts to the head. Although nothing is known of his early life, this battle was fought between Austria and France, so presumably he was serving as a mercenary with the Austrians. Released after capture by the French, he came home and joined a millennialist movement in London. He told Erskine that
he believed he (Hadfield) would be instrumental in the second coming of Christ by being executed by the government. Conspiring with fellow millennialist Bannister Truelock, Hadfield hit upon the one crime for which he was
certain
to be executed – the killing of the king.

Unfortunately for Hadfield, Erskine had other ideas. It would not be until the 1840s that the British judicial system came to a consensus on how to handle criminal insanity.
¹
The standard definition at the time was that a defendant ‘must be lost to all sense . . . incapable of forming a judgement upon the consequences of the act which he is about to do'. Going head to head with the judge, Lord Kenyon, Erskine argued that delusion ‘unaccompanied by frenzy or raving madness was the true test of insanity' and produced three doctors to prove that Hadfield's mania was caused by his head injuries. Kenyon was convinced before the jury had a chance to deliberate and ended the trial with Hadfield acquitted.

There was an immediate outcry as a would-be king-killer walked free and parliament rushed through the Criminal Lunatics Act, which enabled Hadfield to be detained indefinitely because he was regarded as a danger to himself and society at large. He was sent to Bedlam – the Royal Bethlehem Hospital – where he died from gaol fever, probably tuberculosis.

Altogether more dangerous than the clearly deranged James Hadfield was Edward Marcus Despard, an Irish adventurer with a chip on his shoulder. In many ways, Despard's attempted coup of 1802 was a blueprint for Cato Street. Indeed during the trials of the 1820 conspirators, the name Despard was used disparagingly, as how
not
to carry out an assassination and revolution.

Despard was born in Queen's County, Ireland, in 1751. He entered the navy as a midshipman at the age of 15 and was promoted lieutenant in 1772. For the next eighteen years he served in the West Indies, making a name for himself as an administrator with considerable engineering ability. He was stationed in Jamaica at the same time that the father of the future Cato Street conspirator William Davidson was Attorney-General there. He was promoted captain after the San Juan expedition of 1780 and led a successful attack on Spanish-held territory on the Black River two years later. By 1786, Despard was Superintendent of the Crown Colony of Honduras (today's Belize) on the Mosquito Coast south of Yucatan.

The West Indies were notoriously difficult to police. They had a long
history of piracy and running battles between settlers from just about every European state were commonplace. The elder Pitt, adopting a ‘blue-water policy' in the Seven Years' War had mounted several campaigns against the French and on the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, his son tried the same thing. By that time, however, Despard had been recalled to London to answer charges of incompetence.

As Superintendent, Despard's brief was to settle the new territory, which he did without considering race and background. So alongside the exclusively British plantation owners were ex-slaves, smugglers, military volunteers and labourers,
anyone
in effect who agreed to purchase land and farm it. He did this, he said, because according to English law, there was no distinction in land tenure. A free man with enough money had no bar to ownership of property at home, but the Baymen did not see it that way and petitioned the Home Secretary, Lord Grenville, for redress. Cleverly, Despard stood for election as a magistrate and won a landslide victory. The racist Baymen would have none of it, complaining that the Superintendent had only won because he had the backing of ‘ignorant turtlers and people of colour'.

The people of colour arrived with Despard in London on his return in 1790. One was his wife, Catherine; the other his son, James. A great deal of research has been carried out in recent years on the black history of Britain and Catherine Despard deserves her place in it. Unlike the wives of the Cato Street conspirators, when her husband was accused of high treason, Catherine fought on his behalf. It is highly likely that the Despards were a unique example of a mixed marriage in England at that time. The slave trade would not be abolished for another seventeen years; the ownership of slaves not for another twenty after that. Relatively speaking there was a large number of blacks in the country, especially in London and Bristol, but they were not free (unless they had been enfranchised by liberal owners) and usually appeared in the roles of servants, boxers, prostitutes and menials.

The arrival of the Despards probably filled most whites with horror. It was one thing for British soldiers and administrators of empire to take black mistresses in the colonies and even produce mulatto or half-breed children (William Davidson belongs to this category) but actual marriage was something else. The extraordinary ex-slave Olaudah Equiano had already produced the first edition of his autobiographical
The Interesting Narrative
the previous year and in it he wrote:

Why not establish intermarriage at home and in our colonies? And encourage open, free and generous love, upon Nature's own wide and extensive plan, subservient only to moral rectitude, without distinction of the colour of a skin?

Two years later, Equiano himself married a white girl from Cambridgeshire.

Race did indeed lie at the heart of Despard's problems. The government refused to back him, anxious to keep the plantation owners sweet in any colonial sphere and he found himself dragged through any number of claims courts by the Baymen who wanted recompense for what they imagined was criminal mishandling of their affairs. The colonel found himself in the King's Bench prison for debt in 1792.

The prison itself was new, the old one having been burnt by the mob in the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots twelve years earlier. Long before the attack on the Bastille, the English had a reputation for gaol-wrecking. The King's Bench had been destroyed three times by the time Despard found himself there. Like most London prisons, it was all things to all men. It had its own ‘Rules' by which better off prisoners (who would have included Despard) lived relatively comfortably, whereas the poor wallowed in the filth they had known on the outside in the reeking rookeries of St Giles, Wapping and St James. It was here that the disgruntled colonel read the new book by Tom Paine . . .

On his release two years later, Despard joined the London Corresponding Society and shortly after that the United Englishmen, the offshoot of Wolfe Tone's ‘terrorist' organization over the Irish Sea. The most common meeting houses for this group were either Furnival's Inn in Holborn (much was to be made of this place in the Cato Street trials) or Soho Square. Large numbers of Irishmen, like those who lived in Gee's Court off Oxford Street, met there, as did a hard core of disgruntled soldiers.

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.