The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, counter-intelligence and the revolutionary tradition in Britain and Ireland 9781526144997

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Plotting, Counter-Intelligence and the Revolutionary Tradition in Britain and Ireland

Five of the conspirators were subsequently executed and another five were transported for life to Australia. The plotters were a mixture of English, Scots and Irish tradesmen, and one was a black Jamaican. They were motivated by a desire to avenge the ‘Peterloo’ massacre and intended to declare a republic, which they believed would encourage popular risings in London and across Britain. This volume of essays uses contemporary reports by Home Office spies and informers to assess the seriousness of the conspiracy. It traces the practical and intellectual origins of the plotters’ willingness to use violence; describes the links between Irish and British radicals who were willing to take up arms; makes a contribution to early black history in Britain; examines the European context to events; and follows the lives and careers of those plotters exiled to Australia. These well-written essays will find an appreciative audience among undergraduates, graduate students and scholars of British and Irish history and literature. The book will be of interest to those interested in black history, as well as the related fields of intelligence history and Strategic Studies. The Cato Street Conspiracy makes a significant contribution to our understanding of a particularly turbulent period of British history.

Jason McElligott is the Director of Marsh’s Library, Dublin

Martin Conboy is Professor of Journalism History at the University of Sheffield

Cover: Encounter between Bow Street officers and Cato Street conspirators on 23 February 1820. Picture shows Arthur Thistlewood, leader of the conspirators, in the act of killing officer Richard Smithers. Original artwork for Look and Learn, 1972.

The Cato Street Conspiracy

On 23 February 1820 a group of radicals were arrested in Cato Street off the Edgware Road in London. They were within sixty minutes of setting out to assassinate the British cabinet.

McElligott and Conboy (Eds)

The Cato Street Conspiracy

The Cato Street Conspiracy

Plotting, Counter-Intelligence and the Revolutionary Tradition in Britain and Ireland

www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk

Edited by Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy

The Cato Street Conspiracy

The Cato Street Conspiracy Plotting, counter-intelligence and the revolutionary tradition in Britain and Ireland Edited by Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy

Manchester University Press

Copyright © Manchester University Press 2020 While copyright in the volume as a whole is vested in Manchester University Press, copyright in individual chapters belongs to their respective authors, and no chapter may be reproduced wholly or in part without the express permission in writing of both author and publisher. Published by Manchester University Press Altrincham Street, Manchester M1 7JA www.manchesteruniversitypress.co.uk British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN  978 1 5261 4498 0 hardback First published 2020 The publisher has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for any external or third-party internet websites referred to in this book, and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Cover: Encounter between Bow Street officers and Cato Street conspirators on 23 February 1820. Picture shows Arthur Thistlewood, leader of the conspirators, in the act of killing officer Richard Smithers. Original artwork for Look and Learn, 1972.

Typeset by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Stockport, Cheshire

Contents

List of figures vii Notes on contributors viii Abbreviations xi

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

Introduction ‘We only have to be lucky once’: Cato Street, insurrection and the revolutionary tradition  Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy 1 When did they know? The cabinet, informers and Cato Street Richard A. Gaunt 18 Joining up the dots: contingency, hindsight and the British insurrectionary tradition  John Stevenson 34 The men they couldn’t hang: ‘sensible’ radicals and the Cato Street Conspiracy  Jason McElligott 49 Cato Street in international perspective  Malcolm Chase 64 Cato Street and the Caribbean  Ryan Hanley 81 Cato Street and the Spencean politics of transnational insurrection Ajmal Waqif 101 State witnesses and spies in Irish political trials, 1794–1803 Martyn J. Powell 118 The shadow of the Pikeman: Irish craftsmen and British radicalism, 1803–20  Timothy Murtagh 135 The fate of the transported Cato Street conspirators  Kieran Hannon 153

vi

Contents

10 Scripted by whom? 1820 and theatres of rebellion  John Gardner Afterword  Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid and Colin W. Reid

169 186

Index

193



 vii

Figures

3.1 Note from Thomas J. Wooler to William Hone. By kind permission of the Governors & Guardians of Marsh’s Library, Dublin. 4.1 ‘Arthur Thistlewood: Chef de la Conspiration’ (Paris: Pierre Langlume, 1820). Copyright: The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Notes on contributors

Malcolm Chase, Professor of Social History at the University of Leeds, is the author of several publications relating to Cato Street. These include ‘The People’s Farm’: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775–1840 (1988; revised edition, 2010) and 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (2013). He also contributed the entries on several of those connected to the conspiracy to the Dictionary of Labour Biography, Volumes 8 and 10 (1987 and 2000), and on both Thistlewood and the Cato Street Conspirators collectively to the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (2004). Martin Conboy is Professor of Journalism History in the Department of Journalism Studies at the University of Sheffield. He was elected a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society in 2012. He has produced ten books on the language and history of journalism and is widely published in journals and edited collections. He is also on the editorial boards of Journalism Studies; Media History; Journalism: Theory, Practice and Criticism; and Memory Studies. John Gardner is Professor of English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University. He previously taught at the University of Glasgow and continues to work at several universities through external examining and fellowships. His current research is mainly concentrated in the first half of the nineteenth century and he has published extensively on literary cultures in the period. His monograph Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy (2011) was shortlisted for the ESSE prize. At present, he is researching the emergence of the First Mechanics’ Institutes.



Notes on contributors ix

Richard A. Gaunt is Associate Professor in Modern British History at the University of Nottingham. A specialist in late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century British political history, he has published widely in monographs, scholarly editions and academic journals. Since 2013, he has been co-editor of the journal Parliamentary History. His publications include Sir Robert Peel: The Life and Legacy (2010) and a forthcoming study of Conservative Politics in the Age of Reform, 1780–1850. Ryan Hanley is British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow in History at University College London. He has published articles on black history, race, slavery and abolition in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Britain. He has taught at the Wilberforce Institute for the study of Slavery and Emancipation (WISE) at the University of Hull and at New College, Oxford. In 2015, he was awarded the Royal Historical Society Alexander Prize for his article on Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, the first black author to be published in Britain. Kieran Hannon holds degrees from the University of New South Wales, the University of Wollongong, Charles Sturt University and the Australian National University. He is a keen amateur historian whose main research is Australian convict transportation. He is the author of a book about Edward Woodhart, a prominent convict gardener in early Australia. Jason McElligott is Director of Marsh’s Library in Dublin and Adjunct Professor, School of History and Archives, University College Dublin. He is an expert in early modern British print culture with a specialist interest in later political and literary understandings of the English Revolution. He is currently writing a monograph on Book Theft in Eighteenth-Century Dublin and is working on an edition of the ‘lost’ diary of Bram Stoker. Timothy Murtagh is a graduate of Trinity College Dublin, having written his thesis on Irish working-class radicals in the late eighteenth century (submitted 2015). He was the Irish Government Senior Scholar to Hertford College, Oxford (2015–16). In addition to working as a researcher and historical consultant for Dublin City Council, he is a visiting research fellow in Trinity College Dublin and is preparing a monograph on the formation of the Irish working class, 1776–1820. Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid is a Senior Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Sheffield. She is the author of two monographs, Seán MacBride: A Republican Life (2011) and Terrorist Histories: Individuals and Political Violence since the Nineteenth Century (2016). Martyn J. Powell is Professor of Modern Irish History at Bristol University, and is a specialist in Irish political and social history. His books include Britain and

x

Notes on contributors

Ireland in the Eighteenth-Century Crisis of Empire (2003), The Politics of Consumption in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2005), and, with James Kelly, Clubs and Societies in Eighteenth-Century Ireland (2010). He is working on a study of the maiming of British soldiers by Ireland’s urban ‘houghers’ and an edition of the political works of Richard Brinsley Sheridan for Oxford University Press. Colin W. Reid is a Lecturer in British and Irish History at the University of Sheffield. He is currently writing a book on ideas of conceptions of government in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Ireland. He is the author of The Lost Ireland of Stephen Gwynn: Irish Constitutional Nationalism and Cultural Politics, 1864–1950 (2011, 2015) and a number of articles on the history of political ideas in Ireland and Britain. John Stevenson is emeritus Reader and Fellow of Worcester College, Oxford. He has written extensively on British social and political history from the eighteenth century to the twentieth. His publications include Popular Protest and Public Order (ed. with R. Quinault), Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1832, Order and Disorder in Early Modern England (ed. with A.J. Fletcher), London in the Age of Reform (ed.), The Slump (with C.P. Cook), and British Society, 1914–45. His most recent publication is William Cobbett, Romanticism and Enlightenment (ed. with J. Grande, 2015). He is now working on a larger study of William Cobbett and the revolutionary era. Ajmal Waqif is a MA History graduate from Goldsmiths, University of London, with an interest in early socialism, internationalist working-class struggles and the subterranean continuities between ‘premodern’ and ‘modern’ radical politics in the long nineteenth century. He is preparing a PhD proposal concerning Thomas Spence and the Spencean Philanthropists, with an emphasis on their transnational inspirations and aspirations.



Abbreviations xi

Abbreviations

Add. MSS BL Chase, 1820 Gardner, Poetry HO McCalman, Radical Underworld NAI NAS ODNB PRONI Thompson, EWC TNA Wilkinson, Authentic History

Additional Manuscripts British Library Malcolm Chase, 1820: Disorder and Stability in the United Kingdom (Manchester, 2013) John Gardner, Poetry and Popular Protest: Peterloo, Cato Street and the Queen Caroline Controversy (London, 2011) Home Office Iain McCalman, Radical Underworld: Prophets, Revolutionaries and Pornographers in London, 1795–1840 (Cambridge, 1988) National Archives of Ireland, Dublin National Archives of Scotland, Edinburgh Oxford Dictionary of National Biography Public Record Office of Northern Ireland, Belfast E.P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (London, 1966) The National Archives, Kew, UK George Theodore Wilkinson, An Authentic History of the Cato Street Conspiracy (London, 1820)



Introduction 1

Introduction ‘We only have to be lucky once’: Cato Street, insurrection and the revolutionary tradition Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy It was the early evening of 23 February 1820. By 7.30 p.m. around twenty men had gathered in a hayloft measuring no more than fifteen and a half feet by eleven feet above a small stable in Cato Street off the Edgware Road in London. The men planned to set off within the hour for Grosvenor Square, where they intended to assassinate the Prime Minister and the cabinet as they dined together at the house of Lord Harrowby, the President of the Privy Council. The conspirators were filled with an implacable hatred for the ‘arch fiends’1 whom they held responsible for the murders of fifteen men and women only six months earlier at a peaceful demonstration for reform at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester. They sought bloody revenge for ‘Peterloo’ and planned literally to decapitate the guiltiest ministers – Viscount Sidmouth and Lord Castlereagh, in particular – before publicly parading their heads around London in a gruesome parody of the punishment traditionally meted out to traitors. They also hoped that their righteous justice, their tyrannicide as they saw it, would encourage all those who were dissatisfied with political corruption and economic mismanagement to rise in sympathy with them to effect fundamental and far-reaching change. If all went to plan in Grosvenor Square, the conspirators intended to create confusion by setting fire to several buildings across the capital; to seize weapons in private dwellings and public places, including several cannons at the Artillery Ground in Finsbury; to capture the symbolic sites of the Mansion House and the Bank of England; and to issue a declaration establishing a provisional government. The plotters believed, or hoped, that a cadre of London radicals who were not directly involved in the conspiracy would follow them into the streets, and this would encourage Londoners more generally to rise against their oppressors, which in turn would spur impoverished and alienated men and women across the

2

The Cato Street Conspiracy

urban areas of the Midlands, the North and Scotland to strike quickly and seize power in support of the new English republic. Unfortunately for the men who gathered in the Cato Street hayloft, the planned dinner that night at Lord Harrowby’s residence in Grosvenor Square did not take place. They had been lured into a trap by an agent provocateur among their number, a man called George Edwards, who had provided them with information of a planned social gathering of the entire cabinet at the exact point in time at which, after months of discussing different plans, they had determined to assassinate within the next few days as many individual ministers as they could find at their homes. Edwards’s information seemed fortuitous, even providential, in that it enabled the plotters to maximise the number of ministers they could kill, and Edwards’s unsuspecting comrades took the bait. As they gathered in Cato Street readying themselves to strike, the trap was sprung by the authorities. At 8.30 p.m., a group of plain-clothes law officers known as the Bow Street Runners charged into the ground-floor stable and climbed the ladder to the hayloft on the first floor, ordered everyone present to remain still and informed them they were under arrest. Despite the undoubted bravery of the officers, a number of things went wrong during the raid. They were expecting military assistance in conducting the raid, but the delegated detachment of the Coldstream Guards was late and the Bow Street Runners had to enter without support. As the police entered the shed, they met a look-out on the groundfloor named William Davidson who made a concerted effort to prevent them from climbing the ladder, thereby giving some of his comrades time to escape through a back window. Davidson’s pugnaciousness also meant that, when several Runners did eventually reach the top of the ladder, those still within the hayloft had readied themselves for a fight. The conspirators extinguished the candles in the hayloft and in the ensuing melee one of the officers was fatally stabbed by the ringleader, Arthur Thistlewood. When the army unit arrived into the small alley that constitutes Cato Street soon after the raid had begun, they found a scene of chaos; some plotters were apprehended by the troops while trying to escape or hide in the immediate vicinity, but others successfully used the cover of darkness to flee. Those Bow Street Runners who had made it up the ladder were joined by several troops and all were involved in a desperate fight in the dark against the conspirators trapped within the confined space, while others tried to subdue Davidson and other escaping plotters on the ground floor of the stable and in the alleyway. We can never know with absolute certainty, but it seems that all of those who were present in the stable and hayloft on that cold, dark night were eventually arrested. The authorities were interested in dispensing justice as swiftly and efficiently as possible, so several plotters against whom the evidence was less strong were released without charge over the following weeks. Of the eleven men who faced trial at the Old Bailey in late April, five were hanged on 1 May and had their severed heads raised aloft by the hangman and shown to the assembled crowd with the traditional invocation ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ The five were John Brunt, William Davidson, James



Introduction 3

Ings, Arthur Thistlewood and Richard Tidd. Six of the eleven prisoners changed their pleas from ‘not guilty’ to ‘guilty’ during the trial and threw themselves on the mercy of the court. Five of the six were sentenced to be transported to Australia for life. These were Richard Bradburn, Charles Cooper, John Harrison, John Shaw Strange and James Wilson. The sixth defendant, the Scottish bootmaker James Gilchrist, despite pleading guilty, maintained throughout his trial that he had been starving and was lured to the Cato Street barn by the offer of a free meal from Cooper. The authorities appear to have believed him, as his death sentence was respited to a period of short-term imprisonment. The executions of 1 May 1820 proved to be a defining moment in British radical history, as they brought to an end a tradition of violent English Jacobinism which stretched back to the early 1790s. Many great social movements and revolutions are associated with at least one song which can either give heart to the belligerents or serve as a lament to rally one’s scattered forces in time of defeat. In subsequent generations, these songs have the power to coalesce into an emotional statement about, or evocation of, the period in which they first appeared. What song might epitomise or encapsulate the Cato Street Conspiracy? It was certainly not the hopeful revolutionary tune ‘Ça ira’ (‘it will be fine’),2 given the desperate nature of the plot in the wake of the defeats inflicted upon the radical movement by Peterloo and the repressive Six Acts. As he awaited execution on the scaffold on 1 May, James Ings sang in a discordant voice, choked with understandable emotion, a portion of the radical ballad ‘Give Me Death or Liberty’.3 But if there is one tune that evokes the conspiracy it is surely Robert Burns’s ballad ‘Scots Wha Hae Wi Wallace Bled’. This is the song the lookout William Davidson sang after he was overpowered and quickly led across the road to a nearby tavern, where the prisoners were to be secured and searched before being sent on to the cells in Bow Street. The Home Office files concerning the conspiracy report that as Davidson was dragged bound into the pub, presumably struggling against his captors, he was shouting this song. He was soon silenced.4 The files do not record how Davidson was silenced, but we can be confident that his captors did not confine themselves to polite requests to their prisoner to desist. Davidson’s choice of song is significant. Written in 1793 by the Scottish bard Robert Burns, it reads as a speech given to his troops by Robert the Bruce (1274– 1329) before their famous victory over King Edward II (1284–1327) and the English army at Bannockburn in 1314. ‘Scots Wha Hae’ has been described by one Scottish historian as ‘the nearest thing we have to a national anthem’:5 Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled, Scots, wham Bruce has aften led; Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victory! Now’s the day, and now’s the hour; See the front o’ battle lour;

4

The Cato Street Conspiracy See approach proud Edward’s power – Chains and slavery!6

‘Scots Wha Hae’ certainly had Scottish Jacobite contexts which look backwards in time but, written as it was in 1793, it also had dangerous contemporary Jacobin meanings. Burns’s condemnation of slavery – by which he meant a state of unfreedom common to all those deprived of their liberties whatever their colour or ­ethnicity – and his celebration of the concept of freedom and the need to fight to secure that freedom meant that the song was very popular with radicals across Britain.7 In late 1819, for example, a banner at a rally held in Sheffield in the wake of the Peterloo massacre was emblazoned with the simple motto: ‘Scots Wha Hae’.8 Davidson had been born in Jamaica but his father was Scottish, and as a teenager he was sent to the old country where he studied unsuccessfully at Glasgow and Aberdeen before following the trade of cabinet maker in Birmingham and eventually making his way to London.9 Davidson certainly had a Scottish heritage to connect him to Burns’s ballad, yet he probably brought other dimensions to his understanding of the song; his father was a white Briton of high social status, but his mother was a free, black Jamaican. He may well have had a rare combination of a radical, a British and a black perspective on the song, particularly its concept of slavery: Wha will be a traitor knave? Wha can fill a coward’s grave! Wha sae base as be a slave? Let him turn and flee!

It is impossible to discern whether Davidson approached the song as a Scot, a black man or a revolutionary internationalist, or what admixture of these components determined his understanding of the text. It may even be misleading to approach the issue of identity in such a reductive way. Perhaps one of the most striking things about ‘Scots Wha Hae’ in the context of Cato Street is its sense that one could sacrifice oneself in order to make others free: By oppression’s woes and pains! By your sons in servile chains! We will drain our dearest veins, But they shall be free! Lay the proud usurpers low! Tyrants fall in every foe! Liberty’s in every blow! Let us do or die!

‘Scots Wha Hae’ has a certain fatalism that must have seemed very appropriate to a man caught red-handed by the forces of the state in the commission of an act of armed rebellion. The ballad is clear that when rebels embark upon their chosen



Introduction 5

course they must ‘do or die’. Once the game has begun and the dice have been rolled, their reward will either be liberty or a blood-soaked grave: Welcome to your gory bed, Or to victory!

Detection and defeat meant that Davidson and his comrades did indeed suffer the indignity of a ‘gory bed’. The executioner used a lot of sawdust to try to soak up the copious amounts of blood that spewed all over the scaffold from the corpses when they had their heads cut off, but there was plenty enough to attract flies and other noxious creatures on that warm May morning. The executed men then faced the further indignity of being bundled into an unmarked grave strewn with quicklime within the walls of Newgate Prison. The exact location of their final resting place has been lost to history. There was much fevered news and comment concerning the Cato Street Conspiracy in the months after the raid of 23 February, and then later around the time of the executions, but the incident soon faded from the British popular, political and historical consciousness. Biographers of those ministers who were targeted by Thistlewood and his comrades have long taken the plot seriously, but it has received surprisingly little scholarly attention from historians and other commentators.10 There has been a tendency among those who have examined Cato Street to dismiss it as an isolated, forlorn, foolhardy and – ultimately – unimportant event. The violent intent of the conspirators sits uncomfortably with notions of what it was (and is) to be English or British.11 John Stanhope commented in 1962 that ‘A more unheroic lot of conspirators than those who met together that night in an upper room of a stable near the Edgware Road could scarcely be imagined’. He also asserted that the core conspirators could not be regarded as ‘reliably sane … they had the knack of accumulating round themselves a floating population of psychopaths, with a grudge against society’. For him, the conspiracy was both ‘ridiculous and outrageous’.12 In 1972, a year marked by radical social politics in Britain and violent insurrection in Ulster, the illustrated children’s newspaper Look and Learn carried an article on this ‘insane murder plot’ which introduced its young readers to the ‘stupidity’ of the ‘mentally unstable’ Arthur Thistlewood who somehow managed to convince some ‘simple and gullible’ people to engage in a ‘vicious and ridiculous plot which had not the slightest chance of being successful’.13 Cato Street also sits beyond the pale of ‘mainstream’ radical history in Britain, which tends to be framed in terms of the labour movement, trade unions and evolution rather than revolution. For example, R.K. Webb’s Modern England, a set text of the Open University in the 1970s, condemned the ‘grotesque’ and ‘insane’ group of ‘wretched conspirators’ whose ‘wild revolutionism was … irrelevant to the future course of working-class politics’.14 Even within a revolutionary framework, Cato Street can be discussed as

6

The Cato Street Conspiracy

the fantasy of isolated adventurists who had no contact with, or influence upon, the masses or the proletariat.15 Since the mid-1980s there has been a great deal of work on the political and cultural history of radicalism in early nineteenth-century Britain, but Cato Street has remained decidedly marginal within this historiography. Ann Hone mentioned the plot in passing in For the Cause of Truth (1982) and Iain McCalman provided invaluable context and background in his magnificent Radical Underworld (1987). By way of contrast, James Epstein’s Radical Expression (1994) did not mention the episode at all and Marcus Wood’s uncharacteristic error in Radical Satire (1994) of only referring in passing to ‘the Cato Street conspiracy of 1817’ says much about its lack of interest even to historians of radicalism.16 It is very telling that two historians who have recently written general histories of the period dismiss the plot as a contrivance of the government. David Andress sees ‘the whole plan [as] being more or less a provocation by the authorities’, and Adam Zamoyski suggests that ‘the discovery of the conspiracy was highly convenient for the government’ and ‘there is some reason to believe that the whole enterprise had been set up’ by the agent provocateur George Edwards.17 John Gardner and Malcolm Chase (both of whom have written a chapter for this book) have produced important contextualising studies of Cato Street within the past decade, but there is much that is still unclear about the extent of the plot and its links to wider currents of London and British radicalism. The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, counter-intelligence and the revolutionary tradition in Britain and Ireland examines the events of 23 February 1820 through a number of lenses which shed new light on the mechanics of the plot, its significance at the time and its place in the longer history of radicalism and revolutionary movements. Taking inspiration from Roger Wells’s study of British insurrectionaries in the years between 1795 and 1803,18 the editors and contributors are particularly interested in drawing out comparisons and contrasts between the underexplored British insurrectionary tradition and the history of Irish revolutionary violence. One of the central concerns of this volume is how a consideration of revolutionary violence in Britain and Ireland modifies what we think we know about the history of radicalism on each island and further afield. Chapters in this book examine the structure, organisation and nature of the conspiracy; the use of spies and agents provocateurs by the authorities; the response of different types of radicals to the unfolding of the plot; and the effect of the failure of the plot upon the radical movement in London, and across Britain more widely. The contributors also consider broader issues, such as the revolutionary internationalism of Thomas Spence and his followers; the deployment of spies against the United Irishmen; the central role of Irish workers in building British radicalism during the early nineteenth century; French and international understandings of this period of British history; issues of race and ethnicity in the context of the British Empire and black Caribbean revolutionary politics; and the experience of the transported Cato Street plotters in Australia.



Introduction 7

The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, counter-intelligence and the revolutionary tradition in Britain and Ireland considers broad questions facing scholars about the writing of radical history and the careful use of government-sponsored intelligence. The 1820 plot provides students of history, intelligence and strategic studies with an almost perfect study of a recognisably modern plot to assassinate politicians which was foiled by the judicious use of intelligence. It might stand as an exemplar, a synecdoche, of how to detect, deflect and destroy an insurrectionary movement. At Cato Street, the authorities destroyed a revolutionary cell which believed it was within sixty minutes of striking against the cabinet, but they also had an important and discernible effect on the nature and course of the broader radical tradition in British history across the nineteenth century and, by extension, into the twentieth century. Ever since 1820 it has been commonplace to dismiss the Cato Street Conspiracy as the work of deluded fantasists, but this would be to mistake the seriousness of the plotters’ intentions. There had been widespread fears in October and November 1819 that radicals would use either a mass demonstration for reform or against repressive legislation as a pretext to organise a rising in London which would enable several hundred determined men to strike: one nervous report suggested as many as fifteen hundred were ready to take up arms.19 As late as Christmas 1819 the authorities were still being warned about plans for a rising in England and Scotland at or just after New Year20 and, as Malcolm Chase and John Gardner have shown, the government was far less sure in 1820 about the impossibility of serious violence across the kingdom than many later historians who have written from the comfort of their offices.21 Be this as it may, the balance of forces did tilt slowly but steadily in favour of the authorities in the last quarter of 1819 as it became clear that the violence at Peterloo was dissuading many people from taking part in public protests. Reformers and radicals were increasingly divided on the next steps to take, and during December repressive legislation in the form of the Six Acts moved steadily through the Houses of Parliament. It is significant that during November 1819 the hard core of Spencean extremists who had coalesced around Arthur Thistlewood and Thomas Preston began to focus less on the possibility of mass action and more on the necessity for political assassinations which it was believed might stimulate the masses to act. Thomas Preston initially seems to have wanted to target the Prince Regent, Sidmouth and Castlereagh,22 but the Prince Regent soon disappeared from their plans and the conspirators settled on trying to kill leading ministers. There was a difference of emphasis between the plotters as to whether they should attack one or two individuals immediately or wait and hope to catch as many as possible at an event some time in the near future. In general terms, John Brunt and James Ings were for striking as quickly as possible and Arthur Thistlewood cautioned patience in order to maximise the number of targets. The gradually declining numbers of those who turned up to the meetings

8

The Cato Street Conspiracy

o­ rganised by Thistlewood, the regular reports of George Edwards from within the core group23 and the seeming ease with which the plotters were finally rounded up have tended to obscure the very dangerous situation in which members of the cabinet found themselves in the three months before 23 February. The plotters were determined men; even though a quantity of their weapons was seized in early January, they still managed to amass a cache of arms which included one firearm, 24 hand grenades, one large bomb, 20 pike blades, 6 lb of gunpowder, 2000 rounds of ammunition and a range of knives and cleavers. In the event of the initial strike being successful they aimed to seize more advanced weapons from private and commercial premises in the City.24 Thistlewood and his associates had also assembled what would now be called a ‘hit list’: the names and addresses of more than thirty ministers and leading government officials.25 It must have been extremely chilling for the Home Office to know that the conspirators were in the habit of monitoring the movements of their intended targets. For example, on 31 December several of the men watched Castlereagh’s house and on 25 January Lord Harrowby’s house was scouted. James Ings spent the afternoon of 5 February following Castlereagh around London and subsequently told Thistlewood he ‘would be D___D if he Didn’t kill him and one or two More before long’. Thistlewood steadied Ings by arguing it was better to kill as many as possible in one swoop, but a few days later Ings and Abel Hall followed the Earl of Mulgrave’s carriage for one and a half miles from Whitehall to 72 Harley Street. Brunt was adamant at this time that ‘we must go in threes or fours and Destroy them at once or as Many as can be found of them’.26 The discussions between Thistlewood and his most exuberant comrades were heated, and it is no exaggeration to say that at any point one or more of these men might have decided to attack and kill those they were following. The Home Office seems to have been trying to secure as much evidence against as many people as possible without having to rely in court on the testimony of the paid informer George Edwards, but this was a dangerous strategy. The Home Office and the police could never be sure that some of the more hot-headed conspirators would not break ranks, or that Thistlewood would not be persuaded by his friends to change the plan before Edwards the informer could provide the necessary warning. There must have been real fear on the part of the authorities when, on 20 February, at Brunt’s suggestion, it was decided finally to kill Sidmouth and Castlereagh as soon as possible, and hope that other individuals might also be struck by other plotters intent on killing as many on the ‘hit list’ as possible.27 Historians know that the plotters took the bait when the informer within their midst miraculously happened to provide them with information about an imminent dinner in Grosvenor Square at which they could attack the entire cabinet, but had they not done so the authorities would have faced the terrible prospect of small ‘cells’ of armed and desperate men roaming the capital with the means and motivation to kill ministers, leading officials or other officers of the state.28 Individuals engaging in terror certainly seemed anachronistic in the mid-twentieth century,29 a throwback to the anarchists



Introduction 9

of the late 1800s, but in the third decade of the twenty-first century, an age in which news media often find themselves reporting on the carnage caused by ‘lone wolf’ terrorists armed only with rudimentary weapons, we perhaps have a greater appreciation of the dangers posed by small numbers of determined men and women. Small groups of determined ideologues can sometimes change the course of history through ‘the propaganda of the deed’.30 The terrorist may be thwarted numerous times, but even in failure he or she will find comfort in the chilling warning issued in the wake of a failed attempt to assassinate the British Prime Minister and her entire cabinet 164 years after the Cato Street Conspiracy: ‘Today, we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once – you will have to be lucky always.’31 If the potential of the coup de poing against the cabinet in 1820 should be taken seriously by historians, what of the broader coup d’état envisaged by the plotters in their most optimistic moments? This was to include the establishment of a provisional government, the reading of a proclamation in the name of this entity calling on the soldiers to side with the people, the seizure of artillery pieces and small arms around London, the capture of symbolic buildings and an appeal to the people to rally to the side of the new republic. It was hoped that, with London in the hands of the new power, the cities of the Midlands, the North and Scotland would soon rise on the side of the revolutionaries.32 If the plotters had managed to kill several ministers or even the entire cabinet, how likely is it that their more ambitious plans might have been attempted? The first thing they would have needed was a greater number of active conspirators in London than the twenty men who gathered in Cato Street on that fateful February evening. Malcolm Chase’s 1820: Disorder and stability in the United Kingdom identifies nine hitherto unknown Cato Street conspirators,33 and the chapter by Jason McElligott in this collection suggests that there were other sites in London at which men may have gathered to attack the state on 23 February.34 He has also suggested that the prominent radicals Thomas Wooler and William Cobbett may have been associated with the plot. This tends to corroborate the sense that there was a broader number of radicals prepared either to countenance the use of violence or to side with the conspirators in the event of their plans coming to fruition. However, nobody has yet come across the mainstay of any revolutionary endeavour: a group of young men aged between 16 and 25 without wives and dependent children. This demographic formed the core of the 474 men arrested in connection with the Fenian rising in Dublin in 1867 whose ages and occupations were logged by the police.35 Of those rebels who were in the General Post Office in Dublin during Easter Week 1916, no fewer than 29 per cent were under the age of 20, and a further 44 per cent were between the ages of 20 and 30.36 Fearghal McGarry has calculated that during the Irish War of Independence of 1919–21 the median age of the members of Óglaigh na hÉireann who saw action against British forces was a youthful 23, and many of them were single.37 By contrast, the known Cato Street conspirators (and those radicals who it is suspected sympathised with them) were

10

The Cato Street Conspiracy

almost all married men over the age of 30, and many of them had children. Cato Street might best be understood, then, as the hardwood of a generation defined by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars rather than the green shoots or new buds of widespread revolutionary plotting in the world of London radicalism. The most unusual thing about the Cato Street Conspiracy is not that it was penetrated by an agent provocateur who provided full details to the Home Office. The historian and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli long ago commented on the inevitability of an informer turning up whenever a plot ‘has been communicated to two or three people’. He thought it ‘a marvel if a plot which has been communicated to many people, remains secret for any length of time’.38 Indeed, when faced with Thistlewood’s plan to attack the cabinet and foment a rising, at least one plotter claimed that he did not ‘much like to join in anything where so Many [conspirators] are concerned’.39 Once they were arrested and tried, it was only to be expected that the leading Cato Street conspirators would be executed as a warning to others. Death is an essential part of the calculus of conspiracy for anyone undertaking a plot, and many defeated revolutionaries have welcomed it as a release or a blessing.40 What is very unusual about the Cato Street Conspiracy is that the authorities struck decisively against the plotters without succumbing to the temptation to use it as a pretext to treat all oppositional politics as treasonous. To be sure, there was a great deal of political repression during 1820 with dozens of prosecutions for political libel, and in the five years before 1825 several hundred men and women found themselves in gaol for writing, publishing or selling reformist, radical or otherwise transgressive print.41 Yet, it does seem clear that some leading radicals who might have found themselves in trouble for actual or suspected (or invented) involvement with the Cato Street Conspiracy were never pursued in connection with the failed plot. Instead, the authorities seem to have shared, and acted upon, the sentiments expressed by a local official in late 1819 who advised them to pay attention to the key demographic of ‘the middling class who shrink at the Idea of a Revolution’. While the ultra-radicals talked about an impending civil war with a certain degree of enthusiasm and relish, the government was advised to focus on closing down the radical ‘trash’ press, and reaching out with ‘mild words, and vigorous actions’ to the middle class. There should, it was advised, be reforms which would stimulate the economy and decrease the tax burden on the middle class, while increasing charges for the wealthiest, absentee land owners.42 It is clear that at the time of the Cato Street Conspiracy the authorities were very well informed of events, receiving a steady flow of information which was distilled into high-quality intelligence which enabled them to move decisively against the plotters at precisely the right time without over-playing their hand against the radical movement in general, or that portion of public opinion which was reformminded. The British authorities also happened to be very lucky, in that the 1820s saw a growth in economic prosperity at a time when they began to move cautiously and fitfully forward with a number of important changes such as Catholic Emancipation



Introduction 11

and electoral reform. When combined with a pinch of sheer good luck, this entirely fortuitous (for the government) admixture of organisation, insight, decisiveness, proportionality, economic growth and a willingness to make some reforms provided the perfect recipe for defeating the ultra-radical moment that was Cato Street in February 1820. In April 1961, in the aftermath of the ill-fated plot to invade Fidel Castro’s Cuba at the Bay of Pigs, President John F. Kennedy quipped that ‘Victory has 100 fathers and defeat is an orphan’. In the months and years after February 1820, some leading figures within British radicalism rewrote the history of their era by quietly erasing the Cato Street plot from British history and themselves from the history of the plot. Their silence about Cato Street was arguably more fatal to a proper appreciation of its contemporary significance than the repressive actions of the authorities. Richard A. Gaunt opens this book with a consideration of how and when the cabinet became aware of the plot. Three people warned the Ministers in advance of a plot to assassinate the cabinet. However, the emphasis on which warning was taken most seriously, and at which point in time, varied between different members of the cabinet. Gaunt explores these differences in emphasis, concentrating on the accounts given by the Earl of Harrowby, the Duke of Wellington and Viscount Sidmouth. Some of these differences are explained by the imperfect recollections of memory, but they also suggest the varying status, authority and knowledge of members of the cabinet. In a period when agents provocateurs were a common resource for a government worried by extreme forms of popular radicalism, the nature and source of evidence were a matter of practical concern. By comparing the accounts and subsequent fates of Thomas Hiden (an unpaid informer) and George Edwards (an agent provocateur), Gaunt feeds into wider debates about the nature of surveillance and intelligence-gathering in a period of postwar radical discontent. John Stevenson’s chapter on the nature of British radicalism argues that a strict, binary division between ‘violent’ and ‘non-violent’ radicalism is an unhelpful way to consider the fluid political situation that led to the Cato Street Conspiracy. As such, he re-examines the attitudes of British reformers such as Place, Burdett, Hunt and Cobbett to the possibility of insurrectionary action in the years between 1815 and 1820. How realistic was it, he asks, that a dramatic insurrectionary blow would have elicited a significant response in the country and among other reformers? Might any of the better-known reformers have been ready, had circumstances permitted, to contemplate participation in violent action? Stevenson presents evidence which suggests that the Home Secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, may have been justified in suspecting some, at least, of so doing. Jason McElligott uses a recently discovered note from Thomas Wooler to William Hone to suggest that several very prominent figures in the cause of ‘reform’ who subsequently distanced themselves from Cato Street were aware of the event in advance and either were minded to become involved or decided to wait upon the

12

The Cato Street Conspiracy

course of events before making a commitment. Using the note from Wooler to Hone as a ‘prompt’, McElligott examines incongruous items in the Home Office files concerning the conspiracy which might lead one to suspect that the authorities were aware that the circle of plotters, active sympathisers and passive fellow-­travellers was significantly larger, and largely more significant, than Arthur Thistlewood and his gang. McElligott considers the nature and reliability of the evidence historians find in intelligence files and suggest ways in which scholars can recreate something of the ‘lived context’ that sometimes survives as faint echoes deep within historical records. He suggests that both the Home Office and the ‘sensible’ radicals had strong reasons for downplaying the extent of sympathy in the broader reform movement for Thistlewood’s failed coup, whether one considers it was to have been a limited coup de poing against the cabinet or a more ambitious coup d’état. Building on his wonderful book 1820: Disorder and stability in the United Kingdom, Malcolm Chase places the plot in an international context, taking as his starting point a recently discovered contemporary French print which sought to convey ‘le dessein diabolique’ of Cato Street to a continental audience. The year 1820 was not merely one of significant unrest across the United Kingdom. It was also a year of European revolution: regimes were overthrown in Spain, Portugal and much of modern-day Italy. In June, following the assassination of the heir to the French throne, the cavalry charged Parisian demonstrators as chants in support of the victims of ‘Peterloo’ began to ring out: ‘Vivent nos frères de Manchester!’ Yet, even more than Peterloo, it was Cato Street that captured the imagination of French radicals, and Chase demonstrates that the conspiracy remained a touchstone in France of the British capacity for continental-style insurgency. Ryan Hanley is also interested in the broader geographical context of Cato Street. He uses the fact that William Davidson was a black man born in Jamaica to examine the imperial and transatlantic aspects of English and British radicalism. The significance of Davidson’s experiences as a free ‘man of colour’ in the Caribbean, and later as a black immigrant in regency Britain, has never been explored in any detail. Hanley addresses himself to several important questions. How did growing up witnessing the everyday injustices and brutalities of the colonial slave system influence Davidson’s political outlook? Did his ethnicity affect how he was treated within the fold of British ultra-radicalism? To what extent was Davidson’s heritage significant, both during his trial for high treason and in subsequent (that is, posthumous) representations of him? Through an examination of Davidson and his better-known associate and fellow Jamaica-born black revolutionary Robert Wedderburn, Hanley considers how Caribbean slave resistance influenced both black and white ultra-radicals in London. Hanley’s important chapter highlights the interwoven nature of the histories of British radicalism and the British Empire and places the Cato Street Conspiracy within the radical history of two far-flung archipelagoes linked by the Atlantic Ocean. Ajmal Waqif considers the attitude of the revolutionary thinker Thomas Spence



Introduction 13

(1750–1814) and his followers to the notions of violent resistance and revolt. As Waqif points out, the key Cato Street plotters either knew Spence personally and were part of his political circle or were involved with the revolutionary ‘Society of Spencean Philanthropists’ established after the maestro’s death. His chapter shows that Spencean thought and political practice were global and universalist, encompassing a range of people who inhabited the peripheries of the world-system. Spencean works were addressed to indigenous Americans, Irish rebels and enslaved Africans in the Caribbean. The Spenceans embraced these groups not only as equals with full political autonomy but as potentially the foremost proponents and beneficiaries of the Spencean ‘Plan’ for fundamental change in the world economic system. Waqif also points out that Spenceanism itself was shaped by the experiences of resistance and revolt in the periphery. Thomas Spence himself defended the long-term resistance of indigenous Americans to European ‘civilisation’ and praised their egalitarian social relations as evidence of the illegitimacy of private property in land. Spence’s mature works consistently pinned his hopes of realising the ‘Plan’ on the success of those insurrections which were flaring up ‘abroad and at home’. Waqif argues that the efficacy of revolt and armed insurrection in these peripheral contexts convinced Spenceans and their sympathisers of its replicability in England. The small island of Ireland looms large in any study of failed insurrections in Europe in the decades after the French Revolution, and in his chapter Martyn J. Powell looks at the use of spies and state witnesses in trials against the United Irishmen in 1798 and 1803. The defendants included William Drennan, William Orr, Arthur O’Connor, the Sheares brothers, Colonel Edward Marcus Despard and Robert Emmet. Although the role of spies within individual trials has received some attention from historians, Powell’s chapter is the first attempt at an overarching study of their use against the United Irishmen in the trials that occurred after their shift to an underground structure and existence. These cases offer an intriguing example of the overturning of credit relations, whereby individuals with very good characters had their reputations traduced by those with little personal credit. In other cases, state witnesses and spies had been important members of the Irish patriot movement, some having undergone journeys away from radicalism after the French Revolution, and others finding the lure of government pay impossible to resist. The ringleader of the Cato Street plotters, Arthur Thistlewood, was assured on several occasions by an Irish bricklayer on the fringes of the conspiracy that he could provide at least sixty of his fellow countrymen to aid the first stages of the planned revolution.43 This is the context for Timothy Murtagh’s chapter on the involvement of Irish workers in British radicalism during the years between the passage of the Act of Union and the Cato Street Conspiracy. He argues that Irish artisans played a significant role not only in the creation of Irish republicanism during the 1790s but also in the formation of later British radical and working-class politics. He examines

14

The Cato Street Conspiracy

the political activities of these Irish artisans, some of whom were fleeing repression due to their role in the rebellion of 1798 or Robert Emmet’s 1803 rising. In towns like Stockport or Manchester, these migrants could access a pre-existing network of Irish radicals, many of whom had been allied to groups like the United Englishmen or the London Corresponding Society. As a result, there were murmurings of Irish involvement in almost all the major radical agitations or conspiracies during these years, whether it was the Spa Fields riots, Peterloo or the Cato Street Conspiracy. In every instance the figure of the Irish migrant, usually presumed to be a former rebel, was rumoured to play a hand. Furthermore, Murtagh demonstrates how the legacy of these crucial few years laid the groundwork for later developments such as Owenism, the agitation for the Great Reform Act of 1832 and, eventually, Chartism. This chapter argues for sustained Irish involvement in trade unionism and radicalism, while presenting a nuanced case for the role of Irish workers in the creation of a politics based on class. Kieran Hannon notes that accounts of the Cato Street Conspiracy contain only perfunctory details about the five transported plotters. Unlike other convicts, who could try to melt into the general community when their sentence expired, the transported conspirators found it difficult to escape their past. Hannon investigates the lives of these five men from the execution of their comrades on 1 May 1820 to their eventual deaths in New South Wales. His detailed survey of the surviving Australian manuscript and printed records from the period enables him to tackle broad political and sociological questions about the transported conspirators. Were they actually ‘radicals’ in the sense of being determined political extremists who were intent on overturning the constitutional order? Or were they merely relatively representative examples of their peers who had been driven (or dragged) to consider extraordinary actions by the profound economic distress in which they and their families found themselves? In a ‘normal’ society – defined as one which allows the industrious to earn a living – would these men have gravitated to extreme politics or would they have lived quiet, productive lives? Hannon suggests that close attention to the lives of these men in Australia provides highly suggestive answers to these complex questions. John Gardner examines theatrical responses to the rebellions in England and Scotland of 1820. He uses evidence in Home Office files, newspapers, poems, plays and contemporary histories to suggest that many believed at the time that Cato Street and other rebellions were ‘scripted’ by the government. The Examiner’s editorial on the eve of the Cato Street executions makes a theatrical link explicit: ‘The Last Act of the Cato-Street tragedy is now completed by the conviction or confession of the wretched men on whom the consequences of a corrupt system have fallen.’ For more recent periods, John Gardner examines a number of plays and radio dramas, including Robert Shaw’s Cato Street (1970), Hector MacMillan’s The Rising (1973), Stewart Conn’s Thistlewood (1975) and James Kelman’s Hardie and Baird: The Last Days (1990). He finds that theatrical works written around the time



Introduction 15

of the rebellions mainly deal with the concept of class, whereas those from the 1970s onwards explore issues of gender, racism and nationalism. It is clear from Gardner’s chapter that writers write the present when dealing with the past, an insight which has encouraged the editors of this volume to commission an afterword to consider how best to conceptualise and understand the insights of a group of essays produced two hundred years after the events they describe. Notes  1 TNA, HO 42/199, fol. 271.  2 McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 22, 118, 151; James A. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford, 1994), pp. 105, 152, 154; Laura Mason, ‘“Ça ira” and the Birth of the Revolutionary Song’, History Workshop, No. 28 (Autumn 1989), 22–38; C. Alexander McKinley, ‘Anarchists and the Music of the French Revolution’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 1:2 (2007), 1–33.  3 John Stanhope, The Cato Street Conspiracy (London, 1962), p. 137; M.J. Trow, Enemies of the State: The Cato Street Conspiracy (London, 2011), p. 166.  4 TNA, HO 44/4, fols 72–3.  5 William Donaldson, The Jacobite Song: Political Myth and National Identity (Aberdeen, 1988), p. 87.  6 www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/43813/scots-wha-hae (accessed 25 May 2018). This version was chosen after much consideration because it gives a clear sense of the meaning to readers of standard English while preserving something of the distinctive idioms of Scots.  7 Quentin Skinner, Liberty before Liberalism (Cambridge, 1998), pp. 37–49; Murray Pittock, ‘Slavery as a Political Metaphor in Scotland and Ireland in the Age of Burns’, in Sharon Alker, Leith Davis and H.F Nelson (eds), Robert Burns and Transatlantic Culture (London, 2012), pp. 19–30.  8 Thompson, EWC, p. 693.  9 Michael Morris, Scotland and the Caribbean, c.1740–1833: Atlantic Archipelagos (London, 2015), pp. 110, 126, 185; C.L. Innes, A History of Black and Asian Writing in Britain, 1700– 2000 (Cambridge, 2002), p. 56; Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984), p. 218. 10 See, for example, Philip Ziegler, Addington: A Life of Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth (London, 1965); Elizabeth Longford, Wellington: Pillar of State (London, 1972); Wendy Hinde, Castlereagh (London, 1981); John Bew, Castlereagh: From Enlightenment to Tyranny (London, 2011). 11 Thompson, EWC, p. 486. 12 Stanhope, Cato Street Conspiracy, pp. 7, 28, 146. 13 Look and Learn, No. 546, 1 July 1972, pp. 44–5. We are grateful to Lawrence Hayworth, Managing Director of Look and Learn, for providing a copy of this article. 14 R.K. Webb, Modern England from the Eighteenth Century to the Present (London, 1969), p. 162; Edward Vallance, A Radical History of Britain: Visionaries, Rebels and Revolutionaries (London, 2009); David Horspool, The English Rebel: One Thousand Years of Troublemaking from the Normans to the Nineties (London, 2010).

16

The Cato Street Conspiracy

15 Socialist Worker, No. 2043, Sat. 24 Mar. 2007; Lindsay German and John Rees, A People’s History of London (London, 2012), pp. 103–4; Donny Gluckstein, ‘Classical Marxism and the Question of Reformism’, International Socialism: A Quarterly Review of Socialist Theory, No. 143 (Summer 2014). Within the same self-consciously revolutionary Marxist stable, Chris Harman writes Cato Street out of his A People’s History of the World (London, 1999). 16 J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1796–1821 (Oxford, 1982), pp. 305–7, 347–51; McCalman, Radical Underworld; James A. Epstein, Radical Expression: Political Language, Ritual, and Symbol in England, 1790–1850 (Oxford, 1994); Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1822 (Oxford, 1994), p. 66. 17 David Andress, The Savage Storm: Britain on the Brink in the Age of Napoleon (London, 2012), p. 377; Adam Zamoyski, Phantom Terror: The Threat of Revolution and the Repression of Liberty, 1789–1848 (London, 2014), p. 234. 18 Roger Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience, 1795–1803 (Gloucester, 1983). 19 TNA, HO 42/199, fols 129, 381, 469, 513r. 20 TNA, HO 42/199, fol. 394. 21 Chase, 1820, passim; Gardner, Poetry, passim. 22 TNA, HO 42/199, fol. 513. 23 Edwards reported that up to seventy were present at a meeting at the start of December, falling to 38 at a meeting on 22 December. By February 1820, he was reporting on around two dozen attenders at the meetings. TNA, HO 42/199, fols 542–4, 567. 24 TNA, HO 44/4, fol. 100; HO 42/199, fol. 626. 25 TNA, HO 44/4, fol. 346–9. 26 TNA, HO 42/199, fols 580, 604. 27 TNA, HO 42/199, fols 605, 613, 620. 28 Johnson, Regency Radical, p. 95. 29 Alan Smith, ‘The Cato Street Conspiracy’, History Today, 12:3 (December 1953), 846–52, www.historytoday.com (accessed 6 June 2018). 30 This concept emerged among nineteenth-century European anarchists, for which see Richard Jensen, ‘Daggers, Rifles and Dynamite: Anarchist Terrorism in Nineteenth Century Europe’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 16:1 (2004), 116–53; Richard Jensen, ‘The International Campaign against Anarchist Terrorism, 1880–1930s’, Terrorism and Political Violence, 21:1 (2009), 89–109; Ethan Bueno de Mesquita and Eric S. Dickson, ‘The Propaganda of the Deed: Terrorism, Counterterrorism, and Mobilization’, American Journal of Political Science, 51:2 (2007), 364–81. 31 An Phoblacht, Thurs. 17 Oct. 1984, online version of IRA statement at www.anphoblacht.com/contents/5460 (accessed 27 Nov. 2018); B.W.C. Bamford, ‘The Role and Effectiveness of Intelligence in Northern Ireland’, Intelligence and National Security, 20:4 (2005), 581–607. On the difficulties of using the surviving archives to assess a 1918 plot to assassinate the British cabinet, see www.theirishstory.com/2018/09/17/ deliberate-amnesia-the-irish-volunteers-plan-to-assassinate-the-british-cabinet1918/#.W_6QrIv7SM8 (accessed 28 Nov. 2018). 32 TNA, HO 44/4, fols 9, 12, 14–18. 33 Chase, 1820, p. 80. 34 The ‘Wooler note’ identifies the White Hart in Bishopsgate Street. On 22 February,



Introduction 17

George Edwards, informed the Home Office that around twenty men would assemble at either Mr Hazard’s in Queen Street or a ‘house’ in Cato Street. He also claimed that another group would meet at the house of Mr Cook at the back of the Antelope public house in Holywell Lane in Shoreditch, and another would ‘Meet over the water’ to set fire to a ‘large Oil Warehouse’ near Horsleydown in Southwark. HO 42/199, fol. 634. 35 Seán Bagnall, ‘The Fenian Rising in Dublin, 1867’, Dublin Historical Record, 70:2 (Autumn/Winter 2017), 214–23, at 221; Eva Ó Cathaoir, Soldiers of Liberty: A Study of Fenianism, 1858–1908 (Dublin, 2018). 36 Jimmy Wren, The GPO Garrison Easter Week 1916: A Biographical Dictionary (Dublin, 2015), p. 384. Thanks to Professor Fearghal McGarry for this reference. 37 Fearghal McGarry, ‘Revolution, 1916–1923’, in Thomas Bartlett (ed.), The Cambridge History of Ireland: Volume IV: 1880 to the Present (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 276–7. The Gaelic form of the Irish army’s official name is used here to distinguish it from the terrorist group which used the English-language form (i.e. Irish Republican Army) during the Troubles between 1969 and 1994. 38 Niccolò Machiavelli, On Conspiracies (London, 2017), pp. 5–6, 8. 39 TNA, HO 42/199, fol. 613. 40 On the concept of martyrdom in connection with a mid-nineteenth-century American insurrectionary plot see, for example, Charles Joyner, ‘“Guilt of Holiest Crime”. The Passion of John Brown’, in Paul Finkelman (ed.), His Soul Goes Marching On: Responses to John Brown and the Harpers Ferry Raid (Charlottesville, VA, 1995), pp. 296–334. For an Irish context, see Mark McCarthy, ‘Making Irish Martyrs: The Impact and Legacy of the Execution of the Leaders of the Easter Rising, 1916’, in Quentin Outram and Keith Laybourn (eds), Secular Martyrdom in Britain and Ireland: From Peterloo to the Present (Basingstoke, 2018), pp. 165–202. 41 Chase, 1820, p. 72. 42 TNA, HO 42/199, fol. 514v. 43 TNA, HO 42/199, fol. 612; HO 44/4, fol. 277.

18

The Cato Street Conspiracy

1 When did they know? The cabinet, informers and Cato Street Richard A. Gaunt

When the Cato Street conspirators were apprehended in a hayloft on the evening of Wednesday 23 February 1820, Lord Liverpool’s cabinet were fully aware of the plot. How and when they acquired their knowledge is the subject of this chapter. It is well known that three people warned the ministers, in the days preceding the dinner, of a plot to assassinate the cabinet. However, the emphasis on which warning was taken most seriously, and at which point in time, by different members of the cabinet, varies between accounts. This chapter explores these differences in emphasis, concentrating on those given by Dudley Ryder, first Earl of Harrowby, Lord President of the Council, at whose house in Grosvenor Square the cabinet was scheduled to dine, Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, the Master-General of the Ordnance, and Henry Addington, first Viscount Sidmouth, the Home Secretary. In doing so, it explores an issue which has never been addressed in the published literature on the subject. Some of the differences in emphasis are explained by the imperfect recollections of memory, but they also suggest the differing status, authority and knowledge of members of the cabinet and their sources of intelligence. In a period when spies and agents provocateurs were a common resource for a government worried by extreme forms of popular radicalism, the nature and source of evidence was a matter of practical concern. By comparing the accounts – and subsequent fates – of the three men who conveyed information relating to the plot, Thomas Hiden and Thomas Dwyer (unpaid informers) and George Edwards (a Home Office informant and probable agent provocateur), this chapter feeds into wider debates about the nature of surveillance and intelligence-gathering in a period of postwar radical discontent.1



When did they know? 19

Lord Harrowby’s account is well known because it is the one which he gave in court, contemporaneously, during the trials of the conspirators. Harrowby testified that, on Tuesday 22 February, about 2.00 p.m., he was ‘riding in the Park without a servant’, when he was approached by a man near Grosvenor Gate who wished to pass a letter to Lord Castlereagh ‘which was of considerable importance, both to his Lordship and to myself’. Harrowby had some conversation with the man and, after establishing that the letter contained neither his name nor address, obtained a card from him (which he produced in court). Harrowby then rode on to a scheduled meeting of the Privy Council at Carlton House.2 The letter was not treated like intercepted radical correspondence and opened immediately, but forwarded to Castlereagh at the Foreign Office. He received it about 4.00 p.m. and confirmed its contents: ‘The plan is laid to take your lives … these Villings are Gooin to Enter into the House with great things they have made of gunpowder … Your Bigest inemy is thassellwood.’3 The following morning, Harrowby met the man again, by appointment, ‘among the young plantations in the ring in Hyde Park’. This was a private place, which Harrowby chose in order to calm the man’s nerves at being seen in his company.4 Harrowby’s informant was Thomas Hiden, a 33-year-old dairyman living at Manchester Mews in Marylebone. He had been initiated into the conspiracy by the tailor James Wilson, whom he had first met about eight months previously at the shoemakers’ club. Initially, Hiden refused to give up Wilson’s name, stating under deposition after the plotters had been arrested that ‘a man whose name [he] does not know, but who lives in a cottage near Lord’s Cricket Ground’ had met him in the street and told him of the conspiracy. About 4.30 p.m. on 23 February, he met the same man again in Manchester Street for about three-quarters of an hour and discovered more about the plot. At around 7.00 p.m., Hiden met William Davidson at the Horse and Groom but, using his dairyman duties as cover, evaded participation in the events of the evening.5 Hiden’s intervention was described by Wilkinson, the contemporary historian of the conspiracy, as ‘next to a miracle’, and one which could ‘only be attributed to [his] determination and perseverance’. Likewise, William Garrow, summing up for the prosecution in the trial of Tidd and Davidson, described Hiden’s evidence as ‘the most important of any that had been given to the Court, because the conspiracy had been communicated to him by one of the parties’. Hiden had ‘pretended to show a readiness to join the conspirators’, only because of the ‘threat held out that any man who did not join would be put to death’.6 The second piece of intelligence came from an unemployed Irish bricklayer, Thomas Dwyer, who was in the service of Elmore’s livery stables in John Street at the time of the conspiracy. Dwyer, who lived at 15 Gee’s Court, Oxford Street, with his wife and three children, was introduced to the conspirators by Davidson, whom he had met only recently. Thistlewood, whom Dwyer met on 9 February, seems to have regarded him as a useful recruiting sergeant for the community of Irish ­labourers living in Gee’s Court.7

20

The Cato Street Conspiracy

On 22 February, Dwyer wrote to Sidmouth at his London townhouse, informing him that he had ‘got it in My power to Have a Very Serious Communication … respecting a Conspiracy against the Government and State’. The following morning, Dwyer was in Fox Court, Gray’s Inn Lane, being initiated into the conspiracy, before returning home around midday.8 At 2.15 p.m. ‘an Irish labourer’ was seen in Berkeley Square. On recognising a former employer, Major James of the Horse Guards, ‘passing through’ the Square, the labourer told him that ‘the Ministers are all to be Murdered tonight’. This was received by the Major ‘as the casual Expression of a Drunken Man’ but he told Dwyer to go to Sidmouth’s office with any information he possessed.9 Dwyer was true to his word, arriving at the Home Office ‘in great agitation’ around 3.00 p.m., whilst the Major reported their exchange to Mr Coleman of the War Office between 6.00 and 7.00 p.m. Dwyer knew the Major, having worked on his house at Gloucester Place, New Road, but had initially gone to the home of Lord Bathurst, the Colonial Secretary, where he had been turned away because he was ‘a labouring man and not well dressed’.10 During the trials, Dwyer observed: I have lived fifteen years in the parish of Marylebone, with a good character, and yet all of a sudden a band of traitors intrusted me with their traitorous designs. I told them that it was a hard thing to inveigle men into a scheme like theirs, and doubted whether I should be able to accomplish it.11

The final piece of intelligence came from George Edwards, a moderately successful artist and plaster-of-Paris modeller. Sir Herbert Taylor, the Private Secretary to Queen Charlotte, had come across Edwards in Eton. Taylor, who was based with the Royal Household at Windsor Castle, appears to have patronised Edwards’s modelling studio. In January 1818, he recommended him to the Home Office as a man who had knowledge of the leading Spencean radicals and who was ‘willing to disclose all he knows and to assist in discovering more’. Edwards operated out of premises at 166 Fleet Street (close to the Law Officers at Lincoln’s Inn), and, by the time of the conspiracy, was acting as aide-de-camp to Thistlewood.12 Edwards’s role as an agent provocateur, rather than a mere informer, was the subject of keen debate after the conspiracy was revealed. Though Edwards’s name was constantly raised in court during the trials, he never gave testimony from the witness box and evaded all subsequent attempts to indict him for high treason.13 It was Edwards who had first drawn Thistlewood’s attention to the notice advertising the cabinet dinner, which was published in the New Times on the morning of 22 February.14 The newspaper was under the direction of the ultra-loyalist Dr John Stoddart and the notice focused the conspirators’ minds on an immediate target, at a time when lack of funds and progress threatened to divide them.15 Harrowby’s butler, John Baker, later testified that dinner invitations had been issued to cabinet



When did they know? 21

members three or four days prior to the 23rd. Had it taken place, it would have been the first cabinet dinner during the reign of George IV.16 Having laid his trap on the morning of the 22nd, Edwards wrote to Henry Hobhouse, Under-Secretary of State at the Home Office, at 3.00 p.m. the same day, informing him of a ‘foul and Diabolical Conspiracy’ to murder the cabinet at half-past eight the following evening.17 Within 36 hours, nine men had been captured (Bradburn, Cooper, Davidson, Gilchrist, Ings, Monument, Strange, Tidd, and Wilson), the Bow Street officer Richard Smithers had been killed in the course of his duty, and Thistlewood, the man who killed him, was lodging in a safe-house in Little Moorfields provided by Edwards, at which he was subsequently arrested and removed for trial. Little wonder that, a few days later, Taylor expressed his ‘great Satisfaction’ that ‘his friend’ had ‘proved so steady and useful on this last important occasion’.18 In the space of a day, between 2.00 p.m. on Tuesday 22 and 3.00 p.m. on Wednesday 23 February, three sources had independently communicated details of the conspiracy to three different individuals connected with the government. Whom did the authorities believe? Some interesting reflections on this subject emerge from Wellington’s retrospective account of the conspiracy, during a conversation at Walmer Castle on 2 November 1838. There is, necessarily, a problem with evidence given almost two decades after the events they describe. However, this is partially compensated for by Wellington’s well-known, and widely testified, reputation for accurate recall, on a whole range of subjects. Wellington’s reflections were written down at the time and, many years later, formed the basis for two published accounts, the authors of which were father and daughter: Sir John Fox Burgoyne, a distinguished military officer, and Georgiana, Lady de Ros.19 There is little doubt where the emphasis lies in Wellington’s account. Though the ‘first intimation of a conspiracy was received some months before the Cato Street attack, from a young sculptor employed at Windsor’, Sidmouth was said to have paid ‘little attention … to this man’s story’. He was equally unmoved by the testimony of ‘a person who was a kind of foreman to a set of Irish bricklayers’. Having thus dismissed, by report, the information of Edwards and Dwyer, all that remained was the intelligence received from Hiden. Lady de Ros’s account is largely faithful to the chronology stated by Harrowby in court, but her father’s version adds a level of complexity by implying that the two men had their first encounter ‘about a week before the day fixed for the Cabinet dinner’. As we have seen, the invitations for that dinner were issued only three or four days previously and it was fastened upon as a target only the day before it was due to take place, when Edwards drew Thistlewood’s attention to it.20 According to Burgoyne, at their first encounter, Hiden – who was described as ‘a man of respectable appearance’ – was dismissed by Harrowby, as he thought his approach ‘to be a mere preamble to some begging imposture’. A second encounter

22

The Cato Street Conspiracy

occurred ‘a day or two afterwards, at about the same time and place’. At this meeting, ‘Harrowby was induced to appoint an hour next morning to receive’ Hiden, but took the letter from him intended for Castlereagh, which Harrowby ‘deemed … of sufficient importance to mention … at a Cabinet Council which happened to meet the same afternoon’. With the exception of Wellington and Bathurst, who had ‘heard rumours from various quarters, of secret meetings for some dangerous object’, ministers were said to have thought the letter ‘unworthy of serious notice’. However, the Duke prevailed in having the matter referred to the Bow Street magistrates, who proceeded to communicate with Hiden ‘on promise of personal safety and reward’.21 Though there are good reasons for scepticism about the particulars of Burgoyne’s account, the precise date and time of Hiden’s first approach to Harrowby was a matter of some contemporary interest. In court, Hiden was asked when he had first approached Harrowby: ‘“I am not able to say”. “The 23rd was Wednesday; was it the Saturday, Sunday, or Monday, or Tuesday?” – “I do not know what day it was; I cannot state that exactly”.’ Under cross-examination, Hiden stated that he had approached Harrowby because ‘“I could not see Lord Castlereagh … I had not called, but had walked before [his] house”.’22 In his history of the conspiracy, Wilkinson relates some further preliminaries to the meeting between Hiden and Harrowby, though he clearly misdates them, stating that they happened on the morning of the 23rd rather than the 22nd of February. According to this account, Hiden approached Harrowby’s house between 11.00 a.m. and 12 noon, inquiring from the porter if Harrowby was at home. ‘The man appeared very anxious to see [him], but the porter did not give him any hopes.’ After a frustrating exchange, Hiden observed ‘that if he did not see [Harrowby], the porter would not be sitting in his chair in the hall to-morrow’ – an observation which ‘astonished the porter, and induced him to believe that the man really had something of a serious and alarming nature to communicate’. The obliging porter then not only told Hiden the area of the park where Harrowby was riding but ‘described his groom and the livery he wore’. After locating horse and rider and talking with the groom, Hiden spoke to Harrowby, presenting him with the letter for Castlereagh ‘which the earl opened and read’. Thus, by this additional account, not only do we have Harrowby riding with a groom, rather than alone, but breaching an etiquette he took very seriously by opening a letter intended for Castlereagh.23 Wilkinson’s account can be refuted by further evidence from Wellington. In November 1831, Lord Clanwilliam recorded a long conversation with the Duke about the conspiracy in which the latter observed that ‘at first they would not open the letter in Lord Castlereagh’s absence. However, sure enough, the letter announced the intention to attack.’24 Though these internal contradictions may be diverting, rather than illuminating, it demonstrates how Hiden’s testimony, which was extolled by a range of authorities, was not without its difficulties, both at the time and retrospectively.



When did they know? 23

This impression is reinforced by the evidence of the Treasury Solicitor, George Maule, who examined Hiden, ‘with all the Strictness in my power’, in advance of the trials. ‘I have not the least doubt that he is acquainted with much more than he is willing to communicate’, Maule informed Hobhouse: and that his terrors [at being put on the witness stand] do not altogether arise from what he apprehends but partly lest he should be obliged to disclose all that he knows – I got from him so much yesterday as to make it clear that much more might be imparted if [he] was inclined.25

However, in all the accounts based upon Wellington’s recollection, it is Hiden’s intervention with Harrowby which is said to have convinced ministers of the immediate threat to their lives. A meeting of the cabinet took place during the evening of 22 February at Fife House, Lord Liverpool’s London townhouse. Here, Wellington outlined detailed counter-measures for meeting the conspiracy. These are related in both versions of his remarks although, perhaps understandably, it is Burgoyne’s, the account of an ex-soldier, which is particularly illuminating.26 It was Wellington’s recommendation that the cabinet dinner should go ahead as planned. The Duke proposed that ‘twenty picked men of the Foot Guards, and a few of the most active Bow Street officers’ should be concealed in the garrets of 39 Grosvenor Square the night before the dinner. The following day, up to two hundred men from Portman Street barracks were to be put on standby, together with a squadron of 1st Life Guards in Hyde Park barracks, on the pretence of escorting the King to the theatre around 7.00 p.m. During the early evening, ‘a couple of [Bow Street] officers, in plain clothes and well mounted, were to ride about the neighbourhood of Grosvenor Square as if returning from the Park’. At the approach of the conspirators, they were to fetch the soldiers, those from Portman Street creating a cordon in front of the house and the Life Guards surrounding the south side of the square, ‘one party detaching men round by Audley Street, and the others meeting them by Charles Street’. Meanwhile, inside the house the dining room was to be lit as normal. Following the second course, the servants were to shutter the windows and the ministers, who were all to come armed with pistols in their ministerial boxes, would move ‘by the back stairs, up to the drawing-room’, the front stairs having been blocked up at the first landing and barricaded with heavy furniture, whilst the Foot Guards would emerge from the garrets and take up their position in the entrance hall. ‘Such was the Duke’s scheme’, Burgoyne noted, ‘and, had it been carried out, there can be no doubt that every one of the gang must have been killed or captured’. One cannot help thinking that, rather like Winston Churchill at the Siege of Sidney Street in January 1911, Wellington would have relished commanding the ‘Battle of Cato Street’ in February 1820.27 We know that Castlereagh travelled with a pair of loaded pistols during this period, as did Sidmouth ‘when he drove himself late at night and in an open carriage

24

The Cato Street Conspiracy

from the centre of London to his home in Richmond Park’. These were sensible precautions in an age before cabinet ministers had their own security detail. However, ‘the rest of the cabinet having no military vocation’, declined Wellington’s plan as too dangerous – a fact which clearly rankled with the Duke and helps to explain the frequency with which he recounted the story to his acolytes in after years.28 The cabinet’s reasons for caution were well explained by Castlereagh, in a letter to his brother at the time: as [it] would have involved in point of prudence the necessity of some preparations for defence which could not be managed without exciting observation, we thought it better to stay away from the festive board, and not to suffer it to go to single combat between Thistlewood and Marshal Liverpool.29

Nevertheless, whilst arrangements were made to intercept the conspirators before they reached Harrowby’s dining room, the pretence of holding a dinner was maintained to the very last moment. Lady de Ros recalled that her uncle, Bathurst, got dressed for dinner and called his carriage, which ‘remained some time at the door’. All the ministers acted in the same way; no one beyond the cabinet was let into the secret, including family and friends. Harrowby’s son Lord Sandon went to dine at Almack’s, completely oblivious of the danger to his parents, as did Wellington’s confidante, Harriet Arbuthnot. Lady Harrowby was persuaded to dine with her daughters at the Duchess of Beaufort’s while Harrowby was with the Liverpools and Lady Erne at Fife House.30 Some time between 7.00 p.m. and 8.00 p.m., Harrowby wrote to his servants cancelling the dinner. On receiving the news, his chef is supposed to have torn off his cap and ‘trampled it under foot in a rage’.31 By emphasising the evidence provided by Hiden, rather than that procured from Edwards, Wellington’s account differed materially from those at the centre of the intelligence network. Central among them were Sidmouth and Henry Hobhouse. The attitudes of the former can be gleaned from Pellew’s biography which, in the author’s words, ‘comprises the substance of Lord Sidmouth’s own reminiscences on the subject, as related to the author in numerous conversations’ and corroborated by reference to Sidmouth’s papers and ‘the recollection of the survivors’. However, given that it was not published until 1847, it stands in a similar position to Wellington’s retrospective accounts, as relayed to Burgoyne and Lady de Ros in 1838. More useful is Hobhouse’s diary, which was written contemporaneously and published only much later.32 Sidmouth and Hobhouse placed their emphasis on the original warning given by Edwards, which Hiden’s letter and Dwyer’s interview subsequently helped to corroborate. Hobhouse noted that Dwyer’s information ‘corresponded precisely with the facts antecedently ascertained’ whilst Pellew observed, somewhat caustically, that Hiden’s letter:



When did they know? 25 only conveyed the same intelligence to the government which had previously become known to them through other channels: his testimony, however, was found extremely useful in corroborating that of Edwards, whose revelations were proved by the sequel to have been, in the main, correct.33

Both Sidmouth and Hobhouse were in a better position to know the full picture. As Michael Brock commented in 1974: This difference of emphasis is significant in that Edwards was a police spy whereas the other two were not. Thus the danger to the cabinet would have been far greater by the Wellington account than by that of the Home Office. According to Wellington the cabinet might never have received an effective warning at all. According to the Home Office the regular reports from the spy Edwards were enough in themselves to warn the ministers.34

It is well known that Thistlewood had been tried for high treason in June 1817 for his involvement in the Spa Fields riots and that, after Dr Watson was acquitted, the charges against him were dropped. The prosecution case had rested almost entirely on the evidence of the government agent, John Castle. It was a lesson which the government quickly learned. The Special Commission which tried the Pentrich rebels at Derby in October 1817 was conducted in such a way as to prevent ‘Oliver the Spy’ from being called to the stand.35 The same motivations applied now. Obtaining evidence untainted by the public revulsion against spies and informers was crucial to the successful prosecution of the conspirators. Nor was this knowledge confined to the authorities. After Thistlewood’s arrest, he attempted to have his fellow-conspirator John Monument implicate Edwards but Monument ‘asked how I could tell such a falsehood when he knew I had never seen the man’. In court, Harrowby was also pressed on whether he knew Edwards and at what point he had been aware of a threat to the cabinet. Harrowby denied any knowledge of Edwards and was vague as to when he had become aware of a threat: ‘for some time we had had reason to suspect that some intention of a similar nature existed’.36 It was Sidmouth – described by George IV as ‘The Duke of Wellington upon home service’ – who was fully cognisant of events, with other members of the cabinet being informed only as the need arose.37 Matters became more urgent in December 1819, when ministers began to become aware that they were being watched by Thistlewood and his associates and an attempted attack on a cabinet dinner at Lord Westmorland’s house in Grosvenor Square was prevented by the presence of the police.38 Castlereagh congratulated his colleagues, in glowing terms, for their ability to keep their calm, despite knowing that their lives were in danger: If you consider that we ministers have been for months the deliberate objects of these desperate concerts, planning our destruction, sometimes collectively, sometimes in detail, but always intent upon the project, and with our own complete knowledge, you

26

The Cato Street Conspiracy will allow that we are tolerably cool troops, and that we have not manoeuvred amiss to bring it to a final catastrophe.39

To succeed in a court of law, it was necessary to generate such evidence as to make conviction a certainty. Only keeping calm allowed ministers to do this. That is why they decided against Wellington’s plan of armed resistance, which ‘involved consequences much too serious to be rashly encountered’, preferring instead to let the plot ‘proceed unmolested, to the verge of execution, and then to arrest the conspirators, under circumstances which could leave no reasonable doubt of their guilty intentions’. It is also why there was a serious debate, at the time, as to whether to try Thistlewood for the murder of Smithers rather than for high treason.40 As Wellington later reportedly observed: The public mind had been so travaillé about plots, and rumours of plots, and there was so much disaffection astir, that it was very difficult to persuade people that there really was a plot of such atrocity; and the Duke thinks that had Smithers not been shot, it would have been difficult to convict any of the conspirators.41

Fortunately for ministers, the prosecution of the conspirators depended not only on the evidence of Hiden, Dwyer, and Monument (who turned King’s evidence) but on the shoemaker Robert Adams, who became a key prosecution witness. Through the evidence of these ‘approvers’ – one-time conspirators who informed on their former colleagues – five Cato Street conspirators were successfully tried and executed, and five others transported for life. As John Stanhope observed, there was a wide difference in understanding, so far as jurors were concerned, between the evidence of an informer, an approver and an agent provocateur, and ‘a repentant conspirator was less obnoxious than a professional spy’. The government’s dependence on these men is illustrated by George Maule’s determination not to cross-examine Hiden too hard, before the trials commenced, ‘lest we should make him our Enemy’.42 In April 1820, Wellington told Harriet Arbuthnot that: one of the Cato Street conspirators … has since his release confessed all the plot; and his evidence tallies in a most remarkable manner with the story of Edwards the informer; but, in consequence of the gross mismanagement of the Home Department, his evidence cannot be used in the trial as his name is not down among the witnesses.

The issue might have been fatal for the prosecution case, had the government not already secured their ‘approvers’, but Abel Hall, whose apparent mishandling by the Home Office was the subject of Wellington’s remarks, went on to provide ‘weekly secret reports on the activities of metropolitan radicals’ well into the 1830s.43 Hall proved to be a valuable resource in the government’s battle to procure intelligence from inside London’s radical networks, but, as Taylor quickly recognised, Edwards’s usefulness as an informer was now at an end. Although he expressed a



When did they know? 27

willingness to provide Edwards with sanctuary in the aftermath of the conspiracy, he thought it far better that his protégé should go somewhere where he would not be recognised.44 On 4 May 1820, under his newly assumed pseudonym, George E. Parker, Edwards wrote to the Home Office from Guernsey. The following February, he travelled out to the Cape Colony on the Thames. Here, with his wife and four children, he established himself in his former profession as a modeller, being named in various Cape directories during the late 1830s. He died, at the age of 56, on 30 November 1843.45 Edwards had got off lightly, because his status as a government informer meant that he had not been called to give evidence.46 It was far different for Dwyer and Hiden, both of whom were central to the prosecution case. The personal consequences for Dwyer were summarised in a long letter he wrote to Sidmouth on 11 June 1820, detailing ‘the Dangerous Situation that me and my family Stands in at present’. Dwyer observed that he had been ‘Continually abused by the Publick Ever Since The True Bills were found [and] my name was Made Mention of in the Lists of Witnesses’. Dwyer observed that he had been told by Robert Baker, the Marlborough Street magistrate before whom he had sworn his original statement, ‘that my name would Not be made mention of But instead of that it has Been Stated in Bells Weekly Messenger as the real informer’. Although it was six weeks since the condemned men had been executed for high treason, Dwyer was ‘Fritefull of Being assinated Every Moment by Some of Their friends or Some of Those Disafected people that Surounds This Metropolis’.47 Dwyer had good reason for alarm. His character had been questioned on the stand and he was accused of extorting money from men for committing ‘unnatural offences’.48 Nor were Dwyer’s fears of retribution unfounded. On 26 August 1820, Thomas Wakley, the surgeon who later founded The Lancet, was violently assaulted and had his house burned down, on the unfounded suspicion that he had been ‘the person who decapitated Thistlewood and his deluded companions’ at their execution at Newgate on 1 May.49 Whether or not Dwyer received the salvation he sought at Sidmouth’s hands can only be guessed, for he disappears from the documentary record at this point. We know that he was paid £2 10s in witness expenses for attending the trials. It has been conjectured that it was Dwyer, rather than Hiden, whose ‘ambition was fully gratified by a hackney coach licence, then technically termed “a pair of plates”’, as reported by Pellew. If this was the case, then it was not the last occasion upon which Hiden was the victim of misidentification.50 Hiden stood in a comparable situation to Dwyer and, as we have seen, withheld Wilson’s name as long as possible for fear of reprisal. However, he was particularly identifiable because his portrait had been published in Wilkinson’s account of the conspiracy. At the end of March 1820, the Assistant Treasury Solicitor urged Hobhouse to give Hiden ‘some more Satisfactory assurance than I have been able to do [regarding his safety]; he does not like to be taken up & he is averse to going

28

The Cato Street Conspiracy

into the Country’.51 Hiden thought it prudent to change his name after the trials but, like George ‘Edwards’ Parker, was not especially inventive, assuming the name Thomas ‘Haydon’ Green. It was under this identity that, on 22 January 1821, he was admitted into the Board of Stamps at Somerset House as a rolling press printer, with a salary of £85 a year. The warrant appointing him was signed by Liverpool and Vansittart (the Chancellor of the Exchequer) but was clearly upon the recommendation of Lord Harrowby.52 Green’s role provided him with secure, remunerative, work, but his ambitions clearly went higher. In February 1823, he twice approached the Foreign Secretary, George Canning, for a position as a King’s Messenger, reminding him that ‘I ham the man that has given my services to save your life & family Sir not only yours but the Cabinet & Government’. Green expressed a reluctance to approach Harrowby again – ‘his Lordship will think me ungrateful … as [he] gave me my present place’ – but maintained that he had been ‘Deprived of Dowing any thing in business to help soport my family’. Canning recommended Green for a small pension but nothing more.53 In the event, Green served 31 years in the Board of Stamps, retiring as a stamper, on a salary of £100 per annum, with a pension of £66 13s 4d, on 18 June 1852.54 He lived in Walham Green, Fulham, for some years afterwards, before moving to Whitton in Middlesex in 1865. Though Hiden had a wife and family at the time of the conspiracy; by 1868, as Green, he had remarried. His new wife clearly knew all about her husband’s past. In Whitton, the couple lived at 13 Kyezor Place as tenants of Louis Kyezor, a Frankfurt-born Jew popularly known as the ‘King of Whitton’ for his extensive property interests and public-spiritedness.55 Green and Kyezor were involved in a series of increasingly intemperate disagreements during the autumn of 1869 which led Kyezor to issue him with three months’ notice to quit. On the evening of Sunday 10 October, Green was seen cleaning and loading his flintlock cavalry pistols. Around 8.15 a.m. the next morning, dressed in a bob-tailed coat and brown trousers, he intercepted Kyezor in the street and shot him in the belly. Kyezor, who was 72, died fifteen hours later. Green went home to the bottom of his garden and shot himself through the heart: he died instantly. He was buried at Twickenham Cemetery the following Saturday without any church service, attended only by his wife. She died two months later ‘from dropsy, brought on by the shock’.56 What the newspapers called ‘The Whitton Tragedy’ became a matter of national interest when Frank William Agar, the licensee of the Cock tavern in Walham Green, testified at the coroner’s inquest into Kyezor’s death that Green was none other than George Edwards. The court had already had factually correct testimony from Mary Ann Elizabeth Green that her husband was Thomas Hiden, but, faced with a choice between a relative nonentity and a notorious agent provocateur, the newspapers ‘seized on the hearsay alternative proffered by a mere acquaint-



When did they know? 29

ance’ and related Agar’s words as fact. The error gained authority when Reverend Cobbett named Green as Edwards in his Memorials of Twickenham in 1872; the issue of Green’s identity was still a matter of debate a century later.57 For the second time in his life, Hiden’s portrait was in general circulation and his identity was a matter of serious conjecture.58 Neither Harrowby nor any of his cabinet colleagues from 1820 were alive to confirm it. We know that Hiden continued to be known to the Harrowby family, and that he had been seen by the 2nd Earl as late as 1862. Hiden’s connection with the family had been continued through Mrs Walden and her daughter Louisa, who had lodged with him. Mrs Walden was nurse to the future 3rd Earl, whilst Louisa Ewer became housekeeper at Sandon Hall, the family’s Staffordshire home. In 1884, Louisa told her employer: She remembered on one occasion when his mother had been to see them, that after she was gone, Mr Green came into the room in great excitement having recognised the carriage, saying ‘You’ve had a visit from Lord Harrowby! I know him very well. I have often been alone with him in his Drawing-room. He is a very good man!’

Their curiosity excited, the women asked Mr Sweet, a former servant of Lord Bute’s, who had also worked in the Stamp Office, if he knew him. Sweet recalled knowing a man they called ‘Jack in the Green … who told Lord Harrowby of the Cato Street Conspiracy’. According to Sweet, he ‘was a very excitable man’, a fact borne out by the evidence produced at the coroner’s inquest after Kyezor’s death. Mary Ann Green testified that her husband had ‘not been right’ since suffering a head injury in the summer of 1869; among other things, he had accused Kyezor of being ‘responsible for a person hanged at Newgate’.59 The fate of Thomas Hiden reminds us that some informers – especially the ‘accidental’ ones – live with the consequences of their actions, in unexpected ways, for the rest of their lives. For Lady Harrowby, writing in 1897, Green’s suicide was to be explained by the fact that he laboured ‘under the impression that he was always being closely watched’. It is not recorded when Lord Harrowby was informed.60 This chapter has demonstrated how the sources of government intelligence about the Cato Street Conspiracy were a matter of some controversy at the time they were received. In particular, the accounts based upon Wellington’s recollection of events offer a materially different interpretation of the cabinet’s level of awareness, and state of readiness, on the evening in question. However, Wellington viewed the situation almost exclusively as one of public order, maturing detailed plans for engaging the conspirators in battle on the evening in question. This contrasts with the more nuanced approach of Sidmouth. His responsibility as Home Secretary was to consider the consequences of any action, not only in terms of its subsequent effect on the legal prosecution of the conspirators but in sustaining the intelligence network of spies and informers upon which the preservation of domestic peace relied at this time. The fate of Hiden, Dwyer and Edwards demonstrates the long-term effect of such considerations upon the lives of government informers. In different ways, each

30

The Cato Street Conspiracy

of these men’s lives was affected through having helped to uncover ‘The Diabolical Cato-Street Plot’.61 Notes  1 Sue Wilkes, Regency Spies (Barnsley, 2015).  2 Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 166; T.J. Howell, A Complete Collection of State Trials, vol. 33 (London, 1826), col. 789.  3 TNA, HO 44/4, fols 34–6, Hiden to Castlereagh, 22 Feb. 1820 (original spelling); A. Aspinall (ed.), The Diary of Henry Hobhouse, 1820–1827 (London, 1947), p. 13.  4 The ring was a circle, surrounded with trees and forming a fashionable ride and promenade: Peter Cunningham, Handbook of London (London, 1850).  5 Wilkinson, Authentic History, pp. 163–5; Howell, Trials, cols 783-7; TNA, HO 44/4, fols 102–4, Hiden’s deposition, 24 Feb. 1820.  6 Wilkinson, Authentic History, pp. 17, 328.  7 Wilkinson, Authentic History, pp. 173–5.  8 TNA, HO 44/4, fols 37–9, Dwyer to Sidmouth, 22 Feb. 1820; Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 175.  9 TNA, HO 44/4, fols 275–6, Palmerston to Sidmouth, 27 Feb. 1820. Palmerston reported the incident took place in Grosvenor Square around midday, but James (n. 10) reported it as 2.15 p.m. in Berkeley Square. 10 TNA, HO 44/4, fols 277–8, Memorandum by Major James, 27 Feb. 1820; Aspinall, Hobhouse, p. 13; HO 44/4, fols 52–4, Dwyer’s statement, 23 Feb. 1820. Also see TNA, HO 44/6, fols 45-8, George Maule to Hobhouse, 13 April 1820. 11 Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 175. 12 Richmond Local Studies Library, W. McKeown, ‘Murder in Whitton and Conspiracy in Cato Street’ (unpublished typescript, 1985), pp. 4-6. Also see George Pellew, The Life and Correspondence of Henry Addington, First Viscount Sidmouth (London, 1847), vol. III, pp. 316–17; PRONI, D3044/F/4, Lord Clanwilliam’s diary, December 1824 – May 1832, entry for 16 Nov. 1831. The diary is closed to researchers but a transcript has been provided within the online catalogue: https://apps.proni.gov.uk/eCatNI_IE/SearchPage. aspx (accessed 21 Aug. 2018). 13 Parliamentary Debates, 2nd series, I, cols 54–63, 2 May 1820, for a motion by Alderman Wood. Also see TNA, HO 44/6, fol. 150, Wood to Sidmouth, 3 May 1820, and fol. 154, Wood to Sidmouth, 4 May 1820. 14 The New Times, 22 Feb. 1820, p. 3. In spite of Wellington’s belief that it was carried in The Morning Post, none of the other morning papers carried the notice: Seventh Duke of Wellington (editor), A Selection from the Private Correspondence of the First Duke of Wellington (London, 1952), p. 186, Wellington to Marianne Patterson, 27 Feb. 1820. 15 Chase, 1820, pp. 77–8. 16 Howell, Trials, col. 790. Harrowby had intended to hold a dinner on 9 February, but George III’s death on 29 Jan. 1820 changed those plans: Aspinall, Hobhouse, p. 13. 17 TNA, HO 42/199, fols 634–5, Edwards to Hobhouse, 22 Feb. 1820. Also see HO 44/4, fol. 48, Charles Bouchier to Hobhouse, 23 Feb. 1820.



When did they know? 31

18 TNA, HO 44/4, fol. 280, Taylor to Hobhouse, 27 Feb. 1820. 19 Mrs J.R. Swinton, A Sketch of the Life of Georgiana, Lady de Ros (London, 1893), pp. 160-6; Lieutenant General Lord de Ros, Memorials of the Tower of London (London, 1867), pp. 272–83. Also see Sandon Hall, Staffordshire, Harrowby Papers, vol. 288, Mary F. Harrowby (3rd Countess of Harrowby), ‘Account of the Cato Street Conspiracy, taken from Reminiscences of Lady de Ros, Recollections of Dudley 2nd Earl of Harrowby (1862), and other sources’ (24 Apr, 1897). My thanks to the Harrowby Manuscripts Trust (with kind permission of the Earl of Harrowby) for use of this material. 20 Swinton, Georgiana, pp. 160-3; de Ros, Memorials, pp. 232–3. 21 De Ros, Memorials, pp. 232–4. 22 Howell, Trials, cols 787–8; compare Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 165. 23 Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 17. Harrowby testified that he was ‘without a servant’ and had forwarded the letter (which is confirmed by Castlereagh’s endorsements upon the original): Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 166; Howell, Trials, col. 789; TNA, HO 44/4, fols 34–6, Hiden to Castlereagh, 22 Feb. 1820. 24 Lord Clanwilliam’s diary, 16 Nov. 1831. 25 TNA, HO 44/6, fols 25–6, Maule to Hobhouse, 12 Apr. 1820. Hiden did go further than in his original deposition, naming James Wilson: Howell, Trials, cols 783–7; TNA, HO 44/4, fols 102–4, Hiden’s deposition, 24 Feb. 1820. 26 Their accuracy is reinforced by contemporary evidence, which is cited below. 27 Swinton, Georgiana, pp. 163–5; de Ros, Memorials, pp. 234–5. 28 Philip Ziegler, Addington (London, 1965), p. 381; Wendy Hinde, Castlereagh (London, 1981), p. 255; Harrowby Papers, vol. 288, Note from Lady Salisbury’s Diary, 12 Sept. 1834; Harrowby Papers, vol. 288, ‘Account of the Cato Street Conspiracy’, p. 9, suggests that the Lord Chancellor, Eldon, supported Wellington’s plan. 29 PRONI, D3030/5814, Castlereagh to Stewart, 24 Feb. 1820; Sir Archibald Alison, Lives of Lord Castlereagh and Sir Charles Stewart, (London, 1861), vol. III, pp. 111–12. This evidence is to be preferred to that of de Ros, Memorials, p. 235, who stated that Castlereagh, alone among minsters, supported Wellington’s plan. 30 Swinton, Georgiana, pp. 165–6; Harrowby Papers, vol. 288, ‘Account of the Cato Street Conspiracy’, p. 11; Richard Edgcumbe (ed.), The Diary of Frances Lady Shelley (London, 1913), vol. II, pp. 98–101, Harriet Arbuthnot to Lady Shelley, 24 Feb. 1820; Norman Gash, Lord Liverpool (London, 1984), p. 154. 31 Harrowby Papers, vol. 288, ‘Account of the Cato Street Conspiracy’, pp. 13–14. 32 Pellew, Sidmouth, p. 320. 33 Aspinall, Hobhouse, pp. 13–14; Pellew, Sidmouth, p. 317. 34 Harrowby Papers, vol. 288, note by M.G. Brock, 11 Feb. 1974. 35 Richard A. Gaunt, ‘The Pentrich Rebellion: A Nottingham Affair?’, Midland History, 43:2 (2018), 208–28. 36 John Stanhope, The Cato Street Conspiracy (London, 1962), p. 113; Howell, Trials, col. 790. 37 Pellew, Sidmouth, p. 322. 38 Grosvenor Square was preferred by the conspirators because, unlike Downing Street, it was not a cul-de-sac: Pellew, Sidmouth, pp. 312–13; Aspinall, Hobhouse, p. 12. 39 PRONI, D3030/5814, Castlereagh to Stewart, 24 Feb. 1820; Alison, Lives, pp. 111–12.

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Similar sentiments were entertained by Harrowby and Wellington: Henry Reeve (ed.), The Greville Memoirs: A Journal of the Reigns of King George IV and King William IV (London, 1875), vol. I, pp. 26–7, 24 Feb. 1820; Wellington, Private Letters, p. 187, Wellington to Marianne Patterson, 27 Feb. 1820. 40 Pellew, Sidmouth, p. 314; Aspinall, Hobhouse, p. 16. 41 Lord Clanwilliam’s diary, 16 Nov. 1831. 42 Stanhope, Cato Street, p. 159; TNA, HO 44/6, fols 25–6, Maule to Hobhouse, 12 Apr. 1820. 43 Francis Bamford and the 7th Duke of Wellington (eds), The Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot, 1820–1832 (London, 1950), vol. I, p. 14; Chase, 1820, p. 139. 44 TNA, HO 44/4, fol. 280, Taylor to Hobhouse, 27 Feb. 1820. 45 TNA, HO 44/6, fol. 152, George Edwards to Hobhouse, 4 May 1820. His correspondence continued throughout the year: fols 206, 249, 257, 275, 287, 293, 315, 318; R.M. Healey, ‘George Edwards’, Oxford DNB online (accessed 22 Aug. 2018); South African Commercial Advertiser, 9 Dec. 1843, www.eggsa.org/newspapers/index.php/south-afri​ can-commercial-advertiser/153-sac-1843-oct-dec. (accessed 23 Aug. 2018). 46 Edwards’s life in the Cape was not without controversy: see Kirsten McKenzie, Imperial Underworld: An Escaped Convict and the Transformation of the British Colonial Order (Cambridge, 2016), pp. 84–7; Frank R. Bradlow, ‘A Sequel to the Cato Street Conspiracy, 1820’, Quarterly Bulletin of the South African Library, 23 (1969), pp. 109–17. 47 TNA, HO 44/6, fols 337–8, Dwyer to Sidmouth, 11 June 1820 (original spelling). 48 TNA, HO 44/6, fols 45–8, George Maule to Hobhouse, 13 Apr. 1820; Stanhope, Cato Street, p. 94. 49 S. Squire Sprigge, The Life and Times of Thomas Wakley (London, 1897), p. 46. 50 TNA, AO 3/1104, Treasury Solicitor Accounts, 1814–1829; Pellew, Sidmouth, p. 317; McKeown, ‘Murder in Whitton’, pp. 25–6. 51 TNA, HO 44/5, fol. 432, Bouchier to Hobhouse, 27 Mar. 1820; Wilkinson, History, between pp. 200 and 201. 52 TNA, Inland Revenue [IR] 49/17, 22 Nov. 1820 (letter), 10 Jan. 1821 (warrant); IR 49/18, Return of Staff (1821). 53 Edward J. Stapleton, Some Official Correspondence of George Canning (London, 1887), vol. I, pp. 108–9. Hiden was living at Cromwell Road, Brompton, at the time. 54 TNA, T 2, Treasury: Registers of Papers, Book 219, fol. 190. 55 Harold Pollins and Vic Rosewarne, Louis Kyezor: ‘The King of Whitton’ (Twickenham, 2002). 56 Pollins and Rosewarne, Kyezor, pp. 30–4; Western Daily Press, 19 October 1869; Aris’ Birmingham Gazette, 11 Dec. 1869. Hiden/Green would have turned 82 on 1 Nov. 57 McKeown, ‘Murder in Whitton’, p. 16. R.S. Cobbett, Memorials of Twickenham: Parochial and Topographical (London, 1872), p. 207; T.H.R. Cashmore, The Mystery of Thomas Haydon Green, the Whitton Murder and the Cato Street Conspiracy (Twickenham, 1972); Jan Bondeson, Murder Houses of London (London, 2014). 58 See The Illustrated Police News, 23 Oct. 1869, title-page. The newspaper had reported the event in its previous issue (16 Oct. 1869). 59 Harrowby Papers, vol. 288, ‘Recollections’, pp. 12–14; Cashmore, Mystery, p. 5; Pollins and Rosewarne, King of Whitton, p. 31.



When did they know? 33

60 Harrowby Papers, vol. 288, ‘Recollections’, p. 13. 61 Richard A. Gaunt, ‘The Diabolical Cato-Street Plot. The Cato Street Conspiracy, 1820’, The Historian, No. 141, (2019), 12–15.

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2 Joining up the dots: contingency, hindsight and the British insurrectionary tradition John Stevenson

Where does the Cato Street Conspiracy stand in the context of the radical and reform movements in the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland in the revolutionary era? Critically, it is the United Kingdom perspective which encourages a fundamental readjustment from the traditional British focus on relatively peaceful, constitutional progress and one which adopts a simple-minded division between ‘violent’ and ‘non-violent’ traditions and between ‘moral force’ and ‘physical force’ as discrete and binary opposites. Ireland offers an obvious and pertinent example of the complex interweaving of different strands of political activity and a readiness to embrace a violent, insurrectionary tradition which is honoured rather than denigrated. The anniversary of the Easter Rising in 2016 witnessed an extraordinarily thorough and many-sided historiographical debate on what was, in effect, a failed insurrectionary attempt. Although discussion in Ireland in 2016 openly confronted issues such as the death and destruction consequent upon embarking on a violent uprising in a major metropolis like Dublin, there remains an implicit sense of legitimacy or at least exculpation from the cause it served.1 In similar ways, countries such as the United States, France, Italy and other ‘new’ nations have celebrated a revolutionary or violent struggle to achieve independence, unification or ‘freedom’.2 France celebrates its revolution on an annual basis and its revolutionary, indeed insurrectionary, tradition is woven into the fabric of its self-image and historical narrative.3 The mainstream British equivalent, however, is a celebration of peaceful, constitutional progress founded, in large part, in opposition to the French Revolution of 1789 and the kind of violence and bloodshed with which it was associated.4 The bloody and tumultuous events of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries – plotting,



Joining up the dots 35

judicial murder, civil war, regicide, the deposition of kings and experimentation with republican government – were safely deposited behind the firewall of the ‘Glorious Revolution’. Even beyond the conservative ‘Whiggism’ of this interpretation, for many liberals and progressives the British parallel to the celebration of the storming of the Bastille or the erection of barricades was the story of ‘constitutional defiance’: the defence of a free press, the right of public assembly and the gradual extension of voting rights and trade union organisation.5 As Steve Poole has noted, ‘respectable radicals’ like Samuel Bamford welcomed the arrival of a more orderly and inclusive popular polity through the influence of such leaders as Cobbett, whose Register ‘directed his readers to the true cause of their sufferings – misgovernment; and its proper corrective – parliamentary reform’. Rioting and machine-breaking had lost their ‘ancient vogue’, thought Bamford, as protest had become more ‘systematic’.6 From this perspective, peaceful protest and constitutional pressure won out over direct action, wringing gradual concessions from a reluctant and often vengeful government. The insurrectionary activities of Despard, the Cato Street conspirators and the ‘physical force’ Chartists were effectively marginalised as the ‘losing side’ of history in much the same way as Catholic plots and Jacobite risings were shouldered aside in the narrative of the Protestant and Hanoverian regimes which overwhelmed them. The ‘heroes’ of reform were those who were perceived to have persevered in spite of persecution and repression while maintaining faith in peaceful proceedings, legitimate association and the power of free expression compared to the marginal role of what even E.P. Thompson called ‘foolhardy’ revolutionary conspiracies.7 But it was also Thompson who articulated clearly the dangers inherent in the teleological reading of history backwards through the perspectives of the liberal and labourist interpretations of history. Arguing that in the conditions pertaining at the end of the Napoleonic Wars ‘it might appear more surprising if men had not plotted revolutionary uprising than if they had’, he claimed radical history had been ill-served by the bias of ‘the men and women of Fabian persuasion’ who looked back upon the ‘early history of the Labour Movement’ in the light of the subsequent Reform Acts, and the growth of the TUC and Labour Party. This bias was supplemented by the ‘orthodox academic tradition’ which either ignored conspiracy and popular resistance or dismissed it as the work of ‘simpletons’ or ‘men tainted with criminal folly’.8 Thompson exaggerated somewhat, for even many conservative historians accepted there were near-run moments of danger; ‘bad years’ such as 1795, 1801, 1812, 1816, 1832, 1842 and 1848 when political and economic conditions mobilised discontent and put governments under intense pressure.9 The French Revolution had unleashed an unprecedented era in Britain in which unrest and violence appeared to lie very near the surface of politics and all too often broke out. It was impossible to ignore the treason trials of 1794; the huge demonstration which mobbed the King’s coach in October 1795; the Despard conspiracy; the assassination of a Prime Minister in May 1812, which was greeted with jubilation and

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bonfires in the manufacturing districts; or the Luddite outbreaks, which witnessed violence on an unprecedented scale. Indeed, the historians J.L. and B. Hammond, represented by Thompson as examplars of the ‘Fabian persuasion of labour history’, had scarcely minced their words in describing the resistance of the skilled labourers in the Luddite disturbances as having ‘all the elements of a mortal struggle’, a ‘class war’ in which the authorities deployed all the weapons at their disposal like a garrison ‘holding its own in the midst of a hostile people’. For the Hammonds, these last years of the Napoleonic Wars saw a fierce and bitter ‘civil war’ fought against the craft workers, and they had no doubt who had lost and who had won.10 Here was violence aplenty, an unprecedented wave of machine-breaking, food riots and political protest, with the Hanoverian state determined to defend itself with thousands of regular troops, the full range of civil powers and little compunction about enhancing them where necessary by suspending habeas corpus, restricting the press, creating new offences and casting its net wide in the use of charges of sedition and treason, and using spies and informers, some of whom at least seem to have acted as agents provocateurs.11 Even for some of the propertied classes, governments seemed to be stretching legality up to and beyond its limits, repressing legitimate political activity and expression and unforgivably luring the distressed poor into treason. Joseph Strutt, son of Richard Arkwright’s cotton spinner partner, wrote to his brother in 1817 after witnessing the execution of Jeremiah Brandreth and two of his associates for the participation in the Derbyshire rising: ‘Good God are these things to be suffered much longer in our once free and happy land.’12 Discontent with governments reached widely into the propertied classes in late Hanoverian Britain. Before the end of the Napoleonic Wars there was widespread discontent over military mismanagement, the Orders in Council, taxation and corruption. The postwar era threw up new economic and political challenges, not least the introduction of the Corn Law of 1815 and a deepening cleavage between the commercial classes and the unreformed House of Commons.13 But within this tumultuous period British reformers faced a dilemma as the Hanoverian state successfully beat off challenges to its authority and proved more than able to defend itself. As a result, British reformers and radicals had to be wary and found their options limited. In the era of Edwards the spy, the Six Acts and Peterloo it was little wonder that radicals like Cobbett and Bamford urged workmen to turn from machine-breaking and overt illegality to peaceful petitioning for political reform and the development of legal political and industrial organisations. There were clearly pragmatic reasons to desist from violence other than for those who were very determined or highly optimistic. In the British context it was not difficult to regard the advocacy of violent action as foolhardy, regrettable or dysfunctional. But the undercurrent of a threat to the established order could never be dismissed either by reformers or those who opposed them. As E.P. Thompson pointed out, for those who live through it, history is neither ‘early’ nor ‘late’, reformers and



Joining up the dots 37

radicals could not know the future and that their more far-reaching plans, such as universal suffrage or the ballot, would be frustrated for decades.14 They could not know that the Napoleonic Wars would end in military success for Britain rather than catastrophic and unprecedentedly expensive failure, bringing who knew what political repercussions. The rapid decline in Napoleon’s fortunes did not occur until 1812, and there were many still ready to make peace with him in 1813 and who opposed renewing war in 1815. Even after Napoleon’s defeat, economic and social discontent combined with the still powerful revolutionary currents of the era to produce continued uncertainty. The Luddites could not know what the Hammonds did a century later, that the struggle of the craft workers was doomed to long-term defeat, just as Cobbett could not know that the rural world of his boyhood was gone for good. Even with the defeat of the ‘Revolution Militant’, the revolutionary temper was still working its way through the body politic of Europe and the wider world, as the revolutions of 1820 and the next three decades were to prove. A historian writing from a rather different perspective to Thompson, Boyd Hilton, argues in his history of Britain from the end of the American War of Independence to the repeal of the Corn Laws that whatever else the period entailed it did so against a background in which many ‘were terrified’ of the ultra-radical, revolutionary tradition and the many manifestations of discontent it witnessed.15 Citing David Worrall, he argues that, in the eyes of the polite and commercial sections of society, the inhabitants of the exploding urban world of late Hanoverian Britain were increasingly ‘dangerous to know’.16 Hilton argues that historians who dismiss these fears as ‘establishment paranoia’ and see a steady progress to a mid-Victorian calm are relying too much on hindsight.17 It is the theme too of David Eastwood’s characterisation of the period after 1815 as the ‘age of uncertainty’ in which the ‘hegemonic significance’ of ‘reform’ and ‘improvement’ have been overdone. These, he argues, are the kind of teleological readings which ‘radically understate the extent to which the present state and future condition of Britain was the subject of profound contestation, at least until the 1850s, and underestimate the profound uncertainty, which was characteristic both of Britain’s political life and social conditions’. Early nineteenth-century Britain was ‘built across the fault lines opened up by the advent of revolutionary politics and convulsive economic growth’.18 As Carlyle had reminded his readers in 1839: ‘Has not the French Revolution been? Since the year 1789, there is now a halfa-century completed and the French Revolution is still not complete! Whosoever will look at that enormous Phenomenon may find many meanings in it, but this meaning is the ground of all: That it was a revolt of the oppressed lower classes against the oppressing or neglecting upper classes: not a French revolt only; no, a European one.’19 Given this ‘uncertainty’ how did reformers react and conduct themselves in the years leading up to and beyond the Cato Street Conspiracy? Lessons from other countries offer instructive details about the infinite complexities of the relationship

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between differing forms of political activity. Irish history is littered with constitutional reformers who were eventually driven into open rebellion and treasonable activity by British intransigence. The trajectory traced by Tone and Emmet, then later by Casement and Pearse, is only too familiar. It has also seen trajectories in which violence and terrorism gave way to political bargaining and treaty-making, as in the case of Michael Collins, or those who took an entirely constitutional path to at least partial political success, as in the case of Daniel O’Connell. That the British instance did not take the same kind of turns as happened in America, France or Ireland does not remove the question of how the leading British reformers saw their position in this critical period. The answers are not simple, as temperaments varied and circumstances changed. Many reformers had long careers, stretching over decades in which their attitudes and behaviour changed. Take, for example, the case of Thomas Evans, an active member of the London Corresponding Society in the 1790s, apparently close to Francis Place at some points, but later denounced by Place as a ‘fanatic’. Incarcerated for three years following the suspension of habeas corpus in 1798 as a United Irishman believed to be engaged in seditious activity, by 1812 Evans was assisting the parliamentary election of Burdett and Cochrane in Westminster. Becoming one of Spence’s closest associates, he then took over the Society of Spencean Philanthropists in 1814. Although inevitably he had close relations with Arthur Thistlewood and Watson, he appears to have steered clear of their conspiratorial activities; this was probably reinforced by a further spell in prison without charge in 1817–18. Evans was once again as close to treasonable men as it was possible to be – the Spencean Philanthropists were a small body – but avoided entanglement in either the Spa Fields riots of December 1816 or directly in Cato Street, though he raised money for those arrested. Thereafter, he removed himself to Manchester and concentrated on publishing, though his son was prosecuted for ‘libelling the army’. In the 1820s he pursued his land reform schemes and published a life of Spence, eventually returning to London to defend the journalist Richard Carlile and support the London Mechanics Institute.20 Evans demonstrated a wide variety of political activity ranging from electoral organisation to mixing with men clearly bent on violent proceedings. He, not untypically, had periods of activity and periods of quiescence, not to mention vicious and punitive imprisonment without charge. One aspect of his career which reflected circumstances that had larger implications for members of reform and radical circles in this period was the phenomenon of mutual assistance and support. Whatever Place’s personal feelings about Evans, he looked after Evans’s wife and children during his imprisonment in 1798 and both Cobbett and Wooler opened subscriptions for him in their respective journals in 1817–18. Evans reciprocated by his own efforts to assist the families of the Cato Street conspirators.21 In practice reformers and radicals were a broad church, who, while often differing in their ideology, programmes and tactics, moved in and out of co-operation with each other as well as frequently offering mutual support. Reform campaigns attracted men and



Joining up the dots 39

women from diverse backgrounds and from at least the 1790s it was not uncommon to find rich and powerful supporters offering aid and assistance to their social inferiors either through relief subscriptions when imprisoned or, as in the case of the immensely rich and successful barrister Thomas Erskine, defending men like Paine and Hardy at trial in the 1790s as well as reformers in the postwar period.22 That reformers and radicals with widely different aims and methods should be familiar with each other, sometimes co-operating or sometimes offering only arm’s-length support, should not surprise us when looking at the experience of political movements around the world in later periods. By the time of Cato Street there had already been a significant series of experiences for many leading reformers and radicals. Among the most interesting was Samuel Bamford, who was a self-proclaimed ‘ardent admirer’ of Cobbett from the early 1800s, and who took no part in the Luddite disturbances in the North-West at the end of the Napoleonic Wars. In 1816 he became secretary to the Hampden Reform Club in Middleton and it was at a meeting in London to discuss reform petitions that he met Cobbett, Henry Hunt, James Watson the elder and Thomas Cartwright. In 1817, however, he refused to join the March of the Blanketeers, fearing it would lead to violence and retribution by the authorities. Charged with treason in 1817, but quietly released after a period, he led an orderly and peaceful existance contingent to the Peterloo meeting and on his own evidence spent its immediate aftermath urging people to desist from taking up arms in what he felt would be a futile contest with the authorities.23 Bamford recorded that in his interview before the Privy Council prior to his acquittal and discharge on 29 April 1817 he was solemnly warned personally by Sidmouth, ‘no violence, of whatever description, will be tolerated, but it will be put down with a very strong hand’.24 Whether from pragmatism or conviction, Bamford eschewed a violent reaction to the events of August 1819, but to no avail. By the time of Cato Street he had been imprisoned in Lincoln Gaol on a charge of inciting a riot arising from the Peterloo meeting. A reformer of a very different stamp, but one who had come close to inciting violence, if not by his own actions, then by implication, was Sir Francis Burdett. Wealthy and patrician in manner, for a time in the early 1800s he became the darling of the London crowd, the slogans ‘Burdett and No Bastille’ and ‘Burdett and Liberty’ were more than a pale echo of the campaigns of Wilkes in the 1760s and 1770s. Burdett had emerged as a popular champion when he took up the cause of the ill-treatment of radical prisoners and naval mutineers in Cold Bath Fields prison. He was also sufficiently catholic in his contacts in London reform circles to have known Despard and attended his execution. Burdett, like Wilkes, was capable of bringing crowds on to the streets, and his election contests at Middlesex in 1802 and 1804 prompted tumultuous processions in his support. Burdett was elected but then debarred on a technicality on both occasions, but his successful election to the constituency of Westminster in 1807 masterminded by a committee headed by Francis Place has

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often been represented as marking the revival of the reform movement after its slump under the pressures of repression and the patriotic response to Napoleon’s invasion scares. Burdett promoted modest reform proposals in Parliament, but in 1810 his position became the focus of agitation which appeared to hold the potential for the most serious violence in the capital since the Gordon Riots. In 1810 Burdett was charged with a libel on the House of Commons and a warrant was issued for him to be committed to the Tower. This gave the London radicals an opportunity to pit Burdett’s popularity against that of the government. He decided to remain in his house in Piccadilly and await arrest as an innocent victim of ‘tyranny’ surrounded by enthusiastic crowds who had the potential to obstruct his arrest either by constables or the military. The authorities, alarmed at the possibility of serious rioting, had assembled several thousand regular troops and artillery, mobilised ten thousand volunteers and put the Tower into a position of defence, filling the moat and placing cannon at the approaches loaded with grapeshot.25 What had started as an elaborate constitutional charade to embarrass the government began to look like a potentially bloody confrontation as the authorities planned to pursue their arrest of Burdett on the morning of 9 April. A meeting in Burdett’s house on the evening before the arrest was due to take place was fevered, with crowds massed outside and placards proclaiming, ‘Burdett for Ever’, ‘Liberty or Death’ and ‘Magna Carta and the Bill of Rights’. According to Place, writing some years after the event, Burdett was toying with the idea of defending the house and asked Place if he had twenty men to assist in doing so. Place claimed he answered by posing the decisive problem: ‘it would be easy enough to clear the hall of constables and soldiers, to drive them into the street or to destroy them, but are you prepared to go on?’ This appeared to end thoughts of a violent contestation with the authorities and Burdett’s subsequent actions were consistent with an unwillingness to put himself at the head of actions with unknown consequences. Place, however, appeared ready to contemplate ‘destroying’ a few constables or soldiers, but declined to do so on purely pragmatic grounds. In a remarkable passage he later articulated his rationale for not resisting more actively: I did not then, I do not now (1827), disapprove of Sir Francis Burdett’s notions. Had circumstances been such as to promise effectual resistance, not only at the house of Sir Francis but anywhere else, had there been anything like a sufficient body organised to have assured the soldiers that power enough existed to protect them … there would have been a fair chance in the then disposition of men, and no small portion of the army, that a successful effort at the outset would have given them confidence, and that many and perhaps nearly all the troops in London would have revolted. But there was no organisation and no arms, and to have resisted under such circumstances would have been madness.26

Burdett was arrested and, although there were two deaths in disturbances as he was taken to the Tower, no general rioting took place. Burdett was due for release from



Joining up the dots 41

the Tower when Parliament rose, and Place and the Westminster Committee were determined to make as big a show as possible with a triumphal procession. In this instance, and consistent with his determination to win a battle for opinion rather than foment a futile struggle between the people and the authorities, Place was concerned that everything should be meticulously organised: ‘had there not been the greatest order, the whole would have got into confusion, terminating in a riot, and the people would have been slaughtered’.27 Indeed, once again the government put the capital on a war footing, complete with a semaphore system to pass the news of the dissolution of Parliament to the Tower of London and the thousands of troops standing by to deal with any disorder. A magnificent phaeton was prepared for Burdett to use and elaborate stands on his route from the Tower to his house in Piccadilly were prepared and places sold. But the crowds that assembled were disappointed, for when the time due for Burdett’s release came and the crowds of his supporters awaited his appearance, they found that Burdett had slipped away by water to his house in Wimbledon. Burdett had convinced himself that should bloodshed occur he would be held to account and, like Lord George Gordon, not only be the occasion of countless deaths but charged with high treason. As Burdett himself put it: ‘had he by gratifying his personal vanity been the cause of a single accident, or the death of any person, he should have reflected upon it with pain for the rest of his life’.28 The events of 1810 cauterised relations between Place and Burdett. Burdett was, in fact, no Wilkes. He had little relish for the fray of popular politics, still less the stomach to put himself at the head of an insurrectionary crowd. He remained a stalwart of the parliamentary reform movement, continuing the campaign for limited parliamentary reform through reform bills and criticism of government corruption. In 1819 he was an outspoken critic of the behaviour of the Manchester magistrates at St Peter’s Fields and was heavily fined and imprisoned for so doing. Place, the man most recently characterised as one of the founders of Victorian ‘respectability’, is more difficult to pin down. Famously, Place had resigned from the London Corresponding Society on the grounds that constitutional proceedings were futile in the face of government repression in the aftermath of the Terror in France; violence would simply be met by government force, and all that could be done was wait for more propitious times and the collapse of the existing system under its own weight.29 In a sense he was to gain vindication for his ‘wait and see’ strategy in the reform crisis of 1829–32 when the long-awaited breakdown of the unreformed system actually began. In 1820, Place thought the time was not yet right: he would think differently in 1832. An emerging figure who became connected with various reformers in the years after 1816 was John Cam Hobhouse, mentioned by the Duke of Wellington as the man the Cato Street conspirators would put at the head of government should they be successful.30 Although such prophecies may have been the stuff of alarmist chatter, he was a figure who seemed to offer support for the reform cause in the

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House of Commons at a time when Burdett was distancing himself from the radical platform of universal suffrage being promoted by other leading radicals, notably Cobbett and Hunt. Indeed, by 1817 Burdett was being denounced as a traitor by the exiled Cobbett and there was little chance of pro-reform members being elected in any constituency other than Westminster. In March 1819, Hobhouse stood for Westminster following the suicide of Sir Samuel Romilly, and his language during the election went further than many had anticipated. At the Crown & Anchor on 5 February 1819, he attacked the Whigs’ moderate reform views and proclaimed himself ‘one of those extravagant reformers’ whose ‘wild visionary notions’ were the fashion ‘about twenty years ago, with this very party which now recommends their renunciation’. It was followed up with a press report by Place concerning corruption in Westminster under the Whigs in the past and a denunciation of their desertion of the reform cause.31 When the election came, however, Hobhouse was defeated by the candidate supported by the Whigs, George Lamb. None the less, he had joined the ranks of prominent reformers, distancing themselves from the Whigs and courting a wider popularity. Later that year he joined the ranks of reform martyrs for his pamphlet A Trifling Mistake, in which he asked the question, ‘What prevents the people from walking down to the House, and pulling out the members by the ears, locking up their doors, and flinging the key into the Thames?’ He answered that ‘their true practical protectors … are to be found at the Horse Guards, and the Knightsbridge barracks’. In the bitter and repressive atmosphere which followed the Peterloo meeting, the government was lashing out at anything which might be actionable at law and his words were considered by the House of Commons as a breach of privilege. Hobhouse was arrested on 14 December and his confinement in Newgate was confirmed at the court of King’s Bench on 5 February 1820.32 As Jason McElligott argues elsewhere in this volume, Hobhouse was safely above any suspicion of involvement with the Cato Street conspirators as he remained in confinement until 29 February 1820. However, he remained in contact with a range of reformers and was possibly used by Hone as an alibi when he spent the evening of 23 February with him in Newgate. Hone had been visited that afternoon by Cobbett, who had invited him to attend a meeting which Hone feared might have been a means of entangling him in the Cato Street plot. It was also alleged that Thistlewood had attempted to see Hobhouse in Newgate but was turned away by the gaoler. Cobbett too, who Hone later became convinced was a government spy, was also in touch with Hobhouse but the latter was unwilling to co-operate with him. Following his release Hobhouse was able to defeat Lamb at the general election of March 1820, but his fiery pronouncements of 1819 were not followed up. He remained vague on the question of what kind of reform he wanted, confining himself to attacks upon corruption, never speaking out for universal suffrage, annual parliaments or the ballot. As with many other reformers he threw his weight behind the cause of Queen Caroline. His movement away from more radical positions did not, however, lessen the caricature of him as a closet Jacobin and one of the ‘Vile



Joining up the dots 43

Rebels’. In 1821 a Cruikshank cartoon showed a festival of reformers dancing round a pole held by Queen Caroline and topped with her feathered hat and a pair of stays, among them her Whig advisers, Denman and Brougham, Cobbett and Hobhouse, wearing a bonnet-rouge.33 The relations of the prominent reformers Hunt and Cobbett with the ultra-­ radicals have been considered on many occasions.34 The immediate postwar years and the petitioning campaign of 1816–17 had led to widespread ­co-operation across a broad spectrum of reformers, including the Spenceans. Hunt and Cobbett worked in uneasy collaboration with them to organise the mass meetings at Spa Fields in the closing months of 1816. The Spenceans had sought a range of prominent radicals to speak to their mass meeting on 15 November but only Hunt accepted. Burdett, Cartwright and Cobbett demurred. Cobbett feared that something dangerous might occur and tried to warn Hunt off. When Hunt saw the resolutions that Thistlewood intended to present to the meeting, he realised that the contents were dangerous and treasonable, much as he had been warned by Cobbett. Hunt later recalled how he galloped over to Cobbett’s home at Botley to consult with him and help him redraft the resolutions as a safer address to the Prince Regent. On the morning of 15 November, Hunt met up with Thistlewood and showed him the new resolutions before attending the meeting where a crowd, estimated at nearly a hundred thousand, assembled. The meeting passed off relatively peacefully and Hunt was bounced into calling another meeting a fortnight later to receive the Prince Regent’s reply to the address requesting relief for the poor. Already Hunt was suspicious of Thistlewood’s incautious behaviour and that of some of those around him, who included at least one government informer. Hunt was vilified in the government-funded press for inflaming the people and was repeatedly warned by Cobbett to be careful of government spies and entrapment, but he was one of the few prominent reformers prepared to address large public meetings. The meeting which Hunt attended as scheduled on 2 December was, however, forestalled by the insurrectionary attempt by the Watsons (father and son) and Thistlewood for which they were subsequently tried and acquitted for high treason.35 Hunt continued the programme into 1817, pushing forward the cause of universal manhood suffrage and dragging Cobbett and other initially more moderate reformers in his wake. His relations with the Spenceans were always marred by suspicion, especially after the second Spa Fields meeting, but had not completely broken down. While the St Peter’s Fields meeting in August 1819 and its aftermath dominated Hunt’s position in the winter of 1819–20, the London radicals had organised a ‘Committee of Two Hundred’ which included Watson and Thistlewood and had the support of sections of the radial press such as Richard Carlile’s Republican, the Cap of Liberty, and the Medusa. After Peterloo, Hunt had been welcomed into London by enthusiastic crowds in an event organised by the Committee at which it was estimated several hundred thousand people had come on to the streets.36 But

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calls for unity of all reformers at a subsequent dinner at the Crown & Anchor tavern failed to materialise as Hunt and the various factions of London and provincial radicals began to quarrel and diverge over tactics and mutual suspicions. These were reinforced by the passage of the Six Acts which drove a wedge between those who sought direct action and others, including Hunt and Wooler, who wanted legal action against the perpetrators of ‘Peterloo’, remonstrances and the economic boycott of taxed products. Direct action meant at the very least an aggressive series of mass meetings ‘throughout the Kingdom on one and the same day’, a policy opposed by Hunt. Thistlewood, in particular, had already shown himself in December 1816 capable of an insurrectionary attempt and was contemplating something similar again in the absence of any alternative.37 Cobbett returned from exile in the aftermath of ‘Peterloo’, while Hunt remained on bail and awaited news of his trial which was scheduled to take place in spring 1820 and other reformers, like Bamford, languished in prison or tried to decide what to do next. Cobbett’s flight to America in 1817, ostensibly to escape prosecution, had led to criticism that he was either a government spy or simply a coward. Landing at Liverpool in November 1819 he was wary of what the government might have in store for him, and he avoided Manchester where a welcome was being prepared for him by reformers, heading instead for London. Although relations between Cobbett and Hunt had been frosty, Hunt offered him a handsome welcome at a dinner in the Crown & Anchor on 4 December 1819. The dinner was a sell-out and, although Burdett (one of Cobbett’s fiercest critics for deserting the cause of reform in 1817) declined to attend, Thomas Wooler was present and it appeared that some sort of reconciliation might take place. But Cobbett was now somewhat out of touch with the reform movement which had developed since his departure for America. His relations with Hunt remained lukewarm and he was contemptuous of Burdett and the Westminster radicals. His immense egoism led him to imagine himself at the centre of a reform movement which he now only knew in part, being unfamiliar with the manufacturing districts of the North, the Midlands, South Wales and Scotland. His initial proposal on his return to England to erect a memorial for Tom Paine, whose bones he had brought back from America, struck little enthusiasm among radicals and reformers still outraged and traumatised by ‘Peterloo’ and the Six Acts.38 Cobbett’s attention, however, was quickly taken up with the prospect of standing for Coventry in the forthcoming general election. On his way to London from Liverpool he had been encouraged by the reception he had received in Coventry and felt that a town with some twenty thousand artisans and almost three thousand freehold voters would provide him with a genuine prospect of success. Cobbett’s preoccupation in February, as the Cato Street Conspiracy was fomenting, was therefore with the forthcoming election and also his very pressing financial concerns. Cobbett’s financial arrangements had always been somewhat chaotic but now his income was drastically cut by the increased price of his Register under the terms of the Six Acts, which necessarily reduced its circulation. On 25



Joining up the dots 45

February he was forced to send out seventy letters requesting donations of £10 and would later in the year be declared bankrupt and forced to enter the ‘Rules’ of the King’s Bench prison as a debtor.39 Although, according to Ann Hone’s report some twenty years later, her father William Hone suspected Cobbett of inveigling him into the conspiracy in some way (see Jason McElligott in Chapter 3 below), there is also a suggestion from Cobbett’s daughter in her Account of the Family that both she and her father were preparing to journey to Coventry from London when the Cato Street Conspiracy hit the headlines. Hunt was still on speaking terms with Cobbett and called at the inn where Cobbett and his daughter were staying; Hunt remembered it as the last occasion on which he had any communication with Cobbett before he went to Ilchester Gaol. Anne Cobbett marked it with a brief note: ‘The Cato Street plot had just been discovered. Hunt was abusing them all. Told me that his name and Papa’s were on the list of persons to be killed. Papa said he did not believe it.’40 On balance, with Hunt going to trial and Cobbett heading into an election which was fiercely contested by him it seems unlikely that either had anything much to do with conspiracy, whatever the suspicions of other radicals or indeed the government. After the failure of his candidature at Coventry, where he encountered the full brutal force of electoral violence wielded against him and his family, Cobbett’s financial state was worse than ever, but more important than his dire financial state was a new preoccupation emerging from the summer of 1820, the cause of Queen Caroline.41 The Queen Caroline affair remains one of the most intriguing episodes of the pre-reform era, eclipsing the memories of Cato Street.42 For many radicals and reformers, though not all, it became all-consuming but also marked a caesura between the unrest of the post war years and the 1820s. The defeat of the reformers on this issue could be seen to usher in a period of greater stability during the 1820s, but just as Place was to emerge in the reform crisis as one of the conductors of ‘the language of menace’, Cobbett emerged as a cheerleader for the revolution of 1830 in France and sent his son to offer congratulations to its leaders. On the home front, he courted a charge of sedition in his lecture tours of the southern counties in 1831 and was seen by the government as a man they had to try to bring to book. Cobbett was frank in claiming that it was the threat of violence and its actual occurrence in the Captain Swing outbreaks that were, in his opinion, decisive in bringing about reform: he was in no doubt that it was ‘the fires’ that did it.43 One must wonder what Cobbett’s attitude might have been if violence had broken out in the ‘May Days’ or, if the opera buffa of the Burdett affair or Queen Caroline affair had taken a lurch into something more confrontational and violent. The ‘age of uncertainty’ had no predictable outcomes and the reform and radical movements were a broad church in which differences over aims and tactics, personal rivalries and conflicts of interest were only to be expected. The stories of other countries and their liberation or revolutionary movements tell a story with many similarities to late Hanoverian Britain. Alarmed governments saw larger and better

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conspiracies than perhaps ever existed; many of the dots were there, it is simply that entirely contingent circumstances meant they were never connected in an insurrectionary context. Notes  1 See Robert Fisk, ‘Rewriting the Revolution’, The Independent, 19 Jan. 2016, pp. 32–3; also Charles Townshend, The Republic: The Fight for Irish Independence (London, 2013), pp. xiii–xx, for the ambivalent legacy of Easter 1916.  2 See François Furet and Mona Ozouf (eds), The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture (Oxford, 1989); Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution, 1789–1848 (London, 1962). For the widening revolutionary impulse see Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (eds), Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolution: America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750–1850 (Oxford, 2013), especially pp. 192–212.  3 See for example Eric Hazan, A History of the Barricade (London, 2015; trans. D. Fernbach).  4 For the transition to orderly protest in Britain, see Charles Tilly, Popular Contention in Great Britain, 1758–1834 (Cambridge, MA, 1995); John Stevenson, Popular Disturbances in England, 1700–1870 (London, 1979), pp. 274–300, 316–23. For a reiteration of the uniquely stable character of the United Kingdom in the nineteenth century, see David Cannadine, Victorious Century: The United Kingdom, 1800–1906 (London, 2017), pp. 2–4.  5 Katrina Navickas, Protest and the Politics of Space and Place, 1789–1849 (Manchester, 2016), pp. 1–10; Stevenson, Popular Disturbances, pp 289–93; Brian Harrison, The Transformation of British Politics, 1860–1995 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 20–30; Rodney Mace, Trafalgar Square: Emblem of Empire (London, 1976).  6 Steve Poole, The Politics of Regicide in England, 1760–1850 (Manchester, 2000), p. 150. For the tactical dilemmas faced by reformers see Mark Philp, Reforming Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language in the Shadow of the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Cambridge, 2014), pp. 23–39.  7 Thompson, EWC (2nd edn, 1968), p. 13.  8 Thompson, EWC, pp. 647–8.  9 Stevenson, Popular Disturbances, pp. 319–23; Malcolm I. Thomis and Peter Holt, Threats of Revolution in Britain, 1789–1848 (London, 1977); Edward Royle, Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, 1789–1848 (Manchester, 2000). 10 John L. and Barbara Hammond, The Skilled Labourer, 1760–1832 (London, 1919), pp. 10–11. 11 The Hammonds devoted a complete chapter of The Skilled Labourer to ‘Oliver the Spy’, see pp. 341–78. 12 R.S. Fitton and A.P. Wadsworth, The Strutts and the Arkwrights, 1758–1830: A Study of the Early Factory System (Manchester, 1958), p. 189. 13 See the graphic account of the changes in opinion in Archibald Prentice, Historical Sketches and Personal Recollections of Manchester: Intended to Illustrate the Progress of Public Opinion from 1792 to 1832 (London, 3rd edn, 1970), esp. pp. 60–192. 14 Thompson, EWC, p. 648.



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15 Boyd Hilton, A Mad, Bad and Dangerous People? England, 1783–1846 (Oxford, 2006), pp. 37–8. 16 Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous, p. 38, citing David Worrall, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790–1820 (New York, 1992). 17 Hilton, Mad, Bad and Dangerous, p. 38. See also Philp, Reforming Ideas, pp. 25–6, especially n. 41. 18 David Eastwood, ‘The Age of Uncertainty: Britain in the Early Nineteenth Century’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 6:8 (1998), 98. 19 Eastwood ‘Age of Uncertainty’, 110; Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (London, 1839), pp. 26–7. 20 Joseph O. Baylen and Norbert J. Gossman (eds), Biographical Dictionary of Modern British Radicals: Volume 1: 1770–1830 (Hassocks, 1979), pp. 164–6; ODNB, vol. 18, p. 755. 21 Baylen and Gossman, Dictionary, p. 165; ODNB. 22 Baylen and Gossman, Dictionary, pp. 160–4. 23 Baylen and Gossman, Dictionary, pp. 27–9; ODNB, vol. 3, pp. 626–7, n. 23. For the view that Bamford sanitised his earlier radical leanings in his later writings see Gardner, Poetry, pp. 21–32. 24 Eversley M.G. Belfield, The Annals of the Addington Family (Winchester, 1959), pp. 96–7; Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical (London, 1967), pp. 158–61. 25 See Stevenson, Popular Disturbances, pp. 181–7. 26 BL, Add. MSS 27850 (Place Papers), fols 158–60, 200–2. The date in brackets was given in the original by Place. 27 Stevenson, Popular Disturbances, p. 188. 28 Stevenson, Popular Disturbances, pp. 188–9; BL, Add. MSS 27850 (Place Papers), fols 238–9. 29 See Ben Wilson, The Making of Victorian Values: Decency and Dissent in Britain: 1789–1837 (London, 2007), pp. 72–90, 109–13, 245–7; see also Thompson, EWC, pp. 152–63, 506–10 and 562–9. 30 For Hobhouse’s career, see ODNB, vol. 27, pp. 409–12. 31 R.G. Thorne, The House of Commons, 1790–1820 (London, 1986), pp. 279–81. 32 ODNB, vol. 27, p. 40. 33 British Library collection, reproduced in Anne Cobbett, Account of the Family (Farnham, 1999), p. 50. 34 For the fullest account see Penny Young, Two Cocks on a Dunghill: William Cobbett and Henry Hunt: Their Friendship, Feuds, and Fights (South Lopham, 2009). 35 For Spa Fields, see Stevenson, Popular Disturbances, pp. 193–7 36 Thompson, EWC, pp. 762–4; Young, Two Cocks, pp. 162–4. 37 Thompson, EWC, pp. 762–8; Young, Two Cocks, p. 164. 38 Young, Two Cocks, pp. 171–4. 39 See John Gardner, ‘Cobbett’s Return to England in 1819’, in James Grande and John Stevenson (eds), William Cobbett, Romanticism and Enlightenment (London, 2015), p. 64. 40 For the fears about Cobbett see Gardner, ‘Cobbett’s Return’, pp. 64–7; A. Cobbett, Account of the Family, p. 46. 41 See Gardner, ‘Cobbett’s Return’, pp. 69–75, and James Grande, William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England: Radicalism and the Fourth Estate, 1792–1835 (Basingstoke, 2014),

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pp. 114–47, also John Stevenson, ‘The Queen Caroline Affair’, in John Stevenson (ed.), London in the Age of Reform (Oxford, 1977), pp. 117–48, and George Spater, William Cobbett: The Poor Man’s Friend, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1982), vol. II, p. 335. 42 For the fullest recent account, see Chase, 1820, pp. 158–218; also Gardner, Poetry, pp. 159–217. 43 See Grande, William Cobbett, the Press and Rural England, pp. 168–97, for Cobbett’s involvement with the Paris revolution of 1830 and ‘Captain Swing’.



The men they couldn’t hang 49

3 The men they couldn’t hang: ‘sensible’ radicals and the Cato Street Conspiracy Jason McElligott

The Cato Street Conspiracy has always been seen as a desperate and forlorn effort on the part of obscure and unimportant ‘ultra-radicals’.1 This chapter uses a recently discovered note from Thomas J. Wooler to William Hone to suggest that a number of prominent figures in the cause of ‘reform’ were aware of the event in advance and were either minded to become involved or decided to wait upon the course of events before making a commitment. Using the note from Wooler to Hone as a ‘prompt’, this chapter re-examines the Home Office files concerning the conspiracy and discusses a number of curious pieces of evidence which might suggest the authorities were aware that the circle of plotters, active sympathisers and passive fellow-travellers was significantly larger, and largely more significant, than Arthur Thistlewood and his gang. This chapter also addresses the nature and reliability of the evidence historians find in intelligence files. In doing so, it suggests ways in which scholars can recreate something of the ‘lived context’ which sometimes survives as faint echoes deep within historical records. In 2013 a respectable antiquarian bookseller in Devon offered a single-sheet manuscript for sale. The manuscript contains a short note which reads as follows: Dear Hone, I am now in arms in Bishopsgate Street, and your note has been just brought me. I regret that I should have been from home, and still more that I cannot run down to you directly. I will see you as soon as I possibly can; but am afraid it will not be before night. Never mind discord. You must expect it; but you will beat all its arts more easily than you have done the Judges and the Attorney General. Yours very truly Thos. J Wooler White Hart2

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Figure 3.1  Note from Thomas J. Wooler to William Hone



The men they couldn’t hang 51

The sheet of paper measures 18.3 cm by 11.4 cm. It is an original manuscript showing no signs of being altered, tampered with or interfered with in any way. It was written hastily in black ink, and the handwriting is identical to the distinctive handwriting of other extant letters written by the radical journalist Thomas J. Wooler, including others from him to William Hone.3 There is nothing on the reverse of the sheet (indicating that it was not folded to make an envelope), but there is some marking of the page which might suggest that the note was folded very soon after it was written and before the ink had time to dry. The note is undated, but it must have been written after Hone’s trials for blasphemous libel of December 1817, as the references to his success against the judiciary and the Attorney General make clear. If Thomas J. Wooler was indeed ‘in arms’ after December 1817, the note cannot be referring to the insurrectionary Spa Fields riots of 1816 or the Pentrich rising of September 1817. The only context that makes sense is the Cato Street Conspiracy and the note must, therefore, have been written some time on the fateful day of 23 February 1820 when the authorities raided a premises in Cato Street in which around twenty men had gathered with the intention of assassinating the Prime Minister and the other members of the cabinet. If genuine, this note could potentially provide important information about the key outstanding question as to the ‘full extent of the conspiratorial circles around Cato Street’. Historians have long expressed a desire to know whether the plot ‘was linked to any genuine national plan’, and how deep its roots might have penetrated into the world of London radicalism.4 Recent work by John Gardner and Malcolm Chase has provided detailed evidence for the depth and breadth of anger among reformers and broad sections of the labouring classes and the poor across Britain in the aftermath of Peterloo. There is little doubt that the authorities frequently feared that they were on the verge of losing control in London, the Midlands, Lancashire, Yorkshire and swaths of Scotland during these years. Sometimes, it is clear, the fear was of crowds engaged in mass agitation and at others it was of actual or threatened armed actions by smaller groups of activists. The greatest fear of the authorities was a combination of armed actions and mass agitation which variously conjured up memories of the French Revolution or fears of a rerun of the British Civil Wars of the seventeenth century. The authorities had access to plenty of raw information: some of it proved to be reliable, some of it proved to be unreliable, but much of it was difficult to assess or interpret in advance. If it was hard for the Home Office to get an accurate view of events in any one place at a particular point in time, and to maintain the same level of focus and judgement across the entire country over a period of time, it is even more difficult for historians to recreate the febrile lived experience of the period from the surviving records. The ground-breaking work by Gardner and Chase means that we know much more about fear of violence, the threat of violence and a number of actual incidents of violence. Yet, scholars still tend to distinguish between groups of ‘ultra-radicals’ who may

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or may not have had a high degree of co-ordination among themselves, and a broader, but entirely separate and distinct, world of ‘reformers’ and non-violent ‘radicals’. The note offers the potential of rethinking the strict binary division between constitutional reform and revolutionary radicalism in the six months between Peterloo and the arrests in Cato Street. This is because the prolific writer, editor and publisher Thomas J. Wooler (c.1786–1853) has always been viewed as ‘a consistent advocate of Radical organisation, upon the open and constitutionalist pattern’.5 By the same token, the impecunious bookseller William Hone (1780–1842) is also habitually placed by scholars within this milieu.6 The existence of such a note about insurrection between two leading ‘constitutional’ radicals is, therefore, potentially very significant. If the note does relate to the Cato Street Conspiracy, a number of significant points arise. Firstly, Wooler signed a clear acknowledgement that he was ‘in arms’ at a particular location in London. In doing so, he not only potentially put his neck in a noose should the enterprise fail but he made himself liable to the awful punishment meted out for treason: the barbaric ritual of being hanged, drawn and quartered. Secondly, there was obviously some prior contact between the two men about the design in hand, most likely within the previous few hours. Extrapolating from Wooler’s note, it seems that Hone had visited Wooler’s house as a result of prior communications between the two men. When he found Wooler was not at home, Hone wrote a letter or note which was less than enthusiastic about the turn of events. This was carried to Wooler by a family member, friend or colleague who knew that he was at the White Hart. Wooler then tried to encourage Hone either to participate in an armed operation of some sort or to engage positively with the changed political landscape that would exist after a successful armed action: ‘Never mind discord. You must expect it’. Thirdly, this note to Hone was almost certainly never delivered. If it had been delivered, it is most likely that it would have been destroyed because of its incriminating nature. Even if Hone had been foolish enough to keep it, it would probably have ended up among his papers in the British Library, or one of the other half a dozen repositories in Britain and the United States which house his correspondence.7 It is possible, then, that the note went missing when it was being carried from the White Hart to Hone, presumably because the messenger heard that the authorities had discovered the plot, but it may well have been left behind in the White Hart if Wooler and other would-be insurrectionists (one has to assume he was not ‘in arms’ on his own) had to flee at short notice. It is not known where this note was for almost two centuries before it turned up in 2013 on the antiquarian market, but at the time of its purchase by Marsh’s Library it was mounted on card which suggests that it may have been framed for display at some point. The note provides a new location for armed resistance on the night of the arrests: the White Hart in Bishopsgate Street. This adds to the four locations described by



The men they couldn’t hang 53

the government spy, George Edwards, as being associated with the active instigation of the plot on 23 February: Mr Hazard’s house in Queen Street, the fateful premises in Cato Street, the house of Mr Cook at the back of the Antelope public house in Holywell Lane in Shoreditch and, finally, an unspecified ‘large Oil Warehouse’, which was to be burnt to the ground, near Horsleydown in Southwark on the south side of the Thames.8 The historian must always be alive to the possibility that strikingly unusual and unexpected sources are either modern forgeries9 or the contrivance of long-dead agents provocateurs trying to entrap innocent parties for financial or political gain.10 If, however, one uses the note as an aid or tool to work through the voluminous Home Office papers relating to the Cato Street Conspiracy, there does seem to be some substance to the matter. Wooler’s note clearly places him in the ancient White Hart tavern in Bishopsgate Street (now in the London postcode area of EC2).11 This is almost equidistant between the Bank of England to the south, and the Honourable Artillery Ground in Finsbury Square to the north-west, both of which were locations the plotters had talked of seizing in their most confident moments. From October 1819, the conspirators met in a number of London taverns, including the White Lion in Wych Street, the Black Dog in Gray’s Inn Lane, the Rose in Wild Street and the Crown & Anchor.12 For about three months from mid-December 1819, the Home Office files show the conspirators met regularly at ‘the White Hart’ in Brooke’s Market off Gray’s Inn Road (modern London postcode EC1). It was here on 12 December that Thistlewood first revealed his plan to strike during a dinner attended by the cabinet. Three days later, at another meeting, according to an informer, ‘the Landlord said, tho’ he wished us well, he could not let us stay there and we adjourned to the Black Dog’. A number of the conspirators were back at the White Hart on 23 December when Thistlewood expressed his desire to attack at the first possible cabinet dinner and pledged that he was ‘Determined to apply the Whole of his time every Day to Bring it to a Conclusion’. In early January 1820, James Ings rented a room at the back of the White Hart from the landlord, Mr Hodges, for 2s 6d per week. This was to be used by the plotters as a rendezvous and a storage point and it is not known how often it was used before 11 February, when the Home Office informer George Edwards noted: the ‘Room at the Back of the White Hart is Given up’.13 Unfortunately, the conspirators’ White Hart in Brooke’s Market (EC1) is distinct from the tavern of the same name mentioned by Wooler in Bishopsgate Street (EC2). There seems to be no other reference in any surviving source to link the White Hart in EC2 to the plot. Intriguingly, though, in late January during a meeting to discuss the practicalities of killing the cabinet, it was reported to the Home Office that ‘Thistlewood spoke of Hunt[,] Wooler Cobbett &c’.14 This must refer to Henry Hunt, Thomas J. Wooler and William Cobbett. The informer’s written report gives no further details, but the mention of three such prominent names among the reformers by the leading figure in a plot to kill ministers must surely have occasioned some

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d­ iscussion in the Home Office.15 In early February, Thistlewood was reported to have noted sourly that ‘none of the Reformers’ who had been contacted was willing to contribute money. He explicitly mentioned Mrs Carlile, the wife of the imprisoned republican newspaperman Richard Carlile, in this context, but he was obviously also referring to other people.16 So, it seems likely that the plotters reached out to at least some prominent radicals in London. When they did so, what might they have said? Did they ask for material aid or only for money, and, if so, what did they say they were raising funds for? Did they share part or all of the dangerous secret of what they intended to do? Why would any respectable (or even semi-respectable) radical entertain an approach from Thistlewood, who was long known to be a proponent of political violence?17 The written notes of the informer George Edwards in the Home Office files do not provide the necessary context, but he is surely likely to have provided verbal information to those who received this intelligence as to whom exactly Thistlewood intended to canvass for support, and what he had said he would discuss with them. If the Home Office files are silent as to the extent of the government’s interest in possible links between the plotters and the broader movement of reform and radicalism, it may be possible to detect something of their suspicions among the papers amassed as part of the active gathering of evidence against those who were to stand trial for the conspiracy. There are four incongruous items among the thick bundles of Home Office files (HO 44/1–6) which contain informers’ reports on the development of the plot, the arrests of 23 February and the preparations for the trials of the five men who were executed and their five co-conspirators who were transported to Australia. Why, for example, do the files relating to the aftermath of the plot contain a copy of Thomas J. Wooler’s British Gazette published on Sunday 9 January 1820, but which was bought, according to a handwritten note on the front page, only the day after the arrest of the conspirators on the morning of 24 February 1820?18 Our interest here is not in the contents of the serial per se, which include an account of the Oldham inquest into the Peterloo massacre and details of Wooler’s visit to the house where the great Tom Paine had died. Instead, the questions are why was this old newspaper bought on the day after the discovery of the plot, and why did it end up in the files linked to the Cato Street Conspiracy, rather than, say, those of the office of the Treasury Solicitor who regularly collated copies of newspapers, journals and pamphlets which might be prosecuted for libel or under the terms of the Six Acts?19 The same questions naturally arise concerning the copy in the same Cato Street files of Wooler’s Black Dwarf dated Wednesday 2 February 1820, which was purchased, according to a handwritten note, on 25 February. There are two places in this newspaper which were marked by somebody using a pencil. The first mark is beside a passage which begins ‘Death of the King Considered’, and in the context of Peterloo and the forthcoming elections of 1820 warns: ‘No honest, independent mind, of whatever part, has but shuddered at the mere detail of the



The men they couldn’t hang 55

horrible proceedings at Manchester. Now, let them act as well as speak. All who vote for any of those who have sanctioned that sanguinary business, will become as bad as the actors on that disgraceful day.’ On the following page there is another pencil mark beside this argument: ‘All will tend to good, If but the reformers be firm, and persevering. The muzzle of the late Acts will be a little loosened during the period of the election, and we must bite as hard, and hold as fast as we can.’20 There are no other marks on this copy of the Black Dwarf. Whatever the authorities knew or thought they knew about Wooler, it is clear that he was being monitored and his earlier utterances in print were being examined in the immediate wake of the Cato Street Conspiracy. There are two further incongruities in the same file which should be mentioned: one copy each of Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register for Thursday 27 January 1820 and the Manchester Observer published on Saturday 26 February. There is no date of purchase on these two items. It is hard to posit a reason for the Home Office’s interest in the first serial other than assuming a general interest in Cobbett, but the Manchester Observer reports Cobbett’s comments that it was wrong to blame the press for the attempted assassination of the ministers, and includes an excerpt from Wooler’s British Gazette which was not unenthusiastic about the stabbing to death in Paris on 14 February of the royalist duc de Berri by a lone Bonapartist.21 The concept of incongruity is by its nature entirely subjective as it is based on a decision that something is not in harmony with its context or surroundings. Yet, the four items mentioned above do not fit neatly in a file clearly designed to build a case against Thistlewood and the other plotters. Some readers will undoubtedly feel that incongruity is not a category of firm historical evidence, and should not be relied upon in making a positive case for the involvement, or suspected involvement, of leading London radicals with the insurrectionists around Thistlewood. Thankfully, intelligence reports about the actions of several leading radicals after the arrests do provide solid evidence that there was something unusual afoot. Once again, the names of Wooler and Cobbett appear prominently in these reports, with Hone relegated to a supporting, fringe role. On the evening of 8 March, there was a meeting held in the lodging rooms rented by Thomas Preston in Clement’s Inn Passage. Preston was one of the leading conspirators and had been arrested on the night of 23 February. Ultimately, he did not face trial because he was reconnoitering the three pieces of artillery at the Honourable Artillery Ground in Finsbury Park when the other known plotters were being arrested in Cato Street.22 Preston was guilty but it was very difficult to tie him to the active attempt to kill the cabinet and he was eventually released after being charged not with treason but with ‘misprision of treason’, the deliberate concealment of one’s knowledge of a treasonable act or a felony. Those present at the meeting in the squalid rooms on 8 March when Preston was still in custody included his two daughters, the wife of Arthur Thistlewood, a Mrs Chambers whose husband had been arrested and Mr Edmonds, the acting editor of William

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Cobbett’s evening newspaper. Edmonds interviewed Preston’s daughters about their father’s interrogation at Bow Street, the details of which were to appear in Cobbett’s Evening Post the following day. According to an informer present in the room, Edmonds said that he intended to address a number of queries to George Edwards (the man who had provided the Home Office with regular reports about the development of the conspiracy) to prove that he had instigated the plot. The implication was that the arrested men had been entrapped by an agent provocateur, an argument which had been deployed successfully by those radicals who were tried in the aftermath of the Spa Fields riots of 1816. Edmonds’s approach might be consistent with a purely journalistic or editorial interest in events, but his discussion with Mrs Thistlewood about how best to smuggle a message to her husband in the Tower surely crossed a line into illegality. According to the informer, ‘they [i.e. Edmonds and Mrs Thistlewood] expressed much apprehension for the safety of them still at large, from a knowledge that one Haywood of Long Lane having turned informer of all the names present at Cato Street’.23 On 14 March, six days later, there was another meeting in Preston’s rooms which was attended by his daughters, Mrs Chambers, Mr Edmonds the newspaperman and, of course, the unidentified spy who reported back to the Home Office. Edmonds interviewed Mrs Chambers about her husband’s interrogation at Bow Street for the evening paper. The group discussed the strategy that the defendants would rely on in court, and it was agreed that Mrs Chambers was to be a leading witness in the attempt to prove that George Edwards had instigated the entire conspiracy. Edmonds also discussed who might act as counsel for the defence, and it was claimed that he then said, ‘he had arranged with Hone, Wooler, Old Evans & several others to form a Committee for raising Subscriptions, & carrying on the Defence of the Prisoners’.24 The activities of such a committee would explain how a group of plotters usually dismissed as hungry, impoverished and beggarly managed to retain the services of a number of barristers, including one of the leading KCs of the day: John Adolphus (1768–1845). On 24 March, an informer named ‘J.J.’, whose handwriting suggests he was distinct from the person who spied on the meetings in Preston’s lodgings, complained that there were people in London trying to make the populace believe that the plot was a ‘contrivance of government’. ‘J.J.’ referred to a committee formed by ‘Cobbett and Hone’ in favour of the plotters, and noted that ‘Wooler, Pearson, Thompson, Bae are assigned to find out and work upon the … Jurors who are to try Thistlewood’.25 The three reports (8, 14 and 24 March) of these two informers locate Hone, Wooler, Cobbett and his deputy Mr Edmonds within a group of radicals helping to organise and fund the defence of Thistlewood and his co-accused. It might be objected that there is nothing in these March reports to suggest that Cobbett and Hone were doing anything other than defending men whom they believed to be innocent. It is clear, though, that Cobbett’s employee Mr Edmonds was involved with the families of the accused in more than a purely journalistic context, and it was



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claimed that Wooler had gone so far as to countenance trying to ‘nobble’ a jury (to use a colloquial phrase which would probably have been familiar to contemporaries) in favour of the defence. When taken together, these snippets of evidence (the Wooler note, George Edwards’s reports about Thistlewood contacting some London reformers early in 1820, the ‘incongruous’ newspapers and serials in the Cato Street files and the details provided by informers in March about the attempt to organise the defence of the arrested men) suggest that there were men in the world of reform and constitutional radicalism who had advance knowledge that Thistlewood and his gang were planning some sort of strike against the regime. Some (like Wooler) seem to have been enthusiastic, and obviously knew more in advance than they admitted after the fact. Some (like Hone) were less enthusiastic about whatever they heard, but this does not seem to have led him to inform the authorities about the plans in advance, and it did not prevent him from trying to aid the defendants when they faced trial. These snippets of information may also help us to understand some curious remarks made by one of William Hone’s daughters after her father’s death concerning William Cobbett. Writing more than two decades after the events, she alleged that on the afternoon of 23 February 1820 Cobbett arrived at the family home and ‘pressingly invited my father to accompany him to a meeting of politicians at the Hole in the Wall [tavern] in Barbican’. Hone demurred and Cobbett took tea with the family, and later the same evening Hone went to see John Cam Hobhouse, who was imprisoned at the time in Newgate for his pamphlet A Trifling Mistake (1819). According to Hone’s daughter, both her father and mother distrusted Cobbett and her father refused to go with him because he suspected something was amiss. This event marked a definitive break between the two men and they never saw each other again.26 This episode has been interpreted as evidence that Cobbett may have been a government spy who was trying to entrap Hone.27 However, the Wooler note, which it has been suggested above was written on 23 February 1820, may provide a different perspective on Cobbett’s actions. John Cam Hobhouse’s A Trifling Mistake saw him confined to Newgate between 14 December 1819 and 29 February 1820. According to Hobhouse’s diary, Hone visited him in prison on four occasions. On 7 January, he showed Hobhouse ‘a thing with woodcuts called The Man in the Moon’. On 20 January and again on 6 February, Hone sat and talked with him in the evening. But, on 23 February – note the significance of the date and the confirmation of the above account by Hone’s daughter – Hobhouse recorded that Hone came to see him after a visit to his house from Cobbett, who had tried to bring him to a meeting in the Barbican ostensibly for the purposes of discussing Cobbett’s forthcoming election campaign in Coventry.28 Perhaps Cobbett did want to speak about the forthcoming election and it was a coincidence that he came calling at around the exact time that Wooler and Hone seem to have been communicating about ‘discord’ and armed actions. It is, though, intriguing that on this day, according to Hobhouse’s diary, ‘Hone came,

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and sat with me all the evening’. As the assassination plot was being foiled and the Cato Street cell was being rounded up, Hone happened to be sitting talking with a good friend within the confines of Newgate Prison under the watchful eyes of the gaolers. He had the perfect alibi, in other words. If the note quoted at the start of this chapter is genuine, it is beyond a reasonable doubt that Thomas J. Wooler was ‘in arms’ against the state, and it has been suggested on the balance of historical evidence that the date in question was 23 February 1820. The role of William Hone in the affair is less clear-cut. Hone always explicitly placed himself within the constitutionalist tradition, and subsequent historians and critics have seen him in this context of moderate, sensible, decent reform. Yet, when reading Hone’s polemical works produced between 1819 and 1821 – the years of his greatest popularity – there are tantalising glimpses of something that stands outside the constitutionalist tradition. In the immediate aftermath of Peterloo, he published A Letter to Lord Sidmouth, On the Recent Disturbances at Manchester (1819) by ‘Gracchus’. This was obviously a pseudonymous reference to either Tiberius or Gaius Gracchus, the reforming brothers killed by the Patrician faction at the start of the civil strife in Rome of the second century BC. The author ‘Gracchus’ was probably a certain Francis Hall with whom Hone had entered into a formal publishing arrangement earlier in 1819.29 A Letter to Lord Sidmouth called for reform and was explicit about the implications of the events in Manchester if the administration did not change course: ‘a Civil War is begun: citizens have fought against citizens: blood has flowed, not in a private quarrel, or for local objects, but in a cause which is arming thousands of desperate men against the Government’. Politics is now a question ‘of life and death. Passions, feelings, sufferings, are mingled in fierce combustion: a word, a breath, a motion, suffices to give birth to a conflagration extinguishable only by rivers of kindred blood.’ There was an explicit warning to Lord Sidmouth of the need to change course ‘if you would prevent the bursting of a tempest you have no ability to control when raised’.30 Hone’s best-selling pamphlet The Man in the Moon, published in January 1820, is ostensibly nothing more than a witty satire against the Prince Regent, but when one reads the context of the brief literary quotations on its title-page from Shakespeare’s Cymbeline and Addison’s Cato it is clear that Hone was ‘red with uncommon wrath’ about the massacre at Peterloo. He also praised the righteousness of armed resistance to tyranny, but clearly placed this within a European rather than a British context.31 It is not clear whether this was due to concerns about running foul of the law or came from a belief that revolutions had a legitimacy in European societies that they did not have in Britain due to the blessings of the Glorious Revolution of 1688. Hone probably became aware of some aspect of illegal plotting early in the New Year of 1820. A direct approach from Thistlewood seems less likely than contacts from either Thomas J. Wooler or William Cobbett, or perhaps both of them. Whatever he did or did not know in advance, on 23 February Hone received an



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unwelcome visit to his house from Cobbett and was in written communication with Wooler who was ‘in arms’ in Bishopsgate Street. Whether by accident or design, Hone happened to have a very good alibi for the evening of 23 February. If he disagreed on principle with the violent aims of the Cato Street gang, he does not seem to have brought the matter to the attention of the authorities, which would make him guilty of misprision of treason. Far from distancing himself from the plotters in the aftermath of their arrest, he seems to have helped to raise funds for their legal defence, even though he must have known that they were guilty as charged. It is impossible to tell whether Hone sympathised with the rage of the plotters, but feared for his life either through being entrapped in advance by agents provocateurs or afterwards should it fail. It is almost impossible to say how he and others, such as John Cam Hobhouse, might have reacted if Thistlewood’s gang had – and this verb is used in a literal sense – decapitated the cabinet and thereby changed the course of British history. It is, however, important to note that Hone was not a pacifist, as his support for the Spanish revolution of 1820 and his spirited defence as late as 1821 of the violence of the French Revolution show.32 He was familiar, though, with Hume’s maxim in the History of England in relation to the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 that insurrections of the populace ‘not raised and supported by persons of higher quality’ were invariably disastrous and counterproductive in that they strengthened the existing order.33 If Hone’s historical interests did help to inform his political choices, and if part of his caution in 1820 was based on a familiarity with previous failed rebellions such as the Peasants’ Revolt, he may well also have been cognisant of the Rye House Plot of 1683.34 There can be no doubt that as a keen student of British history Hone knew the broad details of this unsuccessful Whig plot to assassinate King Charles II and James, Duke of York, at Rye House near Hoddesdon as they rode back from Newmarket to London.35 As such, he probably noted the fate of his namesake, William Hone (d.1683), who was executed along with Thomas Walcot and John Rouse for their part in the Rye House Plot: There was Walcot and Rouse were both in the plot, And Hone I do reckon must not be forgot; At Tyburn for certain, each man took his turn, And then in the fire their bowels did burn[.]36

Hone had long demonstrated a deep fascination with the print culture of the seventeenth century, as shown by his childhood obsession with a pamphlet from 1649 about the Leveller leader, John Lilburne. Lest Hone’s interest in the ‘age of pamphlets’ (to borrow the phrase about the mid-seventeenth century coined by Dr Johnson a century later) be dismissed as atypical and unrepresentative, it is necessary to stress that many British radicals of the early nineteenth century were familiar with the print culture of the Tudor and Stuart periods, and chose to deploy them in polemical situations. For example, in calling for justice against the Peterloo

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killers, the first issue of Richard Carlile’s newspaper The Republican advertised a reissue of the 1657 pamphlet Killing Noe Murder which had called on the army to assassinate Oliver Cromwell. According to Carlile, ‘It may be proper to state, that this Pamphlet was written in opposition to the authority of Cromwell; and its Effect on that Tyrant was so great, that he never smiled afterwards’.37 Whether or not Oliver Cromwell ever smiled during the last year and a half of his life, there can be little doubt as to his displeasure with this pamphlet, which opened by addressing him directly: ‘my intention … is, to procure your Highnes that justice no body yet does you … To your Highnes justly belongs the honour of dying for the people, and it cannot choose but be an unspeakable consolation to you in the last moments of your life, to consider, with how much benefit to the world you are like to leave it.’ 38 The authors, Silius Titus and Colonel Sexby, argued that Cromwell exhibited all the characteristics of a tyrant, and it was therefore sweet and right to execute him. There seems to be no surviving copy of an edition of Killing Noe Murder from the period around Peterloo and, in the cold light of day, Carlile may have thought better of reprinting this wildly seditious text. Others did, though, frequently make sense of contemporary events in the context of earlier plots. Late in 1819, for example, the Home Office received an anonymous threatening letter warning that the writer and many others were willing to become ‘Feltons’.39 This was a reference to John Felton who assassinated Charles I’s widely reviled adviser George Villiers, 1st Duke of Buckingham, in 1628 by stabbing him in the chest. There were so many references in the radical press to the execution of Charles I in 1649 that one particularly striking case should stand for all the rest; the copy of the republican newspaper Medusa; Or, Penny Politician sent to the Home Office in 1819 by a loyal subject who was so concerned at the quotations from Milton and the attendant rejoicing in the regicide that he – one presumes it was a he – helpfully marked up the offending sections of the newspaper in red.40 Reformers and radicals were also able to draw connections across the seventeenth century: The Statesmen of 1820, for example, proclaimed from its masthead that it stood for the cause for which John Hampden had died in battle against Charles I and Algernon Sydney had been executed under Charles II.41 In a similar fashion, Thomas Preston, one of the Cato Street conspirators who managed to avoid trial, was so reckless as to write to the new king in November 1820 warning him to ‘recollect the unhappy fate of the deluded Charles, and of the misguided James’.42 George IV was a dim, drink-sodden, opium addict with little interest in historical writing, but even he would surely have recognised the brazen reference to James II who had fled Britain in 1688 to avoid the gruesome fate of his father, Charles I. Hone had long coveted a reader’s ticket for the British Museum in order to work on a history of parody but he was frequently rebuffed, presumably because of his radical politics and his low social status. When he finally gained access to the Reading Room in mid-May 1820, after securing the intercession of the physician and antiquarian John Latham of Harley Street, he began his researches by



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gorging on the rich collection of twenty thousand mid-seventeenth-century pamphlets amassed by bookseller George Thomason (d.1666).43 Hone’s research in the British Museum might be seen as a continuation of his long-standing interest in early modern print culture, but his habitual haunting of the Reading Room might also be interpreted as utilising a privileged cultural space to distance himself from the very real dangers attendant upon political activity during this period. Hone surely initially envisaged that he would combine his political and polemical activity with his academic research, and that his research could inform his public actions and utterances.44 Gradually, though, during the first half of the decade, perhaps without even being conscious of the change, he retreated from activism into the world of scholarly enquiry, which then imperceptibly morphed into apolitical antiquarianism.45 This retreat to the Reading Room of the British Museum may well explain why Hone was the only radical polemicist of note not to spend time in prison on some charge or other during 1820.46 He was certainly fortunate to avoid arrest during the crack-down which occurred after the discovery of the Cato Street Conspiracy, but the Wooler note also suggests that he was particularly lucky to be able to die in peace at home in 1842 surrounded by his family at what was then the ripe old age of sixty-two. Notes  1 John Stanhope, The Cato Street Conspiracy (London, 1962); David Johnson, Regency Revolution: The Case of Arthur Thistlewood (London, 1974); M.J. Trow, Enemies of the State: The Cato Street Conspiracy (Barnsley, 2010).  2 Marsh’s Library, Dublin, MS Z2.3.2.  3 Wooler to Hone, 3 Mar. 1818, BL, Add. MS 40,120 fol. 98; Wooler to Hone, 7 June 1823, BL, Add. MS 40,120, fol. 198.  4 Malcolm Chase, ‘Cato Street Conspirators’, ODNB online (accessed 27 Apr. 2018); Thompson, EWC, p. 706.  5 Thompson, EWC, pp. 675, 696.  6 Frederick W. Hackwood, William Hone: His Life and Times (1912; reprinted New York, 1970); Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London, 1796–1821 (Oxford, 1982); Marcus Wood, Radical Satire and Print Culture, 1790–1822 (Oxford, 1994); Ben Wilson, The Laughter of Triumph. William Hone and the Fight for the Free Press (London, 2005). For a contrary view, arguing for Hone’s sympathy with some revolutionary violence, see Jason McElligott, ‘The Royal Shambles (1816): Hiding Republicanism in Plain Sight’, in Geoff Kemp (ed.), Censorship Moments: Reading Key Censorship Texts (New York and London, 2015), pp. 125–32, and Jason McElligott, ‘William Hone, Print Culture, and the Nature of Radicalism’, in Ariel Hessayon and David Finnegan (eds), Varieties of Seventeenth- and Early Eighteenth-century English Radicalism in Context (Farnham, 2011), pp. 241–60.  7 Kyle Grimes, ‘William Hone BioText Project’ see www.uab.edu/english/hone/ (accessed 24 Apr. 2018).  8 TNA, HO 42/199, fol. 634.

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 9 Eric Rentschler, ‘The Fascination of a Fake: The Hitler Diaries’, New German Critique, 90 (2003), 177–92; Mikael Nilsson, ‘Hugh Trevor-Roper and the English Editions of Hitler’s Table Talk and Testament’, Journal of Contemporary History, 51:4 (2016), 788–812; Christopher Jones, ‘The Jesus’ Wife Papyrus in the History of Forgery’, New Testament Studies, 61:3 (2015), 368–78. 10 Gary T. Marx, ‘Thoughts on a Neglected Category of Social Movement Participant: The Agent Provocateur and the Informant’, American Journal of Sociology, 80:2 (1974), 402–42; Jeanne Clegg, ‘Swift on False Witness’, Studies in English Literature, 1500– 1900, 44:3 (2004), 461–85; Ron Dudai, ‘Informers and the Transition in Northern Ireland’, British Journal of Criminology, 52:1 (2012), 32–54; Sara Kamali, ‘Informants, Provocateurs, and Entrapment: Examining the Histories of the FBI’s PATCON and the NYPD’s Muslim Surveillance Program’, Surveillance & Society, 15:1 (2017), 68–78. 11 C.W.F. Goss, The White Hart, Bishopsgate (Cambridge, 1930). 12 TNA, HO 42/199, fols 162–3; HO 42/199, fol. 195; HO 44/5, fol. 42; HO 42/199, fol. 561; HO 42/199, fol. 563; HO 44/4, fol. 66. 13 TNA, HO 42/199, fol. 557v; HO 42/199, fol. 559; HO 42/199, fols 573–5; HO 42/199, fol. 590; HO 42/199, fol. 614; HO 42/199, fol. 617. 14 TNA, HO 42/199, fol. 577. 15 Richard Cobb’s eloquent sketch of the problems inherent in using such reports in the writing of history remains very useful. R.C. Cobb, The Police and the People: French Popular Protest, 1789–1820 (Oxford, 1970), pp. 5–8. 16 TNA, HO 42/199, fol. 607. 17 Kathleen M. Beeston, ‘Regency Rabble Rousers: The Impact and Legacy of the Cato Street Conspiracy’ (University of Texas, MA dissertation, 2012), p. 75. 18 TNA, HO 44/4, fols 63–7. 19 For example, TNA, TS 11/117, which contains among other items a copy of Wooler’s Black Dwarf for 15 Nov. 1820, Carlile’s Republican for 15 Dec. 1820, and Hone’s The Form of Prayer … [to] … Queen Caroline (1820). 20 Black Dwarf, IV:4, 2 Feb. 1820, pp. 114, 115. TNA, HO 44/4, fol. 143. 21 TNA, HO 44/4, fols 125–42; HO 44/4, fols 213–17. 22 Chase, 1820, p. 79. 23 TNA, HO 44/5, fol. 114. 24 TNA, HO 44/5, fol. 373; HO 44/5, fol. 382. 25 TNA, HO 44/5, fols 403–4. 26 Quoted in Hackwood, William Hone, pp. 130–1. 27 John Gardner, ‘William Cobbett the Spy?’, Romanticism, 18:1 (2012), 30–40; John Gardner, ‘Cobbett’s Return to England in 1819’, in James Grande and John Stevenson (eds), William Cobbett, Romanticism and the Enlightenment: Contexts and Legacy (London, 2015), pp. 61–78, at 66–8. 28 Peter Cochran (ed.), ‘Diary of John Cam Hobhouse’, pp. 695, 703–4, 709, 715–16, at https://petercochran.files.wordpress.com/2009/12/28newgate-and-westminster​-​18​ 201.pdf (accessed 27 Apr. 2018). 29 BL, Add. MS 40,120, fol. 111r. 30 Francis Hall, A Letter to the People of England by Gracchus (London, 1819), pp. 4, 16.



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31 See McElligott, ‘The Royal Shambles’, pp. 125–32, and McElligott, ‘William Hone, Print Culture, and the Nature of Radicalism’, pp. 241–60. 32 BL, Add. MS 40,120, fol. 169r; William Hone, The Right Divine of Kings to Govern Wrong! (London, 1821), unpaginated, but p. 12. See also Duncan Wu, William Hazlitt. The First Modern Man (Oxford, 2008), pp. 299–300. 33 This appeared in the book by Francis Hall that Hone published in 1819. A Letter to the People of England by Gracchus, p. 20. 34 Grant Tapsell, The Personal Rule of Charles II, 1681–5 (Woodbridge, 2007), pp. 28–9, 86, 104–5. 35 A catalogue from 1809 of the stock in the bookshop that Hone ran with John Bone at 331 Strand contains a folio account of the 1683 trials, see item 1840 in First Part of a Catalogue of Books, for 1809 … Now on Sale, For Ready Money Only, by Bone and Hone (London, 1809), p. 77. In 1822, when Hone’s financial difficulties forced him to auction the contents of his shop in Fleet Street and some of his personal books, the catalogue included a tract on the last speeches of the conspirators. See item 941 in Catalogue of the Stock of Books of William Hone, and of A Private Library, in Fine Condition (London, 1822), p. 24. 36 A Terror for Traitors Or, Treason Justly Punished ([London], [1683]). 37 The Republican, 1:1, Friday 27 Aug. 1819, p. 16. Oliver Lutaud, Des Révolutions d’Angleterre à la Révolution Française: le tyrannicide & Killing No Murder (Cromwell, Athalie, Bonaparte): Essai de littérature politique comparée (The Hague, 1973). 38 Killing Noe Murder (London, 1657), pp. 1, 4, 8–14. See Jason McElligott (ed.), Censorship and the Press, 1640–1660 (London, 2009). 39 TNA, HO 49/199, fol. 291. 40 TNA, HO 42/199, fol. 107. 41 The Statesman, No. 4793, 14 Aug. 1820, preserved in TNA, TS 11/117, fol. 326B, part 1. 42 TNA, HO 44/3, fol. 34. 43 BL, Add. MS 40,120, fols 106, 138–9, 140–1; BL, Add. MS 40,113, fols 43r–54r. 44 For William Godwin’s understanding of the history of the 1650s see Porscha Fermanis, ‘William Godwin’s History of the Commonwealth and the Psychology of Individual History’, Review of English Studies, issue 252, 61:1 (Nov. 2010), 773–800. 45 On his increasing antiquarian focus see the letter from Charles Lamb to William Hone, 19 May 1823, Folger Shakespeare Library, Washington, DC, MS Y.c.1460(2), and his research notes on ancient sports and pastimes at University of Chicago Library, IL, MS 981, fol. 10. 46 William H. Wickwar, The Struggle for the Freedom of the Press, 1819–1832 (London, 1928), pp. 159–222.

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4 Cato Street in international perspective Malcolm Chase

In May 1829 the Vermont American newspaper reported the death of George Sparrow in the village poor-house at Middlebury. ‘This unfortunate individual was, by his own account, one of Thistlewood’s coadjutors’, observed the paper. ‘This plot, as understood from the public prints of the time, went only to assassinate the king’s ministers … but according to Sparrow’s account, other and widespread mischiefs were contemplated by the conspirators.’ If George Sparrow (who had apparently made a deathbed confession about his involvement) revealed what these ‘other and widespread mischiefs’ were, the paper refrained from reporting them. Instead it devoted the greater part of its obituary to the perils of alcohol abuse, for Sparrow ‘had lingered out a miserable life here, being much of the time stupefied by ardent spirits’. However, the Vermont American also went out of its way to emphasise that he was ‘a man of excellent natural powers, possessed of a singular retentive memory’.1 George Sparrow had apparently been one of three or four otherwise unknown conspirators who sailed to Quebec immediately after the Cato Street raid. With rewards for their arrest circulating – he claimed – in the Canadas, he decided to escape into the United States of America, sailing first from Quebec to Montreal in 1824, and then travelling overland to Vermont. Sparrow’s appearance is not in itself remarkable. As I wrote in 1988, ‘the web of those implicated in Cato Street will never be fully clear. Coachmakers, navvies, tailors, type-founders and shoemakers are among the occupational groups who were apparently poised ready to lend large scale support.’2 Decades later three shoemakers surfaced independently of each other, each revealing substantial knowledge of the conspiracy. Two men actually published autobiographies. John Brown who settled in Cambridge, England, pub-



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lished his in 1858. Another man, a ‘master shoemaker’, almost certainly the last surviving conspirator and still insistent upon anonymity, detailed his involvement in Cato Street in his life history, published in a trade journal when he was eighty-one.3 A third shoemaker, John Johnson, who worked in the same shop as the executed conspirators Tidd and Brunt, ended his days in the 1860s in an Essex workhouse. There he related how he had actually been on his way to the Cato Street loft when the arresting party arrived. He dived into a public house called the Good Woman. He fled to Chatham, but was still arrested and questioned but to his relief released without charge.4 George Sparrow is significant both because he adds bulk to the number of known surviving conspirators and because the circumstances of his death underline how much the conspiracy had become an international cause célèbre. Sparrow’s death was widely reported, for example in Connecticut by the Hartford American, in Maine by Portland’s Eastern Argus, in New Hampshire by the Gazette and the Sentinel and in Massachusetts by the Farmer’s Cabinet. One English newspaper, the Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, even claimed to have sourced news of his death from an unnamed Jamaican paper.5 It is little appreciated how prominent Cato Street has been in the international radical imagination. Few other events in modern Britain occupied quite this space. And this is itself a reflection of the extraordinary events of 1820, when Britain was beset by insurgent tensions during what was a year of European revolution that had no parallel until 1848. Regimes were overthrown in Spain, Portugal and much of modern-day Italy. Popular unrest at this time in France, however, was relatively limited. One consequence of this was that France turned its attention towards Britain. Perhaps the most telling indication of this occurred in Paris in June 1820. On 14 February Charles Ferdinand of Artois, duc de Berri and heir to the French throne, had been stabbed to death on the steps of the Paris Opera. His assassin Louis Pierre Louvel, a journeyman saddler, was avowedly intent upon ending the Bourbon royal line. Louvel was executed on 7 June against a background of escalating protest. Two days later, a demonstrator was killed by the military near the Porte Saint-Denis; others were cut down or trampled under cavalry horses’ feet. The mounted troops had charged after hearing repeated chants of ‘vivent nos frères de Manchester!’ ‘This gathering’, noted the military authorities, ‘was composed largely of people from the most common class’. It was overwhelmingly drawn from the faubourgs of Saint-Denis and Saint-Martin, both of them Jacobin strongholds during the French Revolution.6 Those chants of ‘long live our Manchester brothers!’ were indicative of a heightened Parisian interest in British radicalism. Police surveillance had previously noted that newspaper reports of the Peterloo massacre had been read avidly in the city’s workshops.7 Even more than Peterloo, however, it was Cato Street that became fixed in the French revolutionary imagination. The earliest detailed French account of

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the conspiracy appeared in a quarterly magazine, L’Écho des tribunaux français et étrangers (‘the echo of the French and foreign courts’).8 Indeed, Cato Street was considered so sensational that it was the lead article in the March 1820 issue, granted precedence even over the journal’s coverage of the duc de Berri’s assassination. L’Écho presented a portrait of Thistlewood that noticeably stressed the international dimension of the man, relating how he had deserted from his infantry regiment while serving in the West Indies during Britain’s war against revolutionary France; how he had sailed north to the United States and then crossed back over the Atlantic to France, arriving shortly after the fall of Robespierre (July 1794). L’Écho claimed he remained in France until the peace of Amiens (March 1802) and then returned to Britain, immediately becoming involved with ‘les mécontens’ (the discontented). From that moment, the article concluded, Thistlewood ‘constantly sought the opportunity of overthrowing the constitution’.9 Picaresque rumours about his early life clung to Thistlewood like ivy to a crumbling wall. There is no evidence that any of the claims made by L’Écho were actually true: indeed, some key points conflict with what can be established about his early life. In 1795, for example, Thistlewood stood surety for a marriage bond, in which he was described as a grazier of Tupholme, near Horncastle in Lincolnshire. Between July 1798 and February 1799 he was an ensign in the 1st West Yorkshire Militia. For a similarly short period in 1803 he held a commission in the 3rd Lincolnshire Militia. It has, however, to be conceded that the proposition that Thistlewood had spent some time in France around the turn of the century is plausible. He himself claimed to have served as a captain with a French grenadier regiment. L’Écho’s failure to mention this strongly suggests that it was an invention by Thistlewood; but the period between February 1795 and 1799 is a gap in what is definitively known about his life. The French journal’s chronology had him returning to Britain in 1802 soon after Colonel Edward Despard arrived back in London. Despard, leader of a failed coup d’état in November 1802, was a revolutionary figure who did have extensive experience of the West Indies (he had been governor of Honduras). In 1813 a Home Office informer observed of Thistlewood that ‘from his past life, his present pursuits, principles and low connections he seems to be a second edition of Colonel Despard’.10 Home Office interest in Thistlewood had been prompted by his involvement in a shadowy conspiratorial group, The Patriots, who planned to send an emissary to Paris to urge Napoleon to invade Britain and restore the Saxon Constitution as a prelude to land redistribution along the lines envisaged by Thomas Spence (1750–1814). A Geordie of Scottish Calvinist descent, Spence had moved in 1787 from Tyneside to London, where he attracted considerable attention for his pioneering arguments that the private ownership of land was anathema. Other Patriots included Thomas Hardy (founding secretary of the London Corresponding Society) and Maurice Margarot, another veteran of the same Society who had



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recently returned from Australia, where he been transported in 1793 for his part in the Edinburgh Convention.11 Nor was this the only time that Thistlewood was involved in Anglo-French radical networking. In the summer of 1814 he visited Paris to meet British radical exiles and distribute pamphlets by Thomas Spence, accompanied by Thomas Evans junior (the son of the leader of the Spenceans immediately after their founder’s death).12 A modicum of truth may therefore lie beneath the claims made about the young Thistlewood by L’Écho des tribunaux français et étrangers. Yet in a real sense all this hardly matters: the key point is that L’Écho was claiming the politicisation of Thistlewood for France; it was almost as if his radicalisation could be truly explained only by prolonged exposure to life in the republic. Long after 1820, Cato Street remained a touchstone in France of the British capacity for continental-style insurgency. For example, in 1902 Arthur Lynch (the Irish Nationalist MP for Galway Town who had led the 2nd Irish Brigade of the Boer army against Britain in the South African War of 1899–1902) was tried for high treason. The left-wing newspaper L’Intransigeant noted that, if sentenced to death, Lynch would be the first to be executed for high treason since Thistlewood and his fellow conspirators.13 Nine years later, when Le petit journal, a French socialist party periodical, reported the siege of Sidney Street in London’s East End, le ‘précedént historique’ it seized on was Cato Street, to which it devoted a lengthy discussion on its front page.14 And in 1934 Paris Soir noted with bemused humour that the current inhabitants of Cato Street were agitating for the name of their road to be changed because of its ignominious associations.15 We might also note that, discussing the Europeanwide decline in dismembering the corpses of convicted traitors, Michel Foucault assumed a familiarity with Thistlewood on the part of a French readership.16 Arguably the most intriguing and compelling evidence for the place of Cato Street in the French political imagination is to be found in a print published in Paris in 1820. There is no shortage of graphic depictions relating to the conspiracy, but arguably the most intriguing is the sole illustration to emerge from France, a sepia-tinted lithograph produced by the engraver and publisher Pierre Langlume.17 Langlume mainly published atlases and educational works, from a shop close to the Sorbonne. ‘Arthur Thistlewood: Chef de la Conspiration’, is depicted in the act of shooting Richard Smithers, one of the arresting party, in the Cato Street loft. The print was intended as the first of a series depicting ‘les grandes scènes dramatiques’ of Cato Street.18 Although Langlume claimed precisely to represent the scene in the Cato Street attic he had not, of course, witnessed Smithers’s murder, but neither had George Cruikshank, whose depiction of events in the loft is widely taken to be authoritative. Langlume appears to have based his depiction of the scene entirely upon L’Écho’s account of events, and he makes the curious error of depicting the violent exchange as purely one of firearms, when Thistlewood had actually stabbed Smithers through the heart. Yet, significantly, it took a French artist to imagine the

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Figure 4.1  ‘Arthur Thistlewood: Chef de la Conspiration’ (Paris: Pierre Langlume, 1820)

episode in the most visually arresting way. Langlume’s depiction is to be preferred to Cruikshank’s: it is much more graphic, gothic and altogether less colourful (bearing in mind the scene it depicts took place at 7.30 p.m. on a winter’s night). As the lengthy descriptive text beneath the image states, the attic is depicted ‘in a very bad state … its appearance corresponding perfectly with the evil design [le dessein diabolique] in which Thistlewood was engaged’. There appears to have been no French depiction of the Gordon Riots, of Peterloo or of the 1839 South Wales Chartist rising. In short, Langlume’s lithograph represents a unique moment when revolution in Britain captured the French graphic imagination. This underlines the distinctive character of Cato Street, as well as of 1820 more generally, in European history. The concept of 1820 as a year of European revolution is not a retrospective construction. Thomas Paine ‘thought that he lived in the age of revolution’, Richard Carlile wrote that September: ‘but the present moment better deserves that epithet’.19 The year 1820 was without parallel until 1848. Although in France the consequences of the duc de Berri’s assassination were quickly contained and controlled, in Spain there was a revolution in early March, and in July another in the Kingdom of Naples. Revolution in Portugal followed in August. If we look for a moment to the early months of 1821, there was an insurgency in Piedmont, insurrections against the Ottomans in Moldavia and Wallachia and the dramatic development of an independence movement in Greece.



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That cries of ‘long live our Manchester brothers!’ should have met tragic consequences in Paris ten months after Peterloo is indicative of a growing internationalism within reform opinion in these years. The repercussions in Britain of the 1789 French Revolution have long been investigated in detail, but historians have tended to be unmindful of the traffic of popular political ideas from Britain to France, whilst little attention is paid to popular internationalism before the French Revolution of 1830.20 We therefore need to ‘think back’ Cato Street into the early nineteenth century’s year of revolution, and see the conspiracy as prefiguring a spate of insurgency in both Britain and continental Europe. The assassination of the duc de Berri in February and the Spanish revolution in March particularly shaped the British government’s handling of the prosecution of the conspirators, and of politics more generally. In Ayrshire, according to one Home Office correspondent, the politically disaffected contemplated the duc de Berri’s murder with pleasure.21 Carlile dated several of his publications after the manner of the French revolutionary calendar, but he took ‘the Spanish Revolution from Despotism to Liberty’ as his starting point.22 London ultra-radicals formed an ‘Anglo-Carbonarian Union’, its title taken from the Neapolitan revolutionary movement. The Neapolitan revolutionaries in turn issued an address to the British, praising ‘the patriotic exertions of thy forefathers’ and quoting Shakespeare, Algernon Sydney, Locke and Robert Burns.23 The radical Whig editor of the Leeds Mercury, Edward Baines, warmly welcomed the Spanish revolution as ‘evidence of that growth of knowledge, that spread of liberal ideas, that increase of manly independence … which seem destined to produce a moral and political renovation throughout the earth’. Of the Neapolitan revolutionaries Baines commented approvingly, ‘they do not cry either for blood or a different ruler; their sole object is a REPRESENTATIVE CONSTITUTION’.24 Baines’s rhetoric sharply contrasted with that of the cabinet. ‘They are dumbfounded by the news’, wrote a Russian diplomat. ‘Devil take me. Prince Metternich must march’, declared Wellington in July, ‘He must crush this Italian revolution’. Wellington allegedly talked of nothing except Naples for days on end, though the cabinet’s decision was to observe strict neutrality, other than if necessary to assist in ensuring the personal safety of the Neapolitan royal family.25 Meanwhile, the situation in France was watched with avidity. A revolution in France ‘would decide the fate of the whole continent instantly’, thought Carlile, in particular it would ‘prove an irresistible and universal contagion to the English people’.26 That a militant republican and acolyte of Paine should enthuse about the prospect of European revolution is predictable. But Carlile was far from alone. The Portuguese revolution especially grieved the British government, for, following its success in the Peninsular War, the United Kingdom provided all the senior officers of the Portuguese army. These included its Commander-in-Chief, William Beresford. Since Portugal’s monarchy resided in Brazil, Beresford exercised considerable power as a member of the Council of Regency. To Wellington’s horror

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Beresford had sailed to Brazil in April: ‘I almost went upon my knees to Beresford to prevail upon him not to quit Portugal’, the Duke told one confident, ‘I have been more annoyed by the Portuguese concern than I can express’.27 Because of Portugal’s close association with the United Kingdom, events there had greater potential to impact upon British opinion than the other European revolutions of 1820. Portugal was the subject of an entire morning’s discussion in the cabinet on 12 September. ‘We trust’, Baines acidly observed, ‘that the British government will not be so lost to consistency and reason as to interfere with this revolution’. ‘This new Revolution in Portugal comes famously to our aid’, the octogenarian reformer John Cartwright told Sir Robert Wilson, the radical Whig MP for Southwark.28 ‘This year will certainly form a new era’, Carlile declared in October, ‘it is the year for the emancipation of the human race’.29 That same month five hundred London radicals and Whig reformers dined at the Crown & Anchor in the Strand (the venue of radical choice for such occasions) to celebrate the revolutions in the Iberian peninsula and Kingdom of Naples. The leading speakers were all ‘Queen’s men’, that is supporters of George IV’s estranged Queen Caroline in her efforts to resist the imposition of a divorce: Cartwright, Wilson, Joseph Hume, John Cam Hobhouse, Grey Bennet and Alderman Wood. Another prominent Caroline supporter, Sir Gerard Noel, proposed the toast congratulating Naples and Sicily on ‘consolidating their freedom’, attacking as he did so the ‘disgraceful’ domestic policies of the British government. An Irish Roman Catholic priest, Richard Hayes, used the occasion to announce a new weekly, Catholic Advocate of Civil and Religious Liberty.30 The Catholic Advocate attracted contributions from Henry Hunt (who praised it as ‘written with great talent, and in the true Radical spirit of civil and religious liberty’). It also won plaudits from Carlile.31 Revolutions in Catholic states, he concluded, proved Roman Catholicism was not incompatible with liberty and reform. This argument Carlile then used to castigate further the iniquities of the British political and religious establishment. ‘Falsehood’s minions dare, / My bleeding country’s vitals tear’, ran a poetic contribution to the liveliest of radical periodicals around this time, Black Dwarf, but Where superstition long had dwelt, And man to haughty tyrants knelt; Spain rises, awful and sublime, O’er slavery, error, woe, and crime.32

The apparently decisive role of standing armies in the southern European revolutions also encouraged English radicals. Black Dwarf pointedly linked this issue to the mutinous mood in the Guards. In both Spain and the Neapolitan kingdoms, the Leeds Mercury argued in July, ‘contrary to all former experience, standing armies have been the means of overturning the despotism which they were meant to uphold’; two months later as the pattern was repeated in Portugal the Mercury added that ‘France may now with justice tremble’.33 Carlile issued many appeals to



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British troops to follow their European counterparts: ‘there is nothing wanting in England but a good understanding between the soldiers and people’.34 Anonymous placards appeared in the Leicestershire textile town of Loughborough headed: ‘Revolution in Naples, Effected by the Soldiers’; while in the capital the Spencean Samuel Waddington drew up posters declaiming ‘Remember Spain and Naples! Love and respect the soldiers’, for which he was prosecuted – unsuccessfully – for seditious libel.35 Further evidence for the internationalism of British radicalism in 1820 can be found in the febrile days around Easter. On 1 April An Address to the Inhabitants of Great Britain and Ireland appeared on posters all over central western Scotland, signalling the commencement of the Scottish insurgency.36 The Address was signed by ‘the Committee of Organization for forming a PROVISIONAL GOVERNMENT’ and it contained an arresting reference to recent events in Spain: SOLDIERS! Shall YOU, Countrymen bound by the sacred obligation of an Oath, to defend your Country and your King from enemies, whether foreign or domestic, plunge your BAYONETS into the bosoms of Fathers and Brothers, and at once sacrifice, at the Shrine of Military Despotism, to the unrelenting Orders of a cruel faction, those feelings which you hold in common with the rest of mankind? SOLDIERS! Turn your eyes toward SPAIN, and there behold the happy effects resulting from the UNION of Soldiers and Citizens. Look to that quarter, and there behold the yoke of hated Despotism broke by the Unanimous wish of the people and the Soldiery, happily accomplished without Bloodshed. And, shall you, who taught those Soldiers to fight the battles of LIBERTY, refuse to fight those [the despots] of your own Country? Forbid it, Heaven!

The author of this address was almost certainly Joseph Brayshaw, a Leeds schoolmaster who was the key link between insurgent elements in northern England and Scotland. Brayshaw’s Remarks upon the Character and Conduct of the Men who Met under the Name of the British Parliament, published a few weeks before, likewise referred to the inspiring example of continental European peoples throwing off the yoke of despotism.37 Both the Address and Brayshaw’s Remarks are infused with the language of freedom and slavery. The Address ‘distinguishes the FREEMAN from the SLAVE’ on the basis that the latter is not ‘giving consent to the laws by which he is to be governed’. ‘The man who is compelled to submit to laws which he has no interest in forming’, Brayshaw declared in his Remarks, ‘is a slave’.38 As a second address issued later in the month declared: ‘Let it not be said by future Historians that in the years 1819 and 1820 Britons tamely submitted to become Slaves’.39 Awareness of revolution in continental Europe ran deep in British working-class society. For example, a Burnley weaver, William Varley, wrote in his diary on 7 April:

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And Thistlewood’s circle also kept an eye on news from the continent. The assassination of the duc de Berri galvanised Thistlewood: ‘there never was a better time to stir in England’ he declared the following week.41 Some correspondents with the Home Office seriously argued that the Cato Street conspirators were in collusion with radicals in France. One suggested that Bonapartists supported the Cato Street plot, since they saw the overthrow of the British government as a necessary prelude to Napoleon’s release from St Helena. Charles Ethelston, the Manchester clerical magistrate who had ordered the troops on to the field of Peterloo, detailed rumours that Thistlewood had been to France within the past twelve months, returning ‘with his Pocket full of money’.42 A British resident of Lille told the Home Office that in December 1819 he had seen Thistlewood and another leading Spencean, James Watson, in Cassel in French Flanders. Sidmouth’s private papers contain an account sent to him by an Englishman, resident in northern France, that rumours ‘of the assassination of the Duke of Wellington’ were circulating in both the Pas-de-Calais and the Somme immediately before the exposure of Cato Street. Similar reports had circulated before the assassination of the duc de Berri, Sidmouth was told.43 The weekly newspaper Evans & Ruffy’s Farmers’ Journal confidently asserted that ‘a Frenchman’ was among the conspirators who had evaded capture on 23 February. Even official intelligence sources reported the involvement of Frenchmen in the serious disturbances in the west of Scotland at Easter, although this was almost certainly an elaboration of a popular rumour among the disaffected at the time.44 Firmer evidence emerged for links between British radicals and France in the summer of 1820. Migrant British workers in Cambrai, Lyons and Rouen had established contact with French reformers by June; this, in turn, initiated correspondence with Lancashire, Yorkshire and Glasgow radicals. James Wilson, the veteran Strathaven democrat who contributed to the exchange, assumed that the principal British contact must have been the Spencean James Watson.45 He was mistaken: the English end of the correspondence was in the hands of a Lancashire weaver, James Lang, and an ex-soldier and ‘violent Radical’ called Tootall, from Bolton.46 But James Wilson’s error is an interesting indication of how insurgent elements beyond London believed that the Spencean circle intersected with French radicalism. As a further dimension to the internationalist perspective on Cato Street we might also note how the government protected its intelligence-gathering system by exporting informers abroad when they had served their purpose or Britain had become too hot for them. British governments went to some lengths to ‘bury’ inconvenient sources of political intelligence, once they had outlived their usefulness. Thomas



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Reynolds, the principal informer who had betrayed the United Irishmen in 1797–98, was appointed to a succession of government sinecures in Lisbon, Copenhagen and Iceland. Sustained by a lump sum of £5,000 and a pension of £1,000 a year, he eventually died in Paris in 1836. William Oliver, the spy at the heart of the 1817 Pentrich (Derbyshire) rising, was packed off to Cape Colony in present-day South Africa immediately after the execution of the leading 1817 insurgents. There, as William Oliver Jones, he was employed at the behest of the Home Office as an inspector of government works. He died and was buried in Green Point Cemetery on the outskirts of Cape Town in August 1827. The spy who infiltrated the Cato Street Conspiracy so effectively, George Edwards, was bundled off initially to Guernsey in the Channel Isles, but then to Green Point, Cape Town. It seems almost certain he died there in 1843.47 Considering Cato Street through a global perspective underlines a key element of its significance; it was neither the work of an isolated group of psychopaths nor the work of those who had been duped by an agent provocateur. This latter point was the interpretation to which many political radicals clung, particularly those implicated in the conspiracy. The conspiracy was of wider and longer maturation than the trial of the core conspiratorial group ever established. These conspirators had deep roots in London ultra-radicalism through Spenceanism. It was they who organised the great radical meeting at Spa Fields in December 1816, intending to create sufficient tumult in the capital to signal to the provinces the feasibility of a general rising.48 The failure of this 1816 meeting to achieve what its organisers hoped for was pivotal to the evolution of Cato Street. It suggested that mass demonstrations, however large, would never alone generate the momentum necessary to destabilise the capital. Thereafter this group favoured covert tactics and on at least five subsequent occasions conspired to create circumstances that would destabilise metropolitan government.49 Peterloo regalvanised the most militant Spenceans. ‘High treason was committed against the people at Manchester’, Thistlewood told the judge in his speech before being sentenced to death.50 ‘The protection afforded to the Perpetrators of the bloody outrage of the 16th of August, clearly manifests a design to subvert the laws by those who are sworn to maintain them; and to establish on the ruins of the English Constitution, a military despotism’, another radical reformer declared.51 ‘Are not the recent transactions at Manchester the commencement of a Revolution irresistible?’, the members of an infidel ‘chapel’ in Hopkins Street, Soho, debated.52 Monarchy and aristocracy ‘buy and sell you as they did living stock’, a leading member of the congregation, the Spencean shoemaker Allen Davenport, declared. ‘For my own part I am ready now … I compare the present time to the French Revolution’; and, he added ominously ‘we must arm ourselves as they did and in open Day too and though we may loose [sic] a few lives in the onset yet what is the army compared to the Mass of the Country who are labouring under the yoke of despotism.’53 The leading figure at Hopkins Street was Robert Wedderburn, a

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Spencean of Afro-Jamaican heritage. In the winter of 1819–20 his chapel was also the meeting place of section 6 of the ‘General Union of Non-Represented People’. This section was a significant centre for armed drilling, upon which ‘Thislewood [sic] says he depends more on Wedderburn’s division for being armed than all the rest’, Home Office intelligence noted.54 In terms of official management of political unrest, the Peterloo massacre originated in a deeply serious error. Cabinet members privately acknowledged this: George Canning (President of the Board of Control for India) for example stressed: the difficulty of our position in respect of the Mctr Case, & at the same time the absolute necessity of our maintaining it … It is, to be sure, very provoking that the Magistr[ate]s, right as they were in principle, and nearly right in practice, should have spoilt the completeness of their case by half an hour’s precipitation. But their defence must therefore, I apprehend, be conducted on general grounds, and the details of the particular transaction merged, as much as possible, in the overwhelming question of the magnitude of the mischief, & the necessity of a remedy.55

Official handling of Cato Street, on the other hand, was solely in the hands of senior cabinet members and was not a matter of damage limitation in response to panicky local officialdom as Peterloo had been. A high-profile assassination in Paris days before Cato Street, and the Spanish revolution just days after it, set in stone the government’s resolution to seek a show trial and the execution of the leading conspirators. Yet at the same the government was reluctant to reveal that the conspiracy had evolved in anything other than complete isolation from other disaffected elements. In previous work on Cato Street I have suggested that the decision not to prosecute other Spenceans (for example John and Robert George, John Johnson and Thomas Preston) was rooted in a reluctance to expose the extent of the government’s intelligence network. To a significant extent this was indeed the case. However, the government’s consciousness of the frailty of traditional political authority across Europe was, I would now argue, also a key factor. To expose any evidence of domestic discontent, beyond the bare minimum necessary to secure the exemplary convictions of Thistlewood and those apprehended in and around Cato Street, would have risked conceding that Britain stood on the brink of possible revolution like its continental neighbours. The Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, had actually witnessed the storming of the Bastille in July 1789 and the actions of his government have to be evaluated in that context. Incidents of insurgency were widespread across the United Kingdom in 1820: on 31 March (Good Friday) an uprising in the West Riding textile district centred on Huddersfield; from Easter Monday, a more concerted and serious insurgency in west-central Scotland; then on 11 April a further uprising of Yorkshire textile workers near Barnsley. These have been well documented and do not need to be laboured here.56 What does require emphasis, however, is how widespread aware-



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ness of Cato Street was outside of London. The general officer commanding the Army’s Northern District was clear that ‘what occurred on the 23d [of February] in London, was expected by the leaders of the discontented in the Country’. The Mayor of Leeds noted ‘an expectation here lately among a certain class of the disaffected that some very serious occurrence would take place’.57 In Halifax ‘rumours speak of Expectations lately expressed that something would happen in the very Week’. Four days before the plot’s exposure Joseph Swann, a Stockport weaver, preached: There are many happy days laid up in Store which must come shortly … The Angel of Freedom appears upon the Wing … convulsions and signs are all afloat and burst they must with a tremendous crash.

Perhaps this was the chiliasm of despair, but locals subsequently claimed that Swann knew ‘of the time the horrid Deeds were fixed to be perpetrated’. In the King’s Head, Lichfield (Staffordshire), a Royal Marines pensioner stunned fellow drinkers when he claimed he had been aware of ‘Thistlewood’s Plan, and I wish Lord Sidmouth had been there’.58 Awareness was also evident among ultra-radicals in Scotland that a rising of some kind was to be initiated from the capital in February, along with indications that they were prepared to act if it was successful. The commander of the Army in Scotland was adamant that Scottish reformers ‘expected something very important to take place’ at this time.59 During the last week of February groups hung round the streets of the principal radical centres each evening, eager for news. ‘When the account of the fate of Thistlewood and his party at last reached’ Glasgow and Paisley, radical delegates ‘were staggered and confounded’, one close observer commented.60 However, when news of Cato Street reached Houston, six miles north-west of Paisley, local radicals remained optimistic: ‘Wait a little, and you will hear of a bony [bonnie] hurry yet, in a day or two.’61 Compelling testimony comes from those who, aside from Thistlewood and his closest associates, arguably knew most about the extent of unrest in February 1820: senior members of Liverpool’s government. Sidmouth wrote to Dublin Castle on 24 February that it was believed the plot ‘would be the Forerunner of General Confusion and Revolution’. The following week he sent word to the King, ‘it is certain that committees of the Disaffected in Leeds, Manchester, Carlisle and Glasgow expected to hear of a Blow having been struck last Week in London’.62 Around the same time the Russian ambassador and his wife were invited to dine with the Foreign Secretary. She was astonished to find police on duty inside Castlereagh’s house and that he ‘himself had two loaded pistols in the pockets of his breeches. He showed them to me at the table. I was nervous every time he made a movement to offer me anything.’63 In early March, Sidmouth wrote to one of his principal Yorkshire correspondents that ‘some important Event was throughout the North of Engld anticipated to happen in the last week of Feby, tho’ perhaps the precise Plot might not be known’.64

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For a short but frenetic period Cato Street plunged Britain into panic. ‘Every shabby and hungry-looking man met on the road was pronounced “a radical”’, Harriet Martineau commented. She lived in Norwich at this time, where she recalled ‘young ladies carried planks and ironing boards, to barricade windows’ and country gentlemen scoured ‘the fields and lanes … to fight the enemy who never came’.65 A retired officer whose Hampshire home bordered the Farnham turnpike road wrote to Sidmouth about the sudden passage past his house, a day or so after Cato Street, of some two hundred working men, scattered in groups of three to five. All had come from London and claimed to be on the tramp in search of work; and yet ‘all at once the migration ceased’ as quickly as it had begun.66 Lord Sidmouth confided to a close friend that ‘the most hardened incredulity appears to be staggered’.67 However, in the medium and longer term Cato Street was distinctly advantageous to the British government. It strengthened the justification of repressive policies that – in the immediate wake of Peterloo – had been widely condemned by the parliamentary opposition as oppressive; and it helped consolidate the Liverpool ministry’s position in the general election campaign that – having been triggered by the death of George III in January – took place in the weeks after Cato Street. While it won the election, Liverpool’s ministry leeched support and it is open to speculation that it might have fared even less well had it not been able to play the Cato Street card. The ministry energetically portrayed the conspiracy as justifying its repressive policies. For example, in a speech to his Liverpool constituents on 7 March, George Canning pondered ‘whether any Country, in any two epochs, however distant, of its history, ever presented such a contrast with itself as this Country in November 1819, and this Country in February 1820’. It underlines how an undisguised sense of relief, bordering on joyousness, suffused the cabinet. Shortly after the Cato Street executions, perhaps the most informative cartoon relating to the conspiracy was published by the London engraver, Samuel Fores. It depicts cabinet members dancing round a maypole from which are suspended the severed heads of the five conspirators.68 Meanwhile, Whig leaders referred to Lord Liverpool enjoying ‘the windfall of the Cato Street conspiracy’.69 Cato Street presented a huge challenge for the Whig opposition. After Cato Street, even the most moderate reformers risked portrayal by their opponents as being soft on sedition.70 Leading Whigs were themselves apprehensive that Cato Street indicated ‘a spirit growing every day throughout the country, against the nature and practice of our government, and tending to separate the upper from the middling classes of society’.71 Hobbled by recent events, the Whigs provided indifferent opposition and became animated only when the extraordinary royal divorce proceedings commenced in the summer. Until then they were shackled by the widespread perception, summarised by Lord Liverpool, that ‘it appears clearer every day that there are but two national parties in the country: the church and king party, and the radicals. The latter, however, are become truly formidable.’72 No other peacetime government faced as stern a test as Liverpool’s ministry



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in 1820. How stern is intelligible not only when the full range of domestic politics is comprehended – including the popular reaction to Peterloo across one of the severest winters in memory, the general election required on the death of George III and the peculiar challenges to government posed by his petulant successor. Cato Street was ultimately turned to the ministry’s advantage. Soon after the Spa Fields rally organised by the Spenceans in December 1816, William Cobbett caricatured Liverpool’s ministry thus: ‘They sigh for a PLOT, oh, how they sigh! They are working and slaving and fretting and stewing; they are sweating all over; they are absolutely pining and dying for a plot.’73 The appearance that the Cato Street Conspiracy was the work of an agent provocateur, or at the very least fomented and accelerated through George Edwards’s agency, has meant that it has been too readily discounted as an episode of no deep significance. This chapter has sought to take Cato Street out of the tight and constricted narratives provided by prosecution and defence alike at the conspirators’ trials; and to locate it within the broader context both of British radical politics and of Europeanwide insurgency. ‘I am a stranger to England by birth … I have not a friend in England’, the Jamaican-born conspirator William Davidson (‘greatly agitated’) declared at his trial. He was appealing for clemency. Yet all the Cato Street conspirators were seen as estranged, ‘without a precedent’, to quote Lord Chief Justice Abbott at their sentencing, ‘Englishmen laying aside their national character’.74 Cato Street forces us to re-evaluate the issue of British political exceptionalism. Much emphasis (at the time and subsequently) was placed upon how Britain was out of step with France from 1789, and with Europe in 1848; but in 1820 the United Kingdom was close, uncomfortably so, to the revolutionary mood of the continent. Notes  1 Fred Donnelly, ‘A Cato Street Conspirator in North America’, Labour History Review, 78:1 (2013), 127–30.  2 M. Chase, ‘The People’s Farm’: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775–1840 (Oxford, 1988), p. 119.  3 Boot and Shoemaker, 14 June–6 Sept. 1879.  4 P. Benton, The History of Rochford Hundred (Rochford, 1867), p. 343.  5 Donnelly, ‘A Cato Street Conspirator’, p. 129; Hampshire Telegraph and Sussex Chronicle, 7 Sept. 1829.  6 Rémi Gossez (ed.), Un Ouvrier en 1820: Manuscrit inédit de Jacques-Etienne Bédé (Paris, 1984). I am grateful to Fabrice Bensimon for this reference.  7 Gossez (ed.), Un Ouvrier.  8 ‘Conjuration d’Arthur Thistlewood et Consorts’, L’Écho des Tribunaux Français et Étrangers: Ouvrage Uniquement Consacré aux Procès Récens, No. 1 (Mar. 1820), pp. 5–18; No. 2 (May 1820), pp. 113–51.  9 ‘Et il paroit que, depuis ce temps, il a constamment cherche l’occasion de renverser la constitution’ (p. 19).

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10 TNA, HO 42/136, Smith to the Home Office, 8 Feb. 1813. 11 Chase, People’s Farm, pp. 74–6. 12 Chase, People’s Farm, pp. 91–2. 13 L’Intransigeant 2 June 1902. Lynch was found guilty and sentenced to death, but the sentence was commuted to imprisonment and he was released after a year. 14 Le Petit Journal, 7 Jan. 1911. 15 Paris Soir, 9 Aug. 1934. 16 Michel Foucault, Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (Paris, 1975), p. 16; see p. 10 of the English translation – Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, translated from the French by Alan Sheridan (Harmondsworth, 1979). 17 ‘Arthur Thistlewood: Chef de la Conspiration’, British Museum (Department of Prints and Drawings), museum number 1887,0722.251. 18 Advertisement on the unnumbered endpaper of L’Écho, issue 4 (July 1820). 19 The Republican, 15 Sept. 1820, p. 79. 20 Though see H. Weisser, British Working-Class Movements and Europe, 1815–48 (Manchester, 1975), pp. 7–31. 21 TNA, HO 40/11, fol. 109 (2 Mar.). 22 E.g. A New Year’s Address to the Reformers of Great Britain (London, [1821]), p. 16 – ‘Jan. 1st, Second Year of the Spanish Revolution from Despotism to Liberty’; Carlile’s subsequent periodical To the Reformers of Great Britain was similarly dated. 23 TNA, HO 44/7, fol. 66 (9 Mar. 1821); Courier 16 Sept. For the anglophile leanings of Neapolitan revolutionaries around this time see M. Isabella, Risorgimento in Exile: Italian Emigrés and the Liberal International in the Post-Napoleonic Era (Oxford, 2009), esp. 137–46. 24 Leeds Mercury, 8 Apr. and 5 Aug. 25 P. Quennell (ed.), The Private Letters of Princess Lieven to Prince Metternich, 1820–1826 (London, 1937), pp. 53 and 56; BL, Add. MSS 38387, fol. 212 (Castlereagh to the Admiralty, 13 Sept.). 26 Republican, 15 Sept. 1820, 10 Mar. 1821. 27 Letter, 14 Sept., quoted in Wellington and His Friends: Letters of the First Duke of Wellington … Selected and Edited by the Seventh Duke of Wellington (London, 1965), p. 9. 28 F. Bamford and G.W. Wellington (eds), The Journal of Mrs Arbuthnot, 1820–32: vol. 1, February 1820 to December 1825 (London, 1950), p. 37; Leeds Mercury, 16 Sept.; BL, Add. MSS 30109, fol. 125 (14 Sept.); see also fol. 124 (12 Sept.). 29 Republican, 13 Oct. 1820. 30 Morning Chronicle, 3 Oct. 1820; Black Dwarf, 4 Oct. 1820; Republican, 6 Oct. 1820. 31 To the Radical Reformers, Male and Female, of England, Ireland, and Scotland, 10 Feb. 1821; Republican, 8 Dec. 1820. 32 ‘Ode to the Genius of Revolutions’, Black Dwarf, 2 Aug. 1820. 33 Black Dwarf, 21 June 1820; Leeds Mercury, 29 July and 16 Sept. 1820. 34 Republican, 20 Oct. 1820. See also 18 Feb. and 9 June 1820. Carlile returned to the same theme early the following year with his The Character of a Soldier; by Philanthropos (London, 1821). 35 TNA, HO 40/14 fols 200–2 (21 Aug.); Times, 22 Sept.; McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 173–4.



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36 A printed copy survives in TNA, HO 102/32, fol. 296. 37 [J. Brayshaw], Remarks upon the Character and Conduct of the Men who Met under the Name of the British Parliament at the Latter End of the Year 1819 … (Newcastle upon Tyne, [1820]), p. 35. 38 Brayshaw, Remarks, p. 18 (slaves), pp. 17, 26–8, 31 and 37 (public meetings). 39 TNA, HO 102/32, fols 444–5 (18 Apr.). 40 Burnley Central Library (Community History Department), Memorandum Book of William Varley, pp. 4–5. 41 TNA, HO 44/5, fol. 32 (1 Mar.). 42 TNA, HO 40/11, fols 85–6 (3 Mar.). 43 TNA, HO 44/1, fol. 208 (6 Mar.) and HO 44/5, fol. 346 (Howell to Home Office, 13 Mar.); D[evon] R[ecords] O[ffice], 152M/C/1820/OZ (26 Feb.). 44 Evans and Ruffy’s Farmers’ Journal, 28 Feb.; TNA, HO 102/32, fols 413–21; J. Parkhill, History of Paisley (Paisley, 1857), p. 60. 45 TNA, HO 40/14, fols 131 (information of Alpha, 21 June), 131–2 (copy of Wilson letter, 6 July), 135 (Toothill and Lang’s address to France [copy] 11 July), 137 (Wilson, 20 July). 46 Both Lang and Tootall had been arrested in Dec. 1819 on suspicion of involvement in plans for a general rising but never charged. See W[est] Y[orkshire] A[rchives] S[ervice] (Leeds), Harewood MSS, WYL250/6/2/B2/1/12 (Byng to Lascelles, 29 Dec. 1819); TNA, HO 40/12, fols 53–6, 166–7 (4 and 13 Apr.). 47 Chase, 1820, p. 138. 48 Expectations for the Spa Fields meeting ran high in both capital and provinces. For example, in Lancashire, ‘in the course of the Day’, it was reported that ‘the Tower in London was taken by the Rioters … all agree in expressing the fullest determination to have mustered and armed immediately, in case the disturbance in London had been attended with Success’. TNA, HO 40/4, fol. 1[2], 3 Dec. 1816. 49 Chase, ‘The People’s Farm’, pp. 101–20. 50 Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 339. 51 Anonymous preface to a new edition of William Jones, An Inquiry into the Legal Means of Suppressing Riots, with a Constitutional Plan of Future Defence (London, [1819]), p. iv. 52 TNA, HO 42/195, 29 Sept. 1819. 53 TNA, HO 42/197, 18 Oct. 1819 (report of constables Plush and Matthewson). 54 TNA, HO 42/197, 18 Oct. 1819. 55 BL, Huskisson Papers, Add. MSS 38741, fol. 315, Canning to Huskisson, 14 Aug. [sic – an error for Oct.] 1819. 56 For a full account see Chase, 1820, and on Scotland chapter 4, ‘The “General Rising” of 1820’ of Gordon Pentland, The Spirit of the Union: Popular Politics in Scotland, 1815–20 (London, 2011). 57 WYAS (Leeds), WYL/250/6/2/B1/1/17 (Byng to Lascelles, 2 Mar.); TNA, HO 40/11, fol. 66 (Mayor of Leeds to Lascelles, 29 Feb.). 58 TNA, HO 40/11, fols 105 (Horton to Sidmouth), 170 (deposition of Abel Grove) and 164–6 (Lloyd to Hobhouse). 59 TNA, HO 102/32, fol. 218 (1 Mar.). 60 A. Richmond, Narrative of the Condition of the Manufacturing Population (London, 1824), p. 184.

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61 TNA, HO 102/32, fol. 222, Monteith to Sidmouth (2 Mar.). 62 DRO, 150M/C/1820/OH/2 and 18 (letters to Grant, 24 Feb., and Bloomfield, 3 Mar.). 63 Quennell (ed.), Private Letters of Princess Lieven, pp. 17–18, quoting a letter to Metternich, 1 Mar. 64 TNA, HO 40/11, fol. 105v (draft reply to Horton). 65 H. Martineau, The History of England during the Thirty Years’ Peace, 1816–46 (London, 1849), p. 243. 66 TNA, HO 44/6, fol. 9 (4 Apr.). 67 DRO, 152M/C/1820/OH/6 and 9 (26 and 27 Feb.). 68 National Portrait Gallery, Reference Collection NPG D36701. This image can be viewed at www.npg.org.uk/collections/search/portrait/mw194790/A-May-Day-Garland-for1820?search=sp&sText=A+may+day+garland+for+1820&firstRun=true&rNo=0 (acc­ essed 2 Oct. 2018). 69 Lord Holland, in a letter to R. Adair, 8 Mar. [1820], BL, Add. MSS 51609, quoted in D.R. Fisher (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1820–32 (Cambridge, 2009), p. 217. 70 Chase, 1820, pp. 86–97. 71 Holland to Adair, 8 Mar. [1820], BL, Add. MSS 51609, quoted in Fisher, History of Parliament, p. 217. 72 Letter to Canning, 23 Mar. 1820, Harewood MSS, quoted in Fisher, History of Parliament, p. 218. 73 Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register, 14 Dec. 1816. 74 Wilkinson, Authentic History, pp. 318, 349.



Cato Street and the Caribbean 81

5 Cato Street and the Caribbean Ryan Hanley

The historiography of protest and radicalism in early nineteenth-century Britain sometimes seems most clearly divided on questions of geography. On the one hand, a long-standing tradition emphasises the significance of internal, often localised motivating and organisational factors in the sudden outbreaks of violent resistance that seem to characterise the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century political topography of the British Isles.1 Most modern working-class and labour histories now benefit enormously from a parallel historiography on nationalism and patriotism in popular politics (perhaps most famously Linda Colley’s Britons), but the geographical focus for many investigations into radical politics has, to a surprising extent, remained firmly rooted in Britain and Ireland.2 While the influence of the French Revolution and its ideological bases are often invoked as providing the impetus for British and Irish political resistance, historians have been strangely reticent in venturing any further afield in search of influences and collaborations for domestic radicalism, especially when exploring the period after the Napoleonic Wars.3 The influence of imperial connections is noticeably lacking in much selfdefining British protest history for this period. The result has been a view of political resistance which gives due weight to the specifics of class and nation in local perspective, but has perhaps undersold the impact of imperial and transnational concerns in British radicalism. A second, seemingly discrete historiographical tradition situates British and Irish revolutionary or insurrectionary activities very firmly within the broader framework of the ‘Revolutionary Atlantic’. This corpus can trace its genealogy back to C.L.R. James’s seminal The Black Jacobins, though the consolidation of postcolonial and New Imperial History approaches has significantly refreshed interest in such

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p­ erspectives since the 1980s.4 Among the best known of this wave of studies into transatlantic radicalism, Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker’s The Many-headed Hydra situates the emergence of a ‘transatlantic proletariat’ of sailors, soldiers and slaves in the period classically associated with the emergence of the Thompsonian English working class.5 While Linebaugh and Rediker’s methodology has been (quite fairly) challenged, their model of British radicalism within an Atlantic and imperial framework has been highly influential and retains currency.6 Even more influential has been the theoretical delineation of the ‘Black Atlantic’ and the impact of ‘race’ on the emergence of national identity as articulated by Paul Gilroy.7 Along with Kate Donington and Jessica Moody, I have argued elsewhere for a finergrained analysis of the impact of Empire – specifically slavery – on the development of British political culture at the local and (inter-)personal levels.8 In this chapter, I want to reconcile this approach with both Rediker and Linebaugh’s notion of an activist community resisting hegemonic culture and various iterations of ‘slavery’ across the Atlantic, and Gilroy’s understanding of English cultural sensibility as generated in relation to perceived national and ethnic alterity. Revisiting the Cato Street Conspiracy presents several opportunities for a closely focused re-evaluation of a specific moment of British insurrectionary radicalism in the context of race and Empire. Most obviously, two of the key proponents of Spencean radicalism during this period, Robert Wedderburn and William Davidson, were black men born in Jamaica. Their experiences as highly visible migrants struggling to survive and provide for their families in the biting recession of postwar London cast new light on how economic conditions could interact with popular understandings of ‘race’ and Empire in galvanising radical political activity. This is instructive when we return to the old question of whether parochial economic concerns or political ideology were the real drivers of British insurrectionism.9 Despite what some historians have maintained, black people were treated differently in early nineteenth-century Britain, even among the more demographically mixed workingclass urban communities in which they most often lived.10 In Wedderburn’s and Davidson’s cases this can be linked to exacerbated financial hardship and a degree of social ostracisation, fear and ridicule. Moreover, their close encounters with slavery during their childhoods in the Caribbean graphically underlined for them the limited and conditional nature of Britain’s constitutional commitment to ‘liberty’, demonstrably influencing both of their approaches to political activism. There were few places in the world with as consistent and pervasive insurrectionary traditions as the Caribbean. The revolution in Haiti and major armed uprisings in the British Caribbean in 1816 and 1823 were only the most visible iterations of endemic, constant resistance to slavery during this period, ranging from toolbreaking to absconding, from hunger strikes to assassinations.11 Haiti had provided a model for what a successful and truly ‘bottom-up’ revolution could look like, and Wedderburn at least was keen to replicate aspects of it in the British West Indies as well as metropolitan Britain.12 Wedderburn saw Jamaica as a potential



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testing-ground for the sweeping land and wealth redistribution associated with the Spencean plan. The organisation and armed resistance of the enslaved in the British West Indies also prompted his best-known contributions to the radical movement in Britain. As Roxann Wheeler has identified, the figurative language of ‘slavery’ had played a constant part in discourses of British radicalism since at least the beginning of the eighteenth century.13 Through the intellectual links between domestic and colonial insurrection provided by black migrants such as Davidson and Wedderburn, this figurative language found a persuasive, literal counterpoint that could be easily linked to a heroic struggle against tyranny. An analysis of the transatlantic intellectual milieu surrounding the domestic insurrectionary moment of Cato Street, through the lives of these two migrant black radicals, sheds new light on the deeply enmeshed and sometimes disquieting role played by the realities of slavery and the fictions of ‘race’ in the history of British reform. Our sources of information on both Davidson’s and Wedderburn’s lives are, to varying degrees, unreliable. The main source of information on Davidson’s early life is a short biography published as part of George Wilkinson’s sensationalist Authentic History of the Cato Street Conspiracy.14 This biography was later reproduced (possibly plagiarised) and expanded upon in P. Kelleher’s Lives of … the Leaders of the Cato Street Conspiracy.15 Both of these accounts were written to sell: Wilkinson, for instance, was the editor of the New Newgate Calendar, which specialised in ‘lurid’ reportage of trials and executions.16 Wedderburn, meanwhile, related his early experiences in several published autobiographical accounts.17 As well as the usual caveats surrounding the use of autobiography as a historical source, these accounts present a further methodological challenge when one considers that Wedderburn’s limited literacy necessitated the use of unknown amanuenses and editors.18 As highlighted in Iain McCalman’s magisterial studies, Wedderburn also had an unfortunate habit of producing writing in partnership with untrustworthy collaborators.19 Historians have supplemented these main sources with material produced by hostile Home Office spies and in trial records, the reliability of these genres having been debated extensively elsewhere.20 The accounts that follow, therefore, are based on the best information currently available, cross-referenced wherever possible, and no doubt will be subject to future refinements as interest in these two key figures of nineteenth-century black British and radical history continues to grow. William Davidson was born to a high-status black or ‘mulatto’ woman in Jamaica in 1786. Wilkinson’s and Kelleher’s accounts both claim that his father was ‘Attorney-General Davidson’.21 Historians routinely reproduce this information without comment, but further investigation brings this assertion into question. According to the surviving Jamaican almanacs for the period, no senior member of the Court of Judiciary (the division of the Attorney General) in Jamaica between 1781 and 1820 was named Davidson or Davison.22 The Attorney Generals

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of the island during Davidson’s life were Robert Sewell (served 1780–95), George Crawford Ricketts (served 1795–c.1811) and William Burge (served c.1811–c.1823), with Sewell being the most likely candidate since he was in post when Davidson was born.23 As an illegitimate child, of course, William might have taken his surname from his mother, but that is by no means certain. Thistlewood, for example, was reported to have taken his mother’s name (Burdett) until she subsequently married his father, whilst Wedderburn and his mixed-race brothers, by contrast, always went by their father’s name.24 Moreover, Sewell had no obvious links to Scotland, raising the question: if William was his son, why did he send him to Edinburgh and subsequently Aberdeen to gain an education?25 Other possibilities exist, such as Alexander Davidson, a magistrate for the county of Surrey, where Kingston was located, or Duncan Davidson, a plantation owner with Scottish family connections; it may be significant that William’s youngest son, born in London in May 1819, was named Duncan.26 Wilkinson or the source he consulted for his short biography may well have inflated the father’s social status to embellish the story and add a touch of dramatic irony to the assertion that William ‘had been destined to something above the ordinary walks of life’.27 It may never be possible to answer the question of his paternity with certainty, but in any case he was certainly not born into slavery. His mother, described by Kelleher as ‘a woman of great respectability and property’, gave him some limited financial support throughout his life, including reportedly sending him some money to celebrate his thirty-third birthday in May 1819.28 Apparently at his father’s insistence, the young Davidson was sent to Edinburgh to study for a career in law. Around 1800, he moved to Aberdeen to study mathematics at the college. He proved a very capable student: in the estimation of one of his acquaintances at Aberdeen, an architect named McWilliam, Davidson possessed ‘a gigantic mind’.29 He went on to work at the offices of one of his father’s colleagues in Liverpool for three years, before absconding and enlisting on board a merchant ship. Accounts differ, but, over the next decade or so, he appears to have travelled back and forth between Britain and the West Indies, enlisting with privateers and merchant ships and being pressed into service in the Royal Navy on more than one occasion, while simultaneously giving up on a legal career and learning a new trade as a cabinet-maker.30 The sensationalist accounts published after Cato Street narrate a protracted slide down the social ladder, from student at a prestigious university, to clerk in a Liverpool law office, to itinerant but distinguished seaman, to apprentice cabinet-maker, to impecunious artisan. Arriving in London around 1816, he became involved in radical politics and was introduced by the conspirator John Harrison to Thistlewood. Davidson seems to have taken on the twin roles of ‘enforcer’ and ‘master-atarms’ in the Thistlewood group. When he spoke at public meetings, he tended to emphasise the need for armed resistance and all-out, death-or-glory commitment to the cause. Speaking to an assembly at Finsbury Park on 1 November 1819, for example, he ‘announced it to be his intention to bring arms with him to the meeting



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of the 15th instant for self defence’. Newspaper reportage of this ill-attended meeting ridiculed ‘the “arming” phrenzy of the Mulatto Davison’.31 At the larger Smithfield meeting on 7 December, the spy George Edwards testified that Davidson could be seen ‘protecting’ a black banner that read, pointedly, ‘Let us die like men and not be sold like slaves’, complete with an ominous skull-and-crossbones motif.32 In the weeks leading up to Cato Street, deponents recalled seeing him around town asking for old files that could be sharpened into makeshift pike-heads. When asked if they were to be used for turning tools, he apparently joked, ‘No – they are to turn men’s guts’.33 Others suggested that ultra-radicals used the little yard behind Davidson’s house for military drills and weapons training.34 Evidence at his trial also mentioned that he had redeemed a blunderbuss he had pawned, specifically for use in the assassination attempt.35 Davidson was a tall, well-built man who apparently intimidated some of the men in his neighbourhood. He was known to wander around the rough streets near his home behind Lord’s Cricket Ground late at night with something under his coat, ‘which was supposed to be either a gun or a great stick’.36 It was perhaps for his intimidating physique, along with his military expertise, that he was selected to guard the entrance to the hayloft on Cato Street on the night of 23 February 1820. However, whilst his size, strength and skills may have made him a formidable guard, the colour of his skin made him both recognisable and memorable: liabilities indeed for any would-be assassin. For example, when Elizabeth Weston, who lived on Cato Street, was called to the witness stand to give her recollections of the evening, the first thing she noted amiss about the night of 23 February was feeling ‘much alarmed’ by ‘a man of colour standing by the stable’.37 John Monument, a radical who turned King’s evidence in exchange for the conspiracy charges against him being dropped, specifically mentioned in his testimony that he ‘recollect[ed] the prisoner Davidson from his colour’.38 He may have been the best man for the job of guarding the stable, but it is clear that Davidson’s physical appearance made an impression on witnesses in ways that were different from any of the other conspirators. After his capture, Davidson was well aware that his origins, and the question of racial prejudice, might affect how he was treated as his trial. His defensive strategy was to try to turn these factors to his advantage. He represented himself as the archetype of the striving, self-reliant British artisan, who ‘always maintained the character of an industrious and inoffensive man’, despite the disadvantage of having ‘no friends in England’.39 As Daniel Livesay has noted, Davidson’s defence actively anticipated prejudice on the basis of his skin colour, presenting him as ‘a member of the educated elite, disconnected from London’s rabble of color’.40 He even went as far as to claim that he ‘never associated with men of colour, although one myself, because I always found them very ignorant’. At the same time, he suggested that he himself had been the victim of constant racial profiling and that he had been targeted by the rest of the small artisans in his area, ‘as all the rest of the trade, from jealousy, set their face against me’.41 All of this effectively amounted to an apologia

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for poverty on the grounds of race; the implication being that Davidson would, were it not for his background and the discrimination he faced, have elevated himself to a more respectable station in life and thereby put himself beyond suspicion. The core of his defence, though, was that this was a case of mistaken identity and he had been mixed up with another black man. He went on to describe an incident when he had been teaching at a Sunday-School: A person, a man of colour, insulted one of the female teachers at Walworth. The young lady said it was me, and I found I was slighted, although nothing was said. I sent in my resignation, when the gentlemen waited upon me in a body, and stated what had been alleged to my charge … I afterwards, however, set myself to work, and actually found the man who had committed the offence, made him acknowledge it, and beg the young lady’s pardon.42

Dirty looks, a reproachful silence, the ominous approach of a gang of men intent on protecting a white woman’s honour: Davidson’s account evokes frightening images of racist vigilantism narrowly averted. In such a climate, he seemed to be suggesting, it was hardly surprising that a black man had been picked up for a crime he did not commit. While the jury found his story ultimately unconvincing, his defence rested on the demand that they look beyond his ‘race’ and recognise him as a moral equal: ‘Although I am a man of colour, that is no reason that I should be guilty of such a crime. My colour may be against me, but I have as good and as fair a heart as if I were a white.’43 Davidson was arguing for his life, and, given the extensive evidence collected by the Home Office of his intimate involvement in the conspiracy, it is clear that he had not, in fact, been confused for someone else. How far, then, should we accept his picture of how black men were treated in Britain in this period? Popular representations of poor black people are suggestive of the changing way in which race, and especially the question of racial miscegenation, was understood by the literate public. This was linked both to the periodic upsurges of the black population in Britain that marked the second half of the long eighteenth century and the ongoing question of slavery. The end of the Napoleonic Wars and the war of 1812 led to a wave of black migration from the Americas to Britain. As during the Seven Years War and the American Revolutionary War, British military strategies in the Western theatre of these conflicts included offering freedom to their antagonists’ slaves in exchange for military service.44 Others served as domestic slaves or servants in the United States and came to Britain via the British West Indies after their ‘masters’ were captured as prisoners of war.45 Their arrival in Britain coincided with the demobilisation of thousands of white soldiers and sailors, marginally but hypervisibly devaluing the types of skills associated with military service and increasing competition for those types of work. The black migrant group, in common with most migrant groups, was demographically skewed towards young, single men. This combination led to the expression of gendered anxieties fixating on the sup-



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posed threat to white British men’s access to economic support and working-class women’s imagined preference for black partners. A correspondent writing under the pseudonym ‘An European’ in the ladies’ magazine La Belle Assemblée in June 1818 articulated the terror with which the influx of black men into working-class society was beheld by much of the commentariat. ‘I revolt at the very idea of a negro being allowed to salute, and sometimes even to become the partner for life of a white woman,’ they wrote. ‘Is it because instances of that moral depravity are only yet to be met with amongst the lower classes of society, that the practice is less censurable, and deserving of so little attention?’46 For this correspondent, the mixing of races was so closely confined to the ‘lower classes’ that it directly impacted on the provision for the deserving (i.e. white) poor and destitute. The children of such unions, the argument went, were likely to become a burden on charities, since black men were more likely to be out of work. Being careful to differentiate the honest British worker from the parasitic mixedrace infant, they went on to suggest forced expatriation as a possible cure: When it is known that our industrious tradespeople and mechanics, if, on account of losses, long fits of illness, want of occupation, or infirmity, are reduced to seek an asylum in a workhouse; … could it be considered a more reprehensible measure, in instances of the nature above mentioned, to send back to the original country of their father, supposing similar alliances should continue to be tolerated, those mixed-blood infants?47

Their ugly tone of prejudice aside, this commentator was aware that the threadbare patchwork of parish support in Britain was inadequately configured to support ‘foreign’ black migrants and their families, leading many to depend on charitable societies and commissions when work dried up. While there is no suggestion that the provision of parish relief was in any way inflected by racial prejudice, first-generation migrants were largely precluded from claiming since eligibility was contingent on being born in a parish or ‘settled’ there for at least two years. Without access to this meagre safety net, at least in London, black migrants from the Americas appear to have been especially susceptible to the vagaries of economic recessions. As Tim Hitchcock notes in his study of begging in eighteenth-century London, a black face could be a highly visible ‘signifier of poverty’.48 While this might have been occasionally helpful for soliciting the sympathies of passers-by, it also focused the attentions of those who had tasked themselves with the surveillance and policing of the city’s poorest. In 1786, for example, a special Committee for the Relief of the Black Poor was formed to provide relief and a new home to the formerly enslaved Loyalist refugees from the American Revolutionary War.49 In 1817, the Committee for the Relief of Foreign Seamen reported an especially high take-up of support from ‘blacks’, prompting the Lord Mayor to pledge, ‘let the Government act as it may think proper, he shall still feel it his duty to preserve, if possible, the streets of the City of London from the

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d­ isgraceful vagrancy with which they have of late abounded’.50 The annual reports of the Mendicity Society, an organisation set up in 1818 as much to police vagrancy and funnel indigent beggars into workhouses as to provide relief, gives a sense of the compound challenges faced by black migrants in the metropolis.51 ‘J.P.’, a young black man from Barbados, was a typical case. He applied to the Society in 1819, having ‘slept in the streets for several nights, and been without food’. Since being discharged from the Royal Navy in 1817, he had been forced to support himself by begging, ‘parishes having uniformly refused to grant him relief, in consequence of his being a foreigner’. The Society arranged to have him admitted to a workhouse.52 In the case of ‘W.B.’, a 66-year-old black Philadelphian who had become too sick to work, parish relief was refused without explanation even though he was entitled to it from having been ‘settled’ in London for several years. Frail as he was, he too was eventually taken into a workhouse.53 Despite coming to Britain under marginally more favourable circumstances, Davidson had personally experienced very similar hardships. He had in fact been picked up for begging by the Mendicity Society on 22 January 1820. Work had slowed down considerably: in his application for relief, he stated that he had ‘not earned a penny for the last 18 weeks’ and had pawned all his tools to the value of about £50.54 The parish of Mary-le-Bone offered to take him and his family into the workhouse, but he refused, reassuring them that he could get work if he was able to redeem his tools.55 These were hard times indeed for someone as skilled as Davidson. As Tony Talburt has pointed out, he was ‘certainly the most formally educated of the Cato Street Conspirators’ and, as a cabinet-maker, he ‘had the highest status of them all’.56 He had worked on a number of high-status commissions in the past, including fitting up the country estate of Lord Harrowby, the putative host of the cabinet dinner that the conspirators were to target.57 Certainly, pawning tools was by no means unusual for artisans in Davidson’s situation. Yet it is notable, in the light of his claims that he had been the target of discrimination by the rest of the local tradesmen, that he appears to be the only one of the conspirators reduced to open begging. It perhaps speaks to his desperate situation that he appears to have spent the 40s awarded by the Society not to redeem his tools but to secure his rusty old blunderbuss from a pawnbroker for use in the assassination attempt.58 After his trial and execution, Davidson was represented in print media as a rough, violent type who abused the women in his life, beat up his love rivals and neglected his children. Kelleher’s and Wilkinson’s short biographies of him in particular deployed a catalogue of racial stereotypes, among the more outlandish of which was that he once tried to bite off his wife’s finger. As well as this hint towards cannibalism, Kelleher’s biography resorted to other well-established tropes of anti-black racism to pad out its pages. For example, the ‘gun or great stick’ which he was apparently in the habit of carrying around was rendered in crude, phallic innuendo as an ‘enormous cudgel’ which he ‘always carried to bed with him’ as he peregrinated between his three wives.59 He was presented as a fearsome fighter and an inveterate



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gambler addicted to bull-baiting and cockfighting, unable to restrain his animal urges yet somehow also a cunning and consummate liar. All of these were characteristics attributed to enslaved Africans in the Americas by some radicals and proslavery polemicists during the early nineteenth century, notably William Cobbett.60 Kelleher’s biography made the association explicit, explaining Davidson’s evil actions by reference to ‘the savage blood of his trans-atlantic ancestors’.61 Here, the practical enforcement of the hierarchical rhetoric of race was turned to the end of propagating popular anti-radical sentiment. The ‘diabolical’ nature of Davidson’s political insurrectionism was encoded quite carefully in relation to his racial status. His supposed cannibalistic impulses, violent nature and ‘passionate’ fondness for white women were, readers were to understand, like his insurrectionism: of a parcel with his blackness.62 As we will see, these representations, and especially their focus on black male violence towards white women, paralleled existing reportage of slave uprisings and revolution in the Caribbean. A collation of evidence from Home Office depositions and trial reportage paints a more nuanced picture of Davidson. In these records he comes across as a tough man with a bad temper who was nevertheless a generous friend and devoted father to six young children (including four stepchildren). He loved to sing rude, seditious ballads: at his thirty-third birthday party in May 1819, his neighbour Roger Chaff recalled that ‘the songs were of a political kind, & reflecting in very bad language upon the ministry, & also alluding to the Regent’.63 Giving evidence against him in advance of the trial, John Henry Price, a local blacksmith and neighbour of the Davidsons, noted that he had known him ‘to do several good actions, such as assisting his poor neighbours, & upon one occasion being at the expence of burying one of them’, but conceded that ‘I as well as others was afraid of offending him, & I have known him to use his wife very cruelly’.64 Repeatedly during his trial, Davidson insisted that his chief concern was not for his own life but the safety and well-being of his ‘helpless family’ and ‘her whom I lived but to cherish’.65 In gaol awaiting trial on 20 March 1820, he wrote to the Privy Councillors to request that his three-yearold son John be allowed to stay with him between his wife’s visits.66 After his conviction, he reportedly used his prerogative to write for legal counsel to send for Sarah and the children instead.67 On the scaffold, he was said to have prayed fervently for his family’s protection.68 After his hanging and decapitation, Sarah Davidson joined the wives of the other conspirators in petitioning the King for their bodies so they could be buried properly. The request was denied and William was interred in an unmarked grave inside the walls of Newgate.69 Davidson may have taken care during his trial to distance himself from the majority of London’s black population, but he was nevertheless a known associate of another Jamaican-Scottish ‘creole’ radical, whose insurrectionary politics were much more explicitly linked to his Caribbean heritage. Robert Wedderburn was born around 1761 into a considerably lower rank of Jamaican society than Davidson.

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His mother was a slave, and, though he did not appear to be aware of it, so was he for the first few years of his life.70 His father, James Wedderburn, was a slave-owning planter, a member of a prosperous Scottish family from Inveresk, near Edinburgh.71 Wedderburn’s father did not acknowledge his black children (though he paid to have Robert and his brother emancipated), leaving Robert to make his own way to Britain as a gunner’s mate aboard the Nabob, a Royal Navy store ship, around 1779.72 He married a white woman named Elizabeth Ryan on 5 November 1781 in the parish church of St Katherine Kree, but could not enjoy his honeymoon for too long.73 On 18 July 1782 he was pressed into service aboard the HMS Polyphemus, being discharged in Barbados in January 1783 and once again being left to make his own way back to Britain.74 It was probably at this stage that he applied to his father at Inveresk for some money, but he was rebuffed and sent away with nothing more than ‘a cracked sixpence’.75 By 1794, he and his growing family were destitute, and the cracks began to show. He left Elizabeth on their thirteenth wedding anniversary, only to be brought in by the Middlesex Justices of the Peace in October 1795 to answer for his family’s support.76 Wedderburn became involved in the London radical scene around the same time, with the Painite publisher William Glindon printing his earliest known work, a freethinking essay on religion entitled The Truth Self-supported, in 1802.77 He gravitated towards Thomas Spence and his circle towards the end of the Napoleonic Wars, becoming a leading figure in the movement in 1813. He partnered at first with Thomas Evans, co-authoring and publishing a periodical named Forlorn Hope and establishing a chapel with him at Archer Street, Soho, in 1818.78 They later fell out because Evans found Wedderburn’s rhetoric too extreme. 79 He went on to establish his own periodical in 1817, The Axe Laid to the Root, and his own chapel in 1819 at Hopkins Street in Soho in 1819. He established links with other ultra-radicals including Davidson and Thistlewood.80 At the time of the conspiracy, Wedderburn was in Newgate awaiting sentencing for a conviction for seditious blasphemy uttered at Hopkins Street.81 McCalman has speculated that he would otherwise ‘almost certainly’ have been captured alongside Davidson and the others.82 Slavery was a more prominent fixture of Wedderburn’s political rhetoric than that of Davidson. This was perhaps because he had been closer to it as a child. Throughout his whole life, he always cited the trauma of witnessing his pregnant mother, and later his grandmother, being whipped for minor offences as the origins of his hatred for injustice and unfreedom.83 Like Davidson and a number of the other Cato Street conspirators, he had also lost his own freedom by being impressed into the Royal Navy on at least one occasion. While he took care to treat anti-slavery and radicalism separately after his release from Dorchester Gaol in May 1822, during the Peterloo years he purposefully unified these two interests, treating them as two facets of the same grand struggle. Armed slave insurrection was especially influential on his own political radicalism. Wedderburn’s major publications during this period – The Axe Laid to the Root (1817) and The Horrors of Slavery (1824) –



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were written in the wake of major slave uprisings in the British West Indies.84 Haiti was also highly significant to his political outlook, and as Raphael Hoermann has pointed out, he redeployed the mythic, elevated reports of its violence in the British press to great effect in instilling terror in the hearts of slave-owners and political tyrants alike.85 For Wedderburn, the potential cradle of insurrectionary revolution was not the metropolis but the colonial periphery. Wedderburn gave his fullest account of slave insurrection in his periodical, The Axe Laid to the Root, which ran for six issues in 1817. In the first issue, he imagined two different insurrectionary moments, in separate articles addressed to enslaved people and planters in Jamaica, respectively. In the latter, the rhetoric of insurrectionary violence was deployed to intimidate and terrorise his putative addressees: [T]he island of Jamaica will be in the hands of the blacks within twenty years. Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St. Domingo awaits you … Recollect the fermentation will be universal. Their weapons are their bill-hooks; their store of provision is every where in abundance: you know they can live on sugar canes, and a vast variety of herbs and fruits, – yea, even upon the buds of trees … They will slay man, woman and child, and not spare the virgin, whose interest is connected with slavery, whether black, white or tawny. O ye planters, you know this has been done; the cause which produced former bloodshed still remains, – of necessity similar effects must take place.86

Wedderburn’s nightmarish image of the avenging slave reconfigured early published accounts of the slave revolution in Haiti which had focused minutely on terrible scenes of black-on-white violence, including impaled infants, men being sawed in half, and women being raped on the corpses of their families.87 Even once Haiti declared itself an independent nation in 1804, it remained diplomatically isolated for over a decade, partly for fear that slave insurrections could spread through the Caribbean.88 After 1814, British abolitionists’ receptiveness to the idea of officially recognising the Northern Kingdom of Haiti were met with alarm from some in the West India lobby.89 It is easy to see why; besides the fact it would antagonise the French and Americans, having a legitimate anti-slavery nation so close by might encourage escapes, or even open revolt. Slave resistance remained endemic and continuous throughout this period, even in the comparatively stable British colonies. In April 1816, it looked as though planters’ worst fears might be realised. A large-scale armed uprising broke out in Barbados, resulting in widespread destruction of property and the death of at least one white colonist, as well as the deaths of fifty of the enslaved in battle. The British response was disproportionate: after the army was called in to quell the rebellion, over two hundred of the original four hundred rebelling slaves were executed, with a further 132 sent to other islands.90 Nevertheless, some alarmist reports of the rebellion leaned heavily on racialised depictions of the enslaved as violent and savage, implying that the British might have another Haiti on their hands.91 Given the timing of his publication, it is likely

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that Wedderburn had Barbados as much as Haiti in mind when he appropriated such language for his own radical purposes. The 1816 Barbados rebellion demonstrated that armed uprisings were a distinct possibility in the slave societies of the British West Indies, just as Peterloo demonstrated the same for the nominally free society at home three years later. Wedderburn was unique among metropolitan ultra-radicals of this period in that he explicitly linked his calls for insurrection at home with plans for revolution in the colonies. Elsewhere in The Axe Laid to the Root, he had fabricated an exchange between himself and a (possibly fictional) half-sister in Jamaica, describing how the rebellious enslaved there had adopted a Spencean system of land reform.92 At Hopkins Street, he hosted debates that linked the Haitian revolution and slave rebellion to domestic insurgency. On 9 August 1819, a week before Peterloo, he held a debate on the question ‘Has a Slave an inherent right to slay his master who refuses him his liberty?’93 The sense of the meeting was taken: apparently, several of those attending expressed the ‘desire of hearing of another sable nation freeing itself by the Dagger’ as well as their willingness to join them in rebellion.94 One of the numerous Home Office spies present was under no doubt as to what this really meant, reporting in a letter to Sidmouth that ‘I proceeded to Hopkins St. Chapel to hear the question discussed whether it be right for the people of England to assassinate their Rulers, for this my Lord, I conceive to be the real purport of the question tho’ proposed in other terms’.95 The reality of Wedderburn’s geographical focus was less clear-cut. He both referred unambiguously to the sending of British troops to the West Indies to quell slave rebellion and stated that ‘before six months were over there would be (or he hoped there would be) slaughter in England for their Liberty’.96 Developing the earlier black radicalism of Ottobah Cugoano, Wedderburn identified an amoral British slave-owning economic elite insinuating themselves into political power through the old corruption. The men who ‘would emply [sic] blacks to go and steal females’ in Africa were the same as those who ‘employed [Britons] in their Cotton factories to make Slaves of them to become possessed of money to bring them into Parliament’.97 For Wedderburn, the British political regime was built upon a grand conspiracy of slavery and corruption that spanned three continents. Wedderburn remained active in London’s ultra-radical scene for many years after Cato Street. His greatest anti-slavery publication, The Horrors of Slavery, was also published in the wake of a major slave uprising in the British West Indies, this time in Demerara (present-day Guiana). In August 1823, a rebellion took place in the colony involving over ten thousand enslaved people. It was crushed with typically ruthless efficiency by the colonial authorities, resulting in the deaths of hundreds of the enslaved.98 The rebellion boosted public support for the abolition movement in Britain, in part because of outrage surrounding the arrest and subsequent death in custody of a white pastor named John Smith who had been implicated in the revolt.99 Reportage of the punishments for the revolt, including



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Smith’s fate, sounded a note of disgust towards slavery that carried over to the following year. In February 1824, the popular sporting weekly Bell’s Life in London carried a series of lengthy anti-slavery editorials relating that a plot for another rebellion had been discovered in Jamaica in December 1823 and the conspirators hanged.100 Wedderburn wrote to the paper in response, relating some of his own experiences in Jamaican slave society. This in turn provoked his white half-brother, Andrew Colvile, to write to the paper, attacking Wedderburn and his mother, and defending the actions of their father. This exchange provided the basis of The Horrors of Slavery, one of the most direct and articulate attacks on the British slavery system of the nineteenth century. While it did not blend domestic radicalism with its anti-slavery message as The Axe Laid to the Root had, the background of Wedderburn’s autobiography nevertheless demonstrates how Caribbean insurrections continued to make their way into the intellectual world of the London ultra-radicals well into the 1820s.101 Owing to a mixture of internal politics and a rise in anti-black prejudice among some of his peers, Wedderburn gradually lost prominence in London’s ultra-radical scene during the 1820s.102 He had been in a legal dispute with sometime collaborator George Midford over a pawnbroker’s ticket in February 1823, resulting in his skewering in the newspapers as ‘a man of colour – something the colour of a toad’s back’.103 In May 1824 he bought a printing press at 23 Russell Court, Drury Lane, from fellow radical William Dugdale, but, perhaps unsurprisingly for a writer who had always operated at the margins of legality, none of his productions from this period has yet come to light.104 By 1828, he had resorted to running a lodging-house for prostitutes, an act he described as charity.105 When he did occasionally contribute to radical publications, as in Richard Carlile’s The Lion in 1828, his physical appearance counted against him. The anti-clerical radical Richard Taylor enjoyed his work, but pointedly claimed to be disappointed that ‘Wedderburn’s measure of talent’ could not be ‘served up in a better looking vessel’.106 It is telling of how far his radical star had fallen that, when he was up in court for brothel-keeping in 1830, he was mistaken by one provincial reporter for Davidson (or at least ‘one of the men tried with Thistlewood for the Cato-street conspiracy’).107 After another spell in gaol, he produced his final publication, confusingly an ameliorationist, antiabolitionist tract that proposed that the enslaved should be allowed to purchase their own freedom on an individual basis.108 Seemingly forgotten by the majority of the radical movement, and totally out of step with the abolitionists (who were by this time advocating immediate and universal emancipation), Wedderburn slipped into obscurity. He was last seen at a radical event in 1834, when a Home Office spy noted his attendance at a debate hosted by Richard Taylor.109 He died during the winter of 1834/5, and was buried on 4 January 1835.110 Davidson and Wedderburn brought the questions of race and slavery home to British radicals. Davidson, the high-status, freeborn man of colour, found that

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despite his superior education and family connections, he faced compound economic hardships and social difficulties within the imperial metropolis. For him and thousands like him, blackness in Britain was intimately entwined with acute poverty and, arguably, with curtailed professional and social opportunities. While poverty alone cannot account for insurrectionary politics, in Davidson’s case it may well have interacted with anger against the slave-owning British state to generate conditions favourable to radicalisation. Ironically, his interaction with the Mendicity Society, one of the organisations created to surveil and police the poorest in London society, actually enabled him to further his would-be revolutionary activities by furnishing him with the money he needed to redeem his blunderbuss from the pawnbroker. Unfortunately for him, the colour of his skin made him highly recognisable to counter-revolutionary agents. His claim at his trial that he had been mistaken for someone else was actually more plausible than it might have seemed, given that spies, newspaper reporters and others routinely identified him first and foremost as a ‘man of colour’, and that he was in fact confused with Wedderburn some ten years after his death. Finally, popular depictions of Davidson drew heavily on common racialised stereotypes of African men, painting him as violent, cannibalistic, addicted to gambling and unable to control his animal impulses towards women. The fictions of ‘race’, in this instance, were turned to the work of promoting political loyalism among a low-status readership, further reinforcing plebeian ambivalence towards black migrants and strengthening the pre-existing association between blackness and violence in the popular imaginary. For Robert Wedderburn, the unacknowledged son of an enslaved woman, an abhorrence of slavery provided a key motivator for domestic radicalism. As McCalman confidently asserts, it appears that his lack of direct involvement in the events of 23 February 1820 was merely accidental. Certainly, his rhetoric matched that of Thistlewood or Davidson in terms of its focus on the need for armed rebellion, and he mixed very much in the same circles. Moreover, the resistance of the enslaved, both in Haiti and in the British West Indies, provided a model and inspiration for Wedderburn’s insurrectionism. His detailed vision for the overthrow of British tyranny on both sides of the Atlantic and the potential to implement a Spencean utopia in Jamaica suggests that metropolitan radicalism was neither parochial nor insular. He argued that, since the sinews of the ‘Old Corruption’ stretched across the world, so too should British revolutionists’ response. While he separated such calls from his anti-slavery work during the 1820s, he could not help but publicly respond to news of slave uprisings when they occurred. One result was The Horrors of Slavery, one of the most distinctive and uncompromising anti-slavery tracts ever published. However, despite his work in bringing anti-slavery to a radical audience, Wedderburn eventually fell by the wayside of the movement as it moved to embrace popular patriotism and the development of new ideas about racial difference. While the Caribbean has continued to influence British radicalism down to the present day, the experiences of Wedderburn in his final years suggest that early



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nineteenth-century plebeian solidarity with the enslaved was neither universal nor continuous. Notes 1 Much of the most innovative work of recent years has emerged from the ‘local’ tradition. See, for example, John Hargreaves (ed.), The Charter Our Right! Huddersfield Chartism Re-considered (Huddersfield, 2018); Robert Poole (ed.), Return to Peterloo (Manchester, 2012); Katrina Navickas, Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798–1815 (Oxford, 2009). 2 Linda Colley, Britons: Forging the Nation, 1707–1837 (New Haven, CT, 1992); Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (New Haven, CT, 2006), pp. 27–58; Kathleen Wilson, The Island Race: Englishness, Empire and Gender in the Eighteenth Century (London, 2002). 3 For French influences, see for example, the essays collected in Mark Philp (ed.), Reforming Ideas in Britain: Politics and Language in the Shadow of the French Revolution, 1789–1815 (Oxford, 2014); Gregory Claeys, The French Revolution Debate in Britain: The Origins of Modern Politics (New York, 2007); Mark Philp (ed.), The French Revolution and British Popular Politics (Oxford, 2004). A rare counter-example is Wil Verhoeven, Americomania and the French Revolution Debate in Britain, 1789–1802 (Cambridge, 2013), but again this focuses on the earlier period of British radicalism. 4 C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (London, 1963). First published 1938. For recent work on the ‘Revolutionary Atlantic’, see, for example, Michael A. McDonnell, ‘Rethinking the Age of Revolution’, Atlantic Studies, 13 (2006), 301–14, and the other essays in this special issue; Alan Forrest and Matthias Middell (eds), The Routledge Companion to the French Revolution in World History (London, 2016); Kit Candlin and Cassandra Pybus (eds), Enterprising Women: Gender, Race, and Power in the Revolutionary Atlantic (Athens, GA, 2015); Jerry Bannister and Liam Riordan (eds), The Loyal Atlantic: Remaking the British Atlantic in the Revolutionary Era (Toronto, 2012); Alan Rice, Radical Narratives of the Black Atlantic (London, 2003). 5 Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker, The Many-headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic (London, 2000). 6 For criticisms of Linebaugh and Rediker, see, for example, David Brion Davis, ‘Slavery – White, Black, Muslim, Christian’, New York Review of Books, 5 July 2001; Peter Linebaugh,  Marcus Rediker and David Brion Davis, ‘“The Many-Headed Hydra”: An Exchange’, New York Review of Books, 20 Sept. 2001; Michael Guasco, ‘Review of Linebaugh, Peter; Rediker, Marcus, The Many-headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic’, H-Net Reviews (2003), available from: www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=7645 (accessed 11 Sept. 2018). 7 Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA, 1993). 8 Kate Donington, Ryan Hanley and Jessica Moody, ‘Introduction’, in Donington, Hanley, and Moody (eds), Britain’s History and Memory of Transatlantic Slavery: Local Nuances of a ‘National Sin’ (Liverpool, 2016), pp. 1–20.

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9 See Edward Royle, Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, 1789–1848 (Manchester, 2000), pp. 1–12. 10 See, for example, Kathleen Chater, ‘Job Mobility amongst Black People in England and Wales during the Long Eighteenth Century’, Immigrants and Minorities, 28:2 (2010), 112–30. 11 For a sense of the sheer scale and ubiquity of slave resistance, see Junius P. Rodriguez, Encyclopedia of Slave Resistance and Rebellion, 2 vols (London, 2007). 12 I am obviously using the word ‘successful’ here in a very narrow sense: slavery was abolished, the governing plantocracy was overthrown and replaced, Haiti declared itself independent in 1804. The ‘success’ of the succeeding regimes in the face of persistent and deliberate hostility from global superpowers throughout the nineteenth and much of the twentieth century was, by most reckonings, severely limited. 13 Roxann Wheeler, ‘Slavery, or the New Drudge’, in Srividhya Swaminathan and Adam Beach (eds), Invoking Slavery in the Eighteenth-century British Imagination (London, 2013), pp. 153–74. 14 Wilkinson, Authentic History. 15 P. Kelleher, The Lives of Thistlewood, Davidson, Brunt, Tidd and Ings, the Leaders of the Cato Street Conspiracy (London, 1820). 16 See Peter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century (London, 1991), p. 364. 17 Robert Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. Iain McCalman (Princeton, NJ, 1991); Robert Wedderburn, An Address to Lord Brougham and Vaux, Chancellor of Great Britain, by the Descendent of a Negro; Suggesting an Equitable Plan for the Emancipation of the Slaves (London, 1831). The only known copy of this text is held at the Bodleian Library at the University of Oxford, repr. in Ryan Hanley, ‘A Radical Change of Heart: Robert Wedderburn’s Last Word on Slavery’, Slavery & Abolition, 37:2 (2016), 423–45. 18 Eric Pencek, ‘Intolerable Anonymity: Robert Wedderburn and the Discourse of Ultra-Radicalism’, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, 37 (2015), 61–77; Peter Linebaugh, ‘A Little Jubilee? The Literacy of Robert Wedderburn in 1817’, in John Rule and Robert Malcolmson, (eds), Protest and Survival, the Historical Experience: Essays for E.P. Thompson (London, 1993), pp. 174–220. 19 McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 109–11; Iain McCalman, ‘Introduction’, in Wedderburn, Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. McCalman, p. 28. 20 See, for example, Bernard Porter, Plots and Paranoia: A History of Political Espionage in Britain (London, 2016), ch. 2. First published 1992. 21 Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 406; Anon., The Lives of Thistlewood, Davidson, Brunt, Todd and Ings, the Leaders of the Cato Street Conspiracy, who Were Lately Executed at The Old Bailey; Collected from the Most Authentic Sources: with Original Letters &c. (London: C. A. Madden, 1820), p. 8. 22 The British Library holds almanacs for the years 1788, 1791, 1795, 1797, 1798, 1799, 1801 and 1806. Typescripts for almanacs covering the years 1787, 1790, 1796, 1799, 1802, 1805, 1808, 1811, 1812, 1816, 1817, 1818, and 1820 are available online from www.jamaicanfamilysearch.com/Samples/Almanacs.htm (accessed 14 Sept. 2018). Listings for the Judiciary Courts for each of these volumes have been consulted manually, both at the



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British Library and online. Additional searches for ‘Davidson’ and ‘Davison’ have been made using the online resource. See, for example, The New Jamaica Almanack, and Register, Calculated to the Meridian of the Island for the Year of Our Lord 1801 (Kingston, 1800). 23 Ricketts was probably too young to be William Davidson’s father and Burge was born after him. See ‘Robert Sewell, 1751–1828’, ‘George Crawford Ricketts I, ????–1811’, ‘William Burge, 1787–1849’, all in Legacies of British Slave-ownership, online, available from www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs (accessed 14 Sept. 2018); ‘SEWELL, Robert (1751–1828) of Oak End Lodge, Iver. Bucks.’, in R. Thorne (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1790–1820 (London, 1986), online, available from www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1790–1820/member/sewell-robert-1751–1828 (accessed 14 Dec. 2018); ‘BURGE, William (c.1786–1849), of 7 New Square, Lincoln’s Inn and 50 Wimpole Street, Mdx’, in D.R. Fisher (ed.), The History of Parliament: The House of Commons, 1820–1832 (Cambridge, 2009), online, available from www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820–1832/member/burge-william-1786–1849 (accessed 14 Dec. 2018). 24 Ironically, Wedderburn’s legitimate white half-brother Andrew changed his name to Colvile in order to secure his inheritance. 25 ‘SEWELL, Robert’, in Thorne (ed.), History of Parliament. 26 See the claim of his son in ‘Duncan Davidson, 1800–1881’, in Legacies of British Slaveownership; TNA, HO 44/4/98, fol. 322. 27 Anon., Lives, p. 8. 28 Anon., Lives, p. 9; TNA, HO 44/5/105, fols 494–5. 29 Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 317. 30 Kelleher, Lives, pp. 8–22; Wilkinson, Authentic History, pp. 406–14. 31 The Morning Post, 2 Nov. 1819. 32 TNA, HO 44/5/56, fol. 202. 33 TNA, HO 44/5/41, fols 89–91. 34 TNA, HO 44/5/14, fols 38–9. 35 TNA, HO 44/4/33, fols 100–1. 36 TNA, HO 44/5/21, fols 51–2. 37 Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 176. 38 Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 171. 39 Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 318. 40 Daniel Livesay, Children of Uncertain Fortune: Mixed Race Jamaicans in Britain and the Atlantic, 1733–1833 (Chapel Hill, NC, 2018), p. 364. 41 Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 320. 42 Wilkinson, Authentic History, pp. 321–2. 43 Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 322. 44 British slaves were not so lucky – soldiers in the West India regiments were returned to slavery following the cessation of hostilities. 45 See, for instance, the testimonial in The Second Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity (London, 1820), p. 45. 46 La Belle Assemblée; or, Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, 1 June 1818, p. 271. 47 La Belle Assemblée; or, Bell’s Court and Fashionable Magazine, 1 June 1818, p. 271.

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48 Tim Hitchcock, Down and Out in Eighteenth-century London (London, 2004), p. 122. 49 See Stephen Braidwood, Black Poor and White Philanthropists: London’s Blacks and the Foundation of the Sierra Leone Settlement 1786–1791 (Liverpool, 1994). 50 The Morning Chronicle, 11 Jan. 1817. 51 For the Mendicity Society, see Hitchcock, Down and Out in Eighteenth-century London, pp. 3–10; M.J.D. Roberts, ‘Reshaping the Gift Relationship: The London Mendicity Society and the Suppression of Begging in England, 1818–1869’, International Review of Social History, 36:2 (1991), 201–31. 52 Second Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity, pp. 29–30. 53 Second Report of the Society for the Suppression of Mendicity, p. 37. 54 TNA, HO 44/4/97, fol. 322. 55 TNA, HO 44/4/97, fol. 323. 56 Tony Talburt, ‘The Case of Two Williams: Black Revolutionists in Nineteenth-Century Britain’, in Kehinde Andrews and Lisa Amanda Palmer (eds), Blackness in Britain (London, 2016), p. 43. 57 Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 325. 58 TNA, HO 44/4/33, fols 100–1. 59 Kelleher, Lives, p. 12. 60 Ryan Hanley, ‘Slavery and the Birth of Working-class Racism in England, 1814–1833’, Transactions of the Royal Historical Society, 26 (2016), 103–23; Marcus Wood, Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (Oxford, 2002), pp. 141–80. 61 Kelleher, Lives, p. 15. 62 Kelleher, Lives, p. 12. 63 TNA, HO 44/5/105, fols 494–5. 64 TNA, HO 44/5/41, fols 89–91. 65 Wilkinson, Authentic History, pp. 324–5. 66 TNA, HO 44/5/73, fols 391–2. 67 This letter is reproduced in Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 412. 68 Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 383. 69 HO 44/6/85, fols 271–2; Wilkinson, Authentic History, pp. 391–2. 70 Wedderburn maintained throughout his life that he was freeborn due to an arrangement between his father and his mother’s owner. Nadine Hunt’s research has uncovered that he was in fact emancipated at the age of three. Nadine Hunt, ‘Remembering Africans in Diaspora: Robert Wedderburn’s “Freedom Narrative”’, in Olatunji Ojo and Nadine Hunt (eds), Slavery in Africa and the Caribbean: A History of Enslavement and Identity since the Eighteenth Century (London, 2012), p. 178. 71 Robert Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery; Exemplified in the Life and History of the Rev. Robert Wedderburn (London, 1824), p. 5. 72 Wedderburn, Address to Lord Brougham and Vaux, p. 3. 73 Guildhall Library, London, St Katherine Kree, P69/KAT2/A/01/MS7891/1, ‘Register of Marriages, 1754–1785’, No. 335. 74 TNA, ADM 34/602, ‘Polyphemus’. 75 Wedderburn, Horrors of Slavery, p. 23. 76 London Metropolitan Archives, MJ/SP/1795/10/034.



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77 Robert Wedderburn, The Truth Self-supported; or a Refutation of Certain Doctrinal Errors Generally Adopted in the Christian Church (London, [1802]). McCalman attributes this date in Wedderburn, Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. McCalman, p. 65. 78 McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 128–32. 79 Wedderburn ended their association in spectacular style, stealing the benches and tables from the Archer Street chapel and publishing a pamphlet attacking Evans as an ‘apostate’ and insulting his wife. See TNA HO 42/190, fols 73–4; HO 42/202, fol. 6. 80 McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. 132. 81 Dorset History Centre, Dorchester Prison Admission and Discharge Records, 1782– 1901, NG/PR1/D2/1, p. 111. 82 Iain McCalman, ‘Introduction’, in Wedderburn, The Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. McCalman, p. 23. 83 Wedderburn, Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. McCalman, pp. 49, 51, 81; Wedderburn, An Address to Lord Brougham and Vaux, p. 3. 84 Ryan Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition: Black British Writing, c.1770–1830 (Cambridge, 2018), pp. 203–39. 85 Raphael Hoermann, ‘“A Very Hell of Horrors”? The Haitian Revolution and the Early Transatlantic Haitian Gothic’, Slavery & Abolition, 37:1 (2015), 183–205. 86 Wedderburn, Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. McCalman, pp. 85–6. 87 See, for example, Anon., A Particular Account of the Commencement and Progress of the Insurrection of the Negroes in St. Domingo (London, 1792). For an overview of the Haitian Revolution and British responses, see Julia Gaffield, Haitian Connections in the Atlantic World: Recognition after Revolution (Chapel Hill, NC, 2015), esp. pp. 153–81; Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (London, 2003); David Geggus (ed.), The Impact of the Haitian Revolution in the Atlantic World (Columbia, SC, 2001). 88 Julia Gaffield, ‘Haiti and Jamaica in the Remaking of the Early Nineteenth-century Atlantic World’, William and Mary Quarterly, 69:3 (2012), 583–614. 89 See John Oldfield, Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Age of Revolution: An International History of Anti-slavery, 1787–1820 (Cambridge, 2013), pp. 241–9. 90 See Hilary Beckles, ‘The Slave-Drivers’ War: Bussa and the 1816 Barbados Slave Rebellion’, Boletin de Estudios Latinoamericanos y del Caribe, 39 (1985), 85–110. 91 Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition, p. 209. 92 ‘fabricated’: See Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition, p. 211. 93 Wedderburn, Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. McCalman, p. 113. 94 TNA, HO 42/192, fol. 119, cited in Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition, p. 214. 95 Wedderburn, Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. McCalman, p. 116. 96 Wedderburn, Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. McCalman, p. 114. 97 Wedderburn, Horrors of Slavery and Other Writings, ed. McCalman, p. 114. For Cugoano’s radicalism, see, for example, Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition, pp. 171–86. 98 For a full account of the rebellion, see Emilia Viotti da Costa, Crowns of Glory, Tears of Blood: The Demerara Slave Rebellion of 1823 (Oxford, 1994). 99 Gelien Matthews, Caribbean Slave Revolts and the British Abolitionist Movement (Baton Rouge, LA, 2006), pp. 72–5. 100 For an analysis of the exchange in Bell’s Life in London, see Sue Thomas, Telling West

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Indian Lives: Life Narrative and the Reform of Plantation Slavery Cultures, 1804–1834 (London, 2014), pp. 105–10. 101 See Hanley, Beyond Slavery and Abolition, pp. 220–39. 102 Hanley, ‘Birth of Working-class Racism’, 103–23; Wood, Slavery, Empathy and Pornography, pp. 141–80. 103 The Hull Packet, 3 Mar. 1823. 104 The press was registered by Dugdale on 21 Jan. 1824, and Wedderburn was the next registrant on 6 May 1824. It is possible that Wedderburn intended to print The Horrors of Slavery himself, but for some reason was unable. London Metropolitan Archives, MR/L/P.1824/012; MR/L/P/1824/001. 105 ‘The female prisoner lives there; I believe it is a house let out to girls of the town by a man named Wedderburn.’ Old Bailey Proceedings Online, Dec. 1828, trial of James Mott and Mary Ann Barrand (t18281204–217), www.oldbaileyonline.org, version 8.0, (accessed 1 Oct. 2018). 106 The Lion, 1:13 (1828), p. 395. 107 The Lancaster Gazette and General Advertiser, 13 Nov. 1830. 108 Hanley, ‘A Radical Change of Heart’. 109 McCalman, ‘Introduction’, p. 34. 110 Thomas, Telling West Indian Lives, p. 116, n. 93.



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6 Cato Street and the Spencean politics of transnational insurrection Ajmal Waqif

All of the men involved at the heart of the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820 either had been friends and followers of the radical agitator Thomas Spence (1750–1814) or became members of the Society of Spencean Philanthropists formed after his death to propagate his ideas. Malcolm Chase has claimed that ‘Cato Street is fully intelligible only within the Spencean context’.1 This chapter, therefore, examines the attitude of Thomas Spence and his followers to the use of violence for political ends. It demonstrates that Spence and the Spenceans pinned their hopes for realising the Plan on revolts flaring up ‘abroad and at home’, pays close attention to anti-colonial resistance in the ‘periphery’, and argues that the efficacy of revolt and armed insurrection in these territories helped to convince these men in the dark days after Peterloo of the potential benefits of insurrection in the metropolis of London and across Britain. In 1801, Thomas Spence published The Restorer of Society to Its Natural State, which stands as the most comprehensive summary of his mature political thought. In this text he went further than many of his peers in the English Jacobin milieu, seeking ‘to destroy not only personal and hereditary lordship, but the cause of them, which is private property in land’. In its place he proposed what he, and subsequent adherents, would call the Plan: ‘land shall no longer be suffered to be the property of individuals, but of the parishes’. Rents would still be charged by the parish as a kind of tax, but the revenue generated was to be ‘deemed the equal property of man, woman, and child, whether old or young, rich or poor, legitimate or illegitimate’. Spence believed the ‘rights of man’ must necessarily include a right to land and a right to subsistence, and within his expansive definition of land he included a variety

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of productive property: ‘our wild fruits, our hunting grounds, our fish and game; our coal-mines, and our forests’.2 Spence clearly believed that the possibility of achieving the Plan was dependent on the success of those insurrections unfolding ‘Abroad and at home, in America, France, and in our own fleets, we have seen enough of public spirit, and extensive unanimity in the present generation to accomplish schemes of infinitely greater difficulty … For who, pray, are to hinder the people of any nation from doing so when they are inclined?’3 Just as the scope of revolt had been transnational so too was the applicability of the Plan. Spence emphasised that he did not particularly aim at the overthrow of the Government of this Country, by publishing my plan … For it is as well calculated for any Nation under the Heavens, though I write it in England for the best of Reasons, viz., because, I am here and cannot help it.4

The scope of Spencean politics was always bigger and broader than Britain. Spence was convinced that his ‘Theory … would greatly increase the happiness of the World, or any part of it, that choose to give it trial’5 including the colonial periphery, an area of Spencean influence and association that has been under-researched. This chapter will present two interrelated arguments. Firstly, it will show that Spence believed that both natural rights to the land, and the later violation of these rights through dispossession, were universal experiences across time and place. A project to reclaim the ‘rights of man’ at home must necessarily entail decolonisation abroad if it was truly to be a universal plan for human happiness. Secondly, Spence and his followers engaged politically with contemporary processes of colonial and slave revolts, such as the Irish rebellion (1798) and the Haitian revolution (1791–1804). The engagement of the Spenceans with the colonial periphery, it will be shown, deepened their commitment to revolutionary tactics and helped to convince them of the applicability and efficacy of revolt and insurrection in the metropolis. Thomas Spence was interested in the intellectual, political and social struggles thrown up by the related phenomena of the ‘age of revolution’ and apotheosis of European colonialism.6 This is reflected in the texts he excerpted and reproduced in his role as the ‘judicious Compiler’ of his journal Pigs’ Meat.7 In 1794, for example, Spence reproduced a passage from Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s Sins of the Government, Sins of the Nation (1793), a stridently anti-war pamphlet which also mounted a defence of the French republic. He chose to reprint a portion of Barbauld’s pamphlet in which she denounced the ‘idea which most nations have entertained, that they are the peculiar favourites of Heaven’. The scope of Acts 10:34–5 was expanded by Barbauld: ‘as God is no respecter of persons, so neither is he of nations’.8 In a later issue, Spence reproduced an excerpt from the American revolutionary Joel Barlow’s Advice to the Privileged Orders (1792) which criticised loyalty to nationstates as a ‘Political Superstition’ and claimed that ‘the boundaries of nations have been fixed for the accommodation of the government, without the least regard to



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the convenience of the people’.9 One of the most significant works that Spence quoted in his journal was the French radical C.F. Volney’s epic text of 1791 which first appeared in English in 1796 as The Ruins: Or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empires. Spence reproduced in full the striking ‘dialogue between the people, and the idle classes’ from chapter fifteen of Volney’s book.10 The significance of this text for Spence and his mode of thought is quite clear. Regardless of national or cultural origin, across time and space, the separation of society into an idle oppressor class and an industrious oppressed class persisted. The struggle for natural rights and against tyranny was universal and applicable to all humans regardless of race, culture or creed. Spence emphasised that he had ‘no such narrow views as an eye to one Country only. My Politics are for the World at large.’11 However, any overview of eighteenth-century universalism must contend with its lacunae, oversights and limitations. Often selective, conditional and internally contradictory, ‘republican universalism’ as Suzanne Desan recently summarises, ‘could be evoked for and against conquest and colonization, for and against various people’s autonomy and liberty’.12 Volney’s reception in America exemplifies this well. The bulk of the translation for the 1802 American edition of The Ruins was carried out by Thomas Jefferson, who was a close friend and admirer of Volney. One can only speculate how a slave-owning politician who pioneered the policy of Indian removal might have read Volney’s criticisms of ‘those nations’ who ‘dispeopled a new continent, and … subject Africa at present to the most barbarous slavery’.13 There is a compelling case to be made that Spencean thought and practice transgressed the limits of republican universalism. Spenceanism was distinguished by defining the universal rights of man in terms of an originally derived right of the people to access land and productive property. The Jamaican Spencean Robert Wedderburn’s racially egalitarian gloss of Psalms 115:16 is instructive: ‘the earth was given to the children of men, making no difference for colour or character’.14 The Spenceans did not believe that all nations were based on ‘Political Superstition’ (to borrow Joel Barlow’s phrase quoted above); they clearly sided with those nations and communities that sought to preserve the rights of man over those that would extinguish them. This applied to the colonial periphery where European nations and commercial interests were abolishing native rights to land and subsistence. Spence and his followers believed that revolution could flow not just from the European core outwards but from the periphery to the core. In 1805, Spence produced a poster for distribution with a rendition of the globe and the legend ‘The World Turned Upside Down’. One viewer described it thus: ‘In this map of the hemispheres, the poles are reversed from the usual way’.15 The reversal of poles is a powerful metaphor for understanding this global, anti-colonial conception of human emancipation. Spence himself wrote little which directly addressed colonialism, with only fragmentary references and arguments scattered across his pamphlets and journals. And yet, from these fragments we can trace the outline of a theory of colonialism

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that was integral to the dynamics of his general Plan. Colonialism for Spence was defined by the interrelated processes of land monopolisation and the extirpation of natural rights. He denounced British colonialism: ‘I cannot help abhorring the national thirst of ours, after the universal trade of the world, to the prejudice of all other nations.’ He railed against the British ruling classes, often singling out those who had profited from colonialism, those ‘Villianious Ministers … Jailors, and Bastille Keepers, citizen killing Generals and Admirals … Monopolisers of every description … and slave traders from the East and West Indies’. Spence believed that colonialism was commensurate with the dispossession and monopolisation of land through enclosure in Britain: ‘the same covetousness which is nourished at home, by the oppression of fellow-citizens expands like ambition in its maturity till it grasps at the whole earth’. The pioneers and beneficiaries of the colonial process were identified by Spence as the ‘cruel task-masters, planters, negro-drivers, landlords, and all the devils on the earth’. Those who were dispossessed and destined to claim back their right to the land were ‘the labouring part of mankind’ or ‘the slaves and landless’.16 Spence believed such ‘avaricious Madness’ could be only ‘curbed by force … For the peace of the world it certainly should be accomplished.’ His conviction was that abolishing ‘private property in land’ would be the key to creating a nation that would not ‘hunger and thirst after the riches of the world’ or ‘have their citizens pompously established abroad like princes, under the denomination of prefects or governors’. Such a society would communicate and trade with nations and peoples across the world ‘without having recourse to the expedient of great, avaricious, monopolising companies like us, who for their private ends, disturb the peace of the whole world, setting nation against nation, and people against people, till the whole earth and sea is turned into an aceldama’.17 Spence’s Constitution of Spensonia (1803) was based largely on the Jacobin constitution of 1793. Many articles in Spence’s ideal constitution were copied verbatim from the Jacobins, including those which confirmed the republic as ‘the friend and natural ally of every free people’, guaranteed asylum to foreigners fleeing tyranny and renounced foreign conquest.18 Yet, whereas the 1793 French constitution made no reference to colonies, the Constitution of Spensonia concluded with an innovative section entitled ‘Of Colonisation’. Article 152 ‘disclaims all financial benefits from foreign Provinces, Dominions, or Colonies’, and Article 154 states ‘All the Colonies (therefore) that now belong to Spensonia, or shall be hereafter established by her, are declared independent states, as soon as they adopt and put in practice similar Constitutions’.19 The significance of disclaiming colonialism during this period of European ascendancy, and in a political and intellectual environment where even republicans and Jacobins were content to avoid such questions, is hard to ignore. Adam Smith expressed the sense and ambitions of a whole class of Europeans when he wrote that ‘The discovery of America, and that of a passage to the East Indies by the Cape of Good Hope, are the two greatest and most important events



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recorded in the history of mankind’.20 Spence’s first references to non-European peoples also concerned these regions, but focused on the rights of the inhabitants rather than the commercial potential of the physical spaces. His philosophical conclusions contrasted starkly with those of many contemporaries. The first version of Spence’s Rights of Man – the original summary of his political thought – appeared in London in 1793 and provides a first-person account of how he had arrived at the fundamentals of his Plan: I began to read, and I found the savages in Greenland, America, and at the Cape of Good Hope, could all by their hunting and fishing procure subsistence for their families. Then I enquired whether men left that rude state voluntarily … or whether they were conquered, and compelled for the benefit of their conquerors … all our boasted civilization is founded alone on conquest.21

Here already, the central tenets of his theory that private property originated in conquest, as well as its connections with colonialism, were clearly laid out. Indigenous North Americans were a resonant source of moral and political inspiration for Spence. They exemplified to him a people who refused to submit to the imposition of European colonialism and private property. They featured prominently in his pamphlets and in his halfpenny tokens, the best known of which depicts a defiant indigenous North American hunter declaring ‘If rents I once consent to pay / my liberty is past away’.22 In his utopian narrative A Further Account of Spensonia (1794) Spence assumes an indigenous voice tallying the crimes of the European ‘civilizers’: Many colonies of Christians have established themselves in various parts of America, and carry on here as in their original country, the iniquitous traffic of the soil. They expel, or exterminate us, the natives, because we will not work, or pay rent to them, for living in our own country.

He stresses the ‘uprightness’ and ‘good faith’ that the Spensonian republic would display in its dealings with Indians, demonstrating to them that not all ‘Christians’ wished to dispossess them of their land or enslave them. Because of this, the Spensonians of this fictional utopia are warmly embraced, and they communicate, trade and intermix with their indigenous neighbours without any antagonism or tensions.23 Spence believed in a relatively simple criterion for the legitimacy of social formations; whether it was ‘agreeable to justice and the rights of man’. Any society based on private property in land is in violation of the ‘rights of man’. Therefore only two ‘modes’ of social formation are consistent with the ‘rights of man’: the first is what Spence calls the ‘Indian manner’ which was also ‘done by Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, and Esau and Ishmael’. This ‘mode’ was based primarily on subsistence ‘using [land] as a common grazing pasture and hunting park’, and Spence equates the communal property relations of indigenous Americans with those of tribal Israel in an attempt to glorify both. The second ‘mode’ consistent with the ‘rights of man’

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was, unsurprisingly, his own Plan, which he believed would revive the spirit of the first ‘mode’ but with the added benefit of experience. However, he did not suggest that the second was necessarily superior to the first, only that it was better suited for those societies where ‘experience showed the evils they must endure, on departing from the simplicity of the first, and introducing private property in land’.24 European colonialism in the eighteenth century operated through both conquest and commerce. While the former was often frowned upon in republican discourse as the work of tyrants, republicans were far more open to what Sunil Agnani has recently labelled ‘douce colonialism’ or ‘consensual colonialism’, which emphasised the cultivation of civilisation through trade, commerce and the adoption of European religion.25 It was this mode of thought that informed settler policy in the early United States. George Washington had declared his intent to bring the ‘blessings of civilization’ to Native Americans in 1791, and the first of many Nonintercourse Acts was introduced in 1793 to achieve this. Farmers were hired to teach indigenous tribes European agricultural techniques, and missionaries took the lead and established churches and schools.26 It was George Washington’s reaffirmation of the official Indian policy of ‘douce colonialism’ in his eighth State of the Union Address which was the spur for Spence’s lengthiest and most nuanced discourse on indigenous Americans, The Reign of Felicity (1796). Structured as a dialogue between four characters, the opening lines of The Reign of Felicity are provided by the Clergyman who enquires what the others ‘think of the civilization of the Indians of North America, which General Washington speaks of in Congress’. Through the voice of the Farmer, Spence makes parallels between indigenous Americans’ rights to land and the existence of common rights in Britain. He pointedly defends the continued resistance of the Indians to European conquest: ‘if there can be no civil society without paying rents to individuals, I could heartily wish the Indians to remain for ever in their native freedom, without Kings, Priests, Lords or Landlords’. Spence’s repeated references to ‘savages’, ‘innocence’ or ‘rudeness’ when discussing indigenous peoples might suggest he held to the idea of ‘noble savagery’, entertaining a patronising ideal of indigenous people as innocent and childlike. As Sankar Muthu has pointed out, the ‘noble savage’ theory rests on the indigenous not being ‘cultural humans’, that is humans who are able to transform the world around them. Muthu argues that certain ‘anti-imperialist political theories in the Enlightenment era’ were able to abandon assumptions of natural humanity to conceive of indigenous people as capable of cultural and political activity.27 The Reign of Felicity attempts to appeal to indigenous Americans directly as thinking political agents in their own right. Spence addresses them ‘with the earnestness and warmth of a friend’ and vouches for himself as ‘a man that pants for the emancipation of all the human race’, advising: ‘O ye Indians … let neither force not sophistry deprive you of the Lordship of your soil.’28 Furthermore he believes them capable of transforming their own environment in an explicitly cultural and political way, suggesting they implement the Spencean Plan as the ultimate ward



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against the encroachment of private property. This solution, he suggests, would preserve and elevate the spirit of their civilisation which soon will become the most enviable nation upon earth, and the lovers of freedom will flock to you from all corners of the world, intreating to become your Fellow-citizens … The slaves and disfranchized labourers of other nations would here find emancipation, and ascend to the real character of man.29

In the 6 August 1814 issue of his serial publication The Giant-Killer, Spence reprinted a report from 1808 by a leading missionary of the American Presbyterian Church on the ‘Progress of Civilization among the Cherokee Indians’. The Reverend Gideon Blackburn had begun a ‘civilising’ mission among the Cherokee and Creek nations in 1803. By 1807 he was communicating directly with President Jefferson, reporting on the progress of his mission in detail. He wrote about taking Cherokee children to educate them in English, encouraging the Cherokee to leave their dwellings and settle as independent farmers, and asked Jefferson for national funding for his projects. In the report Spence reprinted, Blackburn boasted of the success of his efforts to turn the Cherokee into ‘men and citizens’; they had adopted a constitution, they had introduced taxes and rates and Blackburn ‘suspec[ted] their next step will be the partitioning of their lands, and entering into regular habits of husbandry’. Spence’s reproduction of the report coincided with the aftermath of the defeat of Tecumseh’s pan-Indian confederation which cleared the way for American settlement of Cherokee and other indigenous lands west of the Mississippi. The commentary that Spence appended to the bottom of the report was caustic. He criticised missionaries as ‘dangerous Civilizers’ who ‘think of nothing but building Churches and partitioning out the Lands … and then they piously thank God for making Rich and poor … Then Equality and Individual Independence vanishes, and Poverty, Distress, and the Slave-trade commences.’30 Spence tended to see his own political role as a planner, educator or advocate, not as an insurrectionist. Nevertheless, there is an undeniable thread in Spence’s writings that expresses interest in armed conflict as a method of taking and maintaining power in a republic through the arming of the population. Such positions were central to the thinking of the physical-force faction of the London Corresponding Society (LCS), of which Spence was an influential member. This interest in the use of arms was evident as early as Spence’s lecture to the Newcastle Philosophical Society in 1775, the main body of which would appear as The Rights of Man (1792). His ideal republic places great emphasis on a well-armed and trained population: All the men in every parish, at times of their own choosing, repair together to a field for that purpose, with their officers, arms, banners, and all sorts of martial music, in order to learn or retain the complete art of war; there they become soldiers.31

His Constitution of Spensonia also envisaged an armed population of citizens who are ‘all exercised in the use of arms’. It enshrined the sanctity of insurrection: ‘When the

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Government violates the rights of the people, Insurrection becomes to the people, and to every portion of the people, the most sacred, and the most indispensable of duties’.32 Spence’s affinity with Jacobin ideas and methods of insurrection was no doubt related to his increasing realisation in 1794 and 1795 that the government, and the property-owners it represented, would never countenance even mild political reform. It is in this context that Spence’s End of Oppression (1795) admitted that ‘a Convention or Parliament of the People would be at eternal War with the Aristocracy’. Spence therefore argued in favour of insurrection led by a group of armed, disciplined revolutionaries: Let us suppose a few thousands of hearty determined fellows well armed and appointed with officers, and having a committee of honest, firm, and intelligent men to act as a provisionary government, and to direct their actions to the proper object … if the aristocracy arose to contend the matter, let the people be firm and desperate, destroying them root and branch.

Spence acknowledged that the enemy would ‘have all the strong Holds, all the Arms, and every advantage’. Nevertheless, he believed that in an insurrectionary confrontation the landowning classes could not rely on the loyalty of soldiers whom they would increasingly be unable to pay as their sources of wealth were being confiscated: ‘thus the war would be carried on at the expense of the wealthy enemy’ and the ‘soldiers of liberty … would be steady and bold’.33 Spence’s commitment to revolutionary violence was not merely abstract or theoretical. In 1794, the year preceding the publication of the End of Oppression, Spence had allowed John Phillip Franklow to use the attic in his shop at Turnstile Road to carry out instruction in arms and drilling with the aim of organising an LCS militia. In April of the same year Spence had been one of a handful of LCS members privy to John Edwards’s plan to procure steel pike-heads from Sheffield for members who were interested in arming themselves.34 As a wave of repression dispersed and demoralised the LCS and other radicals, interest in Jacobin-style insurrectionary tactics in Britain seemed at an end. Yet, Spence’s interest in such methods remained consistent as he searched for ever wider sources of inspiration. If, as suggested at the start of this chapter, The Restorer of Society (1801) can be read as Spence’s mature manifesto then it would follow that insurrectionary force was a fixed part of his thought: ‘anything short of total destruction of the power of these Samsons will not do … we must scalp them or else they will soon recover and pull our Temple of Liberty about our ears’, he argued, warning of a ‘too tender resistance’. Once again, the chances of a victorious revolution would increase in proportion to the quantity of property confiscated: ‘The power and resources of War, passing in this manner in a moment, into the hands of the people from the hands of their Tyrants, they, like sham Samsons would become weak and harmless as other Men.’ Spence cited those insurrections that



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were taking place ‘abroad and at home’ as well as the wave of naval mutinies across Britain’s fleets during the late 1790s, as evidence that insurrection was both possible and effective: ‘Are the Landlords in the Parishes more numerous and powerful in proportion to the People than the brave warlike Officers in our mutinous Fleets were to their Crews.’35 It was through a movement that was both popular and well organised that Spence believed a successful revolution could come to pass. Spence’s ballads reinforce this view, often speaking of mass, popular risings: ‘I beheld till these Preachers were well understood, When the People in all Places arose like a Flood.’36 Following Spence’s death in 1814 a group of his friends and comrades formed the Society of Spencean Philanthropists to preserve and propagate his ideas.37 Its leaders, men like Thomas Evans and Arthur Thistlewood, had earlier been connected to the United Englishmen (later called the United Britons or simply ‘United’), a clandestine organisation formed to support the rebellion of the United Irishmen through the transportation of arms, the instigation of a French invasion and the organisation of a parallel rebellion in England. They brought a commitment to insurrection in Ireland with them into the worldview of Spenceanism. Thomas Evans was the secretary of the LCS in 1798 when he began a long association with Irish politics. He established a London cell of the United Englishmen shortly after the establishment of the first cells in Lancashire in 1797. He also coauthored the first declaration of support from the LCS to the United Irishmen, entitled the ‘Address of the London Corresponding Society to the Irish Nation’. This appeared in Ireland in the 30 January 1798 issue of The Press, and claimed that the LCS beheld with inexpressible regret the enormous cruelties which have with impunity been practised in every corner of your devoted country … we deem it our duty to address and assure you … there are few in Britain who do not shudder with horror at the recital of the sufferings of the Irish people.

A desire to unify the interests of the English labouring classes with the Irish rebels runs through the entire address. Evans specifically argued that the horrors inflicted on Ireland would return home, and that their oppressors were identical: ‘our fellow men in Ireland live under the same form of government, and are in fact governed by the same men’. He made multiple pleas to English soldiers to desert, defending Irish rebel violence against them: ‘if you massacre the Irish, will not the Irish in some measure be justified in retaliating upon the British?’38 Several weeks after this address, Evans used his home at Plough Court in Fetterlane as the London base of an unsuccessful plot to smuggle leaders of the United Englishmen and United Irishmen from Margate to France, where they intended to supplicate the republic to carry out an invasion in support of the Irish rebels.39 Evans continued to hold meetings throughout the year, developing a reputation in

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these years as one of the ‘most inflammatory’ speakers of the United Englishmen.40 On 18 April 1798, a meeting headed by Evans was raided by the authorities, and several documents were confiscated, including a draft oath found in Evans’s pocket committing those who ‘join the society of True Britons, to learn the use of arms, in order that equal rights and laws should be established and defended’.41 Evans was also responsible for drafting a proposed constitution for a free Ireland with a distinctly Spencean flavour, declaring that land was intended ‘for the common use of all and cannot become the property of individuals’.42 Evans’s involvement in the United movement was a formative experience in his political career, and Ireland continued to be important to him long after the movement was smashed by the authorities.43 In 1814, mere weeks before the Spencean Philanthropists were officially founded, Evans sent his son, Thomas John, and his comrade Arthur Thistlewood to renew links with United revolutionaries exiled in Paris and distribute Spencean pamphlets.44 In a letter to the 7 September 1816 edition of The Independent Whig, Evans referred to the horrors inflicted on ‘Ireland – rebellion, execution, persecution, military coercion, and every species of oppression’, and included it within a wider condemnation of British colonialism across the world, listing: ‘the horrors of the colonies, of slavery, of men hunted down by blood hounds – of wars on the Continent of America, – scalping, burning, and hanging, of India, war, rapine, and famine’.45 In his most thorough discourse on Spencean theory, Christian Policy, the Salvation of the Empire (1816), Evans once again returned to the warning he had made to English workers in the ‘Address’ of 1798: This country is now feeling the same situation of distress that has long been inflicted on Ireland, who from the annihilation of her parliament, and the establishment of a military government has been compelled without appeal to submit to exist almost entirely on that one part of her produce, potatoes … Thus the Irish people have been forced under the influence of the bayonet, reluctantly to starve, and go naked in the midst of the plenty produced by the toil of their hands.

In late 1816, the Spencean Philanthropists began to bifurcate between Evans’s official Society dedicated to promoting a well-defined Spencean ideology primarily through print and debate, and a conspiratorial, tactically flexible group coalescing around the ex-militia man Thistlewood, the chemist James Watson and the shoemaker Thomas Preston. The catalyst for the split had been Evans’s misgivings about the latter group organising two mass meetings at Spa Fields, sharing a platform with the reformist MP Henry Hunt and entertaining non-Spencean demands for reform. Evans was also concerned at the intention of the other Spenceans to escalate the meetings to the point of riot, with an eye towards general insurrection. This is not to say that Evans had abandoned insurrectionary tactics, but, as Iain McCalman has pointed out, he believed that misdirected or premature use of insurrectionary methods would end in disaster and repression.46



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Even without Evans’s involvement, Irish grievances were prominent among the politics aired at the two Spa Fields meetings. This can be seen in the choice of language used in the posters spread across London to promote the momentous second meeting: ‘Four millions in distress!!! – Four millions embarrassed!!! – One million and an half fear distress!!! – Our brothers in Ireland are in a worse state!!! – The climax of misery is complete: it can go no further.’ The poster’s message was approved by Thomas Preston, who had witnessed this distress first-hand. Originally from London, he had tramped across Ireland as an itinerant shoemaker in the 1790s where he reflected on the oppression of Ireland: Can any sophist … feel so condescendingly kind as to account to me, why Ireland, the essence of fertility, her sons too, the most industrious among the nations of the earth, should remain so very poor, so extremely wretched? Does she need emancipation? Yes! – emancipation from temporal iniquities, not spiritual disabilities.47

He stressed that ‘the real wants of all countries are nearly the same’. Though the Spenceans at Spa Fields omitted mentioning an explicitly Spencean solution, they continued Evans’s emphasis on the community of grievance between English ­workers and the Irish people, and the importance of insurrectionary solidarity. A handbill which the Spenceans had been distributing among soldiers less than a week before the December meeting was reported to have mentioned ‘that their brethren in Ireland were ready to rise, and hoped they would be the same in England’. James Watson’s speech at Spa Fields once again invoked this commonality, reminding the audience that ‘It is not only this country that is thus oppressed – our sister-country, Ireland, shares in our misfortunes’.48 Arthur Thistlewood is generally understood to have been the leader of the Cato Street Conspiracy, and a significant element of his plan was the desire to win the support of the London Irish, on the assumption that they would be receptive to an insurrection against the British state. This aspect was repeatedly mentioned during the conspirators’ trials.49 According to the statements for the prosecution of the Irish labourer and informer Thomas Dwyer, Thistlewood’s recruiting tactic was to express his anger to Irishmen that ‘Ireland was in a disturbed state’. Thistlewood claimed he had won ‘a good many’ Irish workers to the conspiracy in the months prior to 23 February 1820. Thomas Hiden, a conspirator who turned King’s evidence, mentioned the importance of Gee’s Court, off Oxford Street, to the plot. It was claimed by the conspirators that the residents of this predominantly Irish neighbourhood ‘were in it’, and that it could be used as a friendly rallying point by the conspirators at the plot’s commencement.50 Thistlewood and his group certainly understood that their plans would have ramifications beyond England. One particularly visceral detail of the conspiracy expresses this well; the conspirator James Ings ‘proposed, that after the heads of Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth were taken off, they should be placed on a pole, and carried through the streets. Thistlewood improved the plan, and said that they

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should be carried on a pike behind the cannon in the streets, to excite terror. On this Bradbury observed, that, after they had used Lord Castlereagh’s head, they would enclose it in a box, and send it to Ireland.’51 Lord Castlereagh’s status as one of the leading targets of the Cato Street plot can thus be traced directly to his responsibility for quashing the Irish Rebellion of 1798 and later repressing the reform movement in Britain. Thomas Spence was deeply opposed to slavery in general, and the transatlantic slave trade in particular.52 In The Restorer he had argued that the transatlantic slavetrade was integral to the moral and economic logic of the commodification of all humans: ‘the cursed spirit of traffic pervades everything … So it is no wonder they so earnestly plead for open and unlimited traffic … like great Babylon even in slaves and the souls of men.’53 Spence’s thought bore no resemblance to the paternalism of Wilberforce and the mainstream of the abolitionist movement. Instead Spence looked at slave revolts as moments of hope and possibility, enthusiastically embracing the victory of the Haitian revolution to such a great extent that he dedicated The Constitution of Spensonia to the new republic: And though my book’s in queer lingo, I will it send to St. Domingo: To the Republic of the Incas, For an example how to frame Laws. For who can tell but the Millennium May take its rise from my poor Cranium? And who knows but it God may please It should come by the West Indies?54

The idea that the new Haitian government might adopt Spence’s proposals in their new state was not entirely ridiculous. The French revolutionary and abolitionist Nicolas de Condorcet had earlier proposed that post-revolutionary Haiti should redistribute the land and create state-owned sugar mills to stimulate economic production. These quasi-Spencean proposals had reached the ears of the Haitian leader Dessalines and were seriously considered for a period.55 The ‘Republic of the Incas’ in Spence’s verse (above) is undoubtedly a reference to the Haitian army which Dessalines had styled the Army of the Incas. It was selected, much like the name Haiti itself, to symbolise that the revolution was a project not only of slave emancipation but of vengeance and redemption for the indigenous Tainos who had suffered alongside the slaves at the hands of Europeans.56 The black London ultra-radical Robert Wedderburn contributed to the Spencean understanding of slavery in his journal The Axe Laid to the Root (1817), where over the course of six issues he recounted and appraised experiences of slave resistance and revolt. He proposed that total emancipation and the Spencean Plan were the same political goal. Wedderburn’s first reference to the Haitian revolution appeared



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in the first issue of The Axe Laid to the Root, where he mentioned it as a negative example of bad insurrectionary tactics conducive only to bloodshed and excess. He warned: ‘use no violence against your masters … follow not the example of St. Domingo’, instead advocating the strategic use of work-stoppages, starting with appointing a day when slaves would refuse to work for one hour. This, it is argued, on a wide enough scale, would be enough to ‘strike terror to your oppressors’. This position was entirely reversed later in the same issue when the author claimed to have received several corroborative reports from contacts in Jamaica that the slaves were planning to demand another day of rest per week and that ‘Jamaica will be in the hands of the blacks within twenty years’. In this instance, Haiti is referenced as setting a heroic precedent: ‘Prepare for flight, ye planters, for the fate of St. Domingo awaits you … recollect the fermentation shall be universal. Their weapons are their bill-hooks.’ Wedderburn also mentioned the battle of Vinegar Hill during the Irish rebellion of 1798, where the United Irishmen had suffered an utter rout after trying to face British forces in symmetrical warfare. He described this tactic as ‘silly’ and suggested it should be avoided by insurrectionary slaves in favour of a hit-and-run strategy which would today be termed guerrilla warfare.57 In the second issue of The Axe Laid to the Root, Wedderburn emphasised the importance of military-revolutionary training, calling for slave men and women to learn ‘the art of war’ as they would ‘have need of all your strength to defend yourself against those men, who are now scheming in Europe against the blacks of St. Domingo’.58 In the sixth issue of the journal, Wedderburn once again considered the Haitian revolution as an example for emulation, through a fictitious correspondence with his ‘sister-in-law’ supposedly residing in Jamaica. In the aftermath of a slave revolt in Barbados in 1816, the letters to Wedderburn claimed that slaves being brought to Jamaica by worried masters fleeing from Haiti had been fraternising with Jamaican slaves who were now beginning to talk about their own revolt.59 It was in this ‘correspondence’ that Wedderburn discussed the earlier Caribbean slave revolts known to history as the First and Second Maroon Wars (1673–1731 and 1795–96). Wedderburn made a point of claiming maroon ancestry in The Axe Laid to the Root and recounts that they had ‘fought for twenty years against the Christians, who wanted to reduce them again to slavery, after they had fled into the woods from the Spaniards’. He was at pains to point out the righteousness and humanity of the maroon cause, insisting that they were ‘not barbarous, nor voracious’.60 In both of these conflicts the maroons had faced a much more powerful British force, were often outnumbered ten-to-one, but had nevertheless fought to a victory or an honourable compromise in the form of peace treaties, primarily owing to a guerrilla strategy that exploited their knowledge of mountain and jungle. Wedderburn invoked this history to assert the legitimacy and effectiveness of slave revolt in general, and guerrilla tactics in particular.61 The months preceding Cato Street saw a rapid escalation in insurrectionary language and organisation on Wedderburn’s part. His Spencean group began

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practising military drills after debates at his infidel ‘chapel’ in Soho, and on Sunday mornings on Primrose Hill.62 In the aftermath of Peterloo, Wedderburn wished to ‘revenge the murders committed at Manchester’. At a meeting on 11 October, he claimed ‘that the Revolution had already began in blood there and it must now also end in blood here’. Insurrection was explicitly propounded: ‘nothing short of peoples taking arms in their own defence could bring about a Reform’. Wedderburn vowed that he would sacrifice his own life ‘if he could but have the satisfaction of plunging a dagger in the heart of a tyrant’.63 The escalation in Wedderburn’s violent rhetoric began before Peterloo, which suggests that he probably saw events in Manchester as additional, supporting evidence for the legitimacy of armed insurrection. The Hopkins Street debate held on 9 August 1819 expresses this clearly. Its question was intentionally polysemic: ‘Has a Slave an inherent right to slay his Master, who refuses him his liberty?’ For one informer who had attended the meeting the meaning was obvious; he was actually discussing ‘whether it be right for the People of England to assassinate their Rulers’. And yet simultaneously, Wedderburn spent the debate discussing the history of ‘Insurrections of Slaves in some of the West Indian Islands’. He began by reminding the audience of the government sending British ‘men in arms to [the] West Indies or Africa’ to enslave people to work in the ‘Cotton factories’. He demanded that the British labouring classes stand up for the cause of these slaves, hoping ‘there would be slaughter in England for their Liberty’. He finished by joking that ‘He had written home to the Slaves to avoid slaying their masters until he knew the sense of that meeting … the sense of the meeting was taken … Nearly the whole of the persons in the room held up their hands in favour of the Question. Mr. W[edderburn] then exclaimed, well Gentlemen I can now write home and tell the Slaves to murder their Masters as soon as they please.’64 During the quarter of a century that spans the campaign against the LCS and the execution of the Cato Street conspirators in 1820, the reform movement in England suffered repeated defeats and setbacks. In that time Spence, and his adherents like Evans, Preston, Thistlewood and Wedderburn, kept their political hopes alive by drawing from the examples of the colonial periphery where insurrectionary fires burned bright.65 In the dark, despairing days after Peterloo the efficacy of revolt and armed insurrection in those territories helped to convince these men of the potential benefits of insurrection in the metropolis of London and across Britain. Indeed, in August 1819 Robert Wedderburn made the links between the two sites of resistance explicit. He addressed a crowd of London radicals and praised the Haitian revolutionary slaves who ‘fought in some instances for twenty years for Liberty’. He appealed to Britons ‘who boasted such superior feelings and principles, whether they were ready to fight but for a short time for their Liberties’.66 Placing the Cato Street Conspiracy within this broader geographical and historical context of transnational rebellions and revolts enables us to see the plot as the Spenceans



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likely did, as a belated metropolitan response to multiple rebellions and uprisings that offered hope for the liberation of humanity. Notes  1 Malcolm Chase, The People’s Farm: English Radical Agrarianism, 1775–1840 (Oxford, 1988) p. 120.  2 Thomas Spence, The Important Trial of Thomas Spence (London, 1803) pp. 59, 61; Thomas Spence, ‘The Restorer of Society to Its Natural State’ [1801], reprinted in G.I. Gallop (ed.), Pigs’ Meat: Selected Writings of Thomas Spence, Radical and Pioneer Land Reformer (Nottingham, 1982), pp. 129, 135, 141 (hereafter PM); Thomas Spence, ‘The Rights of Infants’ [1796], reprinted in Gallop, PM, p. 117.  3 Spence, Important Trial of Thomas Spence, p. 59; Spence, ‘Restorer of Society to Its Natural State’, p. 141.  4 Phyllis Mary Ashraf, The Life and Times of Thomas Spence (Newcastle, 1982), pp. 79–82; Spence, Important Trial of Thomas Spence, p. 59.  5 Spence, ‘Restorer of Society to Its Natural State’, p. 158.  6 Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Revolution (London, 1962), p. 15.  7 Pigs’ Meat (hereafter PM, 1795), II (1795), p. 2.  8 PM, 1795, II, pp. 19, 20.  9 PM, 1795, I, pp. 13, 14. 10 PM, 1795, I, p. 73. 11 Spence, Important Trial of Thomas Spence, p. 60. 12 Suzanne Desan, ‘Foreigners, Cosmopolitanism, and French Revolutionary Universalism’, in Suzanne Desan, Lynn Hunt and William Max Nelson (eds), The French Revolution in Global Perspective (Ithaca, NY, 2013), p. 99. 13 Thomas Jefferson, Letter to Volney [17 Mar. 1801], printed in Barbara B. Oberg (ed.), Papers of Thomas Jefferson, vol. 33 (Oxford, 2006), p. 341; Anthony F.C. Wallace, Jefferson and the Indians: The Tragic Fate of the First Americans (Cambridge, MA, 1999), p. 225; Gary Wills, Negro President: Jefferson and the Slave Power (Boston, MA, 2003), p. 3; Constantin-François Volney, A New Translation of Volney’s Ruins; or Meditations on the Revolution of Empires (Paris, 1802), p. 141. 14 Robert Wedderburn, The Axe Laid to the Root, or a Fatal Blow to Oppressors, No. 1 (London, 1817), p. 5. 15 Eneas Mackenzie, A Descriptive and Historical Account of the Town and County of Newcastle, vol. I (Newcastle upon Tyne, 1827), p. 401. 16 Spence, ‘Restorer of Society to Its Natural State’, p. 154; Thomas Spence, ‘An Interesting Conversation between a Gentleman and the Author, on the Subject of the Foregoing Lecture’ [1793], reprinted in Gallop, PM, pp. 69, 72; PM, 1795, I, p. 1. 17 Spence, ‘Restorer of Society to Its Natural State’, pp. 130–1, 145–7. ‘Aceldama’ is taken to refer to the Biblical ‘field of blood’ in Acts 1:18–19. 18 Maria Aletta Hulshoff, Peace-Republican’s Manual; or, the French Constitution of 1793 (New York, 1817), p. 32; ‘The New Constitution of France’, PM, 1795, I, pp. 176–80, 208–12. 19 Thomas Spence, ‘The Constitution of Spensonia’ [1803], reprinted in Gallop, PM, p. 184.

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20 Adam Smith, An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (London, 1776), vol. II, p. 235. 21 Thomas Spence, The Rights of Man, as Exhibited in a Lecture Read at the Philosophical Society in Newcastle ..., printed for the author (London, 1793), pp. 33–4. 22 R.H. Thompson, ‘The Dies of Thomas Spence (1750–1814)’, British Numismatic Journal, No. 38 (1969), 131. 23 Thomas Spence, ‘A Further Account of Spensonia’ (1794) reprinted in Gallop, PM, pp. 80–1. 24 ‘Restorer of Society to Its Natural State’, p. 152. 25 Sunil Agnani, ‘Doux Commerce, Douce Colonisation: Diderot and the Two Indies of the French Enlightenment’, in Larry Wolff and Marco Cipolloni (eds), The Anthropology of the Enlightenment (Stanford, CA, 2007), pp. 68, 75–6. 26 Roger M. Carpenter, ‘Times Are Altered with Us’: American Indians from First Contact to the New Republic (Oxford, 2015), p. 274. 27 Ter Ellingson, The Myth of the Noble Savage (Berkeley, CA, 2001) p. 6; Sankar Muthu, Enlightenment against Empire (Princeton, NJ, 2003), p. 69. 28 Thomas Spence, The Reign of Felicity, being a Plan for Civilizing the Indians of North America; without infringing on their national or individual independence, printed for T. Spence (London, 1796), pp. 4, 7–8. 29 Spence, The Reign of Felicity, p. 9. 30 Gideon Blackburn, ‘Progress of Civilization among the Cherokee Indians’ [1804] reprinted in The Giant-Killer, No. 2 (1814), p. 7. 31 Spence, ‘The Rights of Man’ [1793], reprinted in Gallop, PM, pp. 64, 65. 32 Spence, ‘The Constitution of Spensonia’, pp. 170, 182. 33 Spence, ‘The End of Oppression’ [1795], reprinted in Gallop, PM, pp. 93–5. 34 ‘Trial of Thomas Hardy for High Treason’ [1794], in Cobbett’s Complete Collection of State Trials and Proceedings, vol. XXIV, pp. 673, 693–7. 35 Thomas Spence, ‘The Restorer of Society to Its Natural State’, pp. 140, 141; Niklas Frykman, ‘Connections between Mutinies in European Navies’, International Review of Social History, 58 (Dec. 2013), 87–8, 91. 36 ‘The Propagation of Spenconianism’ [1807?], reprinted in Phyllis Mary Ashraf (ed.) Essays in Honour of William Gallacher: Supplement, Thomas Spence: The History of Crusonia and Other Writings (Berlin, 1966), p. 345; ‘Spence and the Barber’, Spence’s Songs, Part Second (London, 1807?), p. 1. 37 McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. 10. 38 ‘Address of the London Corresponding Society to the Irish Nation’ (30 Jan. 1798), printed in William Cobbett, The Parliamentary History of England ..., vol. xxxiv (London, 1819), pp. 599, 641–5. 39 The Trial at Large of Arthur O’Connor … for High Treason (London, 1798), pp. 72, 74. 40 Quoted in McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. 11. 41 ‘Report from the Commons’ Committee of Secrecy relative to a Treasonable Conspiracy’, printed in Parliamentary History of England, pp. 601–2, 647. 42 Quoted in McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. 25. 43 ‘The Rose and the Shamroc’, Spence’s Songs, Part Third (London, 1807?) p. 1. 44 McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 20, 23.



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45 The Independent Whig, No. 549 (7 Sept. 1816), p. 212. 46 McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. 109. 47 Thomas Preston, The Life and Opinions of Thomas Preston (London, 1817), pp. 9, 10. 48 The Trials at Large of Arthur Thistlewood, James Watson, Thomas Preston (London, 1817), pp. 46, 249–51. 49 The Trials of Arthur Thistlewood, James Ings, John Thomas Brunt (London, 1820), p. 187; The Lives of Thistlewood, Davidson, Brunt, Tidd and Ings, the Leaders of the Cato Street Conspiracy (London, 1820), pp. 3, 4; David Johnson, Regency Revolution: The Case of Arthur Thistlewood (Salisbury, 1974), p. 4; Annual Register, or a View of the History, Politics, and Literature of the Year 1820 (London, 1822), p. 29. 50 Trials at Large of Arthur Thistlewood … (1817), pp. 188, 513. 51 Wilkinson, Authentic History, pp. 291–2. 52 Adam Hochshild, Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston, MA, 2006) p. 241. 53 Spence, ‘Restorer of Society to Its Natural State’, p. 131. 54 Spence, ‘The Constitution of Spensonia’, p. 185. 55 Laurent Dubois, Avengers of the New World: The Story of the Haitian Revolution (Cambridge, MA, 2004), p. 192. 56 Phillipe R. Girard, ‘War Unleashed: The Use of War Dogs during the Haitian War of Independence’, Napoleonica. La Revue, No. 15 (2012/3), 105. 57 Robert Wedderburn, The Axe Laid to the Root, or a Fatal Blow to Oppressors, No. 1 (London, 1817), pp. 11–14. 58 Wedderburn, Axe Laid to the Root, No. 2, p. 90. 59 Wedderburn, Axe Laid to the Root, No. 6, p. 108. 60 Orlando Patterson, ‘Slavery and Slave Revolts: A Socio-historical Analysis of the First Maroon War: Jamaica, 1655–1740’, Social and Economic Studies, 19:3 (Sept. 1970), 317. 61 Wedderburn, Axe Laid to the Root, No. 4, pp. 54, 55. 62 TNA, HO 42/199, fol. 134, John Davis, 21 Nov. 1819. 63 TNA, TS 11/45/167, Rex vs Wedderburn, Deposition of Richard Dalton, 13 Oct. 1819. 64 TNA, HO 42/191, Rev. Chetwode Eustace, 10 Aug. 1819; TNA HO 42/195 [9 Aug. 1819]. 65 Spence, Rights of Man, pp. 1, 2. 66 TNA, HO 42/191, Rev. Chetwode Eustace, 10 Aug. 1819.

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7 State witnesses and spies in Irish political trials, 1794–1803 Martyn J. Powell

This chapter looks at the use of spies and state witnesses in trials of United Irishmen and their Defender allies in Ireland and Britain in the years leading up to the 1798 rebellion, the rebellion itself, and the alleged and planned uprisings of 1802–3. This period saw numerous high-profile trials of figures active in the United Irishmen, the radical reform movement that had pushed towards a republican, separatist agenda by the second half of the 1790s; a period that also saw it ally with the semi-rural Catholic popular protest group, the Defenders, which had originated in Co. Armagh in the previous decade. In many of these cases – and in all of those referenced below – spies were of central importance to the legal process. Individual trials and the role of spies within them have received some attention from historians.1 Thomas Bartlett has written on informers in the 1790s, including Leonard McNally. The historian Michael Durey has published on the informer William Maume, and the activities of the witness Hugh Wheatley feature prominently in Guy Beiner’s work on popular memory.2 However, an overarching study of the use of spies against the United Irishmen in the specific context of trials has yet to be attempted. And yet, unlike in many areas of Irish history, irreparably damaged by the destruction of the Public Record Office of Ireland during the Four Courts fire in 1922, there is a sizeable amount of evidence for Irish political trials in this period, thanks primarily to the attention they received in the newspaper and periodical press of the day. The presence of recorders of proceedings ensured testimony was supplied in the manner of parliamentary debates.3 Many of the most significant cases were included in Howells’s A Complete Collection of State Trials, published in the early nineteenth century.4 These sources provide an opportunity to penetrate the nature of Irish state trials, and the roles of witnesses and spies within them through the lens of a varied print culture.



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Such accounts reveal that in many cases the United Irishmen were sentenced as a consequence of a failure to properly scrutinise the value of witness testimony; or, if it was scrutinised, a failure of juries to take note of significant deficiencies in the type of evidence offered. This was particularly problematic if the case was dependent on the evidence of one individual, as allowed in treason trials under Irish law. The quality and nature of evidence is therefore of key importance to any such study, but there is no attempt in this chapter to ascertain guilt; such an approach is largely redundant as most of the defendants discussed here were undoubtedly involved in plotting against the British state. The nature of the evidence is, of course, difficult to divorce from the witness offering it. In some cases, spies and state witnesses (such as Leonard McNally and Thomas Reynolds) were important members of the Irish patriot movement blackmailed into state employment after being implicated in plots themselves. Others (John Warneford Armstrong and Hugh Wheatley) fit more neatly into the role of agent provocateur, as discussed by Richard A. Gaunt in Chapter 1 above. A final category of ‘informer’ is a little more nebulous; there is usually less evidence of a specific reward or payment on offer, but these individuals might typically be offered immunity from prosecution, some minor employment or both. Michael Durey emphasises the importance of maintaining the distinctions between these categories as it helps to prevent historians of Ireland from overemphasising the number of highly paid spies on the government payroll.5 These acts of betrayal offer an important, dramatic layer to the trials. Those on trial, the legal counsel (for both the prosecution and the defence), judges, members of the jury and some witnesses were frequently from the same social class, had attended the same university and were bonded by a complex network of associational and familial linkages. The United Irish cases offer an intriguing example of the overturning of credit relations, whereby individuals with very good characters (Hamilton Rowan, William Orr, the brothers John and Henry Sheares) had their reputations traduced by those with little personal credit or, indeed, criminal pasts. Courtrooms were very much aware of this juxtaposition, and stenographers were careful to record the admiration felt by trial audiences for the performative personal testimony of the defendants.6 Irish law differed from British law in that during trials for high treason only one witness was required to swear against a defendant, even though the evidence supplied could sentence a man to death. The peculiarity of this situation was arguably most apparent in the trials of William Orr (September 1797) and John and Henry Sheares (July 1798), when the respective testimonies of Hugh Wheatley and John Warneford Armstrong sent them to the scaffold. These cases would have been very difficult to prosecute successfully in a British court. The defence barrister John Philpott Curran pointed this out time after time: ‘that the proof, which in England, would not wound the man, shall here deprive him of his life – that though the people in England would laugh at the accusation, yet here it shall cause the accused

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to perish under it’.7 In the April 1795 trial of the Reverend William Jackson, Curran protested: ‘Did you ever hear of a man forfeiting his life on the unsupported evidence of a single witness, and he an accomplice by his own confession.’ James Fitzgerald, the prime serjeant prosecuting, responded: ‘I have heard this subject treated for two hours past as if this trial were in Great Britain, and that you were called upon, not to decide the case upon law existing in this country where the trial is had, but as if it were had in the sister kingdom.’8 Nevertheless he admitted: ‘I do agree with the gentlemen concerned for the prisoner’, that the evidence ‘under the particular circumstances under which it comes forward, does come so infected as not to have that weight, which it would have, if those circumstances did not exist’.9 In arguably the most dramatic case of this period involving the evidence of a key solitary witness, John Warneford Armstrong, a military officer who had dabbled in radical politics, was introduced to the Sheares brothers by a bookseller involved with the United Irishmen. According to Armstrong’s evidence, he immediately informed a captain in his regiment, who advised he should meet with the brothers. After his conversation with John Sheares revealed a plan to bring over elements of the regiment to the United Irish cause, Armstrong told both his superior officer Colonel L’Estrange and the more senior Lord Castlereagh. Armstrong was able to report on incriminating conversations with John Sheares, and to a lesser extent Henry, who was more circumspect. Armstrong’s oral evidence was key to Henry’s trial; another piece of evidence was presented against John – an incendiary proclamation which he had secreted in his brother’s desk. In Colonel Despard’s trial the defence emphasised the deficiencies in the oral evidence provided by state witnesses. His lawyer, William Draper Best, quoted Montesquieu: ‘Nothing renders the crime of high treason more arbitrary, than declaring people guilty of it for indiscreet speeches.’ In part this goes to the heart of the Treason Trials of the mid-1790s and the difficulty of securing prosecutions for imagining the King’s death.10 Common threads linked defence tactics when approaching evidence given by state witnesses in these cases. One was to focus on the means by which the witness was persuaded to give evidence, which was often intertwined with involvement in the crime. The threat of prosecution was key to securing testimony, though witnesses invariably denied that this factor was an issue. James Keenan in Thomas Russell’s October 1803 trial claimed that he ‘was never threatened with a prosecution: thinks he would not be prosecuted’.11 The evidence from Keenan gives a sense of the way in which magistrates pressurised informers, perhaps offering few explicit commitments, but certainly allowing these individuals to spend periods in prison pondering their potential fate. Its staccato-style also hints at accurate recording: does not believe he would be prosecuted if he did not give evidence; thinks he was imprisoned for fear he would not come forward; was two nights in goal; slept in a little room in the goal, it was rather a good room, does not believe that he would be prosecuted, but that he might be imprisoned for some time; says that he thinks they



State witnesses and spies 121 could not hang him, for he thinks there was no evidence against him. He was told that he would be confined if he did not come forward, but not until after he gave information; he thinks he would be liberated; but would not, he thinks, be liberated if he had not given evidence.12

Another feature of Keenan’s evidence was the sociability that was a key dimension of United Irish planning, a factor that has been discussed in relation to the weakness of the movement in the face of spying.13 But this sociability also impacted upon the reliability of evidence offered by those involved. When questioned by Thomas Russell’s lawyers, Keenan acknowledged that a good deal of alcohol had been consumed during one planning meeting: ‘Recollects drinking whiskey, about five half-pints.’ Then he added: ‘was about twenty minutes drinking there’.14 Even the spy John Cockayne admitted that his recollection of dinner at Leonard McNally’s was imperfect because drink was involved.15 Terence Coghlan’s evidence in Robert Emmet’s trial suggests an unusual entrance into the conspiracy. He got drunk in Dillon’s inn and the ‘next day found himself in the depot and was set to work making white pantaloons and green jackets’.16 Henry Smith, the son of a publican, in whose establishment Thomas Russell held meetings, was another target for the law: ‘knows mr Ford the sheriff; went to him of his own accord, but there had been a guard looking for him in his absence, and he then disclosed the material to mr. Ford’. Smith also enlisted in the militia as a way of shielding himself against the assumption of culpability in the plot. This ploy was insufficient. He was then used as a spy, as he recounted in his evidence, going to see Russell in Kilmainham Gaol. He testified as follows: No one endeavoured to make him swear against the prisoner; no inducement was held out, never was threatened to be confined, nor was he promised liberty if he swore against him, but he expected liberty after evidence, as he volunteered to go and see the prisoner; went without a guard, went to Dublin in a coach which was paid for by government; mr Brown gave him 5s. 5d. when going; he got some money from mr. Blackwood; was kept in gaol since he came to Down, as an evidence.17

Again, the government may not have been explicit, but there were obvious inducements and threats along the way. Some had been betrayed themselves. In the trial of Robert Emmet, the informer Terence Coghlan was asked: ‘How came you to be taken?’ The response: ‘I cannot say’. He was asked, ‘Was it because some person gave information against you?’ Coghlan replied: ‘I suppose so.’ ‘And then you recovered your speech and gave information?’ The answer was ‘yes’. Coghlan also admitted that he was aware of the violence that followed the abortive rebellion, but that this had not acted on his conscience, rather it was the need to provide for his family that led him to give evidence.18 Typically these individuals were brought directly from prison to testify. During Emmet’s trial the witness was asked ‘Where do you live now?’, with the defence lawyer presumably knowing that the response would be ‘In the Tower’.19 The deficiencies of such witnesses was acknowledged

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by the prosecution. In his controversial reply to Emmet’s refusal to offer a defence, Lord Norbury noted: In general, from the nature of the crime of treason – from the secrecy with which it is hatched and conducted, it frequently happens that no other evidence can be resorted to, than that of accomplices; and therefore, notwithstanding the crimes of such witnesses, their evidence is admissible to a jury.20

He was following comments by Lord Ellenborough a few months earlier, who, as judge during Despard’s trial, had admitted that the evidence of informers was ‘sullied with the contamination of the crime’. In fact, one of the Crown barristers in the Despard trial, Thomas Plumer, had taken a similar position as defence counsel during Arthur O’Connor’s trial.21 Evidence given in United Irish and Defender prosecutions revealed the role of a species of entrapment. Military figures, it seems, were deliberately used as agents provocateurs (Hugh Wheatley and Warneford Armstrong), but in other cases military men operated independently, motivated by a desire to access widely publicised rewards. Leonard McNally gleaned important evidence in this way from a key soldier witness in the trial of Lawrence O’Connor and Michael Griffin of Naas in Co. Kildare (August and September 1795). O’Connor and Griffin were accused of administering an unlawful oath to Bartholomew Horan of the North Mayo militia. Horan said: ‘He never heard there was any reward offered for prosecuting defenders, nor does he expect any.’ Another witness in the case, a Captain Burke, had ‘heard a reward was offered for prosecuting defenders in the county Kildare, and thinks it was notorious’. The next witness agreed: ‘it was published in the newspapers, and circulated generally through Kilcock’.22 This was particularly important in considering the September 1797 trial of William Orr, which brings many of these themes together. Hugh Wheatley was the sole serious witness, and Orr’s response focused on the man who testified against him: ‘the evidence against me’, he said, ‘was grossly perjured, grossly and wickedly perjured’. Wheatley was a soldier, and Orr was accused of inducing him to swear an unlawful oath. The only other witness called ‘swore to the administering the oath by the Prisoner; but had no recollection of the substance of it, nor of any thing particular that had passed at that Committee’.23 But Ireland had new legislation on swearing unlawful oaths to soldiers, making it a capital crime without the judicial protections (an indictment, and lists of witnesses and jurors) that a treason trial would have afforded. One of the most significant features of the Orr trial was the way in which evidence came in against the informer Hugh Wheatley from a variety of sources in the form of additional affidavits, focusing on his character. How the evidence in this case, and other cases, was gathered is revealing. The very public nature of the trials may have ensured that individuals sympathetic to the United Irish cause came forward to assist in the defence. The intimate nature of Dublin’s sociable world ensured that it did not take long for those tangentially concerned to be caught up in a trial’s web of



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accusation and counter-accusation. In a particularly interesting case, the wife of the Leinster Directory leader Oliver Bond may well have intervened directly to influence a witness’s testimony. Thomas Reynolds claimed that she had offered a bribe to a woman ‘to prosecute him for alleged fraud, and threatened her with a gaol if she did not comply’.24 In his January 1794 trial Archibald Hamilton Rowan said that ‘it was asserted by the bench, that I had ransacked Connaught for evidence against the character of Lyster’, a key prosecution witness.25 This was one of the reasons why a proper indictment with an advance list of the witnesses who would be called was so crucial in cases of high treason. After his execution in February 1803, the Belfast News-Letter published a moving account of Colonel Despard’s final days. The day before his execution he had apparently declaimed to one of the prison officers: ‘Me – they shall receive no information from me – no – not for all the gifts, the gold, and jewels, in the possession of the Crown.’26 Other radicals, and those in their network of acquaintances, were less stoical. Thomas Reynolds, a silk manufacturer, was one of the most notorious spies to be involved in the 1790s trials. His evidence was crucial in bringing down the Leinster Directory. He was responsible for the arrest of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and was a key witness in several July 1798 trials, including those of Oliver Bond, John McCann and William Michael Byrne. McCann and Byrne were executed, but Bond was willing to testify to the Secret Committee in return for his life. Thomas Reynolds’s evidence offered a range of reasons for spying. He had settled on a pardon and expenses of less than 500 guineas, which would be used in the event that he might need to leave the country should his life be in danger. In the trial it was claimed that he had refused much greater rewards.27 John Cockayne was another spy used in a major United Irish prosecution, that of the Reverend William Jackson in 1795. The Attorney General acknowledged that Pitt had asked Cockayne to accompany Jackson from London to Dublin. Cockayne admitted to being offered £300 by Pitt to involve himself in the prosecution. He was also promised immunity from prosecution, which may be taken as sure evidence of genuine involvement in United Irish activity.28 The scene was set as follows. After posting letters for Jackson, Cockayne claimed he became aware that there ‘was apparent evidence of treason against himself. Added to his feelings for his own personal safety, he felt the danger impending on himself and his country, and he disclosed to government the whole of what he knew or suspected.’ Cockayne successfully managed to inveigle himself into a meeting in Newgate Prison in Dublin with Archibald Hamilton Rowan and Wolfe Tone.29 The Jackson trial secured an even more important spy for the government, Leonard McNally, who had been a patriot voice since the 1770s, and had clearly agreed to spy for the government while representing his client Jackson. This was the first of a sequence of United Irishmen whom he would betray to the authorities by revealing the courtroom tactics of the defence. In the Sheares’ case his involvement was as deadly as that of the informer Armstrong, as he chose to pass

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on the evidence of Armstrong’s unreliability provided by Lord Cork only on the day of the brothers’ execution. More generally, however, the United Irish cases tended not to elicit very obvious ‘spies’, and those who might be categorised as such were usually very keen to deny the epithet. Two of the witnesses in the May 1798 trials of Arthur O’Connor and James O’Coigly were accused of receiving inducements for testifying, or possibly even spying. Frederick Dutton had seen his fortunes transformed from livery servant to quartermaster, a point remarked upon by the defence barrister, Thomas Plumer. Dutton also acknowledged that he had appeared as a witness in previous cases. He said: ‘He never applied to government for his services; but he hoped he and his family would be provided for.’ Revealingly the defence had obtained a letter that revealed Dutton had applied to Lord Carhampton for the role of quartermaster. In the same trial Henry Thomsett, a Kent labourer, was accused of receiving financial inducement for testifying, though he denied it. It was also suggested that he had told his sister that ‘he would hang the prisoners’.30 Thomsett, it seems, was paid to spy on O’Connor and Coigly in prison.31 According to a defence witness, ‘Thomsett said, he was allowed something; that he had been before Pitt, Dundas, and White; told them he was a smuggler, and that they settled on him six guineas a month till the trials were over’.32 The relationship between the state and individuals on the wrong side of a fracturing moral economy can also shine a light on motivations to agree to testify against comrades. Defence prosecutors frequently looked to expose in court the pressures placed on witnesses, either as a mode of undermining character or shining a light on government blackmail tactics. John Barrell’s work on William Pitt’s ‘Terror’ in the mid-1790s suggests that counting executions (there was only one) is a poor way of measuring the oftendraconian policies of the state. Rather, the smaller-scale threats, intimidations and carefully targeted personal and property violence could be incredibly effective.33 The way in which the intelligence on United Irishmen was gathered is suggestive of a range of similar approaches. Following his evidence against the Leinster Director member William Michael Byrne, the United Irishman Thomas Miller said that he had voluntarily given information to Lord Powerscourt. The defence questioning elicited from Miller that ‘he had at Christmas time’ gone ‘into town to sell some green holly, which he had taken without permission of the owners’, clearly illustrating his vulnerability to government strong-arm tactics.34 Sometimes the nature of the evidence offered was indicative either of a financial relationship already in place or of conduct that suggested an awareness of a lucrative financial deal that might be done. When John Lyster was a witness against Archibald Hamilton Rowan in January 1795, he described attending a gathering at Pardon’s fencing school in Cope Street in Dublin’s Liberties: It was curiosity brought him to the room; going through the street saw a crowd at the door – was told it was a meeting of the United Irishmen: He rapped at the door,



State witnesses and spies 125 and on being opened was told, he believes, by Mr Rowan, that no person could be admitted into the room in coloured clothes, but he told him there was a gallery, to which he went.

When papers were handed out to those in uniform, and those in the gallery, Lyster obtained one of them and noted carefully that this had originated in the hands of Hamilton Rowan. Oddly, for a supposedly casual observer, the next step he took was to mark ‘the paper he got, signed his name to it, and made a memorandum on it with the following words: “Got this paper the 16th of December 1792 – got it at a meeting of the United Irishmen in Cope-street; it came from the hands of A.H. Rowan”’.35 Hamilton Rowan’s defence team was puzzled by this admirable care with documents. During questioning, Lyster replied that he ‘made that memorandum on the paper the very day he got it; he made it at his lodgings; no person advised him to do it, he always does so with any paper he gets; he fancied to do it’. He added ‘he did not make that memorandum in order to use it for the purpose of prosecution’. Denis George, the Dublin Recorder, defending Hamilton Rowan, ‘dwelt on the improbability of Lyster’s evidence, when he swore that he made that entry which had been read in court on the back of the publication, without having any intention to prosecute’. More pointedly, Curran claimed that Lyster ‘came to court against Mr Rowan to pay down the purchase money’.36 Lyster had been forced to acknowledge that he ‘was not of any profession at the time he was at the meeting, is now an ensign in the army in the 40th regiment; he was gazetted the 27th of June last; he did not obtain his commission by purchase, he got it by the interest of a lady he had the honour of being related to, lady Hobart’. The coincidence of his sudden rise to junior officer status is replicated in other witness testimonies, and was invariably commented upon by defence lawyers.37 Summing up, the judge Lord Clonmell somewhat charitably brushed aside questions directed at Lyster’s evidence, claiming that ‘the manner in which he got his commission was very naturally accounted for’.38 The evidence provided by William Morton on the same occasion was again indicative of a close relationship with government, and likely a financial inducement to do some spying. Morton was an apprentice goldsmith and just happened to go to Cope Street on the afternoon in question. After the meeting where he obtained a copy of Hamilton Rowan’s manifesto, he headed straight to the house of a relative who lived in the same building in Parliament Street where Faulkner’s Dublin Journal was printed. This newspaper was under the editorial control of the government hireling and office-holder John Giffard, who took the paper from him.39 Giffard was responsible for impanelling the jury in the Hamilton Rowan trial, and the accused pointed out this clear conflict of interest. The Dublin Recorder, Denis George, claimed that Morton’s evidence must be regarded as false as he did not believe Sheriff Giffard had ‘any share, or direction, or management in the Dublin Journal, which was since sworn to be the fact’. There was much laughter in the court

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at William Morton’s attempt to show ignorance of a situation known throughout Dublin.40 The concept of ‘character’ was exceptionally important in the United Irish trials. It played a key role in Robert Emmet’s famous speech from the dock.41 The defence barrister Curran delivered a sequence of set-piece speeches that attacked the characters of spies and informers. ‘Take his own vile evidence for his character’, he said of John Cockayne. ‘He was the foul traitor of his own client’ and ‘a spy upon his friend’. He continued: ‘Is it then on the evidence of a man of this kind, with his pardon in his pocket, and his bribe – not yet in his pocket – that you can venture to convict the prisoner.’42 One of the difficulties for juries in these cases was that those on trial were generally not individuals with a good deal of credit-worthiness. As one report on Orr put it: ‘the generous character of the prisoner, his numerous family, the great beauty and manliness of his person, and the quiet fortitude which he displayed when contrasted with his accusers, seemed to excite a general interest in his favour’.43 It was in the interest of the defence lawyers to emphasise the good character of those being accused, and unearth whatever they could on the band of state witnesses. The defence counsel Curran made explicit the juxtaposition between the informer William Morton and Hamilton Rowan, ‘one of the most respectable characters of the country!’44 Efforts were clearly made to secure negative character witnesses against the informer Wheatley. The Reverend George Macartney, a Co. Antrim magistrate, the Reverend James Elder, a dissenting minister, and Alexander Montgomery all swore affidavits that Wheatley was guilty of perjury and murder.45 Given the limited time available to defence lawyers, and the highly charged nature of public affairs and discourse, the research done on witnesses and spies was impressive. John Lyster, a key witness in the Hamilton Rowan trial, was alleged to have been involved in a case of bond forgery. Mary Hatchell testified that Lyster’s younger brother was married to her daughter, and that ‘he [i.e. John Lyster] had caused a separation, by alleging his brother had another wife, which he had never proved’.46 Cockayne, in the Jackson trial, admitted that he had been tried for perjury but acquitted.47 Later in the trial Curran brought in another witness, who asserted that Cockayne’s ‘public character as an attorney in London was infamously bad’. In summing up, the judge agreed that ‘the case depends so much upon the credit of Cockayne that unless you do believe him, you ought to acquit the prisoner’.48 In Colonel Despard’s trial the witness Thomas Blaize admitted to having been courtmartialled three times and that he had been accused by his employer of stealing leather. This was another trial where contrasts in character stood out. In summing up for the defence, William Draper Best argued that ‘the very nature of the treason, betrays the low origin from whence it sprung. It must have been conceived by minds, unused to look at distant objects, or to compare means with ends’. He questioned ‘whether such a scheme was most likely hatched by these low wretches, or Colonel Despard’.49



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Even those very close to witnesses and spies were prepared to undermine their character. Thomsett’s value as a witness in the Arthur O’Connor trial of May 1798 was challenged by his sister, Sarah Job, who was called by the defence: ‘she asked him what he meant to do with the prisoners? Says he, “hang them to be sure,” “I hope not,” said the witness. He then said, “if they had an hundred lives I would take them all”.’50 Captain Shrivington, Armstrong’s uncle, testified that his nephew had been thrown out of the Somerset militia for his political views. He related that, in his presence, Armstrong had said ‘that if there could be found no other person for the purpose, he would, with pleasure, become the executioner of king George III. and glory in the deed’.51 In May 1794, John Lyster’s character was challenged by his Denmark Street hairdresser, who claimed that when he took Lyster to court for a sum owed to him, Lyster ‘had sworn deliberately and knowingly that he had never before seen him’.52 In April 1795, the defence barrister John Philpott Curran clearly thought that Cockayne’s closeness to Jackson was a fruitful avenue of questioning because it highlighted the betrayal of a friendship. Cockayne admitted that ‘he had known the prisoner for eighteen years, that he was always on a footing of the greatest and most confidential friendship with him’.53 Curran did particularly well in securing an array of testimony against Thomas Reynolds during the Leinster Directory trials of July 1798. Indeed, the list of witnesses against Reynolds appeared to be longer than against the Directory. Curran argued that the start of the whole business came with a financial dispute between Reynolds and William Cope, another silk merchant, after the latter had lent him money for a mortgage.54 This financial dispute came out in court, along with a host of evidence relating to Reynolds’s family affairs, that ranged from fraud to murder. Reynolds’s own aunt, Anne Fitzgerald, claimed he ‘was not a man worthy of credit on his oath’, and the evidence that followed made this apparent. Henry Witherington, Reynolds’s brother-in-law, seemed to suggest that Reynolds had poisoned his mother-in-law with antimony.55 It was also alleged that he had been charged with stealing from his sister and mother, and of passing a fake bond to a Mrs Cahill, an elderly woman who lived in his house.56 The significance of the ‘character’ of John Warneford Armstrong in the July 1798 trial of the Sheares brothers was arguably more significant than any other witness utilised by the state. This can be measured not only through the events of the trial itself, and his role in the conviction and execution of the brothers, but also in the way in which Armstrong’s name became intertwined with the memorialising of the trial in nationalist Ireland during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.57 Under cross-examination by Curran, Armstrong acknowledged that during his period in the Londonderry regiment in 1798 ‘on his return from Wexford with a party, met three peasants, with green cockades, on the road – that one was flogged to extort confessions from him until he gave material information as to the position of the rebels; another was hanged, and a third was shot’. The defence witness Thomas Drought also said that Armstrong had ‘uttered a disbelief as to the existence of a

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God, and a future state of rewards and punishment – asserting that the soul of man became annihilated in death’. The broader point was ‘to shew that Mr Armstrong could not be influenced by the moral or religious obligation of an oath’.58 Lord Cork wrote to this effect in a letter suppressed by the duplicitous defence counsel Leonard McNally. Armstrong’s religious freethinking was apparently matched by political radicalism; he ‘acknowledged he was free in his political opinions, and did not scruple to censure the measures of government, but denied that he had ever said he would consider it laudable to be the king’s executioner himself if no one else would undertake it’.59 The contested nature of this evidence, even if it resulted in guilty verdicts, is revealed by the government’s willingness to use the loyalist press to refute charges against witnesses. After the trial of William Orr, the True Briton stated: ‘He was convicted by the clearest evidence of two witnesses, whose testimony was given in such a manner as to draw from the Bench the most favourable remarks’, and that the later ‘affidavit did not affect the testimony given in Mr. Orr’s case, and it left the character of the other witness unimpeached’.60 This trial had a sequel when Peter Finnerty, the printer of the United Irish newspaper The Press, was charged with libel after making comments hostile to the government concerning Orr’s conviction. Again, the practice of informing loomed large. This time Finnerty proclaimed his incredulity that he was expected to inform on colleagues. Whilst in gaol: it was there proposed to him to exonerate himself from the charge by surrendering the Author, and by betraying other secrets connected with his establishment – a proposal which every man of common honesty, or common pride, must spurn at. The multiplication of Informers might be necessary – Informers might at this time be useful – but it ill suited with his education, and the feelings arising from that education, to officiate in that capacity.61

Justice Downes, in reply, was not impressed: You have said, that offers were made to you of mercy and favour, provided you would give up the Author of this Libel, and you have expressed a great degree of scorn at being desired to aid the Public in getting at the original criminal; you have, with a shew of false spirit, attempted to consider those men who assist in the detection of crimes, as criminals themselves; these are false sentiments, which none but an heated mind can feel: if such offers were made to you, they were manifestly the dictates of a merciful disposition; and yet your Libel speaks with no mercy of those it attacks.62

Finnerty had discerned the truth of the matter, that culpability in the eyes of the Irish public (at least among that section of the public not cleaving to a hard-line Ascendancy position) lay with the informer, and not the individual on trial. This trial also allowed Curran to give a brilliant speech on the role of informers in the judicial process, one that fed off the vogue for gothic horror at the end of the eighteenth century. He referred to



State witnesses and spies 129 the number of horrid miscreants who avowed upon their oaths that they had come from the very seat of government – from the Castle, where they had been worked upon by the fear of death and the hopes of compensation, to give evidence against their fellows, that the mild and wholesome councils of this government are holden over these catacombs of living death, where the wretch that is buried a man, lies till his heart has time to fester and dissolve, and it is then dug a witness … Have you not seen him after his resurrection from that tomb, after having been dug out of the region of death and corruption, make his appearance upon the table, the living image of life and of death, and the supreme arbiter of both? Have you not marked when he entered how the stormy wave of the multitude retired at his approach? Have you not marked how the human heart bowed to the supremacy of his power, in the undissembled homage of deferential horror? How his glance, like the lightning of heaven, seemed to rive the body of the accused, and mark it for the grave, while his voice warned the devoted wretch of woe and death.63

This section of the speech was carried in the Nation in 1843, indicating the continued danger of the informer to Irish political progress. The editor appended the words: ‘Were there no other memorial of Orr’s fate, the eloquence of Curran would give it an immortal voice, calling Irishmen to union and independence.’64 The unsavoury reputations of these witnesses were in stark contrast to many of the United Irishmen on trial, who often came from the same polite and respectable bourgeois background as the jury members. Defending Hamilton Rowan, Curran referred to ‘his almost unexampled humanity to the poor, and his extraordinary exertions in the cause of poverty and innocence, in a manner that interested the feelings of every auditor’.65 Yet, although United Irish character, credit and reputation may have trumped what was on offer on the state witness stand, the outcome was almost invariably the same: a guilty verdict and execution.66 One trial where good ‘character’ did triumph was in that of the MP Arthur O’Connor, who was described by his defence lawyer as ‘a gentleman of ancient and respectable family in Ireland’. He did briefly reflect on ‘his having been afterwards in a situation less honourable, by becoming the Editor of a newspaper’, though clearly this was not enough to damn him in the eyes of the jury which found him ‘not guilty’. In the ultimate character testimony, leading Foxite politicians went to Maidstone to show their support for O’Connor.67 His fellow United Irishman James O’Coigly, a Catholic with no such social standing or powerful connections, was sent to the scaffold. Witnesses, spies and informers had a devastating impact upon the United Irish movement, their plans for an uprising and the smaller conspiracies that followed in 1802–3. There is no doubt that information was key to government gaining an upper hand, and that the Dublin leadership in particular was brought down by the use of key infiltrators. A historical peculiarity that is worth lingering over is the legal quirk that permitted the evidence of one individual to be damning in a treason trial. As Curran put it: ‘It is for you to put it into the power of mankind to say, that that

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which should pass harmlessly over the head of a man in Great Britain, shall blast him here.’68 Consequently the significance of such an individual was elevated, thus securing a greater degree of infamy. The deficiencies in such evidence were passed over by juries, and the Archibald Hamilton Rowan and Arthur O’Connor cases are very revealing as to the partisan nature of those selected for juries and the way in which the Irish legal process lagged behind that of Britain.69 It should be noted that in some cases (for example, those of the Reverend William Jackson and William Orr) the jury recommended clemency, thereby reflecting public sentiment in the courtroom and in wider society, but the harshest sentences available were invariably enforced by Dublin Castle. Irish historiography has long been fascinated, and repulsed, by the ‘informer’ and (invariably) his role in frustrating national and republican movements. Conversely historians such as Keith Jeffrey have taken a more structured approach to the way in which the British state employed intelligence against perceived threats to stability.70 The development of a more rigorous framework for historical study in Ireland has ensured that the former approach now tends to be reserved for those interested in popular history. While intelligence studies is now a respected sub-discipline of history, it can perhaps be said to have neglected the very human dimensions played out in courtroom ‘dramas’, and the processes of entrapment that led to them. New historiographical developments allow us alternative ways of approaching this issue: histories of emotion and associational culture are two of the most recent to emerge in the field of Irish studies. The case of the United Irishmen works particularly well in both contexts. The tight-knit leadership circle was intimately linked in a variety of ways to those present in court as lawyers, judges and jury. That intimacy was often on display in relation to the witnesses who were prepared to bring them down, giving the trials a performative edge, that, if not unique in this period, is certainly noteworthy. The sociability of Irish club life gave would-be and future informers and spies the opportunities to infiltrate the United Irishmen in a manner that would be much more difficult in later republican organisations. It is clear that the trials of 1798 left a mark on the way in which the leaders of the 1848 movement were perceived in the press.71 If we examine the manner in which reputations fade in and out of history then it is clear that complications can ensue. The likes of Oliver Bond and Arthur O’Connor gave evidence to the Commons’ Secret Committee in return for their lives, but their reputations remain largely untarnished. This was primarily because they did not speak against their fellows at show-piece trials, though O’Connor was alleged to have been willing ‘to give information against his Irish accomplices in the acts of treason with which he stands charged’. According to rumours in the press, the government declined ‘to admit him as a King’s evidence, being already in possession of very ample information’.72 But their evidence did play a role in the way in which the United Irishmen might be remembered. Bond, for example, cut adrift the Catholic Wexford rebels, making it clear that his enlightenment ideals were an ill fit with their aspirations.73 The role of



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other witnesses was much more prosaic. Some were down on their luck and were offered a financial opportunity by the state. Others testified to save their lives, if not their reputations. They may have been of comparative obscurity, but the historical importance of their role was amplified by the fact that they were testifying against the first, ‘golden’ generation of Irish radicals and republicans. Events in Ireland between 1798 and 1803 cast a long shadow over British radical history. For example, in Chapter 8 below Timothy Murtagh notes that in 1819 the black, London ultra-radical Robert Wedderburn advised an audience in Soho of the necessity for them to take their rights by force ‘like the Irish at Vinegar Hill’. Robert Emmet was a hero to many British Chartists of the 1840s, and the Land League founder Michael Davitt later met an old Yorkshire Chartist who assured him that Emmet’s portrait hung in hundreds of homes in ‘democratic Yorkshire’. Yet, perhaps Ireland also inspired the counter-revolutionary forces in Britain. Might it have provided some portion of the template for the British authorities to respond to the Cato Street Conspiracy? Castlereagh (a prime target for the 1820 conspirators because of his leading role in the 1798 repression) and his fellow ministers appear to have learned much from Irish affairs on the need to secure inside information about defence strategies in court; the use of spies and agents provocateurs in tracking a revolutionary movement in advance of a rising; and the best way to deploy the evidence of informers and some-time conspirators in the witness box. Appendix 7.1: List of trials referred to in this chapter 1. Archibald Hamilton Rowan, January 1794, guilty, imprisoned. 2. Rev. William Jackson, April 1795, initially guilty, verdict contested, died – likely by suicide – on the day of final sentence. 3. Michael Griffin, August–September 1795, guilty, executed. 4. Lawrence O’Connor, August–September 1795, guilty, executed. 5. William Orr, September 1797, guilty, executed. 6. Peter Finnerty, December 1797, guilty, pillory and then imprisoned. 7. James O’Coigly, May 1798, guilty, executed. 8. Arthur O’Connor, May 1798, innocent, immediately rearrested, then voluntary exile in France. 9. John Sheares, July 1798, guilty, executed. 10. Henry Sheares, July 1798, guilty, executed. 11. John McCann, July 1798, guilty, executed. 12. William Michael Byrne, July 1798, guilty, executed. 13. Oliver Bond, July 1798, guilty, sentence execution, but commuted to voluntary exile, died in prison. 14. Colonel Edward Despard, February 1803, guilty, executed. 15. Robert Emmet, September 1803, guilty, executed. 16. Thomas Russell, October 1803, guilty, executed.

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 1 Thomas MacNevin, The Leading State Trials in Ireland: From the Year 1794 to 1803 (Dublin, 1844).  2 Thomas Bartlett, ‘Informers, Informants and Information: The Secret History of the 1790s Re-considered’, in Thomas Bartlett, David Dickson, Dáire Keogh and Kevin Whelan (eds), 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective (Dublin, 2003), pp. 406–22; Thomas Bartlett, ‘The Life and Opinions of Leonard MacNally (1752–1820): Playwright, Barrister, United Irishman, and Informer’, in Hiram Morgan (ed.), Information, Media and Power through the Ages (Dublin, 2001), pp. 113–36; Michael Durey, ‘William Maume: United Irishman and Informer in Two Hemispheres’, Eighteenth-Century Ireland, 18 (2003), 118–40; Guy Beiner, ‘Forgetting to Remember Orr: Death and Ambiguous Remembrance in Modern Ireland’, in James Kelly and Mary Ann Lyons (eds), Death and Dying in Ireland, Britain and Europe: Historical Perspectives (Dublin, 2013), pp. 171–202. Also see Martyn J. Powell, ‘Irish Political Trials, 1793–1848: Associationalism, Emotion and Memory’, in Michael T. Davis, E.M.V. Macleod and Gordon Pentland (eds), Political Trials in an Age of Revolutions: Britain and the North Atlantic, 1793–1848 (Basingstoke, 2019), pp. 321–55.  3 Bartlett, ‘Informers, Informants’, p. 411.  4 A Complete Collection of State Trials, ed. T.B and T.J. Howell, 33 vols (London, 1809–26).  5 Durey, ‘William Maume’, p. 119.  6 Powell, ‘Irish Political Trials’.  7 State Trials, vol. xxv, p. 851.  8 State Trials, vol. xxv, p. 857.  9 State Trials, vol. xxv, p. 869. 10 See John Barrell, Imagining the King’s Death: Figurative Treason, Fantasies of Regicide, 1793–1796 (Oxford, 2000). 11 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Oct. 1803, p. 578. 12 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Oct. 1803, p. 578. 13 Martyn Powell, The Politics of Consumption in Eighteenth-century Ireland (Basingstoke, 2005). 14 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Oct. 1803, p. 578. 15 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, May 1795, p. 390. 16 State Trials, vol. xviii, p. 1139. 17 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Oct. 1803, p. 579. 18 State Trials, vol. xviii, p. 1142. 19 State Trials, vol. xviii, p. 1141. 20 State Trials, vol. xviii, p. 1160. 21 Morning Post, 10 Feb. 1803. 22 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Oct. 1795, pp. 352–3, 355. 23 Morning Post, 24 Oct. 1797. 24 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Aug. 1795, p. 517. 25 State Trials, vol. xxii, p. 1180. 26 Belfast News-Letter, 1 Mar. 1803. 27 Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Aug. 1798, pp. 514–15. This refusal was clearly inaccurate.



28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66 67 68

State witnesses and spies 133 Reynolds received £5,000 and a pension, which passed to his family, of £1,000 per annum, Durey, ‘William Maume’, p. 119n. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, June 1794, p. 530. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, May 1795, pp. 387–8. Belfast Newsletter, 1 June 1798. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Aug. 1798, p. 538. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Sept. 1798, pp. 589–90. John Barrell, The Spirit of Despotism: Invasions of Privacy in the 1790s (Oxford, 2006). Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Aug. 1798, p. 522. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Feb. 1794, p. 99. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Mar. 1794, pp. 258, 261. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Feb. 1794, pp. 99–100. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Feb. 1794, p. 104. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Feb. 1794, p. 100. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Mar. 1794, p. 259. Patrick Geoghegan, Robert Emmet: A Life (Montreal, 2002), pp. 5–6. State Trials, vol. xx, p. 857. Morning Post, 24 Oct. 1797. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Mar. 1794, p. 261. Lloyds Evening Post, 25–27 Dec. 1797. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Feb. 1794, pp. 100–1. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, June 1795, p. 530. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Aug. 1795, pp. 164, 166. Morning Post, 10 Feb. 1803. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Sept. 1798, p. 590. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Aug. 1798, p. 508. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Mar. 1794, p. 257. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, June 1795, p. 530. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Aug. 1798, pp. 517–18. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Aug. 1798, p. 527. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Aug. 1798, pp. 516–18, 520. Nation, 23 Sept. 1843. See for example ‘The Brothers’ by Lady Jane Wilde, published in the Nation in 1847. For memorialising of the trial see Powell, ‘Irish Political Trials’. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Aug. 1798, p. 508. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Aug. 1798, pp. 504–5. True Briton, 25 Oct. 1797. True Briton, 2 Jan. 1798. True Briton, 2 Jan. 1798. State Trials, vol. xxvi, pp. 989–90. Nation, 16 Sept. 1843. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, Feb. 1794, p. 104. Carrol C. Arnold, ‘Lord Thomas Erskine: Modern Advocate’, in Thomas W. Benson (ed.), Landmark Essays on Rhetorical Criticism (Davis, CA, 1993), p. 97n. Belfast Newsletter, 1 June 1798. Walker’s Hibernian Magazine, July 1795, p. 69.

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69 Niamh Howlin, ‘English and Irish Jury Laws: A Growing Divergence 1825–1833’, in Michael Brown and Seán Donlan (eds), The Laws and Other Legalities of Ireland, 1689– 1850 (Farnham, 2011), p. 117. 70 See for example John Fisher, Gentleman Spies: Intelligence Agents in the British Empire and Beyond (Sutton, 2002); Keith Jeffrey, The Secret History of MI6 (London, 2010). 71 Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford, 2018); Powell, ‘Irish Political Trials’. 72 Belfast Newsletter, 19 Mar. 1798. 73 Report from the Committee of Secrecy (Dublin, 1798).



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8 The shadow of the Pikeman: Irish craftsmen and British radicalism, 1803–20 Timothy Murtagh

The Cato Street Conspiracy was an event with origins and ramifications that extended far beyond London. As Malcolm Chase has demonstrated, it occurred at a time when English radicalism could be understood only in the context of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. For instance, Cato Street contained some distinctly Irish aspects. One of the conspirators, Richard Bradburn, was an Irish carpenter, whilst Thistlewood allegedly hoped for the support of sections of the London Irish community. An Irish bricklayer was one of the people who provided information about the conspiracy to the Home Office.1 One of the main targets of the conspiracy was Lord Castlereagh, a native of Ulster who was detested by English and Irish radicals alike; a man who had been described by Byron as having dabbled his ‘young hands in Erin’s gore’.2 In the years preceding Cato Street, radical orators such as Henry Hunt had sought to link the grievances of Irish Catholics with those of the English working man.3 Within more conspiratorial networks, informers’ reports made frequent reference to Irish men in London being at the forefront of radicalism. In certain regards, this Irish presence is not surprising. After all, during the 1790s, the United Irishmen and their emissaries had been critical to building a revolutionary underground in Britain. Indeed, the United Irishmen have been credited with enlarging the programme of British radicals to include total revolution by physical force. In the years 1797–1802, Irish agitators had been active not only in London but throughout towns in Lancashire, Yorkshire and Lanarkshire. These Irish emissaries had included near-legendary figures like Fr James O’Coigly, Roger O’Connor and William Putnam McCabe (later described as a sort of ‘Emerald Pimpernel’).4 Some towns were instead organised by more plebeian agitators, Irish artisans ‘on the tramp’ who opened lines of ­communication between Ireland and

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the working communities of Stockport, Blackburn and Paisley. While physical-force radicalism found its most spectacular expression in Ireland during the failed risings of 1798 and 1803, Irish activity in Britain had been important too. The Despard Plot of 1802, whilst foiled by the authorities, had been the product of considerable organisation among both English artisans and Irish dockside workers in London.5 Yet the failures of the plots of Despard and Robert Emmet marked an end point. After 1803, Irish radicals (on both islands) seemed to fall from view. By 1810, authorities in Ireland were united in their verdict that radicalism was now a spent force. As early as 1804, an Under-Secretary in Dublin Castle claimed that ‘the wild schemes of Emmet’ had proved ‘fatal to the general cause of the disaffected’. A year later, a local informer confidently declared that ‘the old United system is worn out – indeed its leaders and supporters are almost worn out’. Despite reports of a few veteran rebels continuing to meet in Dublin pubs, the consensus was that they were so frightened and cowed that they posed no real risk to government.6 Several explanations have been put forward for this evaporation of radical momentum. The disillusionment and disappointment of repeated failed risings is an obvious factor, one compounded by the execution and imprisonment of a large cadre of Irish rebel leaders. Historians have pointed to the considerable numbers of Irish radicals who were transported and exiled, with several studies focusing on United Irish leaders who fled to America.7 However, what is less studied is the fate of the Irish republican rank-and-file, the labourers and artisans who had joined the movement. For them, the cost of passage to the United States was unattainable. Far more realistic was to take the boat to England or Scotland. Following the 1798 rebellion, huge numbers of Irish fled to Britain. Some were migrating due to economic dislocation, attracted by the prospect of employment in the growing manufacturing towns of Britain. Others, however, were former rebels who now feared retaliation. A later parliamentary inquiry into Irish migration to Britain would claim that ‘the first powerful impulse to the Irish immigration was given by the Rebellion of 1798’.8 In the years after the rebellion there were frequent reports of a United Irish influx into Manchester, with reports of as many as eight thousand former rebels living in the city.9 In 1801, the Mayor of Liverpool was concerned about ‘several of the persons who were notorious in the late rebellion in Ireland’ who had taken up residence in the city. They had apparently set up a society for the ‘Relief of the Poor Natives of Ireland’, which he suspected was a United Irish front. Even more intriguing, he reported that ‘the infamous Mr Thelwall’ had attended their meetings. John Thelwall had been a founding member of the London Corresponding Society, as well as a high-profile survivor of government persecution in the 1790s. His presence among these Irish circles would have been of great concern to the authorities.10 There were also reports of United Irishmen in Liverpool and Manchester forwarding the ‘United System’. By the spring of 1802, there were reports that the Irish in Liverpool were also spreading the United system into Stockport.11 One recent study of Lancashire radicalism has gone as far as to



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state that ‘1798 had as much, if not more, direct effect upon the Lancashire region as … 1789 or 1792’.12 Further north, Scottish magistrates in the western ports had been ordered to seize all Irish men not possessing a passport, as migration from Ulster to Scotland spiked in 1798–99.13 In both Scotland and the north of England, a second wave of suspect Irish migrants arrived following Emmet’s rising, with one magistrate in Chester lamenting that ‘so many sloops arrive weekly from Ireland, that it is an easy matter for any traitor to escape by these means’.14 However, even these reports paled in comparison to the picture in London, where a long-established Irish community provided cover for thousands of rebels seeking the anonymity of the metropolis. During the 1790s, London had been home to many Irish people who were radicalised in the British capital itself, finding themselves caught up in the new politics of groups like the London Corresponding Society, or one of the numerous informal ‘free-and-easies’, the loose groups of radicals meeting in alehouse tap-rooms that stayed beneath the notice of the police and informers.15 However, after the 1798 rebellion, a new influx of radical Irishmen into London occurred. In 1799, none other than William Wickham, the effective head of Pitt’s secret service, claimed that London was ‘swarming’ with ‘Irishmen lately come over, all of whom have been more or less concerned in the late rebellion’.16 The same month, one informer recounted how ‘the principle [sic] persons concerned in treasonable practices about London consist for the most part of Irishmen’.17 Unsurprisingly, when London’s radical circles revived in 1801–2 with the Despard Plot, it was closely linked with Irish discontent in the riverside and East End ghettos.18 Yet after 1803, most histories seem to discount any significant Irish involvement in radical politics. Instead historians have focused almost entirely on the 1830s and 1840s, overlooking the opening decades of the century.19 Roger Wells once argued that despite the fact that ‘every popular political movement after 1800 had an Anglo-Irish dimension … it has been ignored during the 1800–20 period’.20 Indeed, with the exception of an important (and frequently overlooked) essay by Iain McCalman, very little has been done to rectify this omission.21 Thus, the ensuing discussion will seek to establish the significant role played by Irish radicals, especially radical Irish workers, in Britain during the early years of the nineteenth century. This chapter examines the impact of the Irish in two discrete phases: the period roughly from 1803 to 1815, and then the period of heightened radical activity following the end of the Napoleonic Wars. It will argue that the Irish continued to play a part in British radicalism, but that their role varied depending on the nature of the communities in which they found themselves. Too often the story of the Irish in Britain is characterised by a set of descriptions that emerged only in the middle decades of the nineteenth century. Frequently, an image of Irish migration that was born out of the conditions of the 1840s is applied backwards to earlier periods. As a result, certain characteristics have

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become ­synonymous with Irish migrants: their tendency to gravitate to low-skilled and low-paid employment, their undercutting of English labour and a resulting estrangement from trade unionism. This is an image found in the works of Thomas Carlyle and Friedrich Engels, or in the various parliamentary enquiries that proliferated after 1830. It is a depiction of the Irish in Britain as ‘an example of a less civilized population spreading themselves, as a kind of substratum, beneath a more civilized community’.22 In this view, the Irish were a reserve army of labour, depressing the living standards of English workers. Moreover, they were a group that was preoccupied with Catholic and Irish nationalist politics, with little interest in radical reform. This characterisation is wholly inaccurate for the period before 1820. While Irish immigration had begun to increase after the 1790s, it was still of a relatively small scale in relation to the population of the British towns affected. Moreover, these early migrants tended to be skilled artisans and weavers.23 The years following the risings of 1798 and 1803 were also years in which there was considerable demand for operatives in the new mills of northern England and Scotland. One mill owner would later recall how ‘the Irish rebellion was coincident, in point of time, with the first attempt to introduce the spinning of cotton by power in the west of Scotland … so that the master-spinners of Paisley and Glasgow were glad to employ the Irish’. In addition to those employed in the spinning mills, many Irish weavers trained in the Ulster linen trade branched out to employment in cotton. It has been claimed that the Irish constituted the majority of spinners in the mills of western Scotland in these years. In Manchester, the same period also saw ‘a great influx of Irish to supply the extraordinary demand which existed at that time for hand loom weavers … a good many also came about the same time on account of the rebellion’. There were similar reports of Irish journeymen finding employment in calico printing in other parts of Lancashire in this period.24 Clearly, not every Irish migrant to Lancashire was a former rebel or a conspiring radical. Many were simply workmen attracted to high-paying employment. Admittedly, in London things were different, with well-established Irish enclaves in St Giles and Holborn, areas with reputations for poverty and criminality. In 1815 it was reported that there were fourteen thousand Irish in London who relied on charity alone. The Irish in the capital had long been associated with low-skilled manual labour, whilst those working in the skilled trades were concentrated in shoemaking and tailoring, both industries where conditions were slowly deteriorating with an increase in ‘sweated’ and child labour.25 None the less, the dominant impression is that, at least before 1815, Irish immigrants were not especially marginalised or ‘degraded’. In fact, despite later characterisations of the Irish as undermining British labour, Irish workers were reportedly at the forefront of local labour disputes. In later accounts, it was claimed that during these years the Irish were more prone to take part ‘in trade unions, combinations and secret societies than the English’, and that in Liverpool and Manchester there had been a long history of ‘turn-outs’ that were ‘almost entirely organized by the Irish’.26 In 1799, William Wickham



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had passed on reports to Dublin Castle about large numbers of Irishmen living in Bolton who were assembling in private: ‘their ostensible reason for associating is for the purpose of regulating their wages, being weavers, but from what the informant has seen and heard he is persuaded that their sole object is to form societies, divisions, etc according to the plan of the United Irish’.27 It was a claim that was repeated in 1808 when the Bolton magistrate Colonel Fletcher believed that it was United Irish veterans driving a campaign by local weavers for a minimum wage, with similar reports from Manchester and Stockport.28 It was alleged that after 1808 Irish immigrants played a part in virtually every major strike in the Lancashire cotton industry, whilst there were similar reports of Irish participation in Glasgow’s early trade unions in the early 1810s.29 In many respects, Irish participation in labour organisation should not be surprising. In these early decades the Irish were often integrated into communities of English workers, with little segregation either occupationally or residentially. In a town like Stockport, before 1820 the Irish never exceeded 2 per cent of the total population and in Manchester they probably did not exceed 8 per cent. In both places, the Irish moved with relative ease into highly paid weaving and textile printing jobs.30 This initial lack of significant tensions between British and Irish workers was helped by pre-existing links between illegal trade societies in both countries. There were well-developed networks between journeyman ‘combinations’ that crossed the Irish Sea and which dated from the previous century. Journeymen allegedly had a system that enabled artisans to go ‘on the tramp’ in both Britain and Ireland, with a regular correspondence between curriers, hatters, iron moulders and foundry men in both countries.31 There is evidence of links between workers in Dublin, London and Manchester that went back as early as 1772, with it reported that hatters in these cities had a system of lending each other money during times of labour disputes.32 In Scotland, calico printers in Paisley and Glasgow seemed to have established similar links with workers in Belfast and Dublin by 1814.33 The fact that the Irish were active in these trade unions was crucial to preserving their role in British radicalism. The introduction of far-sweeping anti-combination legislation in 1799 and 1800 had brought organised labour and radicalism closer together in many places.34 Journeyman societies had been key to the politicisation of British and Irish cities during the 1790s, and the local combination or ‘friendly society’ often helped sustain the radical tradition after 1803. There have been suggestions of continuity between ‘Despard’s men’ and the Luddite disturbances, partially facilitated by such clubs.35 While unproven, the idea is not entirely farfetched. Among the many intriguing aspects of Luddism are the sporadic references to Irish links and agitators. In Lancashire there were reports of veterans of 1798 traversing the countryside, one of whom was allegedly an officer under the famed rebel leader Joseph Holt.36 In Yorkshire, an anonymous letter addressed to a local employer made allusions to the Luddites being supported by ‘the papists in Ireland’, who would rise and thus give English soldiers ‘something else to do

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than idle in Huddersfield and then woe be to the places now guarded by them’.37 One anonymous pamphlet described ‘The rebellious associations of the followers of King Ludd, closely resembling, in many material features, the principles and practices of the United Irishmen’.38 There is now an extensive literature concerning Luddism, with recent accounts tending to discount speculation concerning a grand conspiracy behind the disturbances.39 There are certainly good reasons to be sceptical about Irish republican involvement – for instance, the tendency for most reports of Irish links to come from a small handful of sources, mainly informers for whom the Irish were a constant motif. However, even if these reports were untrustworthy, the fact that magistrates gave them any credence at all indicates that they recognised there was an Irish presence in local labour politics. While Irish radical activity in the North is partly a matter of conjecture, there were much clearer indications of an Irish role in London, most notably in the realm of political journalism. London journalism in this period, particularly parliamentary reporting, had a distinctly Irish complexion.40 A good example of this is Peter Finnerty, who had acted as the editor and proprietor of the United Irishmen’s Dublin newspaper, The Press, in 1797. The paper was often inflammatory and had quickly incurred the wrath of Dublin Castle, earning Finnerty a two-year prison sentence for seditious libel. It was an experience that marked him and left him with a lifelong vendetta against Lord Castlereagh, the man he blamed above all others for the violence meted out in Ireland in 1798. When he was released in 1800, Finnerty moved to London, where he obtained employment as a parliamentary reporter for the Morning Chronicle. Finnerty’s career as a parliamentary reporter brought him into the orbit of the reform candidate Sir Francis Burdett, with Finnerty assisting in his campaigns for the Middlesex County seat in 1802 and 1804. In 1809, one correspondent to the Home Office warned that ‘There is now existing in London a combination of English, Scotch and Irish not destitute of talent or literary acquirements and who by writing and other means keep alive and in vigor the principle of those democratical associations in London. Among the most apparently active of these men are Peter Finnerty and Wardell, both conductors and part proprietors of newspapers.’41 Historians drawing an overly rigid distinction between moral and physical-force activity have often failed to notice the swift redeployment of Irish and British revolutionaries into constitutional agitation. For instance, Burdett’s opponents made much of his radical-Irish associates, referring to ‘Green Finnerty’, as well as Patrick Duffin, a United Irishmen who had been imprisoned for inflammatory handbills and who would later serve as the editor and proprietor of the Independent Whig.42 It was in his career as a reporter and political pamphleteer that Finnerty was able to pursue his grudge against Lord Castlereagh. After Finnerty was again tried for seditious libel in 1810, he used the opportunity to restate accusations that Castlereagh had been complicit in torture during the suppression of the 1798 Rebellion. Peter Finnerty was a man who moved in a variety of circles, including the rem-



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nants of London’s artisan radical clubs. Finnerty himself had been politicised as a young apprentice in Dublin, having been let go from his first apprenticeship to a furniture upholsterer due to being ‘too fond of reading political pamphlets and attending public meetings to watch faithfully over the furniture’. He had managed to find his way into an apprenticeship with William Corbett, the editor of Hibernian Telegraph, where once again he got into trouble with his employer, who one morning found him in the composing room ‘mounted on one of the frames, haranguing the men on liberty and equality’.43 It was this background that enabled Finnerty to move from the ‘semi-respectable’ world of London hacks into the city’s subterranean world of tavern clubs (so brilliantly analysed by Iain McCalman) where ‘popular politics intersected with lumpen and professional crime’.44 Finnerty was involved in the founding in 1808 of a club named the Robin Hood Society, open to all willing to pay the 6d entrance fee. It was part of a small revival in 1808–9 of such clubs, which were described as being attending by ‘the most notorious infidels and Jacobins of the age’.45 Finnerty was also on the fringes of a set of informal tavern clubs, referred to as ‘free-and-easies’. He eventually became linked with the Spenceans, most likely via his acquaintance with Thomas Evans, who had also worked on the Burdett campaigns. The Spenceans were certainly eager to recruit among London’s Irish communities, and they were capable of throwing the occasional sop to Irish sentiment, such as including a song entitled ‘The Rose and the Shamrock’ in a collection of Spence’s Songs. Moreover, in 1814, several members of this Spencean circle ventured over to Paris, where they contacted William Putnam McCabe, previously one of the most active United Irish organisers in England. While in France the Spenceans met with several old Irish radicals living in Paris, described by the Parisian police at the time as ‘the worst sort of persons living in the city’.46 The renewal of these links with Irish revolutionary exiles was significant. The ending of the Napoleonic Wars was to precipitate a resurgence in popular protest and reform movements. The ending of the war had occasioned a severe economic depression, partly resulting from the end of a wartime boom in agriculture, as well as the influx of over three hundred thousand ex-servicemen into an already glutted labour market, reducing wages and exacerbating unemployment. The prospect of ‘peace without prosperity’ offered opportunities for groups such as the Spenceans, who in the winter of 1816 staged a series of mass meetings in London, with one meeting hijacked by more radical elements in a stillborn attempt at insurrection.47 These London meetings had been mirrored by similarly large demonstrations in favour of reform in Glasgow and Paisley in October. In response, the Scottish authorities arrested thirty or so radicals in and around Glasgow, revealing an oathbound system of affiliated societies not unlike the earlier United Societies. This series of clubs had been revealed by a spy, Alexander Richmond, a leader among the Glasgow weavers’ union, who described how these secret societies were ‘formed

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strictly on the model of the Irish in 1798 … [it was] chiefly concocted and carried into execution by emigrants who had been engaged in that rebellion’.48 These disturbances in London and Glasgow provoked a response from government in the form of a Seditious Meetings Act in March 1817, severely limiting the size of public meetings without prior permission from magistrates. Despite some sporadic disturbances, the slight improvement of economic conditions in 1817 seemed to produce a lull in agitation. Yet radical clubs, particularly in London, continued to meet quietly, with several Irish figures prominent in proceedings. One of the main radical debating clubs was held at the ironically named King’s Head Tavern, run by a veteran United Irishman named John Doyle. Doyle was active with the tavern clubs of Bethnal Green, hoping to mobilise navvies, sailors, demobilised soldiers and dock workers. Doyle also reportedly hosted meetings of a hundred Irishmen, where they were ‘sounded out’ by English Spenceans like Arthur Thistlewood.49 Thistlewood, the foremost proponent of violent insurrection in these years, was constantly described by government spies as eager to find ‘determined Irishmen’. He is alleged to have claimed that if he could bring ‘5 or 6 hundred Irishmen to act … in ten hours we will raise the whole population of London’.50 Another Spencean, Thomas Preston, organised clubs in Spitalfields and Moorfields, using his trade as a shoemaker to tap into trade clubs. Preston had once gone ‘on the tramp’ in Ireland during the 1790s, involving himself in a strike of shoemakers in Cork. He was later reported as being successful in organising some of the ‘distressed’ Irish cobblers in London, possibly as a result of this link.51 Another focus of London radicalism in this period with a curious concentration of Irish support was the congregation of Robert Wedderburn, a mixed-race tailor from the West Indies. After learning the rudiments of his trade while working as a sailor, Wedderburn established himself in London as a Unitarian preacher, although his congregation was far from conventional. He set up his meeting house in Hopkins Street, which became known as the ‘temple of sedition’, acting as a radical debating forum. One of the most active speakers was an Irishman named Dennis Shaw, a veteran of 1798, who brought with him a large following of Irishmen from Lambeth, specifically a contingent of fifty to sixty workers from Maudslay’s iron works. At the Hopkins Street Chapel, Shaw invoked his native country as an example of what England could expect if a tyrannical government was allowed to use force to abridge the people’s rights. Much like Peter Finnerty in his attacks on Castlereagh, Shaw used tales of military indiscipline and terror in Ireland as a warning to British radials.52 The imagery and rhetoric of the Irish rebellion even found its way into the speeches of Robert Wedderburn himself, who warned his audience of the necessity for British people to take their rights by force ‘like the Irish at Vinegar Hill’.53 Within these circles of metropolitan radicalism, differences existed between those advocating a physical-force takeover and those who favoured exerting moral pressure via mass meetings (perhaps with the implicit threat of physical force). Henry



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Hunt, the orator at the Spa Fields meetings, was instrumental in furthering the later strategy of mass meetings, most famously and tragically at a mass protest meeting of Lancashire reformers in St Peter’s Fields, Manchester. Certain facts are suggestive of an Irish presence in Manchester reform politics at this time. In the month before the meeting was set to take place, one magistrate wrote to the authorities suggesting that English or Scottish troops be brought in to replace a regiment of Irish soldiers stationed near Manchester as ‘we have from 15 to 20,000 Irish in this town and as you may suppose, not the most quiet part of our inhabitants’.54 This may have been hyperbole, but there was undoubtedly a large contingent of Manchester Irish, predominantly weavers and spinners, who supported Hunt. Samuel Bamford recounts the warm reception that both he and Hunt received from the Irish neighbourhoods when they arrived for the meeting in the city.55 In the bloody aftermath of the event, an analysis of the casualty lists suggest that as many as 97 of the 650 injured at Peter’s Fields were of Irish extraction.56 Dublin Castle soon began receiving reports of Irish tradesmen who had been involved in Manchester reform politics fleeing to Ireland following Peterloo.57 Hunt had certainly courted Irish support. At a meeting in Smithfield in July, his supporters unveiled a new tricolour flag of red, white and green, as well as a green silk flag with an Irish harp and, in gold letters, the words ‘universal, civil and religious liberty’.58 He had also issued a strong statement in favour of Catholic Emancipation, issuing a call for the Irish and English to unite in order to achieve a radical reform of Parliament. His Address of the People of Great Britain to the People of Ireland asked the Irish ‘do you think that because Protestants sit in the House of Commons, the Protestant People of England are less the victims of their misgovernment, than the Catholic people of Ireland? … how can you … ever expect to obtain your long asked-for and barbarously withheld emancipation, unless you unite with the people of England?’59 Information is more forthcoming on the reception of the pamphlet in London than elsewhere. Within weeks, the Address was being distributed outside Catholic churches in Moorfields and Whitechapel, whilst Dennis Shaw used his group of Irish ironworkers to distribute the Address into Surrey and Southwark.60 Thistlewood was involved in a mass printing of four thousand copies of the Address which were sent to Dublin and Cork.61 For reformers, events over the winter of 1819–20 seemed to prove the moral bankruptcy of aristocratic government. The resulting widespread popular outrage benefited the more extreme elements of radicalism, with Thistlewood touring London, Manchester and Leicester in search of recruits, apparently casting about for support from groups of Irishmen. Indeed, informers recounted that ‘Thistlewood’s most confidential and desperate men’ were a group of labouring Irishmen from Lambeth.62 By late 1819, reports were also filtering into Dublin Castle of a quiet revival of links between the disaffected in Ireland and their counterparts in England. Reports re-emerged of old rebels from 1798 passing through Stockport, Manchester and Nottingham, contacting old acquaintances in preparation of some

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future rising.63 There were stories of English pedlars touring rural Ireland, exhibiting handkerchiefs printed with pictures of ‘the fields of Peterloo’.64 The authorities in Ireland certainly took the threat seriously, particularly as agrarian protest and intimidation, seemingly a constant feature of Irish society, reached new heights during the winter of 1819–20. One correspondent to Dublin Castle who had lived through the 1798 rebellion pleaded that if ‘strong measures are not soon taken, history will have to record the rebellion of 1820’.65 The links between Scotland and Ulster were once again important, as one report from Dublin described: ‘The North of Ireland presents an assemblage of pastures still more captivating to the leaders of the Radicals than the south or west, in as much as the people are more organized, better armed and altogether more efficient … their numbers are proportionably [sic] greater all through the manufacturing districts … it is astonishing the frequency of communication carried on by the means of people of ostensible trades or commercial travellers’.66 There were reports that ‘Corresponding Societies’ had been recently founded in Belfast for the purpose of communicating with the disaffected in Scotland, with similar reports of a courier distributing two hundred letters from the reformers of Belfast to the Irish in Paisley.67 This would all suggest at least some attempt to co-ordinate reformers across the three kingdoms. The perception of government ministers during the winter of 1819–20 was of a looming crisis, with reports of agrarian disturbances from the west of Ireland, combined with whispers of radical Irish emissaries traversing the Irish Sea. This was made all the more worrying by the heightened reports of conspiratorial politics in London and industrial discord in the north of England. When the old King died at the end of January, the high politics of state were thrown into even futher turmoil and uncertainty. The climax to this sense of impending doom seemed to come to a head on 23 February 1820 with the arrest of Arthur Thistlewood and his co-conspirators in that small hayloft off the Edgware Road. The Cato Street Conspiracy saw active Irish involvement, with one turning informer (the bricklayer Thomas Dwyer) and one going through with the conspiracy and being tried (the carpenter Richard Bradburn). There was hope among the radicals that the Irish of Lambeth and Moorfields would provide bodies for the rising.68 It is possible that this army of radical Irishmen never materialised because they never existed, except in the minds of bar-room boasters and paranoid Home Office officials. This was an era when the line between earnest informer and agent provocateur (or outright charlatan) was frequently blurred; the controversy over ‘Oliver the Spy’ in 1817 was a case in point. Even some of the government’s own informers were wary of reports of invisible armies of former rebels, reports that Irishmen themselves occasionally circulated. In 1804, one informer wearily advised that ‘you know the genius … of our ­Erin-­go-brah fellow citizens … I scarcely ever met with an Irishman, but he would bring a force of five or six thousand men of straw into the field’.69 Moreover, many reports of Irish support were probably instances of informers telling their masters



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what they thought they wanted to hear; the figure of the Irish pikeman of ’98 had a very long life in the imagination of the British police. The execution of the Cato Street conspirators and the death of Queen Caroline in 1821 marked the end, respectively, of an essentially artisanal form of Jacobin conspiracy and the ribald satirical culture of regency radicalism.70 But this move towards a sober culture of self-improvement and the ‘radical march of the mind’ produced new anti-capitalist political economies. The repeal in 1824 of the Combination Acts, which allowed for the development of legal trade unions, played its part in distancing labour activism from the disreputable tavern culture of groups like the Spenceans. By the 1830s, a new culture of unionism was slowly coming to supplant Painite and Spencean outlooks in favour of an ideology based on class distinctions.71 It has been argued that the Irish found themselves alienated from this new type of working-class politics for several reasons. Most important was the changing profile of Irish migration to Britain. This period witnessed the near-destruction of small manufacturing in Munster and the southern counties of Leinster as a series of industrial recessions in 1817–19, 1822 and 1825–27 decimated the populations of Irish cities. This was the result of a number of factors: the removal of the last remaining Irish tariffs in 1825, the introduction of cheap steam-powered, cross-channel shipping and the dumping of heavily discounted English textiles onto Irish markets at times of British recessions.72 While previously the occasional downturn in a certain line of trade in Ireland might precipitate journeymen to seek work in Britain, the stream of tradesmen now became a flood. Moreover, these craftsmen were joined by an ever growing number of low-skilled rural workers, suffering from several prolonged agricultural slumps that had commenced with the collapse of agricultural prices after the wars. There was a growing crisis in the Irish countryside after 1820, with the immiserated rural poor falling victim to regional famines in 1817–19, 1822, 1831 and most catastrophically in 1845–50.73 Innovations in transportation, particularly new cross-channel steamship routes, resulted in a dramatic increase in Irish migration to Britain. While the arrival of Irish migrants into British towns and cities had produced some tensions in the past, these became more acute during the 1820s and 1830s. By 1833, observers like Dr Philips Kay were denouncing the Irish as an insidious social problem, whilst six years later Thomas Carlyle’s famous attack on the Irish described them as the ‘ready-made nucleus of degradation and disorder’.74 The Victorian image of ‘Paddy’ was rapidly forming. Part of this evolution in the image of the Irish in Britain was religious in nature, as Irish immigration became increasing Catholic. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Irish Protestants constituted a large (if unknown) proportion of the migrants finding their way to British manufacturing towns. This now began to change, partly owing to divergent economic trajectories within Ireland itself. The growth of linen manufacture and a host of other industries in Belfast and its

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hinterland provided employment for Ulster Presbyterian workers, in contrast to the collapse of textile employment in cities like Dublin and Cork, as well as the destruction of proto-industry in the heavily Catholic regions of south Leinster and Munster (the wool industry in Co. Cork was notoriously badly hit). While this did not mean that Protestant craftsmen no longer moved from Ireland to Britain (the Ulster–Scotland links were always strong), in many places their numbers were now either matched or overtaken by their Catholic countrymen.75 This was occurring at a time when the meteoric rise of Daniel O’Connell and the politics of Catholic Emancipation offered Catholic migrants an inspiring and exciting outlet for their aspirations. Whereas the growth of Britain as an industrial society meant that popular alienation increasingly found expression in class rather than nationalistic or sectarian forms, this did not hold true in Ireland. Instead, ‘Irish politics were becoming the politics of nationalism, and Irish nationalism was becoming defined in exclusively Catholic terms’.76 O’Connell offered Catholics both at home and abroad a new type of mass-democratic politics which may have served to deflect Irish energies from local politics in Britain.77 None the less, the Irish continued to play a significant role in the development of British radicalism after 1820.78 The Irish handloom weaver John Doherty, who had arrived in Manchester after the wars, became one of the most strident advocates of trade unionism and factory reform. Doherty was also an editor and publisher, later running a radical bookshop in Manchester, indicating the continued potential for Irish involvement in British working-class agitation.79 The growth of the ‘unstamped’ press and the development of an anti-capitalist critique were also areas in which the Irish continued to be active. The Irish-born John Cleave edited and published several of the unstamped journals of the early 1830s. He was a foundermember of the London Working Men’s Association and a signatory of the original People’s Charter. George Condy, from an Irish Methodist family, was the editor of an influential radical journal, The Manchester and Salford Advertiser, and a member of the Society for National Regeneration in 1833–34 which campaigned for an eighthour day via industrial action. Of course, Bronterre O’Brien was not only a key figure in Chartism but an important radical journalist, editing the unstamped Poor Man’s Guardian from 1831 to 1835. 80 In the 1840s, British radicals linked misgovernment in Ireland to the undemocratic parliament in Westminster. Thus the legacy of Irish radicals in the 1790s continued, in a sense, into Chartism: Fergus O’Connor was the nephew of the United Irishman Arthur O’Connor, and the Chartist paper he founded, the Northern Star, took its name from a United Irish newspaper. Another descendant of a United Irishman was the Donegal-born Thomas Ainge Devyr who, in addition to being the secretary to the Northern Political Union, was a subeditor of the Northern Liberator and the author of a pamphlet advocating land reform that was clearly derived from Spencean and Painite principles.81 An earlier generation of scholarship characterised the Irish as remaining aloof



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from Chartism due to the hostility of the Catholic Church towards the movement. Recent research has instead produced a more nuanced picture of Irish involvement, not only at the level of leading figures like those mentioned above, but also at the level of the rank-and-file.82 For instance, the Northern Star occasionally printed the obituary of an aged ‘exile of Ireland’. In 1847, it recorded the death of Betty Scott of Rochdale, aged 79, and described as ‘an old persecuted patriot’. The obituary attested to Scott’s remarkable and continuous devotion to the radical cause, ‘being one of those exiled form her native land, unfortunate Ireland, in the troublesome days of ’98. In 1819 she was one of those females who were cut down by that ever execrable band of murderers, the Peterloo butchers. She still struggled on under the banner of democracy, until the Charter was born, when she was one of the first to enrol her name, and remained to the last true to the good cause.’83 Among British Chartists, the memory of Robert Emmet and his doomed rising of 1803 represented another link to the Irish radical tradition. In the 1830s and 1840s, reprints of Emmet’s famous speech from the dock circulated in their thousands, whilst toasts given at Chartist events frequently invoked his memory. As a romantic figure Emmet was also a staple of Chartist amateur drama. In Manchester in 1840, the performance of a play based on Emmet’s trial was reported as having a ‘striking effect on the audience’, some of whom openly wept.84 Much later, the Irish republican and land reformer Michael Davitt would recount how he had once met an old Yorkshire Chartist who could recite the whole of Emmet’s speech from the dock, while assuring Davitt that Emmet’s portrait hung in hundreds of homes in ‘democratic Yorkshire’.85 Clearly, Cato Street in 1820 did not mark the end of Irish involvement in the British radical movement. Notes  1 Chase, 1820, pp. 76–80.  2 Lord Byron, Don Juan: Dedication (London, 1819).  3 Henry Hunt, An Address from the People of Great Britain to the People of Ireland (London, 1819).  4 Marianne Elliott, ‘Irish Republicanism in England; The First Phase, 1797–9’, in David Hayton and Thomas Bartlett (eds), Penal Era & Golden Age: Essays in Irish History 1690–1800 (Belfast, 1979), pp. 204–21; Roger Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience 1795–1803 (Gloucester, 1983); Kevin Whelan, Fellowship of Freedom: The United Irishmen and 1798 (Cork, 1998), p. 33.  5 Marianne Elliott, ‘The “Despard Conspiracy” Reconsidered’, Past and Present, No. 75 (May 1977), 46–61.  6 TNA, HO 100/122, fol. 288 (Marsden to King, 24 June 1804); NAI, RP 620/14/188, fol. 46 (McNally to Dublin Castle, 28 Aug. 1805). See also TNA, HO 100/142, fol. 217 (report of James Trail dated 21 Sept. 1807).  7 David Wilson, United Irishmen, United States: Immigrant Radicals in the Early Republic (Ithaca, NY, 1998); Michael Durey, Transatlantic Radicals and the Early American Republic (Lawrence, KS, 1997), pp. 80–133.

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 8 British Parliamentary Papers, Royal Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, Appendix G., Report into the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain (London, 1836), p. v.  9 TNA, PC 1/4/A, fol. 152; Elaine McFarland, Ireland and Scotland in the Age of Revolution (Edinburgh, 1994), p. 215. 10 Brancher (Mayor of Liverpool) to Maj. Gen. Gascoyne, 31 Oct. 1801, TNA, PRO HO 42/62, fol. 535; Brancher to John King, 7 and 10 Mar. 1802, TNA, PRO HO 42/65, fols 120 and 481. 11 Information of John Burke, Limerick Regiment, 16 Apr. 1799, NAI, RP 620/46, fol. 138; Robert Glen, Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution (London, 1984), p. 135. 12 Katrina Navickas, Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798–1815 (Oxford, 2009), p. 79. 13 NAS, GD 51/5, fol. 44, Eglington to Dundas 5 Apr. 1799; Bob Harris, The Scottish People and the French Revolution (London, 2008,) p. 159. 14 TNA, HO 100/42, fols 68, 223, Peploe Ward to Home Office, 28 Aug, 1803. For Scotland, see NAS, RH 2/4, fol. 88, C. Hope to Pelham, 29 July 1803. 15 J. Ann Hone, For the Cause of Truth: Radicalism in London 1796–1821 (Oxford, 1982). 16 TNA, HO 100/85, fols 281–3, Wickham to Castlereagh 28 Feb. 1799. 17 TNA, HO 100/87, fol. 351, J.P. Murphy to Home Office, n.d. Feb. 1799. 18 McCalman, Radical Underworld, pp. 14–15. 19 A good example is Dorothy Thompson, ‘Ireland and the Irish in English Radicalism before 1850’, in Dorothy Thompson and J. Epstein (eds), The Chartist Experience: Studies in Working-class Radicalism and Culture 1830–1860 (London, 1982), pp. 120–40. For a more recent look at some of these links, see the essays contained in Terry Brotherstone, Anna Clarke and Kevin Whelan (eds), These Fissured Isles: Ireland, Scotland and the Making of Modern Britain, 1798–1848 (Edinburgh, 2005). 20 Wells, Insurrection: The British Experience, p. 264. 21 Iain McCalman, ‘“Erin go Braigh”: The Irish in British Popular Radicalism c.1790–1840’, in Oliver MacDonagh and W.F. Mandle (eds), Irish-Australian Studies: Papers Delivered at the Fifth Irish-Australian Conference (Canberra, 1989), pp. 168–84. 22 British Parliamentary Papers, Royal Commission on the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland, Appendix G., Report into the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain (1836), p. iv. 23 Although there was also a separate movement of seasonal agricultural workers. See Donald MacRaild, The Irish Diaspora in Britain 1750–1939 (Basingstoke, 2nd edn, 2011), pp. 34–43. 24 British Parliamentary Papers, Report into the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain (1836), pp. v, 64; Navickas, Loyalism and Radicalism in Lancashire, 1798–1815, pp. 112–13; John Butt, ‘Labour and Industrial Relations in the Scottish Cotton Industry during the Industrial Revolution’, in John Butt and Kenneth Ponting (eds), Scottish Textile History (Edinburgh, 1987), pp. 139–60. 25 British Parliamentary Papers, Commons Select Committee on Mendacity in the Metropolis, 1814–1815 (1816), appendices 4 and 5, pp. 90–5; Lynn Lees, Exiles of Erin: Irish Migrants in Victorian London (Manchester, 1979), p. 56; Peter King, ‘Ethnicity, Prejudice, and Justice: The Treatment of the Irish at the Old Bailey, 1750–1825’, Journal of British Studies, 52 (2013), 390–414.



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26 Parliamentary Papers, Report into the State of the Irish Poor in Great Britain (1836), pp. 28, 62. 27 Wickham to Cooke, 13 May 1799, NAI, RP 620/18a/11 fol. 56. 28 TNA, HO 42/95, fol. 5 (Report of Col. Fletcher, no date 1808); HO, 42/95, fols 288–90 (Ralph Wright to Home Office, 25 May 1808); R.A. Farington to Hawkesbury, 4 June 1808, in Arthur Aspinall, The Early English Trade Unions (London, 1949), p. 99. 29 J.H. Treble, ‘The Attitude of the Roman Catholic Church towards Trade Unionism in the North of England, 1833–42’, Northern History, 5 (1970), 96–102; NAS, RH 2/4/98, fol. 330 (Colquohoun to Sidmouth, 4 Dec. 1812). 30 Robert Glen, Urban Workers in the Early Industrial Revolution (London, 1984), pp. 21–2; Mervyn Busteed and Rob Hodgson, ‘Irish Migrant Responses to Urban Life in Early Nineteenth Century Manchester’, Geographical Journal, 162:2 (1996), 139–52 at 141. In Liverpool it seems that the Irish, even when poor, were not initially segregated from the English or other migrant groups. P. Laxton ‘Liverpool in 1801’, Transactions of the Historic Society of Lancashire and Cheshire, 130 (1981), 73–84. See also Tony Crowley, Scouse: A Social and Cultural History (Liverpool, 2012), pp. 9, 19–21. 31 For a recent study of tramping networks, see David Finkelstein, ‘Nineteenth-century Print on the Move: A Perilous Study of Translocal Migration and Print Skills Transfer’, in Jason McElligott and Eve Patten (eds), Theory and Practice in Book, Print and Publishing History (Basingstoke, 2014), pp. 150–66. For a classic study of the ‘tramp’ see E.J. Hobsbawm, ‘The Tramping Artisan’, The Economic History Review, New Series, 3:3 (1951), 299–320. For confirmation of tramping links that extended across the Irish Sea, see R.A. Leeson, Travelling Brothers (London, 1979). 32 House of Commons, Reports from the Select Committee Appointed to Inquire into the State of the Law Respecting Artisans … and Machinery, 51 (1824), p. v; Freeman’s Journal, 25 Oct. 1788. 33 Elaine McFarland, Ireland and Scotland in the Age of Revolution (Edinburgh, 1994), p. 236. 34 John Rule, ‘Trade Unions, the Government & the French Revolution, 1789–1802’, in John Rule and Robert Malcolmson (eds), Protest and Survival: The Historical Experience: Essays for E.P. Thompson (London, 1993) pp. 112–38. 35 J.K. Baxter and F.K. Donnelly, ‘Sheffield and the English Revolutionary Tradition 1791–1820’, International Review of Social History, 20 (1975), 398–423. 36 TNA, HO 40/1/, fols 91–3 (Information of Bent (‘B’) 15 Apr. 1812). 37 Letter addressed to Mr Smith, Shearing frame holder, Hill End, Yorkshire, 9 Mar. 1812, reproduced in Kevin Binfield (ed.), Writings of the Luddites (Baltimore, MD, 2004), pp. 209–10. 38 The Orange Institution. A Slight Sketch (London, 1813). 39 A useful overview of the literature is Katrina Navickas, ‘The Search for “General Ludd”: The Mythology of Luddism’, Social History, 30:3 (Aug. 2005), 282–95. 40 James Grant, The Newspaper Press: Its Origins Progress and Present Position, 2 vols (London, 1871), Vol. II, p. 220. Grant, himself a parliamentary reporter, later in the century estimated that three-quarters of British parliamentary reporters in the Georgian period were Irish. 41 Robert Wardell, whilst not Irish-born, had apparently served his time in Dublin, apprenticed to the Dublin Evening Post. While in London he edited and printed The Statesman.

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TNA, HO 100/153, fols 286–7 (copy of information, dated 24 Apr. 1809 and signed ‘J.W.’). 42 Jonathan Wright, ‘An Anglo-Irish Radical in the Late Georgian Metropolis: Peter Finnerty and the Politics of Contempt’, Journal of British Studies, 53 (July 2014), 663–72. Wright’s article constitutes the most recent and best-researched study of Finnerty yet published. 43 Higgins to Cooke, 21 Sept. 1797, in Thomas Bartlett (ed.), Revolutionary Dublin, 1795– 1801: The Letters of Francis Higgins to Dublin Castle (Dublin, 2004), p. 184; The Extractor; or Universal Repertorium of Literature, Science, and Arts, II (1829), 157–8. 44 McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. 2. 45 The Satirist (May 1808), pp. 237–8; McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. 89. 46 TNA, HO 44/5, fol. 19 (Information of Mr Daniels, n.d. 1819/20); HO 42/168 (Thomas Evans to T.J. Evans, 18 Sept. 1814); McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. 23. 47 Iorwerth Prothero, Artisans and Politics in Early Nineteenth-century London: John Gast and His Times (Abingdon, 1979), pp. 73–83. 48 Alexander B. Richmond, Narrative of the Condition of the Manufacturing Population (1824), p. 183. While some of the radicals arrested in Glasgow were indeed Irish (mainly textile workers from Ulster), Richmond’s evidence needs to be handled with care. See W.M. Roach, ‘Alexander Richmond and the Radical Reform Movement in Glasgow in 1816–17’, Scottish Historical Review, 51 (1972), 1–19. 49 TNA, HO 40/8, fol. 41 (Information of ‘B’, 22 Sept. 1819). See also, HO 40/8, fol. 14 (Report 1 Sept. 1817). 50 TNA, HO 40/8, fols 43, 62, 69. 51 Preston became the ‘advocate’ of the striking shoemakers in Cork. The Life and Opinions of Thomas Preston, Patriot and Shoemaker (1817), pp. 10–13, 22–4. 52 TNA, HO 40/197, fol. 394. 53 TNA, HO 42/196, fol. 177 (Report of Lea and Plush, 6 Oct. 1819). 54 TNA, HO 42/198, fol. 428 (Norris to Government, 13 July 1819). Manchester had recently experienced riots stemming from a spinners’ and weavers’ strike the previous year. 55 Samuel Bamford, Passages in the Life of a Radical, 2 vols (1844), vol. I, pp. 202–3. 56 Michael Bush, The Casualties of Peterloo (Lancaster, 2005), pp. 28–9. Defined as either immigrants from Ireland or those born in England of Irish parents. The methodology is questionable as Bush identified the names using Edward MacLysaght’s general, nonacademic The Surnames of Ireland. 57 TNA, HO 100/197, fol. 217 (Gregory to Hobhouse, 22 Aug. 1819). 58 The Triumphant Entry of Henry Hunt into London on Monday, September 13, 1819. The Order of the Procession, an ample description of the banners and devices; a full report of the speeches at the Crown and Anchor (London, 1819). 59 Address of the People of Great Britain to the People of Ireland, passed unanimously at a public meeting held in Smithfield on the 23rd July 1819 (London, 1819). 60 TNA, HO 40/191, fol. 90 (9 Aug. 1819); see also TNA, HO 42/193, fol. 112. 61 Chase, 1820, p. 54. 62 Prothero, Artisans and Politics, p. 129; TNA, HO 40/8, fol. 216 (Report of ‘B’, 9 Oct. 1819). During the summer of 1819, members of Thistlewood’s circle like Dr Watson had



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assumed the support of ‘fifteen or twenty thousand Irish’ for a planned mass meeting at Kennington Common. TNA, HO 42/192, fols 151–3 (Report of a meeting held at Angel Tavern, 16 Aug. 1819). 63 TNA, HO 40/11, fols 136–41; HO 40/13, fol. 3. 64 Chase, 1820, p. 54; Dublin Evening Post, 8 Feb. 1820. 65 NAI, SOC 2175, fols 1–2 (Strickland to Dennis Brown, 15 Jan. 1820). 66 TNA, HO 100/198, fol. 155 (Letter dated 16 Feb. 1820). 67 NAI, SOC 2084, fol. 9; 2084, fol. 11. 68 David Johnson, Regency Revolution: The Case of Arthur Thistlewood (Compton Chamberlayne, 1974), pp. 93–5. 69 TNA, HO 42/78, fol. 294 (Information of ‘Notary’, 23 Feb. 1804). 70 McCalman, Radical Underworld, p. 181. 71 Noel Thompson, The People’s Science: The Popular Political Economy of Exploitation and Crisis 1816–34 (Cambridge, 1984), pp. 8–27. 72 David O’Toole, ‘The Employment Crisis of 1826’, in David Dickson (ed.), The Gorgeous Mask (Dublin, 1987), pp. 157–71. On the costs to the Irish economy of tariff removals and steamboats see First Report of Inquiry into the Condition of the Poorer Classes in Ireland (House of Commons, London, 1836), appendix C, part 2, ‘Evidence on Combination’, pp. 39c, 44c. See also Peter Solar, ‘Shipping and Economic Development in Nineteenthcentury Ireland’, Economic History Review, 59 (2006), 717– 42. 73 David Dickson, ‘The Gap in Famines: A Useful Myth?’, in E.M. Crawford (ed.), Famine: The Irish Experience, 900–1900 (Edinburgh, 1989), pp. 107– 8; J. Mokyr and C. Ó Gráda, ‘Poor and Getting Poorer? Living Standards in Ireland before the Famine’, Economic History Review, 41:2 (1988), 209– 35. 74 Thomas Carlyle, Chartism (London, 1839), pp. 182–3. 75 There were definite regional variations. For instance, before 1845 Irish Protestant settlers in Scotland were almost certainly more numerous than their Catholic counterparts. MacRaild, Irish Diaspora in Britain, pp. 93–6. 76 Elaine W. McFarland, Ireland and Scotland in the Age of Revolution: Planting the Green Bough (Edinburgh, 1994) p. 242. 77 J.H. Treble, ‘O’Connor, O’Connell and the Attitude of Irish Immigrants towards Chartism in the North of England 1838–48’, in J. Butt and J.F. Clarke (eds), The Victorians and Social Protest: A Symposium (Newton Abbot, 1978) pp. 55–63. 78 Prothero, Artisans and Politics, pp. 272–6. 79 R.G. Kirby and A.E. Masson, The Voice of the People: John Doherty 1798–1854 (Manchester, 1975). 80 Thompson, ‘Ireland and the Irish in English Radicalism before 1850’, pp. 129–31. See also John Belchem, ‘English Working-class Radicals and the Irish, 1815–1850’, in R. Swift and S. Gilley (eds), The Irish in the Victorian City (London, 1985), pp. 85–97. 81 Kyle Hughes and Donald MacRaild, ‘Irish Politics and Labour, Transnational and Comparative Perspectives 1798–1914’, in Niall Whelehan (ed.), Transnational Perspectives on Modern Irish History (New York, 2015), pp. 45–68. 82 Bernard Reaney, ‘Irish Chartists in Britain and Ireland: Rescuing the Rank and File’, Saothar: Journal of Irish Labour History, 10 (1984), 94–103; Christine Kinealy, ‘“Brethren in bondage”: Chartists, O’Connellites, Young Irelanders and the 1848 Rising’, in Fintan

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Lane and Donal Ó Drisceoil (eds), Politics and the Irish Working Class, 1830–1945 (Basingstoke, 2003), pp. 87–112. 83 The Northern Star, issue 515, 4 Sept. 1847. I am extremely grateful to Prof. Malcolm Chase for bringing this material to my attention. 84 Poor Man’s Guardian and Repealer’s Friend, No. 4 (1843); Robert G. Hall, Voices of the People: Democracy and Chartist Political Identity 1830–1870 (Monmouth, 2007) pp. 39–40. 85 Michael Davitt, Leaves from a Prison Diary, 2 vols (London, 1885 edn), vol. I, pp. 141–3.



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9 The fate of the transported Cato Street conspirators Kieran Hannon

Six of the eleven people sentenced to death for their part in the Cato Street Conspiracy escaped execution. During their trial these half-dozen men changed their pleas from ‘not guilty’ to ‘guilty’ and threw themselves on the mercy of the court. Consequently, five of the six had their initial sentence of death by being hanged, drawn and quartered respited to transportation to Australia for life. The five were: the Irish carpenter and joiner Richard Bradburn; the English bootmaker Charles Cooper; the English baker and former soldier John Harrison; John Shaw Strange, an English shoemaker and bootmaker; and the English tailor and former soldier James Wilson. The sixth defendant was a Scottish bootmaker and former soldier, James Gilchrist, who maintained at trial that he was starving and attracted to the Cato Street barn only by the offer from Charles Cooper of a free meal. The authorities appear to have believed Gilchrist and he escaped both death and transportation, serving only a brief prison sentence before being freed from custody.1 On the morning of Monday 1 May 1820, the five prisoners awaiting transportation remained in Newgate while their fellow conspirators were executed outside the prison. A letter written by the transportee Charles Cooper to his uncle in London, John Irving, explains that on the evening after the execution (1 May), he and his four comrades were ordered ‘to be ready at a minute’s warning, and on the same night, at eleven o’clock, we were hauled out of Newgate, and clapt into a coach, and arrived at Portsmouth about the same hour next day, [and] was just allowed to have some dinner’. After being processed at Portsmouth, the conspirators were transferred to the transport ship Guildford, arriving on board around 6.00 p.m. on the evening of Tuesday 2 May, ‘in sailor’s clothes, which were provided for us before we set off’.2 The Guildford was anchored outside the entrance to Portsmouth Harbour in

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the Solent at Spit Head. The Surgeon Superintendent in charge of the convicts, Dr Hugh Walker, had been warned about the conspirators and separated them from the adult convicts by placing them in a cell with fourteen ‘boy convicts’. By the end of 2 May 1820, there were a total of 190 prisoners on board the Guildford: the five Cato Street conspirators and convicts from the two Portsmouth prison hulks Leviathan and Laurel.3 Before departure, the conspirator Charles Cooper wrote from the Guildford: I do not much regret leaving England, and if the others had their wives and children with them, they would rejoice to leave the land of taxes, the country in which Acts were passed to make provisions dear, and where many mechanics are starving for want of work … We all expect that the public will do something for us.4

Even if there were members of ‘the public’ who wished to ‘do something’ for the plotters, their speedy removal to a ship anchored offshore meant that there was no such opportunity. The Guildford remained anchored in the Solent until its captain, Magnus Johnson, received despatches and permission to proceed to Sydney, New South Wales (NSW). The ship sailed from Spit Head at 4.00 p.m. on Friday 14 May 1820. Four of the five conspirators left behind their wives and a total of seventeen children between them. The voyage to Sydney took 139 days, which included a two-week stopover at Simon’s Town (Cape Town’s ‘winter port’) in the Cape Colony. Here water, further supplies and four additional prisoners were taken on board. The convicts remained on the ship during this two-week stopover.5 Throughout the initial part of the voyage some of the convicts proved troublesome, including one who ‘tried to set fire to the ship’, with the presumed intention of killing himself and all on board. The Surgeon Superintendent Dr Walker meted out various punishments including floggings – with some prisoners receiving multiples of dozens of lashes. The conspirators were not mentioned in the punishments, and upon arriving in Sydney they were reported to have been ‘very well behaved’.6 The Guildford anchored in Sydney Cove at 2.00 p.m. on Saturday 30 September 1820. Lachlan Macquarie, the Governor of NSW, recorded the arrival of the ship, and the presence of the conspirators in his journal: Saturday 30. Septr. 1820! This forenoon, the Ship Guildford, Commanded by Capt. Johnson, with 194 Male Convicts from England and the Cape of Good Hope, anchored in Sydney Cove; Mr. – Walker R. Navy being the Surgeon Supdt., … [the convicts] arrived all in good Health – none having died during the Voyage. – Five of the Cato Street Conspirators – tried for & found guilty of High Treason – have been sent out in the Guildford – their Sentences having been Commuted from Death to Transportation for Life.7

Governor Macquarie received two despatches from the ship’s captain, Magnus Johnson, concerning the conspirators. The first was the copy of a letter, dated 11 May 1820, from Henry Hobhouse (Under Secretary of State for the Home Department)



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to Henry Goulburn (Under Secretary of State for War and the Colonies). It stated: I am … to desire that you will bring under his Lordship’s Notice the … [Conspirators] … who were recently convicted of High Treason, in order that Governor Macquarie may be fully appraised of the designing character of these men, and the wicked principles which they may attempt if not narrowly watched to instil into the minds of others.8

The second despatch, dated 12 May 1820, was from Henry Goulburn to Governor Macquarie, with instructions about the conspirators: there is every reason to believe that these persons have in no degree repented of the Crimes of which they have been convicted, and that they are not indisposed to imbark in any further measures of the same Character, whenever an opportunity may offer … in the event of their endeavouring to disseminate those principles, which have led to their Removal from this Country or to engage others in criminal Enterprizes, to point out to you the necessity of placing them in a Situation so separated from the rest of the Convicts as shall effectively counteract their views and intentions.9

It was probably in direct response to this second message that Governor Macquarie decided to send the conspirators onward to the secondary penal settlement at Newcastle, situated on the NSW coast about 160 km north of Sydney. Newcastle was the most northerly settlement in NSW at the time, and accommodated problem convicts and secondary offenders (those found guilty of crimes after arriving in NSW). In 1820, the convict population of Newcastle was close to a thousand, with the main economic activities undertaken being coal mining, timber felling, the production of lime from seashells, and the construction of a harbour breakwater. The settlement was harsh, highly regimented and run on the lines of a military establishment. Although convicts were given opportunities to make legitimate complaints to the Commandant, those who did not follow the ‘rules’ were severely punished. For example, the Newcastle convict punishment register for 1820 records a total of 5,699 lashes administered to 134 separate convicts, with the smallest ‘quota’ being 12 and the largest 100 lashes.10 Despite arriving in Sydney Cove on 30 September, the conspirators disembarked from the Guildford only on 6 October 1820. They were then placed in Sydney Gaol awaiting an onward transport, and at some point around 16 October they (and eight other convicts from previous transports) were transferred to the government brig Elizabeth Henrietta which sailed north to Newcastle.11 The Commandant at Newcastle, Major James Morisset, was given copies of the two despatches previously received by Macquarie. He also received another from the NSW Colonial Secretary John Thomas Campbell (on behalf of Governor Macquarie) with instructions about the conspirators: [They] have shown themselves by no means desisted in the degree that might have been hoped for, from the laxity with which they have been treated, and are considered

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to be still designing and dangerous men. It is in consequence of these considerations that these Men are now sent to Newcastle. It is a justice to them, however to add that they were reported … as hav[ing] behaved themselves ‘very well’ during the voyage … The Governor requests that you will cause these men to be well watched to guard against any conspirations they may be disposed to enter into, but he does not by any means wish them to be treated with greater severity [than] their conduct hereafter may require.12

Commandant Morisset wrote back to the Colonial Secretary on 25 October, stating: ‘the strictest attention shall be paid to his Excellency’s Orders, and I shall from time to time report on the conduct of these men’.13 He initially placed the conspirators in the ‘Gaol Gang’ which undertook heavy labour in chains on reduced rations. On 31 December, however, Morisset reported that ‘the Five Convicts who were engaged in the Cato Street Conspiracy were until lately in the Gaol Gang, but from their quiet and orderly conduct I was induced to release them – Three of them are now employ’d in the Town Gang, one in the Shoe Makers Shop and the other fixing a Bottling Machine at the Windmill’.14 In fact, one of the conspirators, John Shaw Strange, was so trusted that, at some time during 1821, he became a messenger to the Commandant and was appointed a constable, a post which involved supervising other convicts. All appears to have been going well for the conspirators, until the Irishman Richard Bradburn and a number of other convicts escaped from Newcastle in early December 1821.15 There were a significant number of runaway convicts roaming the bush in the early 1820s. Variously described as ‘runaways’, ‘bushrangers’ or ‘convict bolters’, most tried to live off the land, but they occasionally made raids for food on outlying farms. There were so many runaways that on 15 December 1821 the new Governor of NSW, Sir Thomas Brisbane, issued a proclamation to the effect that those who surrendered themselves by 31 January 1822, and had not committed ‘murder, highway or house robbery with violence’ while on the run, would not be further punished.16 Bradburn was one of many escapers who decided to surrender themselves in response to the proclamation, but he did so on unusual terms. During his short time on the run Bradburn had met a certain Francis Clarke, an escapee from Sydney Gaol. Clarke and Bradburn had similar physical characteristics, but differed in their nationality, trade and sentence: Clarke was an English labourer whose sentence was due to expire on 13 July 1822. When Bradburn surrendered himself he did so as Francis Clarke, who was soon to receive a Ticket of Leave (TOL). The holding of a TOL allowed a convict some degree of freedom, but their movements were still restricted and monitored by the authorities, and they could not be considered truly free. The benefit of this deception, for the real Clarke, was that he would no longer be a wanted man, and could therefore try to disappear from official scrutiny for a time and perhaps long enough to secure a ship back to Britain under whatever identity he had adopted. In the confusion engendered while processing so many



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newly surrendered runaways, the deception worked. On 27 February 1822, Richard Bradburn, posing as ‘Francis Clarke’, was sent to the newly established secondary penal settlement at Port Macquarie, situated on the NSW coast about 200 km north of Newcastle.17 Port Macquarie’s Commandant, Francis Allman, was initially impressed by Clarke’s badly needed skills and good behaviour. By June, however, he had become suspicious. Clarke was an excellent carpenter for a man whose indent listed him as a labourer, and his Irish brogue may also have drawn attention. In July and August 1822, a series of letters circulated between Allman in Port Macquarie, Morisset in Newcastle, the authorities in Sydney and the real Francis Clarke’s previous master. For example, Allman sent a letter to Morisset in early July 1822: Dear Morisset, Having reason to suspect that one of the Cato Street conspirators is here under the fictitious name of Francis Clarke, his real name supposed to be Bradburn. He is a stout well looking young man and a good Carpenter. He as yet knows nothing of my suspicion.18

When Clarke’s sentence expired in mid-July, Allman held him under his secondary power as a magistrate and, eventually, Bradburn admitted to the ruse. He might have expected to be severely punished as he had escaped from lawful custody, spent a number of months on the run, abused the provisions of the amnesty offered to runaways and caused considerable inconvenience and embarrassment to the authorities. Instead, Allman wrote to Governor Brisbane: ‘[Bradburn] has behaved himself in every respect remarkably well since his being on the Settlement and I should hope His Excellency would be kind enough not to visit him with any additional punishment on this occasion. He is very useful to us as a good carpenter. Waiting for your directions on the subject.’19 Bradburn appears to have escaped retribution, a remarkable turn of events in an environment where a convict could be punished with a dozen lashes for ‘backchatting’ a supervisor. In fact, later in 1822 Bradburn was appointed the chief carpenter at Port Macquarie, a post he enjoyed for five years. During his time at Port Macquarie, Bradburn was twice called to Sydney. In 1824, he and a number of others were subpoenaed to testify in Rex v Bradney, a case concerning the wife of a Port Macquarie convict accused of poisoning her husband. Two years later, Bradburn and three other convicts were requested by the colony’s chief civil engineer, Colonel Dumaresq, to undertake an unknown task for a number of months in Sydney.20 Bradburn received a TOL in mid-1827. By this time his attitude to runaways appears to have changed, as his TOL states: ‘Granted in consideration of having detected two Convicts in robbing Govt also apprehending runaways and several Bushrangers at Port Macquarie.’21 TOL holders could work for themselves or take employment in their specified district, but were unable to work in other districts or

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travel outside their allocated district without special permission. They also had to attend convict musters and obey curfews as directed. Bradburn’s TOL district was Sydney, where he moved in 1827, and worked for himself as a carpenter and joiner. His commissions included the fit-out of Sydney’s Superintendent of Convicts’ Office from late 1827.22 Bradburn left a wife, Amelia, and eight children behind in England. No record has been found of him requesting them to be sent over at government expense. It was not uncommon in early Australia for a convict separated from their family for many years to have two families, one in Britain or Ireland and the other in Australia. In late 1829, after nine years of separation from his wife and children, Bradburn married the 36-year-old Scottish convict Helen Carr in Sydney.23 Bradburn continued living and working in Sydney until his death in December 1835, aged about 44 years. He was buried on Sunday 20 December 1835. Richard Bradburn was the first of the transported Cato Street conspirators to die in Australia.24 In 1822, Governor Brisbane decided to disband Newcastle as a secondary penal ­settlement and open it up to settlers. During 1823, the bulk of convicts were dispersed to other government works throughout the colony and Commandant Morisset was appointed Commandant at Bathurst, situated over the Blue Mountains about 200 km north-west of Sydney. Bathurst was, at the time, occupied by both settlers and convicts. From this new post Morisset requested the transfer of a small number of convicts, including the four Cato Street conspirators (Cooper, Harrison, Shaw Strange and Wilson). The conspirators arrived in Bathurst early in January 1824.25 Shortly after his arrival, Charles Cooper was assigned as a servant to a settler. Later he was reassigned to the ex-convict Robert Bogg, who ran a bootmaker’s shop in Pitt Street in the centre of Sydney. Bogg was probably a poor employer, being found on a list of people defaulting on agreed ‘wages to their convicts’.26 Cooper is known to have kept in contact with Harrison, Shaw Strange and Wilson; and probably kept in contact with Bradburn when they both lived in Sydney for a number of years. In 1834, Cooper obtained a TOL for the Liverpool district, about 27 km south-west of Sydney. He succeeded in having his TOL district changed a number of times in the 1840s. These districts included Parramatta (23 km northwest of Sydney), Brisbane Waters (about 80 km north of Sydney near Gosford) and Gosford itself. Cooper is known to have spent a few short stints in gaol for drunkenness, a common misdemeanour among convicts at the time which, unfortunately for Cooper, was dealt with harshly in his TOL district. Cooper’s whereabouts have not been determined during the 1850s and early 1860s. He appears to have never married, and died at Liverpool, NSW, on Tuesday 13 November 1866, aged about 80 years.27 James Wilson worked as a convict servant around Bathurst, and at one stage was a police constable. He received a TOL for the Bathurst district in 1829, and a conditional pardon in 1839. A conditional pardon meant he was effectively a free man, but



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was not able to return to England.28 According to the Reminiscences of Roger Therry, a NSW Supreme Court Judge, Wilson ‘became the fashionable tailor of the district. The signboard over his shop contained a correct description in announcing him “Wilson, tailor, from London”’.29 In 1824, Wilson petitioned for his wife Betsy and two children to be sent out from England at government expense. The Governor approved this request, but it appears his family did not actually leave England after being offered passage.30 However, on 27 July 1857, the 64-year-old ‘widower’ James Wilson married Eleanor Hagan at St John’s Church, Glebe, Sydney. He died in Sydney on Saturday 5 March 1859, aged about 66 years.31 John Harrison, like his comrades Cooper and Wilson, initially worked as a convict servant for settlers around Bathurst. In 1828 he was recorded as a police constable, working alongside fellow Cato Street conspirator John Shaw Strange. The pair were responsible for the capture of several members of the notorious Storey Bushranging Gang.32 Harrison received his TOL for the Bathurst district in 1829, and a conditional pardon seven years later. In the early 1830s he opened a bakery in Bathurst. Judge Roger Therry described Harrison as ‘a gaunt muscular man, upwards of six feet in height, with large black eyes … and thick jet black hair hanging in profusion over a pale and rather forbidding visage … [He] was the principal baker in the town of Bathurst at the time I visited it, and … his conduct there, gave no symptoms of the ferocity … [of] … the part assigned him in the [conspiracy]. He loved to litigate before me in cases against his customers, who complained that his bills displayed great skill in addition, but that they also showed he had been but very imperfectly acquainted with the rule of reduction … [He] became … a wellconducted man and an industrious baker.’ Harrison petitioned for his wife Caroline and three children to be sent out at government expense in 1824. Like Wilson, his appeal for his family’s free passage was accepted, but it has not been established that they ever travelled to Australia. John Harrison died at Kelso (Bathurst) on Wednesday 17 April 1839, aged about 54 years.33 After the return of Commandant Morisset to England in 1825, John Shaw Strange continued as the personal messenger and constable to the new Commandant, Mr Fennell, who described him as ‘an active and intelligent police officer’.34 Shaw Strange was involved in investigating and apprehending numerous criminals, including members of the Storey Bushranging Gang, as mentioned above. Judge Roger Therry wrote of Shaw Strange: ‘If it were known that “the Cato-street chief”, the name by which as Chief Constable he was known, was in search of the plunderers who then prowled along the roads, they fled from the district, and his name was quite “a tower of strength” to the peaceable portion of the community.’ 35 Shaw Strange petitioned in September 1825 for a TOL, which was ‘granted on the special order of the Governor’. Initially his TOL district was Sydney, but in mid-1827 this district was changed to Bathurst, where he worked as constable. He retired from the police on 27 January 1829, and received a conditional pardon in 1832.36 In 1822, Shaw Strange unsuccessfully petitioned for his wife Mary and children to

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receive a free passage from England. He appears not to have made another application, despite the successful later petitions in 1824 of both Harrison and Wilson. On 27 April 1829, he married a local Bathurst woman, Jane Bayliss, and in the following year took up a seven-year lease on the government tannery in Bathurst. The tannery was a successful enterprise and Shaw Strange employed a number of men, including convict servants. In 1837, the lease expired and was not renewed because the malodorous tannery now occupied a key position in the expanding town.37 During the 1830s and 1840s, Shaw Strange made multiple land purchases, mostly in and around Bathurst. After the closure of the tannery, he applied for a publican’s licence and leased the Mountaineer Inn at Emu Plains. This inn was situated on the eastern side of the Blue Mountains and would have been one of the last stops for people travelling westward over the mountains towards Bathurst. This venture appears not to have been successful. Shaw Strange then decided to try farming on a property he purchased at Fish Creek, about 30 km south-east of Bathurst. John and Jane had ten children between 1832 and 1857 (see Appendix 9.3 below). The children helped John and Jane work the farm.38 Shaw Strange was an active member of the local community. For example, in June 1843 he was one of the ‘gentlemen’ who asked a certain William Henry Suttor to stand as the local representative for the upcoming NSW Legislative Council elections.39 In 1863, Roger Therry described Shaw Strange as ‘the head of a patriarchal home on the banks of the Fish River at Bathurst, surrounded by children and grandchildren, all industrious persons, in the enjoyment of a comfortable competence’.40 Shaw Strange had been a friend of Thomas Preston, the well-known London radical, who had been arrested for his part in the Cato Street Conspiracy. However, he was never brought to trial due to a lack of evidence linking him directly to the hayloft in which the plotters had congregated.41 It is not known whether the two men kept in contact after 1820 by letter, but a curious incident almost forty years later provides evidence as to the strength of Shaw Strange’s continuing regard for Preston. On 24 December 1856, an article appeared in the Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal about a talk recently given by a visiting preacher, the Reverend R.W. Vanderkiste, to the local British and Foreign Bible Society. At this meeting, Vanderkiste spoke about his work in the ‘Dens of London’, and claimed to have given communion, some years previously, to the dying Thomas Preston, described as the ‘only survivor of the Cato Street Conspirators’. Vanderkiste maintained that Preston was a ‘great sinner’ who had repented of his past evil actions before his death. The next edition of the paper, 14 January 1857, contained a letter from John Shaw Strange. It is worth quoting in full: To the Editor of the Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal. Sir, – In your last issue of the 24th December I saw a narration by the Rev. R.W. Vanderkiste relative to his labours in the Dens of London. Amongst those labours



The transported Cato Street conspirators 161 he said he was sent for to administer the Lord’s supper, to the then dying Thomas Preston, the only survivor of the Cato-street Conspirators. I beg leave to inform the rev. gentleman, and those who heard and read his statement that only a very few months ago (and I believe yet) three of the Cato-street Conspirators were living in this colony, namely James Wilson, Charles Cooper, and myself, John Shaw Strange. The rev. gentleman represents the late Preston as having been a very wicked sinner. In duty to the memory of Preston (his religious creed I was not acquainted with), I assure his reverence, and those who read his anecdote, that he was considered by all who knew him, to be a strictly honest man in all his dealings, sober, industrious, a kind father and a faithful friend; possessing, moreover, too powerful a mind to be duped ensnared and sacrificed like myself and others, by the notorious villain, Edward the Spy, and his employers. By giving this a place in your valuable journal you will much oblige. Your obedient servant, J. S. STRANGE. Fish River, Jan. 1, 1857.42

This letter shows that nearly four decades after the conspiracy Shaw Strange was willing to be identified as one of the plotters, had been in receipt of some news from or about the other living plotters in Australia within the previous few months and was willing to defend the reputation of his much-maligned radical friend. Shaw Strange also continued to stick to the defence strategy outlined at the 1820 trial, that he (and the others) had been ‘duped ensnared and sacrificed … by the notorious villain, Edward the Spy, and his employers’. John Shaw Strange was the last surviving Cato Street conspirator. He died surrounded by his family at Fish Creek on Saturday 11 January 1868. A number of newspapers ran reports of Shaw Strange’s death, including the Bendigo Advertiser: The Death of the last of the convicts concerned in the Cato-street conspiracy is thus reported in a Bathurst paper: – An inquest was held at O’Connell, on the 14th January, before Dr Busby, coroner, upon the body of John Shaw Strange, who about three years ago had a paralytic attack, from the effects of which he never fully recovered. About three weeks ago he took to his bed, and gradually sunk until Saturday last, when he died. As no medical man had seen him during his last illness, it was deemed necessary to hold an inquest as to the cause of death. The verdict was, “Died from old age, and natural causes.” The deceased was one of the Cato-street conspirators, and was sent to this colony upwards of forty years ago for his participation in the conspiracy. So far as we can learn, Strange is the last of the conspirators, and died at the advanced age of seventy-eight years. During his residence in the colony he has been very industrious, and has become a good character amongst his neighbours.43

The description of Shaw Strange as being ‘very industrious’ and ‘a good character amongst his neighbours’ is an assessment which might be applied to all of the conspirators in their new home in the southern hemisphere.

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Around 162,000 male and female convicts were transported to Australia between 1788 and 1868. The majority were convicted in England, Scotland, Wales or Ireland; however, others also arrived in ships from Canada, India and various ‘British possessions’. The majority of transportees were convicted of petty larceny. Political prisoners and social protesters account for only an estimated 2.5 per cent of all convicts.44 As a political expedient, transportation appears to have been an effective governmental tool. Australia’s isolation meant that some of Britain or Ireland’s ‘problem population’ could be removed, and, even if they were allowed to go home at the end of their sentence, the high cost of a return passage meant few could afford this option. Political prisoners were further restricted in that, if they received a pardon, it was usually a conditional pardon. This meant they were free, but not allowed to return to Britain or Ireland. Rare exceptions, such as the six Tolpuddle Martyrs (transported in 1834 for starting a Friendly Society of Agricultural Labourers, that supposedly required members to take a secret oath), did return to England when offered free passages, after receiving absolute pardons (May 1836). Other ‘gentleman’ political prisoners, such as the leader of the Young Ireland Movement, William Smith O’Brien (transported with eleven others after the 1848 rebellion), had the means to travel to and live in Brussels after receiving a conditional pardon. From there, Smith O’Brien used his influence to gain a free pardon, and return to Ireland. The majority of political and social protesters, however, remained in the southern hemisphere. While restricted in their ability to return home, some concentrated their efforts on moving their families to Australia. In general, political prisoners were labelled according to their ‘political crime’, such as: ‘Cato Street Conspirator’, ‘Scots Radical Weaver’, ‘Bristol Rioter’, ‘Young Irelander’, ‘Fenian’, ‘Swing Rioter’ or ‘Chartist’. Within the convict population, such labels brought a degree of prestige and reputation. Some convicts, like John Shaw Strange, appear to have used this reputation to their advantage. Even officials, like Judge Roger Therry, seem to have taken an interest in, and singled out, ‘labelled’ high-profile prisoners. The executed and the transported Cato Street conspirators were on the extreme fringes of London radicalism. Despite their frequent protestations of innocence, there is little doubt that these men did plot to assassinate the British cabinet in February 1820. The question naturally arises as to why they engaged in such extreme actions. One easy explanation lies in the alleged abnormal psychology of the men, whether that is defined in terms of the insanity and mental instability of the leading conspirators or the stupidity, simplicity and gullibility of those who followed them. An obvious line of defence against the argument that radicalism is an illness or psychosis of some sort is that the political and economic conditions which prevailed in England in 1819 and 1820 drove these men to such desperate acts. Yet, the presence of serious grievances does not itself prove that the Cato



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Street conspirators were not criminals, sociopaths, psychopaths or ne’er-do-wells of some description. There were millions of men and women who experienced hunger and political repression during these years, but there were only twenty or so men in the hayloft in Cato Street when it was raided by the Bow Street Runners. All of those arrested in connection with the Cato Street Conspiracy (whether they were executed, transported or released due to lack of evidence) seem to have experienced severe financial hardships in the years after the end of the Napoleonic Wars. Hence, Charles Cooper’s letter of 3 May (quoted above) while on board the convict ship Guildford, saying that he was glad to be leaving behind ‘the land of taxes, the country in which Acts were passed to make provisions dear, and where many mechanics are starving for want of work’. Further, the freed conspirator James Gilchrist asserted at trial that when food appeared on the table in the Cato Street loft, ‘the men came round seemingly as hungry as I was’. In contrast to their starving condition in England, the transported conspirators thrived in Australia and became valued, productive and successful members of the community. A number of the men formed long-standing personal relationships in NSW, with one known to have resulted in the births of ten children. The conspirators’ professional skills were in demand in the colony, and they were presented with material opportunities not available to them in Britain or Ireland. The men made good use of these opportunities within the constraints of the penal colony system. Indeed, both Richard Bradburn and John Shaw Strange developed and displayed significant qualities of personal and professional leadership in Australia. The productive lives and careers in NSW of the five transported conspirators strongly suggest that the explanation for their extreme actions in 1820 should be traced to the dysfunctional social and political conditions then pertaining in Britain, rather than any allegedly abnormal psychology or pathology on the part of the men. Appendix 9.1: Convict indents of the transported Cato Street conspirators45 ‘Guildford’ Convict No: 98 Name: James Wilson Sentence: Life Age: 28 Native Place: London Trade or Calling: Tailor Height: 5 feet 8 inches Colour (Eyes): Blue Colour (Hair): Dark Flaxen Complexion: Pale Sallow General Remarks: Very Well Behaved

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‘Guildford’ Convict No: 99 Name: Charles Cooper Tried Where: Middlesex Gaol Delivery Tried When: 12 April 1820 Sentence: Life Age: 30 Native Place: Durham Trade or Calling: Boot Maker Height: 5 feet 9 inches Colour (Eyes): Dark Colour (Hair): Brown Complexion: Dark Sallow General Remarks: Very Well Behaved ‘Guildford’ Convict No: 100 Name: John Harrison Tried Where: Middlesex Gaol Delivery Tried When: 12 April 1820 Sentence: Life Age: 34 Native Place: Derbyshire Trade or Calling: Baker Height: 6 feet 2 inches Colour (Eyes): Dark Colour (Hair): Dark Brown Complexion: Dark Sallow General Remarks: Very Well Behaved ‘Guildford’ Convict No: 101 Name: Richard Bradburn Tried Where: Middlesex Gaol Delivery Tried When: 12 April 1820 Sentence: Life Age: 29 Native Place: Dublin Trade or Calling: Carpenter & Joiner Height: 5 feet 8 inches Colour (Eyes): Dark Colour (Hair): Dark Brown Complexion: Dark Ruddy General Remarks: Very Well Behaved



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‘Guildford’ Convict No: 102 Name: John Shaw Strange Tried Where: Middlesex Gaol Delivery Tried When: 12 April 1820 Sentence: Life Age: 26 Native Place: Warwickshire Trade or Calling: Boot & Shoe Maker Height: 5 feet 3½ inches Colour (Eyes): Hazel Colour (Hair): Light Brown Complexion: Fair Ruddy General Remarks: Very Well Behaved Appendix 9.2: Births and deaths of transported Cato Street conspirators Richard Bradburn, b. Dublin, c.1791, buried 20 December 1835, Sydney, NSW. Charles Cooper, b. Durham, c.1786, d. 13 November 1866, Liverpool, NSW. John Harrison, b. Derbyshire, c.1786, d. 17 April 1839, Kelso, ‘Bathurst’, NSW. John Shaw Strange, b. Warwickshire, c.1788. d. 11 January 1868 Fish River, ‘Bathurst’, NSW. James Wilson, b. London, c.1792. d. 27 July 1857 Glebe, ‘Sydney’, NSW. Appendix 9.3: Families of the transported Cato Street conspirators In England Richard Bradburn, wife Amelia & eight children. James Wilson, wife Betsy & two children. John Harrison, wife Caroline & three children. John Shaw Strange, wife Mary & four children. Charles Cooper, single. In Australia Richard Bradburn, married Helen (née Carr, aka Wilkinson), 1829 James Wilson, married Eleanor (née Hagan), 1857 John Harrison, none known. John Shaw Strange, married Jane (née Baylis), 1829. John and Jane had ten children: John Joseph b. 2 August 1832; William Henry b. 18 May 1834; Jane Elizabeth b. 24 July 1836; Henry b. 6 August 1841; William b. 20 July 1843; Benjamin b. 10 February 1846; Mary Ann b. 23 September 1848; Sarah b. 9 September 1850; Emma b. 7 October 1853; Emily Louisa b. 1857. Charles Cooper, none known.

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 1 Wilkinson, Authentic History.  2 Letter dated 3 May from Charles Cooper to his uncle John Irving, Caledonian Mercury, 15 May 1820, p. 4.  3 H. Walker, ‘Journal of the convict ship Guildford by Hugh Walker, Surgeon, for 15 April 1820 to 5 November 1820, on a voyage to New South Wales and then Van Diemen’s Land’, TNA, UK, ADM 101/31/2. Diary entry, 2 May 1820.  4 Letter from Charles Cooper dated 3 May to John Irving, Caledonian Mercury, 15 May 1820, p. 4.  5 H. Walker, ‘Journal of the convict ship Guildford’, entry for 14 May 1820.  6 H. Walker, ‘Journal of the convict ship Guildford’, 10 June 1820; Convict Indents Guildford (1820), CON 13/1/2 Assignment Lists and Associated Papers 01/01/1820– 31/12/1823, pp. 100–1. Archives Authority of Tasmania.  7 H. Walker, ‘Journal of the convict ship Guildford’, 30 Sept. 1820; The Sydney Gazette and NSW Advertiser, Saturday 30 Sept. 1820 p. 3; Lachlan Macquarie, ‘Journal of Lachlan Macquarie’, 30 Sept. 1820. Mitchell Library, Sydney.  8 H. Hobhouse to Henry Goulburn, 11 May 1820. NSW Col Sec Papers, Reel 6007: 4/3502, p. 349.  9 H. Goulburn to Lachlan Macquarie, 12 May 1820. NSW Col Sec Papers, Reel 6007: 4/3502, pp. 350–1. 10 J.W. Turner, Newcastle as a Convict Settlement: The Evidence before J.T. Bigge in 1819–1821, Newcastle History Monologues No. 7 (Newcastle: 1973); NSW Government State Archives and Records: Newcastle Penal Establishment: www.records.nsw.gov.au/ agency/2111 (accessed 25 July 2017). 11 H. Walker, ‘Journal of the convict ship Guildford’, 6 Oct. 1820; ‘List of prisoners to be transported to Newcastle’, NSW Colonial Secretary’s Papers, Reel 6007: 4/3502, p. 342. 12 Letter from John Thomas Campbell to Commandant James Morisset, 16 Oct. 1820, NSW Col Sec Papers, Reel 6007: 4/3502, pp. 346–7. 13 Letter from Commandant James Morisset to NSW Colonial Secretary Frederick Goulburn, NSW Col Sec Papers, Reel 6067: 4/1807, pp. 131–2. 14 Letter from Commandant James Moriset to Commisioner Bigge, 31 Dec. 1820. Bonwick Transcripts Box 25, p. 5418, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 15 Sydney Gazette and NSW Advertiser, 29 Dec. 1821, p. 1; 11 Jan. 1822, p. 1; 25 Jan. 1822, p. 1; 1 Feb. 1822, p. 4. 16 Sydney Gazette and NSW Advertiser, 15 Dec. 1821, p. 1. 17 Convict Indents Elizabeth (1) 1816, Francis Clarke, Sutherland Library, Sydney; NSW Col Sec Papers, Reel 6019; 4/3864, pp. 352–3, 27 Feb. 1822. 18 Commandant Francis Allman (Port Macquarie) to Commandant James Morisset (Newcastle), NSW Col Sec Papers, Reel 6067; 4/1808, p. 207. 19 Commandant Francis Allman (Port Macquarie) to Governor Brisbane via the NSW Colonial Secretary, NSW Col Sec Papers, Reel 6068; 4/1815, p. 105 (23 Aug. 1822). 20 Sydney Gazette & NSW Advertiser, 12 Aug. 1824; NSW Col Sec Papers, Reel 6019: 4/3864, p. 144, 24 May 1824; Reel 6069; 4/1816, p. 231, 27 Sept. 1824; Reel 6068; 4/1815, p. 497; NSW Col Sec Papers, 4/1819, p. 107, 28 Jan. 1826.



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21 Ticket of Leave Butt, Richard Bradburn, No. 27/392, 27 June 1827. Mitchell Library, Sydney. 22 NSW Col Sec Papers, 4/1934 No. 27/5490, 13 June, 16 July, 23 Aug. and 15 Sept. 1827; NSW Col Sec Papers, 4/3665, p. 460, 25 Aug. 1827. 23 NSW Births, Deaths & Marriages (NSW BD&M), Bradburn marriage to Helen Carr (aka Wilkinson) 1829, Reg No: 118/1829 V 1829 118 73A. 24 NSW BD&M, Death of Richard Bradburn, Dec. 1835, Reg No: 1085/1835 V1835 1085 102, buried 20 Dec. 1835. 25 NSW Colonial Secretary’s Papers, Reel 6011; 4/3509 p. 600 (22 Nov. 1823); NSW Colonial Secretary’s Papers, Reel 6012; 4/3510 p. 121 (5 Jan. 1824). 26 NSW Col Sec Papers, Fiche 3300: 4/1916.1, p. 4, 31 Jan. 1825. NSW Colonial Sec Papers, Miscellaneous records relating to convicts and criminal and legal matters – Special Bundle: Assignment of convicts 1822–1824, ‘List of defaulters in payment for assigned convict tradesmen, up to 30th September 1824’, AO Fiche 3293, Mitchell Library, Sydney. 27 Ticket of Leave Butt, Charles Cooper No: 34/187 (26 Apr. 1834 and various dates). NSW BD&M, Death of Charles Cooper 1866, Reg No: 4696/1866 (13 Nov. 1866). 28 Ticket of Leave Butt, James Wilson (1829) No: 29/292; Conditional Pardon, James Wilson No: 657 (19 May 1836). Mitchell Library, Sydney. 29 R. Therry, Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Residence in New South Wales and Victoria, 2nd edn (London, 1863), p. 98. 30 NSW Col Sec Records Reel 6065; 4/1800, p. 135; Letter on behalf of the Governor allowing Wilson’s family a free passage, NSW Colonial Secretary’s Papers, Reel 6013; 4/3512 p. 312 (1824); NSW Col Sec Records, Reel 6013; 4/3512, p. 312. 31 NSW BD&M, Marriage of James Wilson and Eleanor Hagan, Reg No: 1162/1857; NSW BD&M, Death of James Wilson (5 Mar. 1859), Reg No: 292/1859. 32 M.R. Saintly and K.A. Johnson (eds), Census of New South Wales, November 1828 (Sydney, 1985): NSW Colonial Secretary’s Office; NSW Clerk of the Peace Papers (1825). Depositions for the trial of the Storey Gang, Nov. 1825 [Sworn statement of Constable John Shaw Strange made before John Fennell Esq., JP, 8 Oct. 1825]. 33 Ticket of Leave Butt, John Harrison No: 29/646; Conditional Pardon, John Harrison No: 794 (31 Dec. 1836); Therry, Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Residence, pp. 98–9; NSW Col Sec Records Reel 6065; 4/1800, p. 135; NSW BD&M, Death of John Harrison, 1839, Reg No: 1209/1839 V1839 1209 102, died 17 Apr. 1839. 34 NSW Col Sec Papers, Reel 6027; 4/1717.2, pp. 234–6, Sept. 1825. 35 Therry, Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Residence, p. 97. 36 TOL reported in Sydney Gazette & NSW Advertiser, 1 Dec. 1825, p. 3; Ticket of Leave Butt, John Shaw Strange No: 25/595 (1825); Retired as P.C., Sydney Gazette & NSW Advertiser, 5 Feb. 1829, p. 1; Conditional Pardon, John Shaw Strange No: 143 (6 Sept. 1832). 37 1822v petition; 1829 27 Apr. Marriage; K. Handley (2015), ‘200 Years of Bathurst: The Terrorist Tanner’. ABC Central West NSW. www.abc.net.au/local/ photos/2015/03/04/4191172; podcast version at https://soundcloud.com/abcnsw/200years-of-bathurst-the-terrorist-tanner (accessed 20 July 2017). 38 NSW Archives & Records. Index to Publicans’ Licences 1830–1861. Record Series NFR14401 [4/68] Reel 5053 [John Shaw Strange, Licence No: 0126, Issued: 1 July

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1837); S. Dowd, ‘Records of the Family of John Shaw Strange and Jane Baylis’ (Personal Contact) (2017). 39 The Australian, 19 June 1843, p. 4. 40 Therry, Reminiscences of Thirty Years’ Residence, pp. 97–8. 41 ‘List of prisoners, charges against them and where imprisoned’, TNA, HO 44/5/107 fol. 497. 42 Bathurst Free Press and Mining Journal, 14 Jan. 1857, p. 3. 43 Bendigo Advertiser, Thursday 6 Feb. 1868, p. 3. 44 George Rudé, Protest & Punishment: The Story of the Social and Political Protesters Transported to Australia, 1788–1868 (Oxford, 1978), pp. 9–10. 45 The men’s ages on their convict indents should be considered approximate. Convicts were asked their age at trial and courts usually had no option but to accept these statements as accurate. While most would have given their correct age, some may have genuinely been unsure of their year of birth and given an approximate age. Others sometimes gave a younger or older age, according to what they thought would be more advantageous. The indent ages of the conspirators conflict with ‘ages’ given on other documents. For example, it is highly likely that John Shaw Strange was born in Warwickshire, 1788. If true, this would give his age in 1820 as 32 (not 26 as stated on his indent). Further, his age of death in 1868 was given as 78. If this were true, then the indent age should have been listed as 30. Convict Indents Guildford, 1820. CON 13/1/2 Assignment Lists & Associated Papers (1/1/1820–31/12/1823). Archives Authority of Tasmania.



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10 Scripted by whom? 1820 and theatres of rebellion John Gardner

Many aspects of the 1820 rebellions bring theatre and execution together. The Cato Street, Bonnymuir and Cathkin events followed the same format. A printed instruction to unknowing actors set each rising in motion. A newspaper advertisement trapped the Cato Street men and a printed address incited those involved at Cathkin and Bonnymuir. As Edward Vallance notes: ‘Having squashed the mass platform, the government now saw an opportunity to flush out ultra-radical insurrectionists.’1 These events produced the last executions for high treason until the Easter Rising in 1916. On 1 May 1820, five Cato Street conspirators were executed in London in front of a crowd of around a hundred thousand people; on 30 August a 67-year-old weaver, James Wilson, was hanged and beheaded at Glasgow Green in front of twenty thousand people for taking part in the Cathkin insurrection; and on 8 September, in Stirling, two weavers were hanged and beheaded in front of several thousand people for taking part in what has been called the Battle of Bonnymuir. These public executions showed a government that was ruthless and vigilant to the point of prescience as each rebellion was prevented before anything happened. From the outset there was a notion by many that these rebellions were scripted by government agents. The Examiner editorial on the eve of the Cato Street executions makes a theatrical link explicit: ‘The Last Act of the Cato-Street tragedy is now completed by the conviction or confession of the wretched men on whom the consequences of a corrupt system have fallen.’ This chapter examines theatrical responses to the rebellions, including skits in contemporary newspapers, Byron’s Marino Faliero (1821), Robert Shaw’s Cato Street (1970), Stewart Conn’s Thistlewood (1975), Hector MacMillan’s The Rising (1973), and James Kelman’s Hardie and Baird: The Last Days (1990). I also touch on Tanika Gupta’s Betrayal: The Trial of

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William Davidson, which was performed as a forty-five-minute play on Radio 4 in 2001. My argument is that theatre and the rebellions of 1820 have been associated from the outset. Using historical accounts, archives, poetry, newspapers and plays, I argue that whilst some conspirators were sincere in wanting to overthrow the government, evidence suggests the conspiracies were likely not their own. Contemporary newspapers saw entrapment in the Cato Street Conspiracy from the outset, as this epigram published on 6 May 1820 from The Champion exemplifies: I tell you madam, it is all a trick. He made the giants first and then he kill’d them. As fox-hunters take foxes to the wood To hunt them out again.

Those trapped may have been ‘foxes’, but the Home Office set them up to ‘hunt them out again’. The Black Dwarf has perhaps the first dramatic response to Cato Street with ‘State Contrivances!’ Here the character ‘Sidemouth’ authors the plot, with ‘Spywards’ as George Edwards, and ‘Castlerag’ the paymaster: Sidemouth. – ‘The filthy swine, that would our Lordships hang, And cry Reform! Reform! Throughout our land, Such rapid strides are making, far and wide, To stop the which, I’ve made us up a plot! For as they roar out ‘Liberty or Death!’ We won’t give one, but they shall have the other! To make up which, the which – the which – you’ll help. Castlerag. – I’ll give thee gold! Spywards. – My Lord, thou’rt kind! Sid. – And I, t’ insure thy escape will mind! Spy. – I myself will get the other! – With hand-grenades we’ll make a smother; I’ll blow into their ears rebellion, loud! – I’ll give them beer and pistols, bread and cheese; With gin, ball-carriages, and pikes, and powder – And when they speak but loud – why, I’ll speak louder! I had forgot – two bags and ’tis compleat To put your Lordships’ heads in – happy feat!2

‘State Contrivances!’ captures the essential facts of Cato Street as they were revealed in the courtroom and from questions raised in Parliament on the use of paid spies. Sidmouth, or ‘Sidemouth’, the Home Secretary, ‘made us up a plot’ to prevent reform, and the conspirators are trapped by a spy who gives them ‘beer and pistols, bread and cheese’. This sick combination of food and weapons shows the conspirators’ drivers as poverty and a need for revenge. The first major play linked with Cato Street is Byron’s Marino Faliero. It warns of the danger of cross-class alliances. When it was performed at Drury Lane in



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1821, a contemporary reviewer decided: ‘If Thistlewood and Ings could have delivered themselves in blank verse, they would have spoken much the same words (for they did utter the same sentiments) as the Doge, and his accomplice Israel Bertuccio.’3 The reviewer suggests that the pretext of Marino Faliero was the Cato Street Conspiracy. Cato Street pushed Byron into writing a play through which he could examine his, and his best friend John Cam Hobhouse’s, relationship with postwar British politics. In his Don Juan, Byron shows his disgust at Wellington, or ‘Villianton’, writing ‘who, / Save you and yours, have gain’d by Waterloo?’4 Byron sympathised with the plight of the poor and famously spoke up for Luddites, saying, ‘nothing but absolute want could have driven a large and once honest body of the people into the commission of excesses so hazardous to themselves’.5 However, Byron’s class allegiances made it impossible for him to associate with reformers, even if he agreed with their aims: ‘persons calling themselves reformers, radicals, and such other names, – I should look upon being free with such men, as much the same as being in bonds with felons’.6 Byron the liberal clashed with Byron the aristocrat. The Cato Street conspirators’ targets were friends of his: ‘if they had killed poor Harrowby – in whose house I have been five hundred times – at dinners and parties – his wife is one of “the Exquisites” – and t’other fellows – what end would it have answered.’7 Marino Faliero seems to paraphrase Byron when he explains his horror at siding with plebeians to overthrow his class: Doge. … but you ne’er spake with them; You never broke their bread, nor shared their salt; You never had their wine-cup at your lips; You grew not up with them, nor laugh’d, nor wept, Nor held a revel in their company; … And can I see them dabbled o’er with blood? Each stab to them will seem my suicide. (III.ii.458–72)

In Byron’s view his friend John Cam Hobhouse appeared to be doing the same as his doomed Doge, by allying himself with radical reformers such as Major Cartwright and Henry Hunt. By the end of 1819 Hobhouse was a prisoner in Newgate for publishing A Trifling Mistake, which said: ‘Individually there is scarcely a poorer creature than your mere member of parliament; though in his corporate capacity the earth furnishes not so absolute a bully.’8 Arthur Thistlewood tried to visit Hobhouse at Newgate, but was refused entry.9 By 1820 there was gossip, and testimony, that Hobhouse had agreed to head a provisional government if Thistlewood’s rebellion succeeded. Harriet Arbuthnot’s diary states: The Duke of Wellington … brought me to shew me the deposition of a man of the name of Hall … he said that Thistlewood, at one of their meetings, had informed them of an interview he had had with Mr. Hobhouse, in which he had stated to Mr. H. their intention of effecting a revolution & asked him whether, in the event of their

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succeeding, he wd place himself at the head of the provisional Government, that Mr. Hobhouse had said he wd! … I doubted Mr. Hobhouse being such a fool as to commit himself with such a man as Thistlewood. The Duke said … that, whatever Mr. Hobhouse had said, he had no doubt of his inclination to place himself at the head of any revolutionary Government.10

In the National Archives there is an undated transcript of Abel Hall’s testimony that corroborates Arbuthnot’s claim: A few days after Mr. Hobhouse was sent to new Gate Thistlewood at his own house told me that he had waited on Mr. Hobhouse at a House in Spring Gardens & that he Thistlewood told him Mr. Hobhouse that there was a plan to destroy the Ministers and that he wished Mr. Hobhouse to give him an answer whether he Mr. Hobhouse would take the Reins of Government after they were destroyed or not, and Thistlewood said that Mr. Hobhouse said that he would.11

A Home Office interview with William Simmons, dated 8 May, the same as Arbuthnot’s journal entry, provides another strand of evidence linking Hobhouse to Thistlewood: Thistlewood … says he will introduce me to many respectable people at his end of the town friends … some of whom will surprise me, that he had lived in Sir Benjamin Hobhouse’s family & knows the young one the member for Westminster, and has often conversed with him and that he is a perfect republican, and that he Simmons thinks that Mr Hobhouse will be the man who will gain this Country its Liberty.12

It is doubtful that Hobhouse agreed to ‘head any revolutionary government’, but it seems that rumours to that effect circulated widely. Attempts to link Hobhouse with radicals, using a trick that would later entrap the Cato Street conspirators, a fake newspaper advertisement, were also made. Hobhouse records that Sherriff Rothwell ‘showed me an advertisement saying that the subscribers to the Manchester Fund and others would meet at Mr Hobhouse’s apartments at Newgate on Monday. I told him I had written about the matter and supposed it a hoax. Presently comes Service and with him Sir R. Philips, telling me it was a hoax – someone had paid three guineas for the advertisement in the Chronicle and Times.’13 Marino Faliero begins in 1355 in Venice with the elderly Doge Marino Faliero awaiting news of how the governing Council of Forty have dealt with Michael Steno, who has slandered Faliero’s younger wife, Angiolina, by writing on the Doge’s chair ‘others kiss her, but he keeps her’.14 Steno receives only a month’s imprisonment, prompting the Doge to say, ‘For such as him dungeon were acquittal; / And his brief term of mock-arrest will pass’ (I.ii). Faliero’s fury then turns towards the Council who have insulted him with their leniency. Faliero is soon approached by Israel Bertuccio, a Captain, and hitherto unknown to him. Bertuccio also seeks revenge on the Council, and tells the Doge that there are others who feel the same:



Scripted by whom? 173 Ber. Know then, that there are met and sworn in secret A band of brethren, valiant hearts and true; … For their great purpose; they have arms, and means, And hearts, and hopes, and faith, and patient courage. (I.ii.482–91)

Faliero feels as though he has become a traitor to his class by joining ‘With common ruffians leagued to ruin states!’ (I.ii.582): Doge. When I first listen’d to your treason. – Start not! That is the word; I cannot shape my tongue To syllable black deeds into smooth names, Though I be wrought on to commit them. When I heard you tempt your sovereign, and forbore To have you dragg’d to Prison, I became Your guiltiest accomplice: … Ber. Strange words, my lord, and most unmerited; I am no spy, and neither are we traitors. Doge. We – We!--No matter – you have earned the right, To talk of us. … (III.i.56–66)

Although Faliero stutters over the notion of ‘We’, Bertuccio seems unaware of the conflict he faces now he is ‘To lead a band of – Patriots’. The plot is betrayed when Bertram warns the patrician Lioni that his life is in danger: Bert. I come To save patrician blood, and not to shed it! And thereunto I must be speedy, for Each minute lost may lose a life; … Go not thou forth tomorrow! (IV.i.153–60)

Here Byron brings the Venetian and Cato Street conspiracies together. In his diary entry for 24 February 1820, Henry Hobhouse, under-secretary to Lord Sidmouth and cousin of John Cam, writes that one of the conspirators, Thomas Hiden, ‘being struck with remorse’, had written a letter to Castlereagh on 22 February disclosing the plans for the assassination that ‘upon inspection appeared to corroborate exactly intelligence previously obtained by Lord Sidmouth’.15 The following day another conspirator, Dwyer, gave information that ‘corresponded precisely with the facts antecedently ascertained’.16 Again, Harriet Arbuthnot seems to have been aware of these events, noting in her journal entry for 23 February 1820: It has been for some months known that a band of Radicals, with Thistlewood at their head, had formed a plan for assassinating the Ministers when they shd be assembled at a Cabinet dinner … Fortunately, it always happens that, in the midst of such a set

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of Ruffians, there is always one or more who betray their secret, & one of the band acted as a spy & revealed the whole plot to the Secretary of State. In addition to this information, one of the parties felt some remorse for the part he was about to act & wrote to Ld Castlereagh detailing the plot and putting him on his guard. The day fixed was Wednesday the 23 of Feby.17

Arbuthnot asserts that the government knew of the plot ‘for some months’ prior to the advertisement appearing in the New Times and that the date was ‘fixed’. Edwards is the spy Arbuthnot refers to, and Hiden revealed the plot to Castlereagh. Crucially, Hiden’s information had public relations rather than intelligence value, as it helped divert attention away from George Edwards. On the execution of the conspirators, John Cam Hobhouse wrote: The men died like heroes. Ings, perhaps was too obstreperous in singing ‘Death or Liberty,’ and Thistlewood said, ‘Be quiet, Ings; we can die without all this noise.’ They admitted they intended to kill the Ministers, but without malice, and as the only resource. It is certain that Edwards, a Government spy, was the chief instigator of the whole scheme. The people cried out for him during the execution.18

Ings sings ‘Oh, give me death or liberty’, and this is repeated by Byron’s Calendaro with ‘death or freedom!’ (II.ii.53). There are further similarities between Marino Faliero’s execution and those at Newgate. After the Doge is beheaded, ‘The gory head rolls down the Giants Steps!’ Byron’s invention, which is not in his historical sources, is repeated in Delacroix’s painting The Execution of the Doge Marino Faliero (1827). Perhaps Byron was inspired by the fate of Brunt whose head was dropped by the executioner and rolled about the scaffold to the ‘howlings and groans of the spectators’.19 Robert Shaw’s two-act play Cato Street, first performed at the Young Vic in 1971 with Vanessa Redgrave playing Susan Thistlewood, puts Arthur Thistlewood’s wife to the forefront of the Cato Street Conspiracy. Shaw makes the play fit the times, stating that he exchanged Arthur for his wife Susan because ‘E.P. Thompson called her “a spirited Jacobin in her own right”; and because I feel it is more interesting for the audience to have a woman to look at. The women of 1819 were active in the Radical movement.’20 The play begins at St Peter’s Field in Manchester, with Susan sitting with her 14-year-old son Harry and ‘the Negro, William Davidson’ eating a meagre meal. Arthur is dead and Davidson and Susan are lovers. At Peterloo they meet Hannah Smith, who, Shaw notes, ‘was hanged before 1819’ and discuss ‘Old butcher – doctor Sidmouth’ (1.5). The 54-year-old Mancunian Smith was actually hanged in 1812 for stealing potatoes. The Yeomanry then attack the crowd and Susan is knocked unconscious before being carried away by Davidson. The scene then cuts to Lord Sidmouth who quotes Edmund Burke and calls for his spy George Edwards. The action shifts to the Crown & Anchor tavern where William Cobbett enters, as do



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Davidson, Ings, Tidd, Adams and Brunt, who meet Susan. Susan and Cobbett clash over the question of reform or revolution, with Susan firmly for the latter. Oddly, Susan cites the death of the real Hannah Smith (who is there at the tavern) as evidence of why the time for reform is over: ‘Four years ago this Government of ours hanged a poor woman in Manchester for snatching a potato from a cart – then hanged her starving child that ate it? At the gallows he cried: “Mother!”’ (1.24). Mabeuf, Edwards in disguise as a French revolutionist, also rebuffs Cobbett’s appeals for reform. A stage direction then has ‘the conspirations set themselves up in the loft in Cato Street’. Susan and her fellows make weapons in the loft, talk politics, and indulge in banter about the size of the black man’s penis: Adams. (To Davidson) I’ll bet your weapon is bigger than Cobbett’s by a foot. Davidson. It is. Adams. And I believe Miss Salt of Litchfield can testify to that. Davidson. (laughing) She screamed with joy when she first saw it, then called for her mother to help. Brunt. To lift it I suppose. (1.36)

And so it goes on. Racist notions may have been played for laughs in the era of TV programmes such as Love Thy Neighbour; however, by 2001 the racism was anything but funny. In Tanika Gupta’s play Betrayal: The Trial of William Davidson, racism is behind Davidson’s conviction. As Matthew Bannister notes, Davidson, ‘betrayed by a government spy … faces a charge of high treason and has to prove himself a victim of agents provocateurs and racism to avoid the gallows’.21 In Shaw’s play Susan decides that ‘We must light the tinder … We are the Committee of the Revolution’ (1.44–1.45). Harry, her son, tries to stop her, stating that his father, Arthur, has already been hanged. Ings suggests escaping repression and poverty by emigrating to America, but that is stamped on by Brunt, who states ‘We’re not bloody fucking Americans. We’re got to do something here, right here, right up here, right up here in this bloody loft in Cato Street.’ Act two reveals that Mabeuf is Sidmouth’s spy George Edwards. The pair have dirt on the conspirator Robert Adams who they say was caught committing an ‘unnatural offence’ in Hyde Park. Back in the loft Mabeuf joins the conspirators and brings a copy of The New Times, detailing the dinner at Lord Harrowby’s house. Here Shaw corresponds with accounts of how on 22 February 1820 Edwards brought Thistlewood The New Times, which stated, in its ‘Fashionable Mirror’ column, that: ‘The Earl of HARROBY gives a Grand Cabinet dinner tomorrow at his house in Grosvenor Square’. The cabinet dinner was advertised only in The New Times, edited by John Stoddart, of the Loyal Association, rather than all the major papers, as was customary. The National Archives contain detailed daily reports from Edwards to the Home Office, where he states how he trapped the conspirators: ‘I went to look at the New Times at the office in Fleet St. and then to the Room found them Hall Thistlewood Ings, Brunt Tidd and Bradburn.’22

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In Shaw’s play the conspirators then plan to kill the cabinet at Harrowby’s and set up a provisional government with Susan as secretary. Edwards is discovered when his wife and child come to the loft, and Susan ‘(screams) Kill him!’ (2.72). Edwards drops the French accent, but it is too late for Susan and her fellow conspirators as the constables enter. Susan shoots Constable Smithers and orders the others to ‘Kill the bastards!’ (2.73). The scene then cuts to a courtroom where Adams turns King’s evidence and is acquitted. The others are charged with high treason and Susan makes a political speech that takes up almost two pages of the play without interruption. The play ends with the execution, by a doctor, of the conspirators, joined by Hannah Smith. This corresponds with contemporary rumours that a doctor carried out the executions of the five Cato Street men.23 The hanging is officiated by Reverend Cotton, whose services all refuse, except the lusty Davidson who requests ‘Kiss me on the lips, Reverend. Yours is the last kiss but one.’ Cotton kisses Davidson who then shouts to Susan ‘I love you’ (2.87). At the scaffold Susan then ‘screams’ for action from the crowd: ‘I say by Christ let those amongst you that have pluck come up and cut us down’ (2.88–2.89). The play concludes with Edwards saying the conspiracy was ‘organized and guided’ (2.90), before he is rewarded with ‘A thousand acres’ in Massachusetts (2.91). Stewart Conn’s Thistlewood first played at the Traverse Theatre in 1975, before becoming a thirty-minute BBC radio drama in 2009. This one-act play of thirty scenes links the use of spies with Cato Street and the Scottish rebellions of 1820.24 In the first scene Thistlewood is questioned by a ship’s captain at Le Havre who suspects many of the people he meets ‘are spies for one side, or the other’ (I.1). Scene two shifts to a public meeting with Samuel Bamford conversing with his wife Mina, Henry Hunt and Arthur Thistlewood. Here Arthur meets his future wife Susan Wilkinson, a fellow follower of Paine and Spence, who was her father’s friend. The Spa Fields riot follows and Thistlewood is thereafter shadowed by Edwards. In scene eighteen Susan reads out the names of dead and injured people at Peterloo. The event enrages Thistlewood who vows to become an ‘Avenging Angel’ (I.19). Edwards encourages Thistlewood towards the end of ‘assassinating the members of the Cabinet’ (I.21), provides Thistlewood with the names of fellow conspirators and takes care of the finances. Only Susan doubts him. John Bull then sings lines from William Hone’s The Man in the Moon (1820) which are uncredited: Reform, Reform, the swinish rabble cry – Meaning of course, rebellion, blood, and riot – Audacious rascals! you, my Lords, and I, Know ’tis their duty to be starved in quiet: (I.21)

Edwards shows the conspirators an unnamed newspaper that advertises the dinner at Harrowby’s, and the plan to kill them is decided upon. However, constables



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appear at the loft and Thistlewood exclaims ‘We are betrayed!’ (I.25). In the next scene Edwards, now renamed Parker, is paid and taken abroad before the trial. In the dock Thistlewood blames the enterprise on ‘the Government spy, Edwards … a hired spy, the suggester and prompter’ but he remains a violent revolutionary, forecasting that ‘Castlereagh and Sidmouth, those bloody butchers, will have their throats cut’ (I.27). The end has Thistlewood executed alone, with no reference to his four fellow conspirators at the scaffold. William Davidson is absent from the entire play. Hector MacMillan’s The Rising, first performed at Dundee Repertory theatre on 1 May 1973, is explicitly concerned with 1970s Scottish nationalism and contemporary politics. It begins with an author’s note criticising ‘the ageing Executive of the Scottish Council of the British Labour Party’.25 MacMillan states that his knowledge of the Cathkin rebellion came from oral history, ‘as a child by the fireside. I had the additional good fortune to learn the story from the best possible source – from my father.’26 MacMillan also claims that the ‘principal events are based as accurately as possible on verifiable fact; dramatic license and interpretative reconstructions have been kept to an absolute minimum’.27 However, it is evident that much of MacMillan’s information is from The Scottish Insurrection of 1820 by P. Berresford Ellis and Seumas Mac A’ Ghobhainn, which argues that the pursuit of Scottish independence was behind the Scottish rebellions of 1820. A nationalist agenda is asserted from the start of MacMillan’s play as the character Davy Walters asks for ‘Repeal o the crippling Union wi England!’ (Prologue). James Wilson, the 67-yearold weaver hero of the play, is a well-respected hard-man/superman/nationalist who states: ‘Ah’ve worked wi every man o importance in the Reform movement in Scotland’ (I.ii). However, Wilson is not a republican, as he quotes, uncredited, selected lines from Burns’s ‘Scots Wha Hae’: Wha for Scotland’s King and Law, Freedom’s sword will strongly draw, FREEMAN stand, or FREEMAN fa’, Let him follow me!

The son of Samuel Johnson’s biographer James Boswell is a character working for the Home Office. Lt Col. Alex Boswell reports to Lord Sidmouth that ‘News of the Cato Street affair was received in North Britain with considerable distress, and anger’ (I.iii). Sidmouth reveals that the Cato Street ‘plot … was financed by and controlled from this room’ (I.iii). The Kirk is another villain in MacMillan’s play, with the Reverend James Lapslie acting as a spy. He enquires of the blacksmith if ‘anyone approached you to make pikes for the Radicals?’ (I.iv). What is not widely known is that clergymen did indeed act as informers to the Home Office, as new findings in the National Archives prove. A spy in the employ of Scotland’s Lord Advocate wrote in the weeks following

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Peterloo that radicals ‘hold the clergy as the most active tools of the Government in oppressing the people’.28 The Roman Catholic priest for Glasgow, Andrew Scott, who became titular Bishop of Erythrae in 1828, spied on his congregation of ‘Roman Catholics on the west coast of Scotland’ who are ‘principally Irish of the Lower orders … very numerous, very poor, and have nothing to lose in a revolution’.29 Sounding like MacMillan’s Lapslie, Scott betrays, ‘Some hundreds of the malcontents are already in possession of pistols, a number of pikes … I have my information from those who saw the pistols and who saw the pike-heads. The pike-heads were made in the Caltown of Glasgow by a Smith.’ Scott states that he must remain an anonymous informer as ‘to drag me before an open court of justice would ruin my character, prevent me from ever receiving any information and expose me to be murdered’.30 John Monteath, a Church of Scotland minister of Houston and Killellan, wrote to Sidmouth on 2 March, referring to the chances of a rebellion if ‘Thistlewood’s plan, or some other great event having happened in their favour’ then this ‘was to be the signal for all those desperate men who approved of it, even in the remotest villages, in the counties of Lanark, Renfrew, and Ayr, to rise in a mass, and unite in deeds of violence’.31 On 31 March, Monteath warned Sidmouth of ‘an intended rising tomorrow’.32 Indeed, over the night of Saturday 1 April an ‘Address to the Inhabitants of Great Britain & Ireland’ appeared pasted to walls in a twenty-mile radius around Glasgow, purporting to be from ‘the Committee of Organization for forming a Provisional Government’.33 The Address exhorts people ‘to take up ARMS for the redress of our Common Grievances’. It calls on soldiers to join them ‘and support the laudable efforts which we are about to make to replace to Britons those rights consecrated to them by Magna Charta and the Bill of Rights’.34 The Glasgow Magistrates’ reply, released on 4 April, offered a £300 reward for information that would ‘cause to be DISCOVERED … those guilty of this OVERT ACT of HIGH TREASON, by printing, publishing and issuing the said Revolutionary and Treasonable Address’.35 The fonts and language of the reply are strikingly similar to the ‘Address’. Alexander Richmond, who had been a government spy, suggests the Address might have been produced by a figure called ‘Franklin, alias Fletcher’ who was ‘supposed to have been connected with government’ and may have ‘induced a few ignorant, foolish men (in reality the dupes of the others) to commit overt acts’.36 The Address was effective, as around fifty to sixty thousand people, mainly weavers from Glasgow and Paisley, went on strike.37 It also found its way to Strathaven, from which, on 6 April, James Wilson set out with around fifteen men to join a radical army that was reported to be in Glasgow.38 They got as far as Cathkin, about five miles from Glasgow, but, hearing there was no army of radicals to meet with, went home. Nevertheless Wilson, who had the reputation of being a radical in the 1790s, was soon arrested. In MacMillan’s play, Sidmouth plans to repeat the success of Cato Street by using misinformation to trap rebels: ‘Suppose we are also able to convince the North Britain rabble that the Day of Liberty had arrived. What then?’ (I.vi). Sidmouth has



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a spy ‘on the Glasgow committee by the name of … King’ as it is ‘always wise for Governments to take the precautions of infiltrating the, eh (with malicious emphasis) in-fil-traitors’. A stranger named Shields comes to meet Wilson, saying, ‘The committee in Glesca sent me. The Provisional Government!’ (II.i). He tells Wilson that there are ‘Nae less than five thoosan!’ men on Cathkin Braes where they are to meet ‘by first lich the morn’ (II.i). Wilson leads his friend Matthew Rony, an Irish mill worker, and a ‘score o men’ (II.iii), to Cathkin ‘Armed with pikes, a sword, and one musket’. There they meet a young woman who tells Wilson, ‘Ye’ve tae disband an scatter! The troops are aw-where … There’s nae risin! Ye’ve been trapped!’ (II.iii). Scene vi has Wilson’s trial, but MacMillan was unaware of actual accounts of the trial and invented the testimony. MacMillan has Wilson adamant that he was engaged in a ‘sacred cause’ to attempt ‘tae overthrough the oppressors o ma country … ma conscience tells me that Ah hae done nae mair nor ma duty!’ (II.vi). This is some distance from the truth, as recently discovered accounts of Wilson’s trial attest. MacMillan is likely to have taken the lead of Ellis and Mac A’ Ghobhainn who wrote of the trial: In February 1821, the notes taken by the shorthand writers at the trials were, indeed returned from London to the Crown Agent in Edinburgh and it was agreed that an edited version of the trials should be published … This version of the trials was published in three volumes in 1825 … Despite careful research by the authors (including questionnaires to the major libraries and record offices) assurances were given that the 1825 volumes relating to the trials did not exist or were not catalogued.39

In fact, two accounts of Wilson’s trial exist. There is a trial transcript taken by John Graham that was published as a pamphlet in 1820. Furthermore, the threevolume version that Ellis and Mac A’ Ghobhainn searched for can be found in a number of libraries, and now online.40 These transcripts include witness statements that corroborate Wilson’s ‘Dying Declaration’, that ‘I refused to go; but they threatened to blow my brains out if I did not accompany them … I indignantly reject that imputation that I committed high treason.’41 Matthew Rownie (Rony in the account by John Graham) corroborated that Wilson was forced to participate in the rebellion: ‘I opened the door, and saw James Wilson coming to the door, and he said, “I am not well to-day,” and there was a man behind the door with a gun, and he said “Wilson, no excuses will do to-day, and if you do not rise and come along with us, I will blow your brains out.”’42 Rownie also stated that he later spoke with Wilson on the road to Cathkin, where he said to him: ‘“Jem. This is a bad job you have in hand to-day.” – “Yes,” says he, “I know it is; but I cannot help it now … As soon as I can,” says he, “I will make my escape.”’43 Wilson’s sister, Mrs Barr, who lived under the same roof as her brother, also claimed that he had been forced to take part: ‘for him refusing to go with them; they swore they would set fire to the house, and burn the b___’s house’.44 Summing up, the judge

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dismissed Barr’s account and directed the jury towards a guilty verdict.45 They found Wilson guilty and recommended him to mercy, but he was sentenced to death on 24 July.46 MacMillan’s play casts Wilson as a nationalist opposed to an English government that hates the Scots. Sidmouth states that ‘With the exception of Sir Walter Scott we always did regard the Scots as a bunch of bloody barbarians’ (II.vii). In scene viii the Reverend James Lapslie arrives to gloat at Wilson. Like Arthur Thistlewood, Wilson shuns the church, telling the gaoler ‘Get this man oot o here!’ Lapslie then tries to trick Wilson into signing a folded statement that will entrap fellow reformers, but Wilson is wise to this and rips it in two, to the Lapslie’s malevolent despair. When Wilson is executed, his wife Janet with other women say, ‘Baird, Hardie and Wilson, by cowards executed, / While privileged, corrupted, oor country still runs’ (II.viii). In MacMillan’s play Wilson is a willing participant in a rebellion concerned with Scottish independence. But MacMillan deviates from the story that P. Berresford Ellis and Seumas Mac A’ Ghobhainn tell as he sees the rebellion as a snare that tricks Wilson. MacMillan was unaware of court records that prove Wilson was forced to take part at gunpoint. James Kelman refers to Bonnymuir as an ‘episode of suppressed radical history in Scotland’ in his introduction to Hardie and Baird: The Last Days.47 It began as a radio play, commissioned and directed by Steward Conn for BBC Radio Scotland in 1978, and was later produced by the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in 1990. In the prologue Kelman situates the action entirely within a Scottish rather than a British context, writing: in 1820 there were eighty-eight counts of High Treason in Scotland. There were many transportations and three weavers were executed: James ‘Purly’ Wilson at Glasgow; John Baird and Andrew Hardie at Stirling. The trials themselves were held under English Law, in direct contravention of the 1707 Treaty of Union.48

Kelman begins with Hardie and Baird awaiting trial for high treason after being involved at the ‘Battle of Bonnymuir’. Accounts state that on 4 April around twentyfive men headed by Hardie, an unemployed weaver, marched from Glasgow to Condorrat after seeing the ‘Address’. Here they met John Baird, a weaver who had fought at Waterloo, and a John Andrews who said that he would lead them towards the Carron iron works where they would secure arms. Andrews was in fact John King, a government agent. King presented the group with a piece of paper saying that he was from the ‘Provisional Government for Scotland in Glasgow’.49 He then left Baird and Hardie in command of thirty-five men to seize the arms. However, a troop of the 80th Regiment of Foot were already at the Carron works anticipating their arrival. On 5 April, near Bonnybridge, the men again met King, who instructed them to march on to Bonnymuir. This group, armed with reportedly only five muskets, two pistols and eighteen pikes, were then intercepted by a troop of the 10th Hussars and the Stirlingshire Yeomanry Cavalry.50 The result was a dead horse and



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the capture of the men. Baird and Hardie were tried for high treason and sentenced to be hanged and beheaded. In Kelman’s play Baird and Hardie discuss how King snared them: Baird. … My brother Rab tae he was suspicious frae the start. Even before yous turned up, it was that yin King, the spy, mind him? There was something just no right aboot him. (II.i)

The real Andrew Hardie, when awaiting execution, wrote poetry which refers to King setting him up at Bonnymuir: ‘Him we saw who had us sent, and on the cause he still was bent, / In one short hour I will you meet, with twenty men, equipped, complete.’51 In Kelman’s play Baird and Hardie argue about the role of the clergy within the spy system, discussing the very scene that MacMillan has in The Rising: Baird. Hear me, they sent James Lapslie into auld Purly’s prison cell. Hardie. I know that. Baird. (contemptuous) The Reverend James Lapslie from Campsie – him that spied against Thomas Muir back in the auld days ken that’s your clergy for ye, trotting along to do their maisters’ bidding. (II.iv)

Like MacMillan, Kelman casts Lapslie as a villainous minister who spies for the Home Office. In Kelman’s play Hardie states that he died for his suffering and insulted country … I took up arms not to rob or plunder, but for the restoration of these rights for which our forefathers bled and we have allowed shamefully to be wrested from us and I trust the innocent blood that is soon to be shed will awaken my countrymen from that lethargy which has so overcrowded them. (II.iv)

The characters in this play hanker for a Scotland of the past. A country that still had serfdom in Hardie’s lifetime is being fought for, not an end to a government that was oppressing the labouring classes throughout Britain. F.K. Donnelly challenges the notion that the Scottish rebellions were concerned with nationalism, disagreeing with the assertion that the rising had as one of its main objectives the secession of Scotland from the Union with England of 1707 in order to achieve national liberation … ­evidence of Anglo-Scottish attempts to co-ordinate their respective rebellions in 1820 is completely at odds with the ‘nationalist’ school’s belief that the ‘Celtic fringe’ has historically engaged in interminable and bitter struggles with the domination of Anglo-Saxon England. An objective view … must point out the similarities of the disaffected areas … explain their common involvement in this form of social conflict.52

Donnelly asserts ‘the strength of the relationship between the co-incident unrest in Scotland and the north of England. During the first two weeks of April 1820 when

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the Scottish Rising was in progress, 2,000 armed radicals made an unsuccessful attack on the town of Huddersfield … Days later 400 Barnsley radicals marched to Grange Moor.’53 As with Cathkin, no military engagement took place at West Riding, although Donnelly convincingly places the participants as radicals with revolutionary tendencies. None the less he asserts that ‘government agents did not instigate the rebellion and this removes one of the foundations of the “nationalistic interpretation.” The rising was not a complete failure because the government agents betrayed or confused the radicals, but because the Anglo-Scottish pact broke down when Lancashire and other areas of England failed to rebel.’54 Seeing the failure of Lancashire to rebel being a factor in the failure seems odd, given that all the risings failed without any real conflict, most devastatingly for the conspirators in London, Glasgow and Stirling, who, unlike the West Riding conspirators, were executed. Donnelly seems to concur with R.L. Stevenson’s words in The Master of Ballantrae: ‘Those that have the underhand in any fighting, I have observed, are ever anxious to persuade themselves they were betrayed.’55 For Donnelly, this notion explains the statements of rebels who claimed they were trapped, such as the men sent to Tasmania from West Riding in 1820, who stated ‘we were the Dupes of artful and designing men who acted upon our distresses and our ignorance caused us to be involved in our present unhappy situation’.56 These men alleged that they faced the same Home Office machinations that the rebels in London and Scotland encountered. Plays concerning the Scottish and Cato Street conspiracies lay the blame on informers, spies and agents provocateurs. Contemporary newspapers, statements by the conspirators, questions in Parliament and files in the National Archives all attest to the use of paid spies. Yet many historians disagree. Christopher Whatley writes of the Scottish rebellions that ‘belief that it was simply the work of agents provocateurs, however, has been soundly refuted and finds no substantial evidence in its support’.57 Gordon Pentland accepts that the Cato Street men were set up,58 but not that spies or agents provocateurs operated in Scotland as there is not ‘any trace in the Home Office records or in Sidmouth’s papers. Other spies – Oliver, Castle, Edwards – did leave documentation, which the government made a point of preserving.’59 However, documents relating to those figures was preserved after they were named in court. Edwards’s role was even voiced in Parliament when the Lord Mayor of London, Matthew Wood, said that ‘he could safely pledge himself to prove by indisputable evidence that Edwards was the sole plotter and founder of the Catostreet conspiracy’.60 The spies at work in Scotland did not achieve public notice, but can be found in the archives as letters from clergyman informers prove. The use of spies and baits is further asserted by the participants, such as in Hardie’s poetry and in the statements at Wilson’s trial, which were thought to have been lost until now. The killing of eight men on charges of high treason helped dissipate post-­ Waterloo radicalism and for a few years ended the notion that a British revolu-



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tion could be successful. People who had a history of dissent, like the old radical Wilson, politically minded weavers like Baird and Hardie, and radicals like William Davidson, were sacrificed to try to make people believe that rebellion was useless. Theatrical responses to the risings were written for their own times, as are history books. It is as impossible to say that one has the facts of an event such as Cato Street from watching Stewart Conn’s play Thistlewood as it is to say that the facts are in the files at the National Archives or a contemporary newspaper account. Each author has an agenda concerning the politics of their time: Byron sets his play in the fourteenth century, but it is really about what might happen when a gentleman, like Hobhouse, links himself with radicals. The Champion and Examiner squibs deal with the Home Office spy system, as does Conn’s play Thistlewood. Robert Shaw’s play puts revolutionary leadership and agency in the hands of women, but contains some of the racism of its time; and Tanika Gupta’s play finds racism behind the conviction of William Davidson. The rise of Scottish nationalism infects the MacMillan and Kelman plays. Whether it is in the oral tradition, poetry, drama, contemporary newspapers or reports in archives, it can be seen that the rebellions that resulted in execution were beset by spies and informers. The rising in the West Riding has been beyond the scope of this chapter, but historians such as F.K. Donnelly have argued that the Yorkshire radicals avoided having their cause betrayed, and statements by conspirators that they were ensnared are dismissed as ploys to escape execution. The question remains though: if this is true, how and why would the radicals in Yorkshire escape the machinations of the same authorities who set up the rebels in Scotland and London. As The Champion put it at the time. ‘I tell you madam, it is all a trick.’ Notes Edward Vallance, A Radical History of Britain (London, 2009), p. 344. The Black Dwarf, 4:22 (7 June 1820), pp. 795–6. The British Critic, New Series, 15 (1821), p. 471. Lord Byron, Don Juan, Cantos IX, X and XI (London, 1823), IX.iv. Speech of Lord Byron upon the ‘Frame Work’ Bill, delivered in the House of Lords, 27 Feb. 1812.  6 Byron’s Letters and Journals, ed. Leslie A. Marchand, 13 vols (London, 1977), vol. VII, p. 81.  7 Byron, Letters, vol. VII, p. 62.  8 John Cam Hobhouse, A Trifling Mistake in Thomas Lord Erskine’s Recent Preface (London, 1819), p. 50.  9 TNA, TS 11, fol. 204. 10 Harriet Arbuthnot, The Journal of Mrs. Arbuthnot, 1820–1832, ed. Francis Bamford and the Duke of Wellington, 2 vols (London, 1950), vol. I, p. 17. 11 TNA, TS 11, fol. 204. 12 TNA, HO 44/6, fol. 208.  1  2  3  4  5

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13 Peter Cochran (ed.), ‘Diary of John Cam Hobhouse’, 8 Jan. 1820. http://www.hobby-o. com/newgate.php. 14 Byron, Appendix to Marino Faliero (London, 1821), p. 186. 15 Henry Hobhouse, The Diary of Henry Hobhouse (1820–1827), ed. Arthur Aspinall (London, 1947), p. 13. 16 Hobhouse, Diary, p. 14. 17 The Journal of Mrs. Arbuthnot, vol. I, pp. 5–6. 18 Lord Broughton (John Cam Hobhouse), Recollections of a Long Life, ed. Lady Dorchester, 2 vols (London, 1909), vol. I, p. 126. 19 Broughton, Recollections, p. 387. 20 Robert Shaw, Cato Street (London, 1972), n.p. 21 The Times, 1 Oct. 2001. 22 TNA, HO 42/199, fol. 622. 23 See John Gardner, ‘Cobbett’s Return to England in 1819’, in James Grande and John Stevenson (eds.), William Cobbett, Romanticism and the Enlightenment: Contexts and Legacy (Abingdon, 2015), pp. 61–76. 24 Stewart Conn, Thistlewood (Todmorden, 1979). 25 From the ‘Author’s Original Note’, in Scots Plays of the Seventies, ed. Bill Findlay (Dalkeith, 2001), p. 72. 26 ‘Author’s Original Note’, p. 71. 27 ‘Author’s Original Note’. 28 TNA, HO 102/30, fols 621–2. Lord Advocate to Sidmouth 19 Sept. 1819. 29 TNA, HO 102/30, fol. 526. Letter from Andrew Scott to Lord Sidmouth, 23 Aug. 1819. 30 Letter from Scott to Sidmouth, 22 Sept, 1820, TNA, HO 102/30, fols 649–52. 31 TNA, HO 130/32, fol. 224. 32 TNA, HO 130/32, fol. 297. 33 The Edinburgh Annual Register, for 1820 (Edinburgh, 1823), vol. XIII, i, p. 326. 34 The Edinburgh Annual Register, for 1820, vol. XIII, i, p. 325. 35 The Edinburgh Annual Register, for 1820, vol. XIII, i, p. 324. 36 Alex. B. Richmond, Narrative of the Condition of the Manufacturing Population; and the Proceedings of Government which Led to the State Trials in Scotland (London, 1825), p. 186. 37 R.A. Cage, The Working Class in Glasgow, 1750–1914 (London, 1987), p. 102. 38 Trials for High Treason in Scotland, Under a Special Commission, Held at Stirling, Glasgow, Paisley, Dumbarton and in the Year 1820, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1825), vol. II, p. 305. 39 P.B. Ellis and Seumas Mac A’ Ghobhainn, The Scottish Insurrection of 1820 (London, 1970), p. 267. 40 John Graham, The Trial of James Wilson, Convicted of High Treason Before the Special Commission of Oyer and Terminer, Held at Glasgow, July 1820; with the Proceedings in the Case of the Other Prisoners; and an Account of Wilson’s Execution (Glasgow, 1820); C.J. Green, Trials for High Treason, in Scotland, under a Special Commission, Held at Stirling, Glasgow, Dumbarton, Paisley, and Ayr, in the Year 1820, 3 vols (Edinburgh, 1825). 41 James Wilson, ‘The Dying Declaration of James Wilson. (Written by Himself)’, in Peter MacKenzie, Reminiscences of Glasgow and the West of Scotland (Glasgow, 1865), pp. 177–8.



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42 Green, Trials, vol. I, p. 226. 43 Green, Trials, p. 228. 44 Green, Trials, p. 235. 45 Green, Trials, p. 372. 46 See also John Gardner, ‘Preventing Revolution: Cato Street, Bonnymuir, and Cathkin’, Studies in Scottish Literature, 39:1 (2013), 162–82. 47 James Kelman, Hardie and Baird & Other Plays (London, 1999), p. 107. 48 Kelman, Hardie and Baird, p. 109. 49 MacKenzie, Reminiscences of Glasgow, p. 107. 50 The Monthly Magazine; or, British Register (London, 1820), XLIX, p. 368. 51 Andrew Hardie, ‘Bonnymuir’. Reproduced in Ellis and Mac A’ Ghobhainn, Scottish Insurrection, p. 341. 52 F.K. Donnelly, ‘The Scottish Rising of 1820: A Re-interpretation’, International Review of Scottish Studies, 6 (2008), 35. 53 Donnelly, ‘Scottish Rising of 1820’, 28. 54 Donnelly, ‘Scottish Rising of 1820’, 34. 55 Robert Louis Stevenson, The Master of Ballantrae (London, 1996), p. 12. 56 Yorkshire Rebels’ petition signed at Hobart, 13 Feb. 1826, in Historical Records of Australia, Despatches and Papers Relating to Settlement of the States, ed. Frederick Watson, 37 vols (Sydney, 1922), vol. V, p. 452. 57 Christopher A. Whatley, Scottish Society, 1707–1830: Beyond Jacobitism, towards Industrialisation (Manchester, 2000), p. 309. 58 Gordon Pentland, The Spirit of the Union: Popular Politics in Scotland, 1815–1820 (London, 2011), p. 92. 59 Pentland, The Spirit of the Union, p. 103. 60 Parliamentary Debates: New Series; Commencing with the Accession of George IV. Comprising the Period from the Twenty-First Day of April to the Twenty-Sixth Day of June 1820, ed. T.C. Hansard (London, 1820), vol. I, p. 258.

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Afterword Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid and Colin W. Reid

Is there a British revolutionary tradition? Irish history cannot be explained without revolutionary violence; British history presents a rather different tale. It is noteworthy that, in his discussion of the architect of the Cato Street Conspiracy of 1820, E.P. Thompson compared Arthur Thistlewood’s courage and foolhardiness to the leaders of the Irish rebellions of 1803 and 1916.1 In co-opting Thistlewood as an English ‘Emmet’, Thompson tacitly accepted that there is no appropriate British frame of reference for the conspiracy. Yet, it is not the case that revolutionary violence visited Britain for the first and last time in the troubled year of 1820.2 That Britain did not endure a revolution on a par with the continental upheavals of 1789 or 1848 masks the violent potential of British political culture at various key moments, from the Jacobins of the 1790s to the Chartist agitation of the 1830s and 1840s, via Cato Street. While these instances of unrest appear unrelated, thus undermining the idea of a British revolutionary ‘tradition’, the fear of sustained violence was very real from one moment to the next; perhaps tradition is to be found in the fear of revolutionary violence rather than in revolutionary violence itself.3 The events at Cato Street in 1820 did not completely discredit the tactic of political violence; the Chartists sporadically deployed violent means in the late 1830s and early 1840s, spurred on by the belief that physical force was a form of legitimate political expression when confronting tyranny.4 Only in retrospect does the British experience appear relatively stable. A revolutionary tradition presupposes a radical ideological framework that rejects the constitutional norms of the day and stresses the coherence of a historical consciousness. This consciousness legitimises the contemporary struggle by historicising its dynamics, while also creating a pantheon of revolutionary figures and



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movements. It is plausible to argue that there exists a distinctively Irish revolutionary tradition, as those who deployed violence with the goal of ending British rule in Ireland considered themselves part of a singular insurrectory spirit that spanned centuries. Yet, a persuasive case has been made recently for viewing the United Irishmen of the 1790s through the prism of French-style revolutionary internationalism rather than the more traditional confines of Irish nationalism.5 However, later republicans co-opted the rebellion of 1798 into a national tale of ­struggle against Ireland’s powerful neighbour. The Proclamation of the Irish Republic, which was read aloud in Dublin by Patrick Pearse at the commencement of the Easter Rising of 1916, was steeped in a narrative of oppression and resistance. ‘In every generation the Irish people have asserted their right to national freedom and sovereignty’, the Proclamation asserts; ‘six times during the past three hundred years they have asserted it in arms’.6 While it is bad history to bundle up Irish revolutionary moments as one and the same thing, the inescapable fact is that Irish republicans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries envisaged themselves as the latest recruits in a long war against an unchanging foe. Pearse took time to sketch out an Irish separatist canon that included Theobald Wolfe Tone, carried through the nineteenth century via Thomas Davis and John Mitchel, and culminated with an exhortation that the generation of 1916 would not shrink from a historically mandated struggle.7 Such writings did much to ‘invent’ a revolutionary tradition. There is nothing quite like this in Britain. British towns, cities and countryside have witnessed political violence, but the perpetrators do not neatly fit into a distinctive revolutionary box. There was no concerted attempt to craft a British revolutionary canon. Jacobin, Luddite, Chartist and pro-reform violence represented the fragmented nature of physical-force politics in Britain. There were occasional overlaps in personnel (members of the London Corresponding Society were found in the ranks of the Chartists, and former Chartists were in the crowd at the meeting in Hyde Park in 1866 which spilled over into violence), but the revolutionary moments appear isolated. Nineteenth-century British radicalism, by and large, operated within a ‘constitutional idiom’, which stressed the compatibility of radical programmes and the existing legal and political framework of the state.8 It is telling that, when Alexis de Tocqueville travelled through England in 1835, he noted the commitment of English radicals to constitutional means, in contrast to French radical ‘contempt for the law’.9 English radicalism drew legitimacy from constitutional traditions, meaning that violence largely remained the preserve of political desperadoes and not the basis for a united national movement. The fact that radical constitutional changes from the Magna Carta to the revolution of 1688 occurred with little violence in England appeared to strengthen this conviction; it was too tempting to adopt a Whiggish view of English history that showcased moral force as the engine for change. Tocqueville summed up this mindset of English radicalism with a typically acute reflection: ‘I have never caught them showing signs of wishing to impose on the Nation (even for its own good) a political condition not of its own choosing.’10

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Irish republicans might say that this was precisely the problem. In contrast to English radicalism, Irish republicans celebrated a revolutionary canon which emphasised a disregard for British law and basked in audacious acts of rebellion. One of the most enduring collections of Irish republican oratory was Speeches from the Dock, which was first published in 1867 and went through multiple editions until the mid-twentieth century. Speeches from the Dock anthologised the Irish revolutionary tradition by gathering the courtroom addresses of rebels such as Theobald Wolfe Tone, William Orr and Robert Emmet, popularising their subversive ideas and normalising their illegal actions.11 Arthur Thistlewood and the Cato Street conspirators did not receive any such attention. The Cato Street affair was not the victim of a form of ‘social forgetting’ following 1820 (a process which Guy Beiner has recently brilliantly described with regard to the memory of the 1798 rebellion within the Ulster psyche);12 it was simply not claimed as the inheritance of any later groups. While republicans in Ireland continued to recover the archaeology of revolutionary action throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,13 radicals in Britain airbrushed the Cato Street Conspiracy from history, preferring instead to emphasise the state-inflicted trauma of Peterloo in 1819.14 At his trial following the breaking-up of the conspiracy, Thistlewood referred to Peterloo as an act of ‘High Treason against the people of Manchester’, a sentiment with which many radicals would have agreed. But it was quite an imaginative leap to arrive at Thistlewood’s favoured solution of tyrannicide, with the government depicted as Caesar and the Cato Street conspirators as Brutus and Cassius. ‘Insurrection’, Thistlewood declared, was ‘a public duty’ when a government harmed its own people.15 This convinced few people in England, but was a defence that chimed with the messages of the most infamous Irish rebels gathered in Speeches from the Dock. Indeed, in keeping with the focus on revolutionary rhetoric, the Cato Street conspirators deployed a metaphysical tool favoured by Irish republicans since Emmet. In preparation of a national uprising following the assassination of the cabinet, Thistlewood planned to release a public declaration which read, ‘Your tyrants are destroyed – the friends of liberty are called upon to come forward – the Provisional Government is now sitting’.16 Similarly, the risings in Ireland of 1803, 1867 and 1916 were accompanied by proclamations from self-styled ‘Provisional Governments of the Irish Republic’.17 A revolutionary elite casting itself as a ‘provisional government’ thus attempted to appropriate the stewardship of a sovereign nation. While the notion of a provisional government was primarily a rhetorical device in the context of Cato Street, it was a response to contemporary debates surrounding the nature of political legitimacy. For the radicals, the provisional government signalled the beginning of the republic of Britain, legitimising the violence needed to achieve the downfall of aristocratic rule. For the state and its defenders, the possible existence of a provisional government represented an act of high treason, justifying the harshest possible punishment for the rebels caught in the act. The Cato Street Conspiracy does not fit easily into traditional narratives of either



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British radicalism or the British state. The conspiracy, with its curious mixture of outcasts, informers, a provisional government, unrealistic expectations and, above all, a bungled execution, looks decidedly Irish. Scholars tend to pass by the affair quickly in histories of radicalism in Britain, suggesting that it was not a matter of importance. Yet, as this volume vividly demonstrates, the events of Cato Street are ripe for reinterpretation, and can illuminate many facets of British life in 1820, such as class, race and gender, as well as violence, the state and ideas of political legitimacy. While widely disowned by British radicals, Cato Street cannot be divorced from its context. Perhaps Cato Street was to Peterloo what the Young Ireland rebellion of 1848 was to the Famine: a violent act of desperation carried out by a small number of radicalised and alienated outcasts, in the context of a perceived breach of the social contract under which the state had an obligation to protect its citizens. While ultimately both the 1820 conspiracy and the rebellion of 1848 were dismal failures, they were part of the larger respective stories of Peterloo and the Famine. As such, the attempts at insurrection reveal much about life in Britain and Ireland in dangerous times of turmoil. Traditions, it has been famously argued, are invented.18 Great care went into the crafting of an Irish revolutionary tradition by separatists during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and violent actions and mentalities remain a primary research area for historians of Ireland. No such tradition was proclaimed in Britain during the same epoch, and British historiography remains largely blind to political violence. It is tempting to present Irish and British histories in binaries: violence and non-violence; insurrectionary and pacific politics; perpetual unrest and seeming tranquillity. Yet, such binaries are unhelpful, as they misinterpret the political cultures that flowered in Ireland and Britain, which were distinguished by fluidity and a complex relationship with violence. Radical politics in both countries did not follow clearly delineated boundaries of violent and non-violent action; nor were, of course, Irish politics exclusively violent and British politics purely peaceful. For example, the Conservatives dabbled in violence with their support for the Ulster Volunteer Force during 1913–14, and in 1918 Sinn Féin was transformed from a niche protest group into a mass political party.19 Revolutionary traditions do not exist in isolation from other political traditions. The challenge remains to reconcile the rather different impulses of the national historiographies to tell the story of the United Kingdom in all its complexity. The revolutionary tradition in Ireland is as much part of British history as it is of Irish history. The most innovative recent histories of the United Kingdom are often produced by those who seek to integrate British and Irish history into a single framework, either uncovering significant exchanges of people and ideas or interrogating subject matter in a comparative manner.20 When John Pocock made his noted plea for new approaches to British history in 1973, he challenged the dominant historiographical tradition that called itself British history but was, in fact, merely English history. This Anglocentric approach was a historiographical expression of

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what Pocock depicted as the ‘dominant culture’ with Great Britain after 1707 and the United Kingdom (after 1801). ‘The obvious first step’, argued Pocock, ‘in passing from “English” to “British” history would be to make sure that the student read as much of Irish as he [sic] did of English historiography.’ This was not intended as reparations for historical guilt on behalf of the English historian, but simply to recognise that ‘things happen in different places at the same time’.21 After a slow start, we have taken significant historiographical strides in this direction. Of course, contemporaries at times looked in the wrong places for revolutionary moments. One of the most intriguing studies of nineteenth-century Ireland was written by the travel companion of Alexis de Tocqueville. Published in 1839 as L’Irlande: sociale, politique, réligieuse, it was Gustave de Beaumont’s masterpiece, a book that shed light on the dark underbelly of British ‘tyranny’ in Ireland in the era before the Famine. De Beaumont, in a Tocquevillian fashion, was fascinated by the growth of democratic sentiment in Ireland, and thus gravitated towards Daniel O’Connell and his movement for the Repeal of the Union. In O’Connell, de Beaumont saw a figure with the power of a sovereign, an ‘empire of a single man’ who directed the mass of the people.22 Because of the tensions between Ireland’s aristocratic rulers and democratic-inclined inhabitants, de Beaumont believed that the country was a revolutionary powder keg. O’Connell, he believed, was potentially a dangerous spark. The O’Connellite movement was, de Beaumont conceded, committed to peaceful agitation, but such was its scale that he could not avoid asking a rhetorical question. ‘The purpose is to prepare a petition to parliament’, de Beaumont wrote, but ‘what would be the result if, instead of asking for petitions, the association demanded bayonets?’23 The theory was never put to the test. While de Beaumont’s observations remain thought-provoking, from the vantage point of 1839 it was the radical movement in Britain that presented the more serious revolutionary challenge. De Beaumont did not reflect on Chartism in his study of Ireland, but, as the book was being published, militant Chartists were planning the Newport rising of November 1839, which triggered sporadic attempts at rebellion across Britain the following year. Attempts at insurrection were more akin to riots and were quickly suppressed; the violence petered out in 1840.24 ‘Physical-force’ Chartism differed from ‘moral-force’ Chartism in matters not of ideological outcome but of tactical manoeuvre. The early Chartist slogan was, after all, ‘Peaceably if we may, forcibly if we must’.25 The dilemmas of the repeal and Chartist movements were often similar. In Ireland, O’Connell was firmly opposed to violence, but the Repeal association split in the mid-1840s over the theoretical right to deploy physical force. The question of violence was thus a shared aspect in British and Irish political cultures during the 1830s and 1840s. The ebbing and flowing of the politics of physical force, its relative strength in Ireland and weakness in Britain, and the continuities and discontinuities between the two countries, should remain vital research areas. In finally treating the Cato Street Conspiracy as a serious topic for historical investigation, we gain a deeper understanding of the revolutionary



Afterword 191

impulses and counter-revolutionary reactions that shaped the United Kingdom in 1820 and beyond. Notes  1 Thompson, EWC, p. 701.  2 Chase, 1820.  3 See Edward Royle, Revolutionary Britannia? Reflections on the Threat of Revolution in Britain, 1789–1848 (Manchester, 2000).  4 Paul Pickering, “Peaceably if we can, forcibly if we must’: Political Violence and Insurrection in Early-Victorian Britain’, in Brett Bowden and Michael T. Davis (eds), Terror: From Tyrannicide to Terrorism (Brisbane, 2008), p. 115.  5 Ultán Gillen, ‘Constructing Democratic Thought in Ireland, 1775–1800’, in Joanna Innes and Mark Philp (eds), Re-imagining Democracy in the Age of Revolutions: America, France, Britain, Ireland, 1750–1850 (Oxford, 2013), pp. 150–1.  6 Proclamation of the Irish Republic (1916). Conflict Archive on the Internet: http://cain. ulst.ac.uk/issues/politics/docs/pir24416.htm (accessed 20 Dec. 2018).  7 See in particular Pearse’s final essays in Collected works of Pádraic H. Pearse: Political Writings and Speeches (Dublin, 1924), pp. 219–372.  8 James A. Epstein, ‘The Constitutional Idiom: Radical Reasoning, Rhetoric and Action in Early Nineteenth-century England’, Journal of Social History, 23:3 (1990), 553–74.  9 Alexis de Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, ed. J. P. Mayer (New Haven, CT, 1958), pp. 87. 10 De Tocqueville, Journeys to England and Ireland, p. 86. 11 Colin W. Reid, ‘Constitutional Rhetoric as Legal Defence: Irish Lawyers and the Languages of Political Dissent in 1848’, in Kyle Hughes and Donald M. MacRaild (eds), Crime, Violence and the Irish in the Nineteenth Century (Liverpool, 2017), p. 116. 12 Guy Beiner, Forgetful Remembrance: Social Forgetting and Vernacular Historiography of a Rebellion in Ulster (Oxford, 2018). 13 Bulmer Hobson (ed.), The Letters of Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1920) and The Life of Wolfe Tone (Dublin, 1921). 14 Malcolm Chase, Chartism: A New History (Manchester, 2007), p. 46. 15 W.B. Gurney, The Trials of Arthur Thistlewood, James Ings, John Thomas Brunt, Richard Tidd, William Davidson, and Others, for High Treason: At the Sessions House in the Old Bailey … April, 1820, with the Antecedent Proceedings, 2 vols (London, 1820), vol. II, pp. 630–1. 16 Quoted in Wilkinson, Authentic History, p. 152. 17 Although it should be noted that the proclamation was seized by the Crown in advance of the 1803 rising. 18 E.J. Hobsbawm and T.O. Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge, 1983). 19 Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid and Colin W. Reid, ‘Introduction: The Constitutional And Revolutionary Histories of Modern Ireland’, in Nic Dháibhéid and Reid (eds), From Parnell to Paisley: Constitutional and Revolutionary Politics in Modern Ireland (Dublin, 2010), p. 2. 20 Outstanding examples include Eugenio F. Biagini, British Democracy and Irish

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Nationalism, 1876–1906 (Cambridge, 2007); Innes and Philps (eds), Re-imagining Democracy; Alvin Jackson, The Two Unions: Ireland, Scotland and the Survival of the United Kingdom (Oxford, 2011); Matthew Roberts, ‘Daniel O’Connell, ‘Repeal and Chartism in the Age of Atlantic Revolutions’, Journal of Modern History, 90:1 (2018), 1–39. 21 J.G.A. Pocock, ‘British History: A Plea for a New Subject’, reprinted in Pocock, The Discovery of Islands: Essays in British History (Cambridge, 2005), p. 37. 22 Gustave de Beaumont, Ireland: Social, Political and Religious, ed. W.C. Taylor (Cambridge, MA, 2006), p. 228. 23 De Beaumont, Ireland, p. 220. 24 Royle, Revolutionary Britannia?, pp. 111–12. 25 Chase, Chartism, p. 46.



Index 193

Index

Abbott, Lord Chief Justice 77 Adams, Robert 26 Addison, Joseph 58 Adolphus, John 56 agent(s) provocateur(s) 2, 6, 10–11, 18, 20, 26, 36, 56, 59, 73, 77, 119, 122, 131, 144, 175, 182 Americans, indigenous 13, 105–6 Andrews, John 180 Anglo-Saxon England 66, 181 Arbuthnot, Harriet 24, 26, 171, 173, 174, 183 Armstrong, John Warneford 119–20, 127 Australia Bathurst 22, 24, 158–60, 165 Newcastle 155–7 New South Wales (NSW) 14, 154–6, 158, 163, 165–7 Port Macquarie 157 Storey Bushranging Gang, NSW 159 Sydney 154–5, 157–9, 165–7 Sydney Gaol 155–6 Tasmania 182 Baird, John 180 Baker, Robert 27 Bamford, Samuel 35, 39, 143, 176 Barbados 88, 90–2, 113 Barbauld, Anna Laetitia 102 Bastille (Paris) 35, 74, 104

Beaumont, Gustave de 190 Belfast 139, 144–5 Berri, duc de (assassinated) 55, 64, 65, 66, 68, 69, 72 Blackburn, Reverend Gideon 107 books see printed items Boer War 67 Bonaparte, Napoleon 66 Bond, Oliver 123, 130–1 Bonnymuir, battle of 169, 180–1 Boswell, James 177 Bow Street Runners 2, 3, 21–3, 56, 163 Bradburn, Richard 3, 21, 135, 156–8, 163–5 Brisbane, Sir Thomas 156, 157–8 Brown, John, Cato Street plotter 64 Brown, John, US abolitionist 17 Brunt, John 2, 7, 8, 65, 174–5 Burdett, Sir Francis 11, 38–44, 84, 140 Burke, Edmund 174 Burns, Robert 3, 4, 69 Byron, Lord 135, 169–70, 171, 173–4, 183 Ça ira, revolutionary song 3 Cape Colony 27, 73, 154 Caribbean 12–13, 81–3, 85, 87, 89, 91, 93–4 Carlile, Richard 54, 60, 68, 69–70, 93 his wife 54 Carlyle, Thomas (historian) 37, 145 Caroline, Queen 42–3, 45, 145 Cartwright, Thomas 39, 171

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Index

Castle, John 25 Castlereagh, Lord 7–8, 19, 22–5, 131, 140, 142, 173–4, 177 Castro, Fidel 11 Cathkin rebellion 169, 178–9, 182 Catholic Emancipation 10, 143, 146 Charles I, King 60 Charlotte, Queen 20 Chartism 14, 146–7, 162, 186–7, 190 Chase, Malcolm viii, 6–7, 9, 51, 64, 101, 135 Churchill, Sir Winston 23 Clanwilliam, Lord 22 Clarke, Francis 156–7 Cobbett, Anne 45 Cobbett, William x, 9, 11, 42–5, 53, 57–8, 77, 89, 174–5 Coghlan, Terence 121 Coldstream Guards 2 Conn, Stewart 14, 169, 176, 180, 183 Cooper, Charles 3, 21, 153, 158, 161, 163–7 Corbett, William 141 Corn Law 36 Coventry 44–5, 57 Cromwell, Oliver 60 Cruikshank, George 43, 67, 68 Cugoano, Ottobah 92 Davenport, Allen 73 Davidson, Sarah 89 Davidson, William 2, 3–5, 12, 19, 21, 82–90, 93–9, 170, 174–5, 177, 183 Davis, Thomas 187 Davitt, Michael 131, 147 Despard, Colonel Edward 13, 66, 120, 123, 126, 131, 136–7 Doherty, John 146 Drought, Thomas 127 Dublin Castle 75, 130, 136, 139–40, 143–4 Dugdale, William 93 Dwyer, Thomas 18–21, 26–7, 29, 111, 173 Easter Rising 169 see also Ireland Edmonds, Mr, editor of Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register 55–56 Edward II, King 3 Edwards, George 8, 20–1, 24–29, 36, 53–4, 85, 174–7, 182 Elder, Reverend James 126 Emmet, Robert 13–14, 38, 121, 126, 131, 136, 147, 186, 188

Erskine, Thomas 39 Evans, Thomas 38, 67, 90, 109, 141 Felton, John (assassin) 60 Fenians 9, 17 Finnerty, Peter 118–30, 140–2 Fitzgerald, Lord Edward 123 Fletcher, Colonel, Bolton magistrate 139 Foucault, Michel 67 Fox Burgoyne, Sir John 21 French Revolution 10, 13, 34–5, 37, 51, 59, 65, 69, 73, 81 George III, King 76–7 Gilchrist, James 3, 21, 153, 163 Glindon, William 90 Glorious Revolution 35 Gordon Riots 40, 68 Goulburn, Henry 155 Gracchus, pseudonym 58 Graham, John 179 Gupta, Tanika 169, 175, 183 Haiti 82, 91–2, 94, 113 see also St Domingo Haitian revolution 92, 102, 112–13 Hall, Abel 8, 26, 172 Hall, Francis 58 Hamilton Rowan, Archibald 119, 123, 124–6, 130–1 Hardie, Andrew 180–1, 183 Harrison, John 3, 153, 158–60, 164–5 Harrowby, Lady 24, 29 Harrowby, Lord 1–2, 8, 11, 18–19, 21–5, 28–9, 171, 175–6 Hiden, Thomas 11, 18–19, 21–2, 24, 26–9, 111, 173, 174 Hilton, Boyd 37 Hobhouse, Sir Benjamin 172 Hobhouse, Henry 21, 24–5, 27, 154, 173 Hobhouse, John Cam 41–3, 57, 59, 70, 171–2, 174, 183 Hone, Ann 6, 45 Hone, William (d. 1683) 59 Hone, William (d. 1842) 11, 12, 42, 49–51, 52, 57–9, 61, 176 Hunt, Henry 11, 39–45, 53, 70, 110, 135, 143, 171, 176 Incas 112 Ings, James 3, 7–8, 21, 53, 156, 171, 174–5 IRA see Óglaigh na hÉireann



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Ireland x, 34, 38, 81, 109–12, 118, 122, 129–31, 135–7, 139–40, 142–6, 162–3, 169, 187–92 Irish War of Independence 9 Jackson, Reverend William 120, 123, 130 Jamaica 4, 12, 82–3, 91–3, 113 James II, King 60 Jefferson, President Thomas 103, 107 Johnson, John (escaped Cato St. conspirator) 65, 74 juries 57, 86, 119, 122, 125–6, 129–30, 180 Kennedy, John F. 11 Kyezor, Louis 28 Labour Party, the 35 Lapslie, Reverend James 177, 180–1 Latham, Sir John, antiquarian 60 LCS (London Corresponding Society) 14, 38, 41, 66, 107–9, 114, 136–7, 187 Leinster Directory 123, 127 Life Guards 23 Lilburne, John 59 Liverpool, Lord 18, 28, 44, 74, 76, 84, 136, 138, 158, 165 Locke, John 69 London (places and taverns) Antelope public house, 53 Bishopsgate Street 49, 52–3, 59 Brooke’s Market 53 Cold Bath Fields 39 Crown & Anchor public house 42, 44, 53, 70, 174 Gee’s Court 19, 111 Grosvenor Square 1–2, 8, 18, 23, 25, 175 Harley Street 8, 60 Holywell Lane 53 Hopkins Street, Soho 73, 74, 142 see also Wedderburn, Robert Lord’s Cricket Ground 85 Marylebone 20 Mary-le-Bone, parish 88 Primrose Hill (armed drilling) 114 Queen, Street 53 Sidney Street 23, 67 Spa Fields 14, 25, 38, 43, 51, 56, 77, 110–11, 143, 176 Tower of London 40–1, 56, 121 White Hart Tavern 49, 52–3 London Corresponding Society see LCS London Working Men’s Association 146

Louvel, Louis Pierre (assassin) 66 Luddite disturbances 36, 37, 39, 139–40, 171, 187 Lynch, Arthur, MP 67 Lyster, John 123, 124, 125–7 Mabeuf (literary character) 175 Macartney, Reverend George 126 McCalman, Iain 6, 83, 90, 94, 110, 137, 141, 148 McGarry, Fearghal 9, 17 Machiavelli, Niccolò 10 MacMillan, Hector 14, 169, 177 McNally, Leonard 118–19, 121–3 Macquarie, Governor 154–5 Magna Carta 40, 178, 187 Manchester 55, 58, 72–3, 75, 114, 136, 138–9, 143, 146–7 Maule, George 23, 26 Maume, William 118 Mendicity Society, of London 88, 94 Mitchel, John 187 Monteath, John 178 Monument, John 21, 25–6, 85 Morton, William 125–6 Naples 68–71 Napoleonic Wars 10, 35–7, 39, 81, 86, 90, 137, 141, 163 Newgate 27, 29, 42, 57, 89–90, 123, 153, 171–2, 174 newspapers see printed items Noel, Sir Gerard 70 O’Brien, Bronterre 146 O’Coigly, James 129 O’Connell, Daniel 38, 146, 161, 190 O’Connor, Arthur, MP 13, 122, 124, 127, 129–30, 130–1, 146 O’Connor, Fergus 146 Óglaigh na hÉireann (IRA) 9 Oliver, William, spy 25, 73, 144, 182 Orr, William 13, 119, 122, 126, 128, 130–1, 188 Paine, Thomas 39, 44, 54, 68, 69, 176 pamphlets see printed items Paris 55, 65–9, 73, 110, 141 Pearse, Patrick 38, 187 Peasants’ Revolt 59 Peel, Sir Robert ix Pentland, Gordon 182 Pentrich rebellion 25, 51, 73

196 Peterloo 1, 3, 4, 12, 14, 39, 42, 43–4, 51–2, 54, 58–60, 65, 68–9, 72–4, 76–77, 90, 92, 114, 144, 147, 174, 188–9 Philpott Curran, John 119, 127 Pitt, William 123–4 Place, Francis 11, 38–9, 40, 41–5 Plumer, Thomas 122, 124 Pocock, John 189–90 Portugal 12, 65, 68, 69, 70 Powerscourt, Lord 124 Preston, Thomas 7, 55, 56, 60, 74, 111, 114, 142, 160–1 printed items Axe Laid to the Root, The 90–3, 112–13 see also Wedderburn, Robert Belfast News-Letter 123 Belle Assemblée, La 87 Black Dwarf, The 54–5, 70, 170, 183 see also Wooler, Thomas J. British Gazette, The 54, 55 Cobbett’s Evening Post 56 Cobbett’s Weekly Political Register 35, 55 Don Juan 171 see also Byron, Lord Dublin Recorder 125 Examiner, The 169 Faulkner’s Dublin Journal 125 Forlorn Hope 90 Hampshire Telegraph 65 Horrors of Slavery, The 90, 93–4 see also Wedderburn, Robert Independent Whig, The 110, 140 Killing Noe Murder, 60 Lancet, The 27 Leeds Mercury 69–70 Letter to Lord Sidmouth, A 58 Lion, The 93 see also Richard Carlile Look and Learn 5 Manchester and Salford Advertiser 146 Manchester Observer 55 Man in the Moon, The 57 Marino Faliero 171–2, 174 see also Byron, Lord Medusa, republican newspaper 60 Morning Chronicle, The 140 Nation, The 129 New Times, The 20, 174–5 Northern Liberator 146 Northern Star, The 146–7 Petit Journal, Le 67 Poor Man’s Guardian 146

Index Press, The 128, 140 Republican, The 43 see also Carlile, Richard Socialist Worker 16 Soir, Le 67 Sussex Chronicle 65 Vermont American 64 Quebec 64 race ix, 6, 82–3, 86–7, 89, 93–4, 103, 189 racism 15, 86, 88, 91, 94, 175, 183 ‘Paddy’, racist image of 145 Redgrave, Vanessa 174 Rediker, Marcus 82 Reynolds, Thomas 119, 123, 127 rights of man 101–2, 105, 107 Robert the Bruce 3 Robespierre, fall of 66 Robin Hood Society 141 Romilly, Sir Samuel 42 Royal Navy 84, 88, 90 Rudé, George 168 Russell, Thomas 120–1, 131 Ryan, Elizabeth 90 Rye House Plot 59 scaffold 3, 5, 89, 119, 129, 174, 177 Scots Wha Hae, song 3–4, 177 Scott, Sir Walter 180 Scotty, Betty 147 Sewell, Robert 84 Shakespeare, William 58, 69 Shaw, Robert 14, 174, 169, 183–4 Shaw Strange, John 3, 153, 156, 158–63, 165 Sheares, Henry & John 13, 119, 120, 127, 131 ships Elizabeth Henrietta 155 Guildford, prison ship 153–5, 163 Laurel, prison ship 154 Leviathan, prison ship 154 Nabob, HMS 90 Polyphemus, HMS 90 Thames 27 shoemakers 19, 64–5, 110, 111, 142, 156, 158 Sidmouth, Lord 7–8, 20–1, 23–5, 27, 29, 39, 58, 72, 75–6, 92, 170, 173–4, 177–8, 180, 182 Sinn Féin 189 Six Acts 3, 7, 36, 44, 54 Smithers, Richard 21, 26, 67



Index 197

Smith O’Brien, William 162 Spain 12, 59, 65, 68, 69, 70–2, 74 Sparrow, George 64–5 Sparrow, George (escaped Cato St conspirator) 64 Spence, Thomas x, 6, 13, 38, 66–7, 90, 101–9, 112, 141, 176 Spencean Philanthropists, Society of x, 13, 38, 43, 67, 74, 77, 101–3, 109–11, 101–3, 110–11, 114, 141–2, 145 Spensonia, constitution for 104, 105, 107, 112 St Domingo 91, 112–13 see also Haiti Stoddart, John 20, 175 Strutt, Joseph 36 Suttor, William Henry 160 Sydney, Algernon 60, 69 Taylor, Sir Herbert 20 Thelwall, John 136 Therry, Judge Roger 159–60 Thistlewood, Arthur 2–3, 8, 7, 10, 12–13, 19–21, 25–6, 42–4, 53–8, 67–8, 72–5, 84, 93–4, 109, 110–11, 142–3, 144, 171–7, 180, 183, 186, 188 Thistlewood, Susan 174–6 Thomason, George, bookseller 61 Thompson, E.P. 35–7, 56, 174, 186 Tidd, Richard 3, 19, 21, 65, 175 Titus, Silius 60 Tocqueville, Alexis de 187, 190 Tolpuddle Martyrs 162 Tone, Theobold Wolfe 187–8

Ulster 5, 135, 137, 144 United Englishmen 14, 109–10 United Irishmen 6, 13, 38, 73, 109, 113, 118–20, 122–4, 126, 128–30, 135, 136, 139, 140, 146, 187 Vanderkiste, Reverend R.W. 160 Varley, William 71 Vinegar Hill 113, 131, 142 Volney, C.F. 103 Wakley, Thomas 27 Walcot, Thomas 59 Walker, Hugh 154 Waterloo 171, 180, 183 Watson, James 25, 38, 39, 43, 72, 111 Webb, R.K. (historian) 5 Wedderburn, Robert 73, 82–4, 89–94, 103, 112–14, 142 Wellesley, Arthur, Duke of Wellington 18, 21–6, 29, 41 69, 72, 171 Westmorland, Lord 25 Weston, Elizabeth 85 West Riding 74, 182–3 Wheatley, Hugh 119, 122, 126 Wilberforce, William 112 Wilkes, John 39, 41 Wilson, James 3, 19, 21, 70, 72, 158–61, 153, 159, 163, 165, 169, 177–81 Wilson, Sir Robert 70 Wooler, Thomas J. 9, 11–12, 38, 44, 49–50, 51–7, 58, 59, 61 Young Ireland Movement 162, 189