Enemies of the State Read online

  By the end of the year, many leading radicals, whether they had been involved in Manchester or not, were in gaol or awaiting trial on a variety of charges; Hunt, Bamford, Saxton and others who had been unceremoniously bundled from St Peter’s Fields; James Wroe of the Manchester Observer; Burdett, Cartwright, Wolseley, Carlile.

  What no one outside Manchester knew was that the heart had been ripped out of the local radical movement. Bamford wrote of men sharpening scythes and muttering in darkness about retribution. An ugly crowd milled for a night or two around the house of Edward Meagher, trumpeter of the MYC. But nothing actually happened. London, in particular, seemed unaware of this or perhaps they merely wanted to keep the open-air meeting alive. On 29 August there was a huge rally at Smithfield, at which Arthur Thistlewood was principal speaker. An even larger one took place the following week in Westminster, with Burdett, Cartwright and John Thelwall holding forth. And there were rumblings in the provinces too. In October and November there was talk of pike-production in smithies across Newcastle, Sheffield and Birmingham. Drilling was carried out in Halifax, Wigan, Bolton, Blackburn and Huddersfield.

  It was in these weeks that Watson, Thistlewood and Preston began to plan their own revolution. Admittedly, the information came largely from an informer, John Williamson, but the authorities certainly believed it. The rising was initially planned to take place on the day of Bartholomew Fair, 28–29 August and the police were employed rummaging through agricultural baskets, oyster-tubs and sausage-stalls looking for pike-heads. The Life Guards and Royal Horse Guards were on stand-by just in case. By this time, it is clear that Thistlewood, not Watson, was the prime mover. He held secret meetings at midnight, made enquiries as to the number of cannon in certain London barracks and arranged for a crowd to cheer Richard Carlile as he arrived for his trial at the King’s Bench.

  What prevented any rising at Bartholomew Fair (or anywhere else in London in these weeks) was an upswing in the economy, making the weavers of Spitalfields for instance less likely to get involved in dangerous politics. It didn’t help that Watson, in particular, kept his plans a close secret in case of spies or informers, thereby confusing everybody, including himself. But the major reason, by November, was the passing of the government’s Six Acts.

  The term ‘police state’ did not exist in 1819, but the measures rushed through by the government after parliament reconvened at the end of November almost defined it. The Training Prevention Act prevented the unarmed, silent drilling which had so unnerved Byng and Nadin’s constables. Anyone found guilty would be liable to transportation for seven years or imprisonment for two. The Seizure of Arms Act gave the authorities the right to search any premises or individual for illegal weapons, especially no doubt the dreaded pike. The disturbing point about this was that the oath of only one witness was necessary for this law to be put into motion. When that witness was a spy or the searchers were Nadin’s corrupt, evidence-planting constables, the scope for injustice was huge. The Misdemeanours Act was designed to rush judgments through the courts. The longer men like Hunt were allowed to wander round on bail stirring up discontent, the worse a situation was likely to get. The Seditious Meetings Act prevented the holding of meetings of more than fifty people without the written consent of a magistrate or sheriff. Even with consent, such meetings could be dispersed within fifteen, as opposed to sixty, minutes and there were to be no banners, no outsiders and no semblance of drill. The government was also aware of the inflammatory potential of newspapers and journals, no doubt the Manchester Observer foremost among them. The Blasphemous and Seditious Libels Act threatened radical editors (and indeed non-radical ones like Thomas Barnes of The Times) with severe punishment including exile for articles likely to disturb the peace. The Newspaper and Stamp Duties Act, finally, hit journals like the Black Dwarf and Twopenny Trash with duties for the first time. This meant that cheap editions were now a thing of the past; editors had to deposit large sums of money against any fines that might be imposed.

  It is true that habeas corpus was not again suspended, but it is difficult to imagine how much tighter the radical cause could have been hemmed in. At a stroke, freedom of the press was censored. The right of Englishmen to bear arms was destroyed. The open-air meeting, the most public expression of working-class and popular grievance, was savagely curtailed. None of this excuses what nearly happened in Grosvenor Square two months later, but it does place it in context. As long as men like Lord Ellenborough could see ‘no possible good to be derived to the country from having statesmen at the loom and politicians at the spinning jenny’, the only recourse open to the hard-liners of the radical movement was illegality and bloodshed.

  In February 1818 the leader of the Cato Street conspiracy, Arthur Thistlewood, continued his headlong rush to self-destruction by challenging Lord Sidmouth to a duel. He published an open letter to the man, listing a whole variety of grievances, some personal, some national. As a result, Thistlewood found himself in prison, first at the King’s Bench, then in Horsham. According to E P Thompson, Sidmouth paid for Thistlewood’s time in gaol personally, but if he did, Thistlewood was singularly ungrateful, because on his release he not only sent a list of damages to Sidmouth, but had them published in pamphlet form. Thistlewood claimed he had been all set to emigrate with his wife and son to America and that Sidmouth owed him £180.

  A rather miffed John Cam Hobhouse, Sidmouth’s Under Secretary, told Thistlewood his demands were unreasonable. Thistlewood replied that he hoped Hobhouse

  thenceforth . . . will cast off [his] hypocritical saintlyness . . . and appear in no other character but [his] own, that of the willing tool of the vilest of mankind.

  And he sent Hobhouse a list of belongings from his family that he wanted back – a coat, a pair of pantaloons, a waistcoat, three shirts, two pairs of stockings, a hat, a coat, waistcoat and trousers for his little boy, as well as the lad’s bed, box of colours, inkstand, two writing books, music books and several goose-quills. Not to mention Mrs. Thistlewood’s umbrella.

  By the autumn of 1819, Watson, Thistlewood and the rest had organized the mysterious Committee of Two Hundred; mysterious, because when Thistlewood needed their support in Cato Street, they were nowhere to be seen. Some of them certainly can be named. John Gale Jones, the old Jacobin who had been active in London radicalism since the 1790s was there and apart from the old Spa Fields ‘gang’ of Watson, Preston and Thistlewood himself, Samuel Waddington had joined the throng. They were backed by various hard-line publications – the Republican, the Medusa and the Cap of Liberty.

  Increasingly the centre of activities for Thistlewood in the weeks before Cato Street became the White Lion, in Wych Street, alluded to several times in the subsequent trials. ‘Here of an evening,’ deposed an eyewitness,

  a select committee assembled and no others were admitted. This was the room in which the most private transactions were carried on. Mr Thistlewood or Dr Watson always came out into the passage to speak to any person who called there on business. In a very large room upstairs . . . upwards of a hundred ill-looking persons have assembled of an evening; in it the open committee and loose members of the society met . . . Here their processions etc were arranged; their flags . . . kept while the more private business was carried on below in the parlour.2

  It was as well, given the events of February, that Henry Hunt had already distanced himself from Thistlewood. He disliked Watson and John Gale Jones – ‘You are a damned officious, meddling fellow’ he told him – and felt generally that the hero of Peterloo should be accorded even more adulation in London than he actually received. While Hunt and others still advocated slow, peaceful means to secure change, ultra-radicals like Thistlewood were now, especially after the Six Acts, going their own way.

  A national day was planned for mass meetings, with 1 November, All Hallows Day, as the target. All over the North plans were being made for this throughout October and it says a great deal for the murderous shift of inclination that Major-Gene
ral Byng, keeping his ears to the ground in Yorkshire, should now believe that Thistlewood, not Hunt, was the key. In the event, only a few meetings actually happened, partly because Hunt officially washed his hands of it. In an unworthy moment – although it may have been to avoid bloodshed – he fell back on the old expediency of accusing Thistlewood himself of being a spy.

  Throughout November, the radicals tore themselves apart in their own newspapers, the loyalists clearly delighted by this turn of events. In the first week of that month, William Cobbett came home from his exile in America, bringing with him the bones of Tom Paine. Cobbett in absentia was far more powerful than Cobbett in the flesh. He was never a hands-on rabble-rouser and he was out of the swim of the monumental events of a cold, wet November in England. Putting forward only one proposal after the Six Acts, he set up a fund for reform to be raised by the unions, but since only he would know how much was in it, only he would decide how it should be spent, the whole thing looked like the act of a man who was either deranged or needed to recoup personal cash fast.

  There is no doubt that, at the end of 1819, there was a vacuum in the radical movement of this country. Into it, with both feet, stepped Arthur Thistlewood. Subsequent historians, building on ever more lurid accounts that appeared shortly after Cato Street, have branded the man as an ‘atombomb traitor’ (R J White), given to ‘personal neuroses’ (John Stanhope) and even ‘Britain’s first professional terrorist’ (Clive Bloom). None of these quite fits the bill. We have already charted what is known of Thistlewood’s career up to 1819, but what of his followers?

  Richard Tidd was born in Lincolnshire, probably in 1775, and the first we hear of him he was apprenticed to a Mr Cante of Grantham. Apprentices normally began work with a master at the age of 12. Four years later he left for Nottingham. Again, apprenticeships normally ran for seven years, so it may be that Tidd never actually finished his ‘probation’ as a shoemaker. He would have arrived in Nottingham about 1791 when the town already had a reputation as a turbulent place prone to food riots. He stayed here for two and a half years, leaving at about the time when Jacobins were ducked in a local pond. We have no idea of young Tidd’s politics at this time, but the thumbnail sketch provided by Wilkinson paints a picture of a dodgy character, on the run from something. By 1795 he was in London, presumably working as a shoemaker (a particularly radical profession at the time), and in 1803 ‘he thought it prudent to retreat into Scotland’.3

  The reason for this flight was that there was a price on his head – £100 to be exact – because he had tried to vote illegally for Francis Burdett against Mr Mainwaring at the Middlesex election. Middlesex was famous as the most ‘open’ county (i.e. with the largest number of voters) but this did not apply to Tidd, who was not actually a freeholder and therefore had no vote.4 Like all Wilkinson’s summaries of the conspirators’ lives, a great deal of the basic chronology is flawed. ‘He was engaged in the conspiracy for which Colonel Despard suffered’, Wilkinson writes and this, more than the Middlesex election, probably explains his rapid departure from London.

  Where Tidd lived in Scotland is not recorded, but after five years he probably thought the coast was clear and came south again, living and working in Rochester for a further nine years. Wilkinson also records that Tidd worked a scam on and off for a number of years and this would have been made easier by the fact that he kept on the move. At a time when volunteers for the army were welcomed with open arms, Tidd enlisted in a number of regiments, took the king’s shilling and the offered bounty. This was a cash inducement for likely lads to sign up. True, most of it was whittled away at the barracks for mysterious ‘expenses’ but for a short time it was in the volunteer’s hands. This was Tidd’s window of opportunity and he took it, working his way (according to Wilkinson) through half the regiments of the army under assumed names.

  None of this quite accorded with Tidd’s claim at his trial:

  I always was a hard-working man, working sixteen and eighteen hours a day. I never had any time to spare, except on a Sunday.5

  According to Wilkinson, Tidd was back in London by 10 March 1818, living at 4 Hole-in-the-Wall Passage, Baldwin’s Gardens, near Brook’s Market. He had a wife, Ann, a brother and a daughter, Mary Barker, who spoke for the defence at her father’s trial. ‘From that time on,’ wrote Wilkinson, Tidd ‘attended all Mr Hunt’s meetings, public and private and was present at all the subsequent Radical meetings.’

  Tidd denied this in court – ‘I never attended any meeting after the acts to prevent illegal meetings’ (November 1819) – but he did claim it was fellow conspirator George Edwards who told him he had it on the highest authority that meetings could go ahead as long as they focused solely on parliamentary reform.

  For much of his life, the rather gloomy Tidd had a presentiment that he would one day be hanged. He was ‘unhappily’, wrote Wilkinson, ‘too good a prophet’.

  James Ings was born in Portsea of a family of ‘respectable tradesmen’ with a reasonable amount of money. Although at his trial he claimed to be ‘a man of no education and very humble abilities’, he could clearly write and became a butcher. Hit by poor trade in the vagaries of the war and peacetime economy, he had to sell up his tenements and move to London. By this time he had a wife and four children and, with the money he still had, set up a butcher’s shop in the West End. This didn’t work either, so he moved to the cheaper East End, setting up another butcher’s shop in Baker’s Row, Whitechapel. Ings tried to make a go of this ‘from midsummer to Michaelmas’, but the long, hot summer was against him. With no means of refrigeration, butchers’ premises were particularly at the mercy of the weather and Ings moved around the corner to Old Montague Street where he opened a coffee-shop with the last of his money. He finally pawned his watch to be able to send his wife and children back to Portsmouth.

  Coffee-houses, like pubs, were centres of radical politics and Ings began to read and distribute pamphlets like Richard Carlile’s. Here, too, the men of Cato Street began to drift. Ings testified:

  After my wife had left me, there was a man who used to come and take a cup of coffee at my shop. I never had nothing to do with politics, but he began to speak about the Manchester massacre.

  This was George Edwards and from then until 23 February, he rarely left Ings alone.

  Abandoning the coffee-shop, the ex-butcher moved in January to Primrose Street, near the Fleet market. By now he was virtually destitute, trying desperately to sell his furniture. And so he was grateful for the bread and cheese Edwards bought for him in the White Hart and even more when Edwards provided a room in the house of John Brunt. What Edwards did not make clear, at least at first, was that there were strings attached.

  John Thomas Brunt was a Londoner, born in Union Street, off Oxford Street, probably in 1782. Although his father was a tailor, young Brunt became apprenticed at the slightly elderly age of 14, to a Mr Brookes, maker of ladies’ shoes, just down the road. When Brunt’s father died as the boy reached 18, his mother bought him out of his apprenticeship and he effectively worked for her for some years. At 21 he became articled to a boot-closer and quickly excelled at the trade. For several years a window display in a Strand shop exhibited a prize-winning boot made by Brunt. Two years later he married a ‘respectable young woman’ named Welch who gave birth to their son on 1 May 1806 – by coincidence exactly fourteen years before the boy’s father would die on the scaffold.

  Brunt did not explain how he came to be in Paris shortly after the end of the war, but it was probably connected with the presence of Wellington’s army of occupation, still of course requiring boots which Brunt made. While at Cambrai, Brunt met Robert Adams, who may still have been a serving soldier with the Royal Horse Guards. ‘Adams worked for the officers’, Brunt said at his trial, implying that this was in the leather trade in a private capacity. Jealous of the quality of his work, Adams threatened Brunt that he would kill him and Brunt took the hint and travelled to Lilsle to work for an English tradesman named Brail
sford.

  Clearly, Brunt had taken his son to France with him and on their return, found that his wife had ‘lost her senses’ and was in the asylum of St Luke’s, believing that her husband and son had been murdered. She was released into his care and must have been extremely grateful for this. At the time, St Luke’s had 300 patients and was in woeful need of upgrading. Its superintendent preferred chains to other forms of restraint and believed that the insane responded only to strict discipline. There were high windows without glass that were covered at night with iron shutters. Brunt returned to the boot trade, doing well enough by 1819 to have his own apprentice, a lad named Joseph Hale. This boy would testify against him in court.

  The last of the men to be hanged for his part in Cato Street was William Davidson, the enigmatic ‘man of colour’, who so fascinated his contemporaries and, Thistlewood perhaps aside, remains the most complex of the men of Cato Street. He was born in 1786, in Kingston, the second son of the Attorney-General of Jamaica and a slave woman. Wilkinson described the father as a ‘man of considerable legal knowledge and talent’ and this sort of master/slave, black/white relationship was not uncommon. Young Davidson was technically a mulatto, a half-breed, but portraits of him show very definite African features. It was perhaps rather a bizarre decision to send the 14-year-old William to England to study for the law, but presumably Davidson senior had notions of the boy returning to Jamaica to practise. His mother was bitterly opposed to it, but lost that particular battle and the boy ‘having learned the first rudiments of education’ went to an academy in Edinburgh where he focused on mathematics. After this he moved to Liverpool with letters of introduction to his father’s agent.