The unfortunate Colonel Despard and other studies

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I. The Unfortunate Colonel Despard ... 1

II. Arthur Thistlewood and Cato Street ... 22

II Arthur Thistlewood And Cato Street

The man who is outside the common humanity of his own generation, who takes the manners, the morals, or the enthusiasms of one period into another, may be magnificent or sinister, pathetic or grotesque. Sometimes he is all four at once. English history is rich in such eccentric figures, but none is more curious as a character study than Arthur Thistlewood, the " British Jacobin," who reproduced the cheap humanitarianism, the reckless bloodthirstiness, the bombastic phraseology and the autolatrous megalomania of the Parisian demagogues of 1792 before the eyes of the England of Sir Walter Scott and Miss Austen, and who furnished the young Thackeray with the most gruesome anecdote of his boyhood. In the orthodox Whig tradition, on which nineteenth-century history is generally written, he is lightly passed over, and not without reason. For the acts of the Tory Ministers in the distressful years that followed Waterloo have to be decried wholesale, and the words and deeds of the wild fanatics, who frightened Liverpool and Addington into repression, have therefore to be kept dark — or at least relegated to short and vague paragraphs and footnotes.

Arthur Thistlewood, the legitimate spiritual heir of Guy Fawkes, came within a measurable distance of slaying Canning and Wellington before their time. He had made elaborate preparations for parading the head of Castlereagh on a pike along Oxford Street and Holborn, after the slaughter of the whole Cabinet. Nor does it seem at all impossible that he might have carried out his bloody scheme. Insurrections may be foreseen and nipped in the bud ; on the other hand, assassination is a hard thing to guard against, as witness the fates of Alexander of Russia and Frederick Cavendish, of Abraham Lincoln and Sadi Carnot. The more obscure and the fewer that plotters are, the more hard are they to discover. The very fact that Thistlewood's murderous gang was insignificant in numbers, and composed of unknown men, might have enabled him to carry out his appalling plan. For common prescience could not have availed to avert such an unlikely danger, and no victims could have been more helpless than a party of Ministers off duty, and dining quietly in a private house. But for the want of caution that led the arch-conspirator to broach his designs to two ill-chosen recruits, one of whom was a systematic traitor and the other too much of an honest man, he might have made Grosvenor Square the most tragic name in modern English history. As it was, he only succeeded in conferring a half-forgotten notoriety on Cato Street, Edgware Road. But the mere thought of what he might have accomplished makes the brain reel. Imagine Liverpool and Castlereagh, Wellington and Canning, Eldon and Addington — not to speak of minor figures like Vansittart, " Prosperity " Robinson, and Lord Bathurst — all cut off simultaneously by the assassins' swords and bombs. There would have been incendiarism and riot to follow, but it is certain that the affair would not have ended, as Thistlewood hoped, in a general rising of the lower classes of London, culminating in the successful proclamation of a Republic, with himself as " President of the Provisional Government." Most probably the result would have been the instant repression of the turmoil by military force, followed by a sort of " White Terror." After such an atrocity the Tory Party would have been confirmed in power for a whole generation, and it must have ruled with a revengeful vigour compared to which Addington's and Castlereagh's measures of repression in 1816-20 would have been child's play. There would certainly have been no Reform Bill in 1832. Would there have been an ultimate British Revolution of a very venomous sort some years later ? Assassination breeds repression, and repression breeds revolution. Let us be thankful that Mr. Thistlewood's caution was not equal to his energy, and to his compelling power as a leader of men.

He was not young when he first came before the public eye. He was born in 1770, the son of one William Thistlewood, land agent to the Vyners of Gantby, in Lincolnshire, a considerable county family. His father was well-to-do, and he received a good education : he wrote a fair eighteenth-century style of the turgid sort, occasionally lapsing into bombast — as when he spoke of " the purple stream that circulates through a heart enthusiastically vibrating to every impulse of patriotism and honour." [His own, of course.] But it cannot be denied that he possessed a certain eloquence — as witness his dying words : —

" A few hours hence and I shall be no more : but the nightly breeze, which will whistle over the silent grave that shall protect me from its keenness, will bear to your restless pillows the memory of one who lived but for his country, and died when liberty and justice had been driven from her confines by a set of tyrants, whose thirst for blood is only equalled by their activity in plunder. For life, as it respects myself, I care not ; but, while yet I may, I would rescue my memory from the calumny which (I doubt not) will be industriously heaped upon it, when it will be no longer in my power to protect it. My every principle was for the prosperity of my country. The height of my ambition was to bring welfare to my starving fellow-citizens. I keenly felt for their miseries, but when their miseries were laughed at, when because they dared to express those miseries they were cut down by hundreds [an exaggerated allusion to ' Peterloo '], barbarously massacred, and trampled to death, when infants were sabred in their mothers' arms, and the breast from which they drew the tide of life was hacked from the parent's body, then indeed my feelings became too excessive for endurance, and I resolved on vengeance. I resolved that the lives of the instigators of massacre should atone for the souls of murdered innocents."

This sounds genuine enough, when spoken on the edge of the grave. But though Thistlewood ended, we cannot doubt, as an honest fanatic, his life was no more of the idealistic or the Spartan type than that of many of the Jacobins whom he so much admired. He was always restless and thriftless. He was trained as a surveyor, but never took to the profession, and remained a burden on his father long after he had reached manhood. By an odd, unexplained chance he happened to be in Paris for some months during the Terror, and what he saw there of the power of the mob and the mob-leader remained fixed in his mind, to bear fruit in later years. But on his return from France he did not (as we might have expected from his later career) dabble in any of the revolutionaryagitations of the 'nineties. Quite the reverse — he accepted an ensign's commission in the 1st York Militia, and later (1798) became a lieutenant in the 3rd Lincoln Militia. He is reputed to have been an active officer and a " good drill," but to have been a loose liver, a persistent and unlucky gambler. In 1804 he courted and married a lady a good many years older than himself — a Miss Jane Worsley. She possessed a good income, and he retired from the militia and settled down in Lincoln to live on her money. Unfortunately for him she died less than eighteen months after the marriage, and as her property was settled on her nearest of kin in default of issue, Thistlewood was thrown upon the world almost penniless. The heirs made him a small allowance.

Soon after he had to quit Lincoln, on account of unpaid debts of honour. He had continued his gambling when he had not the wherewithal to settle up. After a period spent in low water, he emerged for a moment into renewed prosperity — an uncle died and left him a farm valued at £10,000. He sold it, not for cash down, but for an annuity ; after two years the guarantor of the annuity went bankrupt, and his security disappeared. For a second time he sought salvation in matrimony, taking to wife Susan, daughter of Mr. John Wilkinson of Horncastle, a prosperous butcher. She was philosophic enough to accept and rear a son whom Thistlewood produced — the offspring, not of his first wife, but of an amour. Her dowry served to stock a farm near Horncastle ; and here, periodically assisted by loans from his father and elder brother, Thistlewood maintained himself more or less for some years. He was not a competent agriculturist, but prices ran high in the last years of the struggle with Napoleon. Then came the " slump " in corn after the war was over, when the quarter of wheat fell from 80s. to 52s. in a few months. It ruined Thistlewood along with many other fair-weather farmers. Finding that he was losing rather than making money, in consequence of high rent and high taxes, combined with low prices for produce, he got rid of his farm, and came up to London in 1814 with his wife and his son, " not in actual want, but his finances were at a low ebb." Apparently he had sold his lease for something ; his wife, " a smart, genteel little woman," had still some resources, and both he and she probably contrived to extract occasional doles from their relatives in Lincolnshire.

What was Thistlewood's original scheme of life on arriving in London no man can say. But very shortly after his establishment there he began to appear as an agitator of the extreme Radical sort. He has left no account of the causes of his sudden launch out into politics, beyond vague declamation about his sympathy for the distressed and unenfranchised masses. This will hardly pass as an explanation : his previous life had not been that of a philanthropist. Vain, ambitious, bankrupt for the third or fourth time, soured by perpetual ill-luck that mainly came from his own thriftlessness, he attributed his present poverty to anything rather than his own fault. London was seething with political discontent, but it was mostly inarticulate and leaders were wanting. " Orator " Hunt and " Dr." Watson were certainly not abler men than Thistlewood : marking then notoriety, he evidently saw no reason why he should not rise as high. His tongue was ready and eloquent, his vehemence tremendous, his personal influence over other men was clearly exceptional ; his hatred for those who administered England was no doubt real — to them he ascribed his own indigence. He had the ruined gambler's grudge against all who had scraped and saved ; the shopkeepers of London, he once observed, were an aristocracy as pernicious as the Tory majority in Parliament — he should rejoice to see their shops looted and their tills cleared out. But no doubt the governing inspiration in his mind was his memory of the Paris of the Jacobins : he had seen what mobs could do when the fabric of the State was rotten, and he thought — not wrongly — that he himself was singularly gifted for a mob-leader.

From 1816 onward he was one of the most prominent figures in that small band of agitators who advocated physical force as the remedy for all ills, and who broke completely away from the Whigs and their constitutional methods. He was heard advocating violence at every open-air meeting, and that his words were not vain declamation was shown by the fact that he headed an armed party at the abortive Spa Fields riot of December 2, 1816, and tried — carrying a tricolour flag and followed by a constantly dwindling crowd that finally melted away to nothing — to break into the Tower. He was tried, along with the younger Watson, for this escapade, but was fortunate enough to be indicted for high treason, not for riot : the jury acquitted them of the weightier charge, because they thought they ought only to have been tried for the lesser offence. Encouraged by his escape Thistlewood continued to preach violence, till he was at last arrested for having sent the Home Secretary Addington (Lord Sidmouth) a challenge to a duel. For this he suffered a year's imprisonment in Horsham Gaol [1818-19], but came out from it not cured of his pugnacity or his megalomania, but almost beside himself with long-suppressed rage. This was the summer of the " Manchester Massacre," the untoward affair when the Lancashire Yeomanry rode down a riotous assembly that had met to hear " Orator Hunt," where five people were crushed to death, and many scores more hurt by being trampled upon or cut about with sabres.

Thistlewood sat in judgment upon the Ministry, and condemned them all to death, for what was in truth the act of a scared magistrate and a body of amateur soldiers, who had lost their heads when the mob closed around them. He went about London trying in vain to induce the leaders of the Radical Party to authorize an armed insurrection to avenge what he styled High Treason against the People of England. But no one of any weight or importance would listen to the proposal. Thistlewood said that if they were not cowards they were traitors : he believed that if he could get at the Home Secretary's papers in Whitehall he would find that Orator Hunt received a secret pension, and probably Cobbett also, " for all his writings, he had no doubt that he was a spy too."

For months the would-be insurgent tramped the streets trying to organize a rising, but with small effect and evergrowing rage. We have a description of him at the time : " Five feet ten inches, with a sallow complexion, long visage, dark hair, a little grey ; dark hazel eyes with very arched eyebrows, a wide mouth and a good set of teeth ; he has a scar under his right jaw ; he is slenderly built and has the carriage of a military man. He usually wears a long blue coat and blue pantaloons . ' ' From another and most unfriendly source we hear that " his countenance, always forbidding, seemed now to have acquired an additional degree of malignancy. When in custody in 1817 for the Spa Fields affair he was a stout active man with a fearless and determined cast of features. Within the last six months he has undergone a change — his countenance has grown squalid and emaciated, his dress shabby." He was generally observed walking — almost running — through the streets with eager impetuosity, his shoes and hat untidy and much worn, as if he were continually posting about on some absorbing and interminable errand which brooked no delay. And, in truth, the errand existed — all that autumn and winter he was trying, with no great success, to collect the nucleus of the revolutionary army with which he would sweep the streets and proclaim the Republic at the Mansion House. As the possibility of " straightforward insurrection " — his own phrase — receded farther and farther into the clouds, be began to vary his plans with schemes of mere vengeance, the murder of one or more of the leading Ministers — Sidmouth for choice, both as his own personal enemy and as the Home Secretary directly responsible for the " massacre " at Manchester. This was no new idea : it was afterwards remembered that direct incentives to assassination of individuals occurred in several of his speeches as far back as 1817. The statement often made, or hinted at, by Whig writers, to the effect that he only lapsed into murderous plans under the instigation of the man George Edwards — of whom more hereafter — has no foundation. He was ready for any bloody design long before he first met Edwards in June, 1819.

Thistlewood sounded many scores of Radicals, great and small, working on, as he tested his man, from general plans of violence to more definite proposals for the removal of individual " tyrants." The large majority drew off at the first hint at murder. " I may be a great fool, but I was not foolish enough to enter into such a scheme," said one habitue of riotous meetings, when tempted by two of Thistlewood's acolytes. " I did not think they would ever get any persons to be so mad as to join them." Nevertheless, the plotter did, by infinite pains, succeed in collecting a small band of desperadoes, who did not shrink from the idea of assassination. There were two types among them — a minority were Jacobins of Thistlewood's own type, like the shoemaker Brunt, who acted as his second in command. This man was a prosperous workman, who often made 40s. or 50s. a week, and kept an apprentice ; he was the only one among the gang who ever had money in his pocket, and he readily disbursed it on " the cause." He was a great reader, saturated with the works of Tom Paine and other freethinkers, and had the whole vocabulary of French republicanism at his command. Unlike most of the others, he was neither starving nor of evil reputation. He was as perfect a fanatic as his leader — so, it would appear, were one or two of the other conspirators. But the majority were broken men, on the edge — or over the edge — of starvation, whom Thistlewood had attracted by the idea of a general overthrow of existing society.

Most of them, as their counsel pleaded at their trial, were probably thinking more of the plunder of the shops of London than of the preliminary murders that were to herald the night of pillage. The most violent of them was a bankrupt butcher, one James Ings, whose square brutal face contrasts curiously with the cadaverous countenances of the rest in the little gallery of portraits that illustrates the contemporary publications of 1820. His ferocious language, and his grotesquely boisterous conduct on the scaffold, were long remembered. Down to 1819 he had a fair record for honesty — not so the remaining members of the gang, who were as choice a set of scoundrels as could be fished from the gutter — Davidson, a plausible canting mulatto, who had earned good money as a cabinet-maker, till he was expelled from a Wesleyan congregation to which he belonged for a series of indecent assaults on Sunday-school girls ; Tidd, a cobbler, whose speciality during the late war had been enlisting into many regiments and absconding with his bounty money ; Robert Adams, an old soldier, whom his own fellow-conspirators described as a professional swindler ; and Dwyer, who is accused of maintaining himself by blackmailing persons of immoral life. Thistle wood was not unaware of their characters — but he had to get his instruments where he could find them. Among others he took into his confidence George Edwards, already mentioned, a very clever dissolute fellow, by trade a modeller of statuettes, who had been much about at Radical meetings of late, and distinguished himself by advocating outrages of an ingenious sort.

Thistlewood described him as " poor and penniless, without a bed to lie upon or a chair to sit in : straw was his only bed — his only covering a blanket ; and, owing to his bad character and his swindling propensities, he was ever driven off by his landlords." Yet the conspirator eagerly welcomed him as a recruit. He was far more intelligent than most of the gang and full of wiles. This was Thistlewood's first mistake, for Edwards, though not a systematic agent provocateur of the Government, as many alleged at the time of the trial of his comrades, had earned money before by giving secret information to the police, and was ready to earn it again. We have the word of Canning himself for the fact that George Edwards was not a regular Government spy — he was not in the employment of Bow Street, nor did he receive an allowance. He volunteered information and got a dole occasionally, and he had never received any large sum till he earned blood-money to the tune of £1,000, when the plot was discovered, by betraying the whereabouts of Thistlewood. During the winter of 1819-20 he apparently communicated several times with the police or the Home Office, but could give them no definite information, because the plot had not taken shape. Thistlewood was ripe for murder, but had settled neither his victims nor his exact modus operandi. He continued collecting associates and getting together stores of arms — the last no easy task, because of the insufficiency of his exchequer. But hidden about at the lodgings of various conspirators were some dozens of swords, bayonets, and muskets, an immense number of pike-heads — some made of sharpened files, but quite effective — about 1,200 rounds of ball-cartridge, and a quantity of bombs and grenades. One of these was of specially large size, and calculated to produce a tremendous explosion. There was also a provision of fireballs for incendiary purposes.

The plot was taking shape by January, and Thistlewood had fully made up his mind that the preliminary step to a general rising should be the murder of certain Ministers, whether in the street or at their offices, when his plans were put out by the death of the old King George III. This took all official persons to Windsor for some days, and disarranged the routine of business. It was not until February that things had become normal again, and Thistlewood could trace and mark down his intended victims. By this time he had come on an idea which surpassed in completeness and ingenuity all his previous schemes. The members of the Ministry were in the habit, from time to time, of dining together in each other's private houses in rotation at " Cabinet Dinners." The next was to be at the house of the Earl of Harrowby, Lord President of the Council, in Grosvenor Square, on the south side, at the corner of Charles Street, on Wednesday, February 23. Thistlewood would thus find his " tyrants " concentrated in a very accessible spot, with no further guard than Lord Harrowby's butler and footmen.

Having armed themselves at some convenient rendezvous, the conspirators were to go to Grosvenor Square in twos and threes, and were to disperse themselves unostentatiously in the neighbourhood of the Lord President's mansion. Thistlewood, about the time that dinner was half over, was to knock at the door, carrying a red box, such as are used for ministerial correspondence. While he was explaining to the porter that a dispatch of great importance must be handed at once to Lord Castlereagh, other conspirators were to press in to the open door behind him, knock down or kill the servants in the hall, and rush for the dining-room. Bombs were to be thrown upstairs and down, and a select party were to burst into the dining-room and murder the guests. All this is undisputed, and was acknowledged by several of the conspirators. Details were added by the informers at the trial which may or may not be correct. Thistlewood, so it is said, intended to present himself before the startled Ministers with the words : " My Lords, I have got as good men here as your Manchester Yeomanry — enter citizens and do your duty ! " When the killing was done, the butcher Ings was to cut off the heads of Sidmouth and Castlereagh, and to place them in two bags which he carried for the purpose. When the city should have risen, as Thistlewood hoped that it would, the heads were to be placed on pikes and carried in front of the mob in true Parisian style. It is certain that Ings, on the fatal night, carried two large bags and a butcher's knife — but his defenders suggested that the receptacles may have been for Lord Harrowby's plate rather than for Lord Castlereagh's head. Who shall decide ?

It was hoped that the news of the wholesale slaughter of the Cabinet would cause a general turmoil in the streets. This was to be helped by incendiary fires. One of Thistlewood's trusted lieutenants, a man called Palin, was furnished with a quantity of fireballs, which he was to throw, or cause to be thrown, into various inflammable places, of which one, we are told, was the hay store of Albany Street Barracks, and another an old house near Furnival's Inn. He had three coadjutors allotted to him, but it is doubtful whether they would have effected much, when the signal should have been given on the fateful night. For Palin, according to the evidence of one of his comrades, had primed himself up for the business with liquor, and was quite incoherent and incapable. Another party, headed by a man named Cooke, was to endeavour to seize the guns of the Light Horse Volunteers at their drill-hall in Gray's Inn Lane, and those of the Honourable Artillery Company. There is no proof that any serious force was ready at Cooke's disposal — apparently Thistlewood had arranged for him to be supported by some Irish labourers living in Gee's Court, St. Giles, with whom he was in communication. But it is evident that his real hope was in the general assistance of the mob, when the news should have got about. If all went well, the main body of the gang, who had been charged with the actual assassination, were to press eastward along Holborn, gathering up Cooke's party with the cannon from Gray's Inn Road, and were to seize the Mansion House. Thistlewood was to install himself there as president of a " Provisional Government," with Ings as secretary. The proclamations which they were to post up and publish were duly prepared. Of what, meanwhile, the Guards and other troops garrisoned in London would have been doing, Thistlewood does not seem to have taken account. There is no mention of them in the evidence of his accusers or of his defenders — a strange piece of reticence !

On Monday, February 21, Thistlewood hired as his armoury and as the base from which his operations were to start, an empty three-horse stable in Cato Street, Edgware Road. This obscure thoroughfare was little more than a lane or mews — it connected John Street and Queen Street, which both run into the lower end of Edgware Road on the right (or eastern) side. No doubt Thistlewood must have been fascinated with the name of Cato Street, with its suggestions of stern ancient Roman republicanism. But the premises were not imposing — three stalls and a coach-house below, a large loft and two small living-rooms above. They were, however, amply sufficient as an arsenal, and thither the muskets, swords, pikes, and grenades were transferred from their several hiding-places.

The first news concerning the final development of Thistlewood's plan did not come, as might have been expected, from the informer Edwards, though he had given some general warnings, but from Thomas Hyden, a dairyman, who came up in great agitation to Lord Harrowby, as he was riding in Hyde Park on the morning of February 22, and besought him to put off at once his dinner of the next night, or he and his friends would be murdered. This person had been solicited on the previous Sunday to come into the plot by a man called Wilson, one of Thistlewood's minor satellites, and had been told enough to frighten him nearly out of his wits. He tried to catch Lord Castlereagh on the Monday, but failed to get access to him, though he made four calls. Wherefore he waylaid the Lord President- next morning, and was more successful. This, according to Lord Harrowby's evidence at the subsequent trial, was the first definite news of Cato Street that came to hand : " We had general information that some plan was in agitation, but knew neither the time nor the particulars." It is quite untrue to say — with some

u.o.d. d

Whig historians — that the whole matter of the dinner-party was settled with the spy Edwards as a trap for Thistlewood.

But it is quite clear that later on the same day on which Hyden confided the matter to Lord Harrowby, Edwards gave similar information to Lord Sidmouth at the Home Office. For the Ministers by that night had private advice that they were to meet, not at Grosvenor Square, but at Fife House. The preparations for the dinner, however, were allowed to go on, nothing being said to Lord Harrowby's servants as to a countermand. Thistlewood's emissaries watched Grosvenor Square all day, and saw nothing to undeceive them.

Considering that the main outlines of the plot were in the possession of the Home Office by eleven o'clock on Wednesday morning, it does not seem that the arrangements for the arrest of the conspirators were so well concerted as they should have been. The main responsibility was in the hands of Mr. Richard Birnie, the magistrate at Bow Street : he took with him for the business Ruthven, the chief of his patrol, and eleven others of his men only, armed with short cutlasses and pocket-pistols. He was informed that he should have military support, and relied upon it. But from an exaggerated idea of the importance of keeping all preparations secret till the last possible hour, no definite information was given before evening to the Colonel commanding the 2nd Battalion of the Coldstream Guards, in the Portman Street Barracks, from which the detachment was to be drawn. At a quarter to eight the picket on duty was suddenly turned out and ordered to march : it was, by the chance of the roster, under Lieutenant Frederick Fitzclarence — one of the numerous natural sons of Wilham Duke of Clarence — who received at the last moment the instruction that his party — a sergeant, a corporal, and twenty-eight privates — were to aid the police in the seizure of armed conspirators in Cato Street, Edgware Road. The soldiers were not in the least acquainted with the task that they were to perform : they supposed that a fire had broken out, and that they were required to guard property from a casual mob. No guide was sent with them, nor was anyone from the police patrol left to pick them up. It was only when their officer halted them at the corner of