Enemies of the State (11 page)

The atrocities referred to can only mean in 1795 the control of bread riots in Paris. If that is so, then Thistlewood, the wannabe
sans-culotte
, was on the wrong side. The fall of Robespierre saw a general sigh of relief across the country, with moderation creeping back and even the church gaining some renewed acceptance. By May, however, the old disorder returned among a starving population and the mob invaded a meeting of the Convention and stuck the head of a deputy on a pole. Elsewhere in the country the White Terror began, a counter-revolution by royalists hell-bent on restoring the Bourbons.

At some point, probably in 1797, Thistlewood joined a French grenadier regiment. The Revolution had effectively swept away the titled officer class and there was no purchase system in the army. By now Lazare Carnot's reforms were having some effect and the ragged army of the Republic was winning victories against the massed ranks of the ancien regime. Wilkinson also tells us that Thistlewood fought at Zurich, but he clearly did not know the name of the French commander. It was André Massena, later to become a Marshal of France and one of the ‘souls of iron' under Napoleon. There were actually two battles of Zurich and it is possible that Thistlewood fought them both.

In the first, between 4 and 7 June 1799 Massena was driven out of the city by an Austrian force under Archduke Charles, but he pulled back to the river Limmat and fortified his position on the Zurichberg, settling down to a stalemate. By the end of September, the Austrians had been replaced by their Second Coalition allies, the Russians, under General Korsakov. Massena's attack was masterly. Outnumbered two to one, with a second Russian army and an Austrian force arrayed against him, he smashed first one army, then the next, in true Napoleonic style. It helped that his wing
commanders were Generals Oudinot and Soult, both brilliant men in their own right. So Arthur Thistlewood could say, in all modesty, that he had saved France from invasion and helped destroy the Second Coalition as Russia withdrew days later.

Infuriatingly, Wilkinson refers to ‘a variety of adventures in France and on different parts of the Continent' for Thistlewood but gives no more details. By the Peace of Amiens, however, it was time for the adventurer to come home. Returning to Horncastle where his father and brother ran farms, Thistlewood courted a local girl, Miss Wilkinson. The impoverished soldier was in funds again, not this time because of his new wife but because he had inherited ‘a considerable estate' from a relative. He sold this for £10,000, a vast sum at the time, to a gentleman from Durham, but not outright. Instead, he took an annuity bond which gave him an annual income of £850. This was a risky venture and in eighteen months the purchaser went bankrupt, leaving Thistlewood relatively high and dry.

The narrative now gets confusing. The Thistlewoods moved to London along with a son, James, ‘a natural child' (who the boy's mother was is not recorded). An attempt by Thistlewood's family to get Arthur settled on a Horncastle farm failed – he was paying more in rent and tax than the farm earned – and with what remained of his legacy he went south. He either got in with a bad crowd – ‘all the vices and dissipation of the metropolis' – composed mostly of army officers richer than he was or he drifted into radical politics. Perhaps it was both. He lost over £2,000 to a card-sharping ring in a ‘Hell' in St James's and was unable to recover the loss. Bitter and broke, he found the Spenceans, especially the Evanses, and still seems to have had enough cash to travel with the younger Evans to France where the pair stayed for almost a year.

From this moment, George Wilkinson believed, Thistlewood's only goal was to overthrow the constitution. Certainly when the adventurer reached London the place must have been buzzing with talks of Despard and Thistlewood had seen for himself in France how dangerous a mob could be. Get the London mob on your side, arm them, give them a leader and a cause and the rest would be history.

The end of 1816 was the perfect time, although we have no clear idea of what Thistlewood was doing in the fourteen years preceding it. Distress had reached an all-time high and the London Corresponding Society in
particular was galvanized into action. The Spenceans wrote to possible national leaders to front a mass meeting on 15 November at Spa Fields. Today, Spa Fields in Islington is easy to miss. It is a small park bisected by a path and when I visited it the major concern was what sort of adventure playground locals wanted for their children. What would the revolutionaries of 1816 have made of that? To be fair, it was always a place for the people. Known as Ducking Pond Fields in the mid-eighteenth century, crowds came from all over London to watch bull-baiting and duck-hunting, to wager on the outcome of bare-knuckle prize fights, like the female match won by Bruising Peg in 1768. At Whitsuntide, it was the scene of Welsh or Gooseberry Fair with donkey races, cudgel play and gurning
⁵
competitions. In the 1770s the Methodist Lady Selina, Countess of Huntingdon, had a chapel built and by the time of the 1816 disturbances, a large graveyard occupied the two acres behind the building. It remained a notorious haunt of footpads however and only slowly did respectable streets develop across it. When the Spencean letter arrived, William Cobbett, in one of his more timid moments, declined, but Henry ‘Orator' Hunt accepted.

Hunt would go to the opening of an envelope. Easily the greatest demagogue of the radicals, he was powerfully built, a crack shot, excellent boxer and fine horseman. He had a knack for public speaking and the crowd loved him. When speaking, the weaver Samuel Bamford noted, Hunt's grey-blue eyes became

blood-streaked and almost started from their sockets . . . His voice was bellowing, his face swollen and flushed; his griped hand beat as if it were to pulverise.

He loved danger, he loved attention – and wore a white wideawake hat to make sure he got it in a crowd. If anyone could rouse the London mob, it was Henry Hunt.

What made Hunt so successful was his gentlemanly pedigree and conduct. Despard was popular for the same reason. Across the Channel in the early days of the Revolution, so was the Marquis de la Fayette. The radicals may have railed against privilege and power, but they were delighted when someone with those qualities agreed to lead them. They were, after all, part of a centuries-old hierarchy; actual equality was unknown to them. So Hunt was a loyalist, raising a troop of militia in his native Wiltshire, but man-of-the-people enough to challenge a colonel of yeomanry to a duel and
to assault a gamekeeper; both gave him a prison record.

By 1806 Hunt had joined the radicals, standing unsuccessfully as MP for Bristol in that year. He also had a reputation as a ‘bit of a lad', living in sin with a Mrs Vince in Brighton in open emulation of the Prince of Wales at the Pavilion up the road. The rather more scrupulous Cobbett had his doubts – ‘Beware of him; he rides the country with a whore.' Hunt would write later of a letter from Arthur Thistlewood, ‘requesting me, when I came to town, to favour him with a call, as he had to communicate to me matters of the highest importance connected with the welfare and happiness of the people'.

Hunt did not reply, but a second letter from Thomas Preston, specifically inviting him to address a mass meeting, had the desired effect.

It was not possible, or intended, to keep the Spa Fields meeting a secret. And the government was scared. A note in Sidmouth's Home Office read:

The meeting in Spa Fields is aware of the Collection of Soldiers in this vicinity. The appearance of Troops will occasion the destruction of London. Twenty thousand Englishmen can set any city in such flames as no Engines can extinguish.
⁶

The basic Spencean plan for Spa Fields was not particularly revolutionary. The idea was to hear prominent radical views and for a show of hands (the only means of voting until 1872) to elect Hunt and Sir Francis Burdett to take a petition to the Prince Regent. The petition asked for relief from distress and the reform of parliament.

Sir Nathaniel Conant had other ideas. He was a magistrate of Bow Street and as such, in command of the most dynamic police force in London.
⁷
But his men were not prepared for the size of the crowd. Some 10,000 people jostled in the open space outside the Merlin's Cave pub to listen to Henry Hunt. Some of them had just witnessed a hanging, so they were in jovial mood and Hunt was on fine form. His own white hat was prominent on that November day, but so too were the older symbols of revolution waved from the window behind him – the French tricolour and a cap of Liberty; perhaps one of those was waved by Thistlewood.

Hunt's speech was measured, demanding reform while at the same time not condoning violence. He spoke of mental rather than physical force, aware as he must have been of the Bow Street patrols and the scarlet-coated troops ringing the Field, but he did tease the authorities –

Those who resist the just demands of the people are the real friends of confusion and bloodshed . . . but if the fatal day should be destined to arrive, I assure you that if I know anything of myself, I will not be found concealed behind a counter or sheltering myself in the rear.
⁸

Conant cannot have missed the fact that the greatest cheer came from Hunt's ‘fatal day' reference. Thistlewood would have caught that too.

Large numbers signed the petition, demanding universal male suffrage, annual general elections and a secret ballot. It was voted unanimously that Hunt and Burdett should present it to the Regent, but Burdett turned the proposal down. This led to a quarrel between the radical leaders which weakened the movement and delighted the authorities. While Hunt's accusations of cowardice flew, he twice begged an audience at Carlton House and was twice refused.

Accordingly, a second meeting was called at Spa Fields on 2 December, to protest at the arrogant disdain shown to Hunt. It is difficult to imagine a less impressive figurehead than the Prince Regent. A gambler, a womanizer and spender of other people's money, George had no real understanding of the political issues of his day and lived in such a cloud-cuckoo land that he talked in military circles as if he had been present on the field of Waterloo.

Hunt was late for the second meeting and was told while rattling along Cheapside in his carriage that a riot had broken out and that the mob had taken control of the Tower of London. At Spa Fields, the hustings wagon in the centre was draped with tricolours and a banner reading ‘The brave soldiers are our friends' – precisely the sort of notion that makes revolutions happen. On the wagon stood the Watsons, Thistlewood, Hooper and the other leading Spenceans of the Cock and the Mulberry Tree.

As far as the authorities were concerned, the last straw came when Jem Watson quoted the speech made by Camille Desmoulins before the storming of the Bastille:

If they will not give us what we want, shall we not take it? Are you willing to take it? Will you go and take it? If I jump down amongst you, will you come and take it?

This was clearly incitement, each sentence punctuated by ever louder cheers and John Stafford, Conant's number two, ordered the arrest of the leaders and the confiscation of their flags. From now on, everything became chaotic.
There were at least as many people at Spa Fields at this second meeting as at the first and Jem Watson jumped down from the wagon and snatched up a tricolour. In the symbolism of the day, the flags meant everything. On a field of battle, for centuries, the flag was a sacred token; it must not be allowed to fall into enemy hands. On the other hand, the tricolour on London's streets must have been to the authorities like a red rag to a bull.

With a vague, Despard-like plan in the leaders' heads, the mob marched towards Newgate with the probable intention of destroying the place for the second time in forty years and freeing the prisoners. Some of them broke off in the direction of the Royal Exchange to grab whatever gold lay there and the bulk moved against the Tower of London. On the way, to give them a fighting chance against the garrison, they looted gunsmiths' shops on Snow Hill. There is no doubt that for many of the mob, looting was the sole aim of the day (the crime would resurface, oddly, in the Cato Street trials) and when a looter got into a row with Jem Watson, the radical shot him in the stomach at point blank range.

Then, it all fell apart. At the Exchange Alderman Shaw and a mere seven constables staged a showdown with the mob, arrested three leaders and the rest went home. At the Tower, disappointed to discover that the soldiers were not after all their friends, a rioter climbed onto the railings below the walls, brandishing a cutlass, urging the garrison to join the mob. There is every likelihood that that rioter was Arthur Thistlewood. The garrison didn't move and, again, everyone went home.

In some ways, Spa Fields was the British equivalent of the attack on the Bastille and the differences are blinding. In one case, a desperate mob destroyed an object of tyranny and went on to overturn the world order, at least in Europe. In the other, the mob tired of the game, got bored and melted away into the alleys of London. This was partly because of how the second Spa Fields, in particular, was organized. When a man met Henry Hunt in Cheapside to tell him the Tower had been taken, he was not just spreading one of those aspirational rumours that flies at events like Spa Fields, he was deliberately making it up.

His name was John Castle and he was a spy.

Chapter 7

Oliver the Spy

Early September 1997 and an estimated one million people, united in grief and anger, were milling outside Buckingham Palace and along the Mall. Days earlier Diana, Princess of Wales, had died in a car crash in a Paris tunnel and the crowd was incensed that the royal family was failing to react properly to Diana's death. There was no flag flying over the palace because the Queen was away in Balmoral on holiday. There should have been a flag, the crowd thought, and it should have been at half mast.

Author and broadcaster Richard Belfield wrote:

Should [the crowd] choose to march in any direction the only way they could be stopped would be to bring the army out of its barracks, an unthinkable act in peacetime, which would also result in heavy loss of life. An anxious civil servant asked if there was a precedent and was told ‘Yes, Paris 1789.'
¹

It sounds incredible that such a mood and such a scenario could exist in the late twentieth century, but the royal family in particular had totally misunderstood the nation's mood. How was that possible? For ‘crowd' read ‘mob', for ‘death of Diana' read ‘Corn Laws' and we have an action replay of the decade after 1810. Today, because of the intrusion of the mass media, we know what our politicians look like. Up to a point we know what they say and do. They, in turn, with opinion polls and think tanks and MPs' surgeries, do their best to keep in tune with voters' needs and concerns.

In the early part of the nineteenth century, Cabinet ministers only appeared as crude cartoons, if, in the opinion of a Gilray or a Cruikshank, they deserved to be lampooned. The vast majority of politicians were faceless. They only appeared to their constituents (the equivalent of less than an eighth of the population) every seven years on election day. Their anonymity may have been a strength, but it contributed to the frustration of the people in that they had no peaceful and acceptable means of redress.
This again was a two-way street; the government and the politicians had no way of knowing the mood of the nation, especially its unenfranchised elements, unless someone told them.

That job was given to the
agent provocateur
, the spy. Arguably, the creator of a secret service in Britain was Francis Walsingham, the devoted servant of Elizabeth I and a member of her Privy Council. At a time of religious and political upheaval, when a rampant Spain was threatening the stability of Europe, there were at least five assassination plots against the queen. Walsingham's job was to keep the woman – and the country – safe by whatever means at his disposal. To this end, he employed a number of ‘intelligencers' and ‘projectioners', including university men like playwright Christopher Marlowe, to listen at keyholes and report to superiors. Robert Cecil, who effectively became the queen's first minister on the death of his father, Lord Burghley, continued the practice and not only foiled the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, but orchestrated it throughout.
²
With the help of his informer, Cecil knew exactly how far the plot had progressed, almost on a daily basis, and made life easier for the conspirators in order to catch them red-handed. Such Machiavellianism continued into the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell and beyond.

The debonair fiction of the spy rests today on the suave figure of James Bond. Shaken but never stirred, Bond is a creation of the Cold War of the late twentieth century, even if he is partially based on Sidney Reilly (Sigmund Rosenblum) who was a triple and possible even quadruple agent for the British shortly before and during the First World War. The spies who operated in Georgian England were of a very different character. They were usually, but not always, literate and came from varied walks of life. They rarely reported direct to anyone in the corridors of power in Whitehall, but to magistrates, police officers and mill owners at a local level. The case of Colonel Despard and the case of Cato Street were different.

There is no doubt that William Pitt used a spy network and there is equally no doubt that, in liberal society and among the labouring poor, the use of such men was detested and smacked of the French Terror at its worst. There, neighbours were encouraged to inform on neighbours. Tittle-tattle and old grievances led directly to the guillotine. This policy extended right through from the Jacobin 1790s to the bread-deprived years two decades later. Committees of Secrecy met in the lobby rooms of the Commons in
1801, 1812 and 1817, turning pale as they heard anecdotal evidence of insurrection. In the 1790s, it was French agents working for the good of the Revolution across the Channel; twenty years later it was the work of Luddites and unbridled democrats. In both instances, the target was the same: the reactionary, retrenched and uncaring government.

E P Thompson sums up the situation superbly:

The line between the spy and the
agent provocateur
was indistinct. The informer was paid by piece-rate; the more alarmist his information, the more lucrative his trade . . . At a certain stage, it is impossible to know how far they [the government] were themselves deluded by conspiracies which their own informers engendered . . . These years reveal such a foul pattern of faked evidence, intimidation and double agents . . . If the Cato Street conspirators had achieved their object in the assassination of the Cabinet, the Cabinet would have been slain by conspirators whom their own repressive policies had engendered and their own spies armed.
³

The problem lies in the value of the evidence provided by
agents provocateurs
. Moderate reformers, like Burdett and Whitbread, poured scorn on the wilder stories. The social historians the Hammonds, writing in the middle of the twentieth century, tended to believe the bulk of what they read. E P Thompson, ever the defender of the forming working class, veered towards Burdett and Whitbread. Our dilemma, 200 years after the events is that we cannot
know
the extent of planned insurrection. All we can do is to see it in action.

In July 1817, five months after somebody threw a stone at the Prince Regent's carriage as he rattled past towards Westminster, the satirical cartoonist George Cruikshank drew a piece which encapsulated the honest man's view. Around a table littered with radical threats, Castlereagh, Canning and Sidmouth, conspirators against the people, are plotting to give titles and honours to the best known spies of the day – John Castle and W J Richards, who usually used the alias Oliver. In the background, John Bull, the upright, working Englishman, looks on appalled. ‘Poor starving John', said the caption, ‘is to be ensnared into Criminal Acts and then the Projectors and Perpetrators are brought forward as principal evidences.'

It was one of those projectors and perpetrators who met Henry Hunt along Cheapside on 2 December 1816. John Castle was a shady character,
very much part of London's criminal fraternity. He was a ‘bully', as pimps were called, and met some of the reformers while serving time in the Fleet prison. E P Thompson analyses the two types of informer and Castle fits both. He could have done his work at Spa Fields in exchange for immunity from arrest and punishment; or he could have been working just for cash. Can we therefore trust the word of men like Castle? No, but again we cannot dismiss his evidence out of hand. Employers, magistrates and the government employed several men in the same area, so Castle would have no way of knowing whether he himself was being spied on, a sort of quality control of what he had to sell.

In his semi-literate hand, he wrote to Mr Litchfield, solicitor for the Treasury at the trial of James Watson in March 1817:

sir thear is one thing that I am not certain weather I menshened but I have thought it most properest to cumenecate to you thear was to have been small Detachments plased at Diferant Enterenses in and out of London to prevent Government for sending despatches to haney part of the Cuntrey as thear was only one hors soulger sent with them . . . proposed by young watson and thisilwood and a greed to by all.
⁴

We cannot be sure exactly when Castle joined the Spenceans but by October 1816 he was on the committee of six with the Watsons, the Evanses and Thistlewood. The report above has the ring of truth because working-class meetings (even secret, underground ones that plotted revolution) had formal proceedings, including a revolving chairman, proposals, seconders and so on. It also makes sense because it proves a degree of planning not actually apparent from the events of the day.

In his memoir of 1822, Hunt wrote that, at the first rally, on 15 November, Castle had loudly proposed a toast over dinner at the Bouverie Hotel – ‘May the last of Kings be strangled with the guts of the last priest'. Watson and Thistlewood were appalled by this and visited Hunt the next day to apologize. Neither of them seems to have realized that Castle was going over the top in an attempt to seem at one with the cause. At the meeting on 2 December, Castle was seen stashing weapons into one of the hustings wagons on its way to Spa Fields and told the court at Watson's trial that he had been tasked with making pikes.

The
agent provocateur
had done his job well. Sidmouth at the Home Office could now move against the reformers. The charge was treason and
Jem Watson made a run for it, shooting his way out of trouble with police officers at Highgate before boarding a ship in London docks disguised as a Quaker, his face disfigured with caustic, according to the
Independent Whig
of 27 July 1817. His destination? America, a safe haven where nearly everyone had committed treason forty years before.

The others were caught and Watson senior, Thistlewood, Preston and Hooper were put on trial at the King's Bench on 9 June. Previously the grand jury of Middlesex had decided there was a case to answer and Mr Justice Bayley told them they were to deliberate on ‘the highest crime that can be committed – the crime of high treason'. There were four counts (which were to be repeated three years later in the Cato Street trials) and fourteen ‘overt acts' mostly perpetrated on the second Spa Fields meeting on 2 December. A vast 228 possible jurors were whittled down to twelve men and true. One was a gentleman (Thistlewood's status); the others variously a buttonmaker, woollen draper, lottery office keeper, anchor-smith, carpenter/undertaker, capillary maker, ironmonger, shoemaker, carrier and druggist. What no one appears to have asked these men was their take on radical politics. We can, perhaps, draw our own conclusions, because after five days of evidence, another biased summation by Lord Ellenborough, the principal judge and a bottle of wine and some sandwiches, they found James Watson not guilty.

Ellenborough, Bayley and the other two judges, Abbott and Holroyd, must have been appalled. The prosecution decided to try each of the four Spa Fields leaders separately. This was a risk because if the first was acquitted, as was the case, then all of them would walk. On paper, the evidence against Watson senior looks strong, but the authorities made the mistake of relying on John Castle and his evidence occupied the whole of the third day. He was at the Bar for between eight and nine hours in which he outlined in great detail the insurrecting plans of the Spenceans and how he, Watson and Thistlewood had spent days talking to discontents in pubs across London to persuade them to join the rising. This was nothing to the next day however, when he was mauled by Mr Wetherell for the defence.

‘Your memory was very good yesterday,' said the lawyer, ‘. . . seemed as good as an almanac, but today you do not recollect anything.' He ripped into his man, forcing him to admit that he had previously betrayed fellow criminals which resulted in those men's deaths; that he had done time for
attempting to smuggle French prisoners-of-war out of the country, for money; that he was a forger; that he had committed bigamy; and that he was a ‘bully' for a lodging house in King Street, Soho, where Mother Thoms hired out her rooms for half an hour at a time – or even, something the jury found amusing, for five or six minutes.

In his summation, Wetherell went further than the actual evidence would allow by implying that Castle was a government spy. The Attorney-General and the judges were outraged, but there is little doubt that Wetherell was right. Despite this, there is a sense that the Spa Fields four got off lightly. There were parties in London to celebrate their victory, with flags flown and toasts drunk. Perhaps it gave Arthur Thistlewood a sense of immortality, an optimism, which overcame his disappointment at how easily his revolutionary army had collapsed. It also meant that, for the rest of his life, he was a marked man.

But if the authorities had fallen down badly in placing their faith in Castle, worse was to come that year of 1817 and many miles to the north. E P Thompson makes the point that, if the weavers of Lancashire, Yorkshire, Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire had bought their banners to Spa Fields, then Watson's and Thistlewood's revolution might have worked.

On 1 March, Liverpool's government again suspended habeas corpus in the face of a growing number of riots across the country. On the 10th, starving spinners and weavers set off from Manchester to walk the 165 miles to London to see the Prince Regent. It was all part of the working man's naive faith in the hierarchy of Old England. However wicked, corrupt and uncaring the king's ministers were, the man himself (or in this case, because of George III's increasing infirmity, his son) was somehow approachable, fair and kind. Men believed the same of Charles I before, during and even after the Civil War. So did the Russian peasants who marched behind Father Gapon (another spy) to the Winter Palace in 1905. The spinners were called Blanketeers because they carried blankets over their shoulders to use as sleeping bags. In the event, after eleven miles, they were halted at Stockport by the army, who arrested the leaders and dispersed the rest.

One of the great question marks over this period of British history is the links between London and the provinces. Some provincial leaders, like Joseph Mitchell, a journeyman printer from Lancashire, visited the Spenceans in the Cock along Grafton Street and, as we shall see, events in
Manchester in the summer of 1819 had a direct bearing on Cato Street. It was on one of his visits to London that Mitchell met William Oliver, who sometimes called himself Oliver Williams and who had just been released from debtors' prison at the Fleet. Oliver's freedom had been arranged by the Jacobin shoemaker Charles Pendrill, who had been an associate of Colonel Despard.