Enemies of the State (14 page)

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 Brailsford.

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.

For nearly three years, Davidson worked as an articled clerk for a Liverpool lawyer. The work was dull (Benjamin Disraeli would tire of it equally quickly a few years later), the hours long and much time was spent laboriously copying legal documents with a quill pen. Born by the sea as he was, Davidson may have had a natural wanderlust and signed as a clerk on board a merchant vessel. Less than a day out from port, however, he found his duties consisted of scrubbing decks with the other hands.

Clearly, sailing in wartime carried its own risks. Davidson's ship was stopped by a British man of war and the crew impressed. At his trial, the ‘man of colour' claimed to have ‘ventured my life fifteen times for my country and my King' and if this was true, his time aboard the warship was the only possible opportunity for this. Six months later, he was back home and somehow managed to get out of the navy, sending begging letters to his father's friend. The upshot was that Davidson was now apprenticed to a cabinet-maker and all thoughts of the law seem to have gone out of the window.

Davidson rarely seems to have been without female companionship and was on the point of marrying a Liverpool merchant's daughter when her friends got wind of it and whisked her away. We have already seen the outrage caused by Colonel Despard's mixed marriage, to the extent that even subsequent generations of his family claimed that the woman was merely a servant. The loss of his bride-to-be was naturally a blow to Davidson, who decided to go back to Kingston on board a West Indiaman.

History repeated itself and Davidson was once again pressed into the navy. This time he deserted at the first opportunity and, cadging from friends, became a journeyman. Wilkinson's narrative becomes confusing at this point. Technically, desertion in wartime was a hanging offence, but there is no further mention of this and Davidson's mother now appears on the scene, paying the boy 2 guineas a week through her agent (presumably her husband's friend from Liverpool).

In Litchfield, Davidson was employed by Mr Bullock, a cabinet-maker who was impressed with the young man's high levels of skill, earning up to 4 guineas a week. With a total of 6 guineas a week at his disposal, Davidson began to pay court to the 16-year-old Miss Salt, who seems to have been a feisty girl who met the handsome mulatto secretly. Since the girl would come into an inheritance of £7,000 when she came of age, it was clearly worth Davidson's
staying around. Mrs Salt reluctantly agreed to the marriage, keeping her husband in the dark. When Mr Salt discovered the truth, he lay in wait for Davidson in his garden and fired a pistol ball through the suitor's hat (presumably aiming for his head). Salt summoned a constable and Davidson was charged with attempted robbery.

An unusually upright magistrate believed Davidson's version of events, set the man free and imprisoned the girl's father. A deal was struck – Salt would allow the marriage if Davidson brought no charges. So far, so good, but a hidden clause was that Miss Salt could only marry when she came of age. Davidson was prepared to wait; she was not. When her father sent her to ‘a distant part of the country' she found someone else and married him instead.

Davidson was heart-broken. He bought poison from a chemist in Litchfield and swallowed it. He lost his nerve however and told a friend who provided an antidote, thus saving the man's life. A kind of pattern develops in the lives of the Cato Street conspirators. Reversals, life's upheavals, downward paths – all play their part, leaving the men particularly vulnerable and disordered. Davidson let his business slide and had soon spent virtually all of the £1,200 his mother had settled on him in a London bank.

We have no time-line for any of this, but after the collapse of his Midlands business he came to London and worked for Mr Cox, a cabinetmaker in the Haymarket. At the same time he became a Sunday school teacher in a chapel in Walworth and for the first time we have a religious light thrown onto Cato Street. Among those condemned to death in April 1820, only Davidson turned to his God. In Walworth, the cabinet-maker fell foul of the law again. The exact details are unknown and Davidson mentioned them in the Cato Street trial in one of the earliest – and weakest – attempts to play the ‘race card' on record. He was clearly in the habit of touching up not only his female colleagues in the Walworth Chapel Sunday School, but some of the girls as well. Wilkinson wrote:

He habitually indulged in attempts of a gross and indelicate nature on the persons . . . way-laying them on their return home . . . from divine worship and taking improper liberties with them.

He was not the first or the last Sunday school teacher to abuse his position of trust and for a while, his targets put up with it. One of them finally
reported matters to the committee who conducted an enquiry and kicked Davidson out. ‘His habitual lying, prevarication and intrigue' had become as obvious as his ‘brutal propensities'.

At the Cato Street trial, Davidson claimed that one black man looked very like another; that he had been wrongly accused in the Walworth case; and that he had found the real culprit and forced him to apologize to the young lady concerned. Since, at the time, Davidson was trying to pretend that he was an innocent bystander at Cato Street, a man in the wrong place at the wrong time and there were perfectly innocent explanations for his carrying a sword and carbine that night, it all merely underlines Wilkinson's obvious contempt for the man.

In 1816, Davidson went into business for himself in Walworth and married a widow, Mrs Lane, who had four small children. The year was a bad one for cabinet-makers as it was for everyone else and he lost trade, moving to Marylebone. It was here and it was then that his political activities began.

The men we have met so far were hanged for their involvement in Cato Street, but six others escaped the drop and a seventh never even appeared in court. The six are notoriously vague. Because they changed their plea to guilty after the trials of the five, they did not directly face the wrath of the court themselves, so our knowledge of them is limited. Usually, they appear as a collective group, huddled in a smoky tap-room muttering mutiny. We have no clear picture of them as individuals.

James Wilson was a tailor; Richard Bradburn a carpenter; James Gilchrist a shoemaker; Charles Cooper a bootmaker; John Monument a shoemaker and John Shaw a carpenter. Together with Ings, Tidd and Davidson, they were all arrested in the hay-loft at Cato Street or the area nearby. Cooper lived in Garden-Court, Baldwin's Gardens, and most of them were local men whose lodgings could be found in the rabbit warrens off Oxford Street and Holborn. On the warrant issued for arrest on the night of 23 February, in addition to some of the names above
⁶
were Abel Hall, a tailor, and John Palin, a child's chair-maker and former corporal in the East London Militia.

Not all the Cato Street conspirators were caught. Some got away from the notorious hay-loft and melted into the London underworld. But one who escaped deserved, perhaps, more than anyone to die. And he did not
even appear in court, although his name was mentioned by every defendant and most witnesses. Among the 162 potential witnesses listed to attend at the Old Bailey Session House in April, one name stands out – that of George Edwards, modeller of Ranelagh Place.

In the trial of Arthur Thistlewood, the witness Robert Adams, a former conspirator who had turned king's evidence referred to Edwards sitting in the White Hart on 19 February. It took him a while for his eyes to acclimatize after the glare of the snow outside, but he saw the man there in the company of the others. And it was Edwards who, in the same pub on the next night, announced that a Cabinet dinner was due to be held at Lord Harrowby's in Grosvenor Square. On the 21st, Edwards was busy making ‘fusees' (hand-grenades) along with Ings and Abel Hall.

Joseph Hale, Brunt's teenaged apprentice at Fox Court, remembered Edwards as a regular visitor to his master's house, more often indeed than Adams. He believed him to be an artist.