Enemies of the State by M. J. Trow Read Free Book Online

‘terrorist’ organization over the Irish Sea. The most common meeting houses for this group were either Furnival’s Inn in Holborn (much was to be made of this place in the Cato Street trials) or Soho Square. Large numbers of Irishmen, like those who lived in Gee’s Court off Oxford Street, met there, as did a hard core of disgruntled soldiers.
    What we have here is the lunatic fringe of the Jacobin movement. We have no idea of their numbers but Despard, like the men of Cato Street, seems to have genuinely believed that there was an army of the dispossessed out there, in London, Sheffield, Leeds and elsewhere, ready to rise at the drop of a cap of liberty. By 1801, the mutinous rumblings had formulated into a plan which has some of the elements of urban guerrilla warfare and aUtopian vision of a rosy future.
    Despard’s links with the Irish underground are shadowy. He almost certainly met Wolfe Tone in the mid-1790s and probably Robert Emmett, the son of the viceroy’s doctor who had joined Tone’s United Irishmen in 1789. There is no real evidence in Despard’s case that his plan to seize power in London was linked either to a French invasion or Emmett’s scheme to capture Dublin castle and imprison the viceroy. In fact between 1797 and 1803, the Franco-Irish plans seem to have been totally disjointed, with timings going wrong and Emmett, in 1803, forced to go it alone, with, for him, fatal consequences.
    By the year of Wolfe Tone’s rebellion, Catherine Despard was increasingly worried about her husband’s political machinations and he took to using a ‘safe house’ rather than talk sedition with fellow conspirators at their home. Both the LCS and the United Englishmen/Irishmen were hit by the authorities in that year after a traitor was discovered at Margate with plans for an Irish rising he was taking across the Channel to France. Among thirty Jacobins, Despard was arrested and held in Coldbath Fields gaol in Clerkenwell. There was a deep irony here because this prison was known as The Steel (i.e. Bastille) because of its associations with the notorious Parisian gaol. The Jacobin poets Southey and Coleridge wrote of it:
    As he went through Coldbath Fields he saw
A solitary cell:
And the Devil was pleased, for it gave him a hint
For improving his prisons in Hell. 2
    In fact, when Despard was there, the place was only four years old. It had 232 cells and cost a staggering £65,000 to build.
    Tone’s rebellion broke out while Despard was still inside and, since habeas corpus was now suspended, the colonel could, in theory, be held indefinitely.
    Enter the feisty Catherine Despard. She contacted the radical MP Sir Francis Burdett who raised the issue of the Coldbath inmates in the Commons. Burdett was a brilliant choice, the respectable face of English Jacobinism, a rebel by temperament who was the darling of the mob. He read out Catherine’s letter to an unruly House, equally divided over their attitudes towards habeas corpus. Colonel Despard, he told them, was being held ‘without either fire or candle, table, knife, fork, a glazed window or even a book to read’.He also read out a second letter, an appeal from a Coldbath prisoner written with a splinter of wood dipped in blood. There were cries of ‘Burdett and no Bastille’ on the one hand, but on the other, the Attorney-General Sir John Scott expressed himself surprised that Catherine Despard wasn’t in prison along with her husband.
    Once released, Despard returned to his old haunts and his plans were reformulated. In six articles presented to the United Englishmen’s Committee, the first attack should be on the Tower. Not only was the place a prison along Bastille lines (several of the Cato Street conspirators would be sent there in 1820) but it contained the Royal Mint, a barracks and a sizeable arsenal of guns and powder. In theory, the massive 80 foot thick walls of the White Tower