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

ahead, of course, it became the Chamber of Horrors.
    Marie Tussaud took the likeness at the undertaker’s premises in Mount Street, Lambeth, working quickly and unobtrusively. Despard was the last celebrity to be modelled by Madame Tussaud herself. The hanged traitor’s likeness travelled as a star exhibit to Edinburgh. Wisely, however, when she toured in Ireland in 1804, Despard’s head remained in storage. Eight men had been hanged for treason in Dublin the previous September and British troops patrolled the uneasy provinces in the aftermath of the Act of Union. Not until she returned to Scotland in the summer of 1808 did Despard appear again. His name remained in the catalogue until 1818, by which time interest was probably waning. 11 The head is believed to have been burnt, ironically, during an exhibition in Bristol when the city was partially destroyed by rioters over the Reform Bill agitation of 1831–2.
    What are we to make of Despard’s desperate enterprise? In his sentencing, Lord Ellenborough said
    the objects of your atrocious, abominable and traitorous conspiracy were to overthrow the government and to seize upon and destroy the sacred person of our august and revered Sovereign.
    There was little doubt of that. The Newgate Calendar concluded:
    it was certainly the most vain [futile] and impotent attempt ever engendered in the distracted brain of an enthusiast [fanatic]. Without arms or any probable means, a few dozen men, the very dregs of society, led on by a disappointed and disaffected chief, were to overturn a mighty empire; nor does it appear that any man of their insignificant band of conspirators – Colonel Despard alone excepted – was above the level of the plebeian race. Yet a small party of this description . . . brooding over their vain attempts at a mean public house in St George’s Fields, alarmed the nation. 12
    So futile did the whole business seem that many men at the time and several historians since have concluded that Despard was mad. This is patently not true. As we have seen, seducing the London-based garrisons (Wood and Francis were privates in the Grenadier Guards) was the right way to go, especially as these regiments were closest to the king, both physically and in terms of their historical relationship. 13 Seizing the Bank of England also made sense. It was after that that the plan fell apart. Many historians have overlooked the importance of the Gordon Riots of 1780 when a charismatic leader, like Despard, had not only incited murder and mayhem but got away with it.
    Incensed at the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which was actually the government’s cynical attempt to raise Catholic troops for the armed forces in the teeth of the American crisis, George Gordon was accompanied by a mob of several thousand to the Commons on 2 June 1780 to demand the Act’s repeal. He broke off from his speech to the House to harangue the crowd from an upstairs balcony and an estimated 60,000 of them went on the rampage, burning down the houses of judges like Lord Mansfield and magistrates like Sir John Fielding before attacking the Bank of England and destroying as many prisons as they could. The gin distilleries in Holborn were blown up and large parts of the city reduced to rubble. As the dust settled, there were 235 dead, 173 wounded and 139 arrested.
    Gordon’s trial was a farce. The authorities deemed, inexplicably, that there was no direct evidence against him as having caused the violence and he was acquitted. Twenty-five others in the dock were found guilty of high treason and executed.
    The key to the whole thing was the ‘dregs of society’, the ‘plebeian race’ who provide the cannon-fodder in any revolution. Today, we tend to dismiss this rank and file as unimportant. We look to the leader of revolt, from Spartacus to Castro, and measure their worth against some rational yardstick that we have invented. But there is little rational