The plot to assassinate the King was sensational — a blueprint for revolution so violent and cold-blooded that it threatened to plunge Britain into a terrorist nightmare.
As George III’s carriage trundled from Buckingham Palace to Westminster for the State Opening of Parliament in 1802, renegades planned to open fire with a ceremonial Turkish cannon.
The murder weapon was already in position in St James’s Park — displayed as a trophy from the war with Napoleon in Egypt. No one would suspect the plot until the first cannonball smashed the royal coach to gilded splinters.
That cannon blast would be the signal to the other plotters in three regiments of the Guards to seize control of the capital, taking Parliament and the Tower of London. The Post Office would also fall under military control and all communications out of the city would be blocked.
Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, 51, was the central figure in the notorious Despard Plot. And he has found fresh fame on televison today — in Poldark. He is played by Vincent Regan, with his wife played by Kerri McClean
Across Britain and Ireland, dozens of revolutionary cells were ready to join this civil war. This was an uprising that would eclipse the French Revolution. As one newspaper of the era, the St James’s Chronicle, put it, the plot was of ‘so shocking a description that we cannot mention it without pain and horror’.
At the centre of the murderous plans was a figure well known to government agents: a former soldier and friend of Admiral Lord Nelson. He was Colonel Edward Marcus Despard, 51, and he was married to a young black woman whose mother was a freed Caribbean slave.
Known to friends as Ned, he was the central figure in the notorious Despard Plot. And he has found fresh fame on televison today — in Poldark. Played by Vincent Regan, Despard begs old friend, Captain Ross Poldark (Aidan Turner), for help from his prison cell in the final series of the Sunday night BBC costume drama.
Screenwriter Debbie Horsfield takes a liberty by having Poldark and Despard serve together against George Washington’s rebels during the American War of Independence — Despard in fact did his wartime service in the disease-ridden swamps of Central America known as the Mosquito Coast.
But much of his real life does match the story woven around the TV character. He really was married to a fearless black anti-slavery campaigner. He did stand up for former slaves in Honduras to the fury of British profiteers in the mahogany trade. And he certainly spent years without trial on trumped up charges in a hellish London prison . . . just as Poldark found him.
All this raises one crucial question. Was Despard the monstrous traitor that he was painted as by Parliament and the Crown? Or was this one of the greatest miscarriages of justice in British history?
Despard begs old friend, Captain Ross Poldark (Aidan Turner), for help from his prison cell in the final series of the Sunday night BBC costume drama
Many images of Despard were circulated at the time — as traitor, pirate, freedom fighter and noble scapegoat. No one could ever prove conclusively which was right.
Despard was 21 when he arrived in Jamaica with the 50th Infantry Regiment in 1772. The youngest of seven brothers, he was brought up in a manor house on an estate near Mountrath in County Laois, Ireland.
He served the Crown in the Caribbean and Central America, with only two visits home, until he was 40. Jamaica at the end of the 18th century was a remote island colony, where a few thousand white Europeans, administering the immensely lucrative sugar plantations, were vastly outnumbered by hundreds of thousands of black slaves.
When Despard arrived, a slave rebellion had just been quelled with brutal force. Rebel leaders were burned alive or chained in cages and left to starve in public.
The young officer’s first view of Kingston harbour probably revealed not only the emerald slopes of the Blue Mountains, but dozens of slaves, their bodies decomposing, gibbeted from yardarms and street signs, and impaled on posts along the waterfront.
It was a fitting sight. For the majority of Despard’s comrades in the 50th, this posting to the Caribbean was a death sentence. Tropical diseases ravaged the regiment, killing so many within three years that the unit was disbanded.
Many images of Despard were circulated at the time — as traitor, pirate, freedom fighter and noble scapegoat. No one could ever prove conclusively which was right
Despard made his first visit home aged 27 but, with the outbreak of the War of Independence the next year, he was sent back to Jamaica, where he met 21-year-old Captain Horatio Nelson, in command of a frigate called the Hinchinbrooke.
They were despatched to the coastal jungles of modern-day Belize and Panama, thick with clouds of malarial mosquitoes. Despard and Nelson patrolled between the Mosquito Coast and Jamaica, clashing with Spanish warships. In 1780, Nelson was stricken with dysentery and nursed by ex-slave Cubah Cornwallis. It might be that Despard met his wife Catherine in similar circumstances. Her mother was a freed slave, her father by some accounts a preacher, and she was educated and ferociously intelligent. Whether or not they ever formally married, Catherine took his name and they had a son, James.
In 1790, Despard was recalled to London over a dispute, an incident which also featured in Poldark. Home Secretary, Lord Sydney, had appointed him as an administrator in the Bay of Honduras. His task was to divide the bay into territories for the settlers. This enraged a small number of businessmen who had carved it up for themselves and were making a fortune exporting rainforest mahogany to Britain. They were known as the Baymen.
But the coast was also home to a collection of labourers, freed slaves, smugglers, former pirates, brewers and ex-soldiers — white, black and mixed race. They were known as the Shoremen and they needed land to farm or build houses.
Despard treated the Shoremen fairly, to the fury of the Baymen. When Sydney was replaced as Home Secretary by the venal William Wyndham Grenville, Despard was ordered back to London, where he and Catherine were placed under surveillance by the government’s network of spies.
The French king had lost his head to the guillotine. In Britain, the ruling classes were terrified of revolution — and Despard’s treatment of the Shoremen seemed to smack too much of liberty, equality and fraternity.
Instead of lying low, Despard plunged into radical politics. He and his family moved lodgings frequently, dodging from Soho to Camden Town, St George’s Fields to Berkeley Square. But informers were always able to spot him by the dark-blue greatcoat he wore even on summer days — 20 years in the tropics and frequent bouts of malaria had left him acutely vulnerable to the cold.
He had a reputation as a formidable speaker, according to spies who claimed they heard him outline a plan to overthrow the government and seize London with republicans and Irish revolutionaries. It could be that the accusations were false. That is certainly the picture presented in Poldark.
But it is also true Despard was a friend of the United Irish ringleader Hamilton Rowan, a man Catherine mistrusted deeply. And he was among a band of protesters who laid siege to Prime Minister William Pitt the Younger in Downing Street, smashing windows and chanting, ‘No war, no Pitt, cheap bread!’ In 1798, the police swooped on members of the London Corresponding Society, a radical organisation committed to political reform. Despard was thrown into jail in Clerkenwell. Soon after, as rebellion broke out in Ireland, habeas corpus was suspended, meaning political prisoners could be held indefinitely without trial.
Despard spent the next three years in a freezing cell, where he would leap from a chair to his bed and onto the floor, in rotation, for hours just to keep warm.
Once habeas corpus was restored, the government had to set Despard free. But he was not out of jail long. In November 1802 the Bow Street Runners arrested him at the Oakley Arms in Lambeth, in the midst of a political meeting. Many there were organisers for United Irish.
This time he was charged with high treason.
Lord Nelson was among those who spoke for Despard’s loyal character: ‘We slept many nights together in our clothes upon the ground,’ he said. ‘In all that period of time no man could have shown more zealous attachment to his sovereign and to his country than Colonel Despard did.’
Despard was found guilty. The jury recommended mercy. The judge ordered him to be executed by the traditional method for traitors: hanging, drawing and quartering.
One reporter described Catherine’s grief-stricken reaction, writing that she ‘almost sunk under the anticipated horror of his fate; her feelings, when the dreadful order arrived, can scarcely be conceived’.
Catherine petitioned everyone to save her husband — Nelson, the PM, the King himself. She prayed for a pardon, or at worst a life sentence. She had the crowd on her side: most Londoners believed Despard was innocent. It proved difficult even to find labourers to erect the scaffold.
With the sentence due to be carried out at Southwark, on the roof of Surrey County jail, local magistrates became alarmed at the strength of public feeling.
Trying to avert riots, they announced a measure of mercy. Contrary to the custom for traitors, Despard would not be disembowelled and forced to see his own entrails burned, and his corpse would not be hacked into quarters. Instead, he was to be beheaded.
But first, he had to be drawn and hanged. Drawing was the traditional humiliation, where a prisoner was tied to a gurney without wheels and dragged over cobbles to the gallows.
Every member of the Bow Street, Queen Street and Hatton Garden militias were on duty, and constables drafted in from outlying boroughs, but the magistrates still felt ‘drawing’ Despard through the streets was certain to incite violence.
Instead, at 7am on February 21, 1803, when the bell of St George’s church had been tolling for two hours, Despard was led into the prison yard.
Standing beside a small cart was the executioner with a drawn sword.
Despard, in his greatcoat and boots, with his hands tied, was seated backwards on a straw bale, roped to the cart. As the bale was dragged bumping across the courtyard, he burst out laughing: ‘Ha, ha! What nonsensical mummery is this?’
Six other prisoners were to die beside Despard but he was in a cell on his own when Catherine was permitted to make a farewell visit, under the eye of a reporter. It was said that Despard showed no ‘unmanly’ emotion. The sun rose on a vast crowd that had been gathering for days and which now waited in near silence. They watched seven coffins being brought to stand beside the gallows on the prison’s flat roof, and at 8.30am the prisoners began to file up to the scaffold.
Despard was the last to be led to the rope. He was impassive: ‘His countenance underwent not the slightest change,’ wrote one observer, as the noose was slipped around his neck.
He tilted his head to allow the executioner to tighten the knot under his left ear, knowing from his Caribbean experiences that this was the best way to ensure a broken neck and instant death.
Beside him, a florid-faced Irishman named John Macnamara, was heard to mutter: ‘I am afraid, Colonel, we have got ourselves into a bad situation.’
Despard replied: ‘There are many better, and some worse.’
Then he turned to the Sheriff of Surrey, who was presiding over the execution, and asked to be allowed to say a few words. The Sheriff gave permission but warned him that if anything ‘inflammatory or improper’ was spoken, the lever would be pulled and the trapdoor beneath his feet would open.
‘Fellow citizens,’ Despard said, ‘I come here as you see after having served my country faithfully, honourably and usefully, for 30 years and upwards, to suffer death upon a scaffold for a crime of which I protest I am not guilty. I solemnly declare that I am not more guilty than any of you who may now be hearing me.’
At the front of the crowd, people cheered and clapped — but they were likely government informers, watching to see who joined in with their applause.
‘Citizens,’ Despard continued, ‘I hope and trust the principles of freedom, of humanity and of justice will finally triumph over falsehood, tyranny and delusion.’
This was too much for the Sheriff.
At his side, another condemned man, a soldier named John Francis, murmured: ‘What an amazing crowd.’ Despard answered: ‘Tis very cold. I think we shall have some rain.’ They were the last words he spoke.
His body hung at the end of the rope for 37 minutes, to ensure he was dead, before the executioner took him down. A surgeon stepped forward to swiftly remove his head, but his knife hit bone and he was soon reduced to nervous hacking.
The executioner began wrenching at Despard’s head, a spectacle that ‘filled everyone present with horror’. Eventually, it was separated from his body and the executioner lifted it by its hair, declaring to the hisses of the crowd: ‘This is the head of a traitor.’
Ned Despard was the last man in Britain to be sentenced to death by hanging, drawing and quartering, and the last to be drawn over cobbles behind a cart.
But it was Catherine Despard who had the last word. Knowing that her husband’s family had the hereditary right to burial in St Paul’s Cathedral, she campaigned doggedly to see him given his due.
And so it was that the ‘traitor’ Colonel Despard, hanged and beheaded for plotting to kill the King, was finally laid to rest in the great church beside Britain’s national heroes.