Enemies of the State by M. J. Trow Page A

cry was ‘insurrection, revolt and the constitution of 1793’ and his song – ‘Dying of hunger, dying of cold’ – could be heard in the cafés of Paris by the mid-decade. Probably psychotic, Babeuf believed that the appalling September massacres had not been appalling enough and the only remedy was to destroy the Republic’s government which consisted of ‘starvers, bloodsuckers, tyrants, hangmen, rogues and mountebanks’.
    It all sounded like an incitement for Despard and the men of Cato Street, but was there any link with Thomas Spence? No hard evidence exists, butthere were rumours of weapon collecting and drilling in connection with the man’s followers and, after all, Spence himself used underground revolutionary techniques – handbills, pub meetings, possibly the orchestration of bread riots in 1800 and 1801. In 1803 little children were arrested on the orders of Lord Portland, the Home Secretary, for selling Spence’s tracts. Certainly, the government continued to believe that Spence’s was one of the ‘hidden hands’ behind unrest. Francis Place on the other hand believed that Spence and his followers were harmless people ‘next to nobody and nothing’. But Place often misread his contemporaries and was prone to pretend that working-class reform revolved around him alone.
    But whatever the involvement of Thomas Spence himself in plans for revolt, there is no doubt that, after his death, his followers certainly were involved. Calling themselves Spenceans or Spencean Philanthropists they took to the streets of London in 1816 as the nucleus of what was intended – and might have become – open rebellion.
    Meeting in a variety of public houses, they were focusing their thoughts on what might be termed agrarian communism with their slogan ‘The Land is the Peoples’ Farm’. The leading lights of this group were more properly Jacobins or Painites – ‘old Jacks’ – many of them republicans. There was no overall leader, but Dr James Watson and his son Jem (James junior) were perhaps most prominent. Watson senior is a shadowy figure, possibly 50 at the time of Spa Fields, ‘a medical man and a chymist’ who had been involved in radical politics for years. He was a friend of fellow surgeon John Gale Jones, a great believer in freedom of the press and of the mass demonstration as a means of squaring up to the authorities, ‘the free and easy’ as it was called. On 4 December 1816, the Lord Mayor of London said, ‘I always considered the Watsons – both of them – the bravest men in England.’ As always, Francis Place had a different view; the elder Watson was ‘a man of loose habits . . . wretchedly poor’, the younger was ‘a wild, profligate fellow’.
    The other father and son team in the Spencean leadership were Thomas Evans and his son, also Thomas, the elder being the group’s librarian. Place paints a picture of an eccentric, wandering from pub to pub with a Bible under his arm. In fact, Evans’s Christian Polity the Salvation of the Empire written in that year advocated socialism in a rural, agricultural setting andproved very popular with London working men, especially the shoemakers (the occupation of two of the five men hanged after Cato Street).
    Thomas Preston, a master shoemaker, said when examined by the Lord Mayor in December 1816:
    I have seen so much distress in Spitalfields that I have prayed to God to swallow me up – I have seen a fine young woman who has not been in a Bed for nine months . . . I have ruined myself. I have not £1 . . .
    Other leading members of the group were the labourers John Hooper and John Keens.
    But there is one name that stands out in the context of this book: Arthur Thistlewood. Virtually everything we know about this man, unquestionably the leader of the Cato Street conspirators, comes from the information at his