The Colonel Accused Of Plotting To Kill The King

By the winter of 1803, Colonel Edward Marcus Despard had travelled a long way from the Caribbean campaigns of his youth. Irish-born, a career officer of the British Army who had served the Crown with distinction on the Spanish Main, he now stood accused of high treason against that same Crown. The charge was the so-called Despard Plot — a conspiracy said to include a scheme to assassinate King George III and seize the Tower of London and the Bank of England, striking at the monarchy and the machinery of the state in a single blow. Whether the plot was as grand and real as the prosecution claimed, or whether it was inflated and steered by government informers, is a question historians have argued over ever since. What is not in doubt is the sentence, or the manner in which Despard met it. Despard was convicted of high treason, and the court passed upon him the full, ancient penalty: that he be hanged, drawn and quartered. It was the last time in England that this sentence — the law’s most deliberate spectacle of horror, designed to unmake a traitor’s body as a warning to all who watched — would be passed in a treason case. Even in 1803 it was an anachronism, a relic of a crueller age hauled into a new century. Before the sentence, there had been the trial, and at the trial there had been an extraordinary witness. Admiral Lord Nelson — the most celebrated man in Britain, the hero of the Nile — came to give evidence to Despard’s character. Decades earlier the two men had served together, and Nelson did not forget it. “We went on the Spanish Main together,” he told the court. “We slept many nights together in our clothes upon the ground; we have measured the height of the enemy’s wall together.” It was the testimony of one old soldier for another, a memory of shared danger offered in a courtroom where a man’s life hung on the impression he made. Nelson was honest about its limits — he admitted he had lost sight of Despard for some twenty years and could not speak to the man he had since become. It was not enough to save him. But it remains one of the most remarkable character references in English legal history: the nation’s greatest naval hero, standing up for a condemned traitor because they had once bled in the same service.

The Horror

On 21 February 1803, Despard was executed at Horsemonger Lane Gaol — the Surrey County Jail — in Southwark, London. In keeping with the sentence, though in mercifully remitted form, he was first drawn: laid on a hurdle and dragged through the yard of the prison, the ritual opening of the traitor’s death. The full horror of hanging, drawing and quartering — the disembowelling, the burning, the division of the body into four — was not carried out. The sentence was partially remitted. Despard was drawn on the hurdle, hanged until he was dead, and then beheaded. There was no quartering. It was, by the standards of the punishment named in his sentence, a restrained death — and it was still a man dragged along the ground to a rope and then, once lifeless, decapitated before a vast crowd. Around twenty thousand people had gathered to see it. And here the scene became strange. This was not the jeering, bloody-minded mob that such executions often drew. The crowd was notably silent, notably orderly — a great mass of Londoners standing quiet, whether from sympathy, unease, or the sheer weight of what they were watching. Despard used the scaffold as his last platform, and he did not use it to repent. He gave a defiant speech denying his guilt and casting himself not as a traitor but as a martyr to principle. He stood there, he said, “because he has been a friend to truth, to liberty, and to justice… because he has been a friend to the poor and to the oppressed.” He looked past his own death to what he believed would outlast him, expressing his “hope and trust… that the principles of freedom, of humanity, and of justice, will finally triumph.” These were not the words of a man begging for mercy or a soul commending itself to God in fear. They were the words of a man arguing his case one final time, to the largest audience he would ever have, moments before the drop. Contemporary accounts record that the silent crowd broke into a reaction as he finished — the quiet that had held over twenty thousand people giving way at last. The aftermath belonged to his widow. Catherine Despard — who had campaigned for him and stood by him through the trial and the sentence — secured for her executed husband a burial of real dignity, a resting place far grander than a traitor’s death would ordinarily allow. She arranged for him to be buried at St Faith’s, within the precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral in London. A man condemned as an enemy of the state was laid to rest inside the ground of the nation’s great cathedral.

The Modern Relic

Despard lies there still. His grave is within the crypt and precincts of St Paul’s Cathedral — one of the most visited buildings in London, ground shared with admirals and heroes of empire, including, in time, Nelson himself. The colonel who was drawn on a hurdle and beheaded before twenty thousand silent Londoners rests within the same great cathedral as the very man who once stood in court and remembered sleeping beside him on the cold ground of the Spanish Main. Whether Despard truly plotted to kill his king, or was a friend of liberty caught in a net woven partly by government informers, the stone and the cathedral remain — a place you can walk into, and stand quietly, as twenty thousand people once stood quietly for him. He asked that the principles of freedom, humanity and justice would finally triumph. He said it with a rope waiting, to a crowd that answered with silence.

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