Free Enemies of the State by M. J. Trow Page B

politics at all.
    John Bellingham was an unstable businessman whose business took him to Russia. It all went wrong for him and he ended up in a Russian prison. With his money gone, he turned to the British ambassador in St Petersburg who was less than helpful. So too was the Consul-General. On his release, Bellingham came home, rented rooms in rundown New Millman Street and began to bombard the government with letters demanding redress. Since Bellingham had brought his disasters on himself and broken Russian law at a time when it was in the government’s interests to keep Russia sweet against the common foe, Napoleon, nothing could be done for him.
    At his trial between 13 and 15 May it was decided that Bellingham did indeed know right from wrong and he was sentenced to death. To the government, whatever the specific motivation on Bellingham’s part, the plans of Despard, the riots of the starving, the machine-wrecking of the Luddites and the insanity of John Bellingham were all merely the jutting ugly tips of the same terrifying iceberg and the ship of state was on a collision course with it. No one was in the pardoning mood and Brunskill, the executioner, was sent for again.
    Outside Newgate with a large crowd jostling and cat-calling it was clear that the condemned man was a hero. ‘God Bless you!’ they roared and such was the noise it was probably only Brunskill who heard Bellingham’s last words: ‘I thank God for having enabled me to meet my fate with so much fortitude and resignation.’ 10
    At his trial, Edward Despard had referred to the Cabinet of Henry Addington as the ‘man eaters’. As is clear from Sydney Smith’s comment on Perceval the family man versus Perceval the Prime Minister, each of the Cabinet had his soft, loving side. Collectively, they could be said to be guilty of murder.
    Essentially, by 1812, the men who would be the targets of the Cato Street conspirators had metaphorically taken their places around that dining table at Lord Harrowby’s. The only conspicuous absentee was Arthur Wellesley, then beginning the second phase of his war in Spain, taking the fortresses of Badajoz and Cuidad Rodrigo. All the others were already there.
    Oddly, in the whole of the 430-page account of the Cato Street trial by George Wilkinson, there is scarcely a mention of the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, who took over a nation, at once stunned and euphoric, on the death of Perceval. This is hardly surprising. The politician who would be dubbed years later ‘the arch-mediocrity’ by Benjamin Disraeli hardly emerges as a firebrand. Castlereagh, Sidmouth, Eldon – these were the black, reactionary heart of the Cabinet as far as the men of Cato Street were concerned; Liverpool was almost an irrelevance.
    Robert Banks Jenkinson was 50 at the time of Cato Street. The portrait of him by Sir Thomas Lawrence shows a rather bland face with a slight twinkle around the eyes, a large, prominent nose and decidedly thinning hair. He was the son of a Tory country squire and was educated at Charterhouse and Christ Church, Oxford. It was rather unfortunate that he went on the obligatory Grand Tour (to soak up the classical sites and fleshpots of Europe) in 1789 as all Hell broke out in Paris. He personally witnessed the fall of the Bastille and for him more than most, this was a defining experience of terror that never left him.
    At 21, the political borough 11 mongers were at work arranging for his seat for the pocket borough of Appleby in Yorkshire. Shy, awkward and rather serious, his maiden speech in the Commons was awful, especially as it was in answer to Samuel Whitbread’s attack on Pitt’s ministry over naval expenditure. Whitbread was a hugely popular Whig MP, as well as a brewer and promoter of ingenious contraptions; his bright yellow curricle was one of the sights of London. As a pacifist, he objected to anything pro-war. Dubbed ‘England’s greatest and