Edward Despard

A friend from Caribbean service, Horatio Nelson

Edward Despard was born in 1751 in Coolrain, Camross, Queens County,[1] in the Kingdom of Ireland to a Protestant Anglo-Irish family of Huguenot descent. He was one of five brothers all of whom, save the eldest who inherited the family estate, served in the British military.[2] An elder brother, John Despard (1745–1829), rose to the rank of full General.

Despard “acquired the character, the manner, and the habits of a gentleman, and a soldier” as a page, from age eight, in the household of the Lord Hertford (Ambassador to France, Lord Lieutenant of Ireland).[3] In 1766, age fifteen, Despard entered the British Army as an Ensign in the 50th Foot.[4]

Posted with his regiment to Jamaica, Despard served as a defence-works engineer and in 1772 was promoted to Lieutenant.[5] His work required him to lead "motley crews", including free blacks, Miskitos and others of mixed-ancestry. In "forming and coordinating the gangs of workers whose labor was his triumph", it has been suggested that Despard was "creolized” in his sympathies".[6]

During the American War of Independence Despard served with distinction in sea-borne descents upon the Spanish Kingdom of Guatemala. He fought alongside Horatio Nelson (and attained the rank of captain) in the San Juan expedition of 1780. Two years later he commanded the British force that in the Battle of the Black River recovered British settlements on the Miskito Coast after having the driven the Spanish from the area, for which he received a royal commendation and the rank of colonel.[7] While leading reconnoitring missions, Despard again worked intimately with the African-Indian Miskitos[8] Olaudah Equiano, a former slave who had lived among them in the 1770s, recorded that "These Indians live under an almost perfect equality, and there are no rich or poor among them. They do not strive to accumulate, and the great unwearied exertion, found among our civilised societies, is unknown among them".[9]

Territory conceded by Spain to British settlers for cutting timber.

After the Peace of Paris which concluded the war in 1783 Despard was made Superintendent of the British logwood concessions in the Bay of Honduras (present-day Belize). As directed from London. Despard sought to accommodate British subjects, the "Shoremen", displaced in the evacuation agreed with the Spanish (Convention of London 1786) of the Miskito Coast. To the dismay of the established "Baymen" (slave-holding loggers), Despard did so without "any distinction of age, sex, character, respectability, property or colour".[10] He distributed land by lottery in which, the Baymen noted in their petition to London, "the meanest mulatto or free negro has an equal chance".[11][12]

To the suggestion from the Home Secretary, Lord Sydney, that it was impolitic to put "affluent settlers and persons of a different description, particularly people of colour" on an "equal footing", Despard replied "the laws of England ... know no such distinction". (He had, on the same principle, overruled a local law excluding Jewish merchants from the Bay). Moved by the Baymen's entreaty that under "Despard's constitution" the "negroes in servitude, observing the now exalted status of their brethren of yesterday [the free, and now propertied, blacks among the Shoremen] would be induced to revolt, and the settlement must be ruined ", in 1790 Sydney's successor, Lord Grenville, recalled Despard to London.[13][14]

Before leaving the Bay, in 1790 Despard had married Catherine, a black woman, by some accounts the daughter of a Jamaican preacher, by others an educated Spanish creole. He arrived in London together with her and their young son, James, as his acknowledged family. There was scarcely precedent in England for what was considered a "mixed-race" marriage. Yet in what may be "a marker of the more fluid and tolerant character of racial attitudes in the Age of Reform", their marriage does not appear to have been publicly challenged.[15]

When following Despard's arrest in 1798, the government sought to discredit Catherine's articulate intercessions on her husband's behalf, they thought it sufficient to observe that she was of the "fair sex". On the floor of the Commons John Courtenay MP (an Irishman), read a letter from Catherine in which she described her husband as being held "in a dark cell, not seven feet square, without fire, or candle, chair, table, knife, fork, a glazed window, or even a book". In reply, the attorney general Sir John Scott suggested that Catherine was being used as a mouthpiece by political subversives: "it was a well-written letter, and the fair sex would pardon him, if he said it was a little beyond their style in general".[16]

At the time of the Despards’ arrival in London, the virtue of openly mixed race marriages was being championed by Olaudah Equiano. Equiano, touring with his autobiography and abolitionist polemic The Interesting Narrative of the Life of ... The African and himself married to an English woman, asked: "Why not establish intermarriage at home, and in our colonies, and encourage open, free and generous love, upon Nature’s own wide and extensive plan, subservient only to moral rectitude, without distinction of the colour of a skin?"[17]

The next generation of Despards denied Edward and Catherine's marriage. Family memoirs referred to Catherine as his "black housekeeper", and "the poor woman who called herself his wife". James was ascribed to a previous lover, both of whom were written out of the family tree.[12]

In London, Despard was arrested 16 November 1802 while attending a meeting of 40 working men at the Oakley Arms public house in Lambeth. Taken in chains to be interrogated by the Privy Council the next day, he was charged with High Treason. Government informers named him as the ringleader in a leader of a United Britons conspiracy to assassinate King George III and seize the Tower of London and Bank of England. Despard was prosecuted by Attorney General Spencer Perceval, before Lord Ellenborough, the Lord Chief Justice in a Special Commission on Monday, 7 February 1803.

Perceval had evidence that others in the club room of the Oakley Arms had discussed an insurrectionary plot with connections (he did not see fit to detail in court) to a northern underground: United Britons committed to rise on news of a coup in London. To implicate Despard, he relied heavily on the many mentions of his name in United Irish correspondence. But at "several stages removed from the colonel's actions" these were often from persons Despard had never met.[28]

Lord Nelson, then famous for the Battle of the Nile, made a dramatic appearance as a character witness in Despard's defence: "We went on the Spanish Main together; we slept many nights together in our clothes upon the ground; we have measured the height of the enemies wall together. In all that period of time no man could have shewn more zealous attachment to his Sovereign and his Country". But Nelson had to admit to having "lost sight of Despard for the last twenty years."[29][30] The same was conceded by General Sir Alured Clarke and Sir Evan Nepean who similarly testified to Despard's military service.[31]

In the end the jury was satisfied with a prosecution case that connected Despard to only one overt act: the administration of illegal oaths. But perhaps moved by the Vice-Admiral's testimony, they recommended clemency. In denying their motion, Ellenborough emphasised the revolutionary nature of Despard's purpose: not only to rend the new union between Great Britain and Ireland, but to affect "the forcible reduction to one common level of all the advantages of property, of all civil and political rights whatsoever".[32] Together with John Wood, 36, John Francis, 23, both privates in the army, Thomas Broughton, 26, a carpenter, James Sedgwick Wratton, 35, a shoemaker, Arthur Graham, 53, a slater, and John Macnamara, a labourer, Despard was sentenced to be hung, drawn and quartered.[7]

Catherine Despard persisted with her campaign on her husband's behalf. With Nelson's assistance she interceded with the Prime Minister and the King, but secured only a waiving of the already archaic rites of disembowelment and dismemberment.[33]

Edward Despard addresses the crowd at his execution, 1803

Edward Despard was hanged and decapitated on the roof of the gatehouse at Horsemonger Lane Gaol on 21 February 1803. The authorities had feared a public demonstration. Constables were ordered to watch “all the public houses and other places of resort for the disaffected,” and the jail keeper was issued a rocket to launch as a signal to the military in the event of trouble.[34]

Despard had declined to take divine service. He offered that while "outward forms of worship were useful for political purposes", he thought "the opinions of Churchmen, Dissenters, Quakers, Methodists, Catholics, Savages, or even Atheists, were equally indifferent". He was permitted a final meeting with his wife during which, according to reports, "the Colonel betrayed nothing like an unbecoming weakness".[35]

With the hangman’s noose loosely around his neck, Despard stepped to the edge of the platform, and addressed a crowd, estimated at twenty thousand (until the funeral of Lord Nelson following the Battle of Trafalgar the largest gathering London had witnessed), with words Catherine may have helped him prepare:[36]

Fellow Citizens, I come here, as you see, after having served my Country faithfully, honourably and usefully, for thirty years and upwards, to suffer death upon a scaffold for a crime which I protest I am not guilty. I solemnly declare that I am no more guilty of it than any of you who may be now hearing me. But though His Majesty’s Ministers know as well as I do that I am not guilty, yet they avail themselves of a legal pretext to destroy a man, because he has been a friend to truth, to liberty, and to justice

[a considerable huzzah from the crowd]

because he has been a friend to the poor and to the oppressed. But, Citizens, I hope and trust, notwithstanding my fate, and the fate of those who no doubt will soon follow me, that the principles of freedom, of humanity, and of justice, will finally triumph over falsehood, tyranny and delusion, and every principle inimical to the interests of the human race.

[a warning from the Sheriff ]

I have little more to add, except to wish you all health, happiness and freedom, which I have endeavoured, as far as was in my power, to procure for you, and for mankind in general.

Catherine Despard's final service to her husband was to insist on his hereditary right to be buried in St Faith's in the City of London, an old graveyard that had been subsumed within the walls of St Paul's Cathedral, a campaign she won despite protests to the government from the Lord Mayor of London. On the day of the funeral (held Match 1st to allow their son James serving in the French army to return from Paris), lined the street from their last residence in Lambeth, across Blackfriars Bridge, towards St Paul's, at which point they dispersed in silence.[37]

After his death, there was a report of Catherine Despard being taken under the "protection" of Lady Nelson.[38] The MP Sir Francis Burdett, who with Horne Tooke had assisted in the defence, helped arrange a pension. She spent some time in Ireland, a guest of Valentine Lawless, 2nd Baron Cloncurry who had been detained with Despard in 1798. Catherine Despard died in Somers Town, London, in 1815.[39]

Their son James returned to Britain after the Napoleonic Wars. The final trace of him in the family records is an episode recounted by General John Despard, Edward's older brother, who was leaving a London theatre when he heard a carriage driver calling the family name. He made his way towards the carriage he assumed was his, "and there appeared a flashy Creole and a flashy young lady on his arm, and they both stepped into it."[40]

Edward Despard appears as a character in the fifth (2015) series of the popular British television drama Poldark, played by Vincent Regan .[41] The screenplay is based on the historical novels of Winston Graham.

• Conner, Clifford D., Colonel Despard: The Life and Times of an Anglo-Irish Rebel. Combined Publishing, 2000. ISBN 978-1580970266.
• Jay, Mike, The Unfortunate Colonel Despard. Bantam Press, 2004. ISBN 9781472144065.
• Linebaugh, Peter. Red Round Globe Hot Burning. University of California Press, 2019. ISBN 9780520299467.
• Oman, Charles William Chadwick. Unfortunate Colonel Despard and Other Studies. Burt Franklin, 1922.