Edward Marcus Despard (175121 February 1803), an Irish officer of French descent in the service of the British Crown, gained notoriety as a colonial administrator for refusing to recognise race as a distinction in English law and, following his recall to London, as a republican conspirator. Despard's associations with the London Corresponding Society, the United Irishmen and United Britons led to his trial and execution in 1803 as the alleged ringleader of a plot to assassinate the King.
Ireland, and military service in the Caribbean
Edward Despard was born in 1751 in Coolrain, Camross, Queen's County (now Laois), in the Kingdom of Ireland, the youngest of eight surviving children (six sons, two daughters) of William Despard, a Protestant landowner of Huguenot descent, and Jane Despard (née Walsh). With neighbouring gentry, his father and grandfather enlarged their estate by enclosing "waste", and parish, land to which their tenants had had traditional access. This contributed, in Despard's childhood years, to local Whiteboy disturbances (well remembered by his niece).Linebaugh, Peter (2003), "'A dish with one spoon': American experience and the transformation of three officers of the crown", in Thomas Bartlett et al. (eds.), 1798: A Bicentenary Perspective, Dublin, Four Courts Press, , (pp. 642–657 [652–653]).
Despard was boarded at the Quaker School in Ballitore, County Kildare, which, looking beyond basic literacy, instructed children in mathematics, the classics and, uniquely in Ireland, modern languages. These subjects would not have been neglected when from age eight, Despard began to acquire "the character, the manner, and the habits of a gentleman, and a soldier" as a page in the household of the Lord Hertford, Ambassador to France (1763–65), and Lord Lieutenant of Ireland (1765–66). It is possible that the young Despard was acquainted with David Hume in Paris, where the Scottish enlightenment philosopher and historian attended Hertford as the embassy secretary.Klibansky, Raymond, and Ernest C. Mossner, eds. 1954. New Letters of David Hume. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 77–79.
In 1766, aged fifteen, Despard followed his older brothersone of whom, John Despard (1745–1829), was to rise to the rank of full generalinto the British Army. He enrolled as an ensign in the 50th Foot.Oman, Charles William Chadwick (1922), Unfortunate Colonel Despard and Other Studies. London, Burt Franklin. p. 2
Posted with his regiment to Jamaica, Despard served as a defence-works engineer and in 1772 was promoted to lieutenant. 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 labour was his triumph", it has been suggested that Despard was "creolized" in his sympathies".
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 from the Spanish. For this he received a royal commendation and the rank of colonel. While leading reconnoitring missions, Despard again worked intimately with the African-Indian Miskitos.Conner (2000), pp. 47–48 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".
"Without distinction of colour": Superintendent of the Bay of Honduras
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". 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". Despard also set aside lands for common use (a reversal of the enclosures to which his family had been party in Ireland) and sought to keep food prices down “for the poorer sort of people”.
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.) Persuaded 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.Linebaugh and Rediker (2000), p. 273Jay (2004) pp. 145–147, 158–159
Despard had supplied Grenville with a 500-page report in which he characterized the Baymen as an "arbitrary aristocracy". He buttressed his argument with the results of the magistracy election in which he had stood shortly before he left, winning a resounding majority on an unprecedented turnout. But "the cause of electoral representation struck no chord with Grenville": he had bought his own seat in Parliament and had served as Chief Secretary for Ireland without being persuaded of the urgency of extending votes to Catholics.
In the Bay Despard's work was undone. By the 1820s the settlement would have seven legally distinct castes based on skin colour.
Catherine Despard, "mixed" marriage Before leaving the Bay, in 1790 Despard had married Catherine Gordon, the daughter of a free black woman from Kingston, Jamaica.Erin Trahey, Free Women and the Making of Colonial Jamaican Economy and Society, 1760–1834 (PhD thesis, History Department, University of Cambridge, 2018). 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.
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".
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. Himself married to an English woman, Equiano 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?"
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.
Irish radical in London
Pitt's "Reign of Terror" Without a further commission and having been pursued by his enemies in the Bay with lawsuits, in London Despard found himself confined for two years in a debtors' prison. There he read Thomas Paine's Rights of Man. A response to Edmund Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France, it was a vindication of the "wild and Levelling principle of Universal Equality" he had been accused of administering in the Bay."Petition by Settlers against Despard's Constitution" (1788) cited in Jay (2004), p. 153
By the time Despard was released from the King's Bench Prison in 1794, Paine had been forced to take refuge in the new French Republic, with which the British Crown was now at war, and in both Britain and Ireland some of his more ardent admirers were beginning to consider universal franchise and annual parliaments a cause for physical force.
In October 1793, a British Convention in Edinburgh, with delegates from English corresponding societies attending, was broken up by the authorities on charges of sedition. Joseph Gerrald and Maurice Margarot of the London Corresponding Society and their host Thomas Muir of the Society of the Friends of the People were sentenced to fourteen years transportation. When in May 1794 an attempt to indict the radical English MP John Horne Tooke for treason misfired with a jury, the ministry of William Pitt (Grenville's cousin) renewed what was to have been an eight-month suspension of Habeas Corpus.
In the summer of 1795 crowds shouting "No war, no Pitt, cheap bread" attacked the prime minister's residence in Downing Street and surrounded the King in procession to Parliament. There was also a riot at Charing Cross at the scene of which Despard was detained and questioned, something which a magistrate suggested Despard might have avoided had he not, in giving his name, used the "improper title" of "citizen". In October, the government introduced the "Gagging Acts" (Seditious Meetings Act and the Treason Act), which outlawed "seditious" gatherings and rendered even the "contemplation" of force a treasonable offence.Jay (2004) pp. 231–232
United Britons Despard joined the London Corresponding Society (LCS), and was quickly taken on to its central committee. He also took the United Irish pledge (or "Test") "to obtain an equal, full and adequate representation of all the people of Ireland" in a sovereign parliament in Dublin. At a time when the Irish movement was turning increasingly towards the prospects for a French-assisted insurrection, Despard would have found it represented in LCS and other radical circles in London, by the brothers Arthur and Roger O'Connor, and by Jane Greg.
In the summer of 1797 James Coigly, a Catholic priest who had risen to prominence among the United Irishmen during the Armagh Disturbances, arrived from Manchester. There, as a test for "United Englishmen", he had been administering an oath to "Remove the diadem and take off the crown ... [to] exalt him that is low and abuse him that is high". In London, Coigly met with the leading Irish members of the LCS. In addition to Despard, these included Society President Alexander Galloway, and the brothers Benjamin and John Binns. Meetings were held at Furnival's Inn, Holborn, where, convening as the "United Britons", delegates from London, Scotland and the regions committed themselves "to overthrow the present Government, and to join the French as soon as they made a landing in England" (in December 1796 only weather had prevented a major French landing in Ireland).