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this which brought the house down.
    Hadfield’s behaviour was decidedly odd. Having missed with his pistol, he said to the king, ‘God bless your royal highness; I like you very well. You are a good fellow.’ He stood trial on the inevitable charge of high treason and was defended by the brilliant lawyer Thomas Erskine, himself a supporter of the French Revolution and a member of the Friends of the People, set up in 1792. Erskine’s acceptance of a retainer from Tom Paine cost him the friendship of the Prince of Wales and a possible appointment as Attorney-General. As MP for Portsmouth, he made speeches on behalf of both Thomas Hardy and Horne Tooke and was a natural to defend Hadfield.
    It was clear from Hadfield’s demeanour – and indeed, appearance – that Erskine’s best bet would be to plead insanity. Hadfield had been a serving soldier until the battle of Tourcoing in 1794, when he took eight sabre cuts to the head. Although nothing is known of his early life, this battle was fought between Austria and France, so presumably he was serving as a mercenary with the Austrians. Released after capture by the French, he came home and joined a millennialist movement in London. He told Erskine thathe believed he (Hadfield) would be instrumental in the second coming of Christ by being executed by the government. Conspiring with fellow millennialist Bannister Truelock, Hadfield hit upon the one crime for which he was certain to be executed – the killing of the king.
    Unfortunately for Hadfield, Erskine had other ideas. It would not be until the 1840s that the British judicial system came to a consensus on how to handle criminal insanity. 1 The standard definition at the time was that a defendant ‘must be lost to all sense . . . incapable of forming a judgement upon the consequences of the act which he is about to do’. Going head to head with the judge, Lord Kenyon, Erskine argued that delusion ‘unaccompanied by frenzy or raving madness was the true test of insanity’ and produced three doctors to prove that Hadfield’s mania was caused by his head injuries. Kenyon was convinced before the jury had a chance to deliberate and ended the trial with Hadfield acquitted.
    There was an immediate outcry as a would-be king-killer walked free and parliament rushed through the Criminal Lunatics Act, which enabled Hadfield to be detained indefinitely because he was regarded as a danger to himself and society at large. He was sent to Bedlam – the Royal Bethlehem Hospital – where he died from gaol fever, probably tuberculosis.
    Altogether more dangerous than the clearly deranged James Hadfield was Edward Marcus Despard, an Irish adventurer with a chip on his shoulder. In many ways, Despard’s attempted coup of 1802 was a blueprint for Cato Street. Indeed during the trials of the 1820 conspirators, the name Despard was used disparagingly, as how not to carry out an assassination and revolution.
    Despard was born in Queen’s County, Ireland, in 1751. He entered the navy as a midshipman at the age of 15 and was promoted lieutenant in 1772. For the next eighteen years he served in the West Indies, making a name for himself as an administrator with considerable engineering ability. He was stationed in Jamaica at the same time that the father of the future Cato Street conspirator William Davidson was Attorney-General there. He was promoted captain after the San Juan expedition of 1780 and led a successful attack on Spanish-held territory on the Black River two years later. By 1786, Despard was Superintendent of the Crown Colony of Honduras (today’s Belize) on the Mosquito Coast south of Yucatan.
    The West Indies were notoriously difficult to police. They had a longhistory of piracy and running battles between settlers from just about every European state were commonplace. The elder Pitt, adopting a ‘blue-water policy’ in the Seven Years’ War had mounted