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several campaigns against the French and on the outbreak of the Revolutionary War, his son tried the same thing. By that time, however, Despard had been recalled to London to answer charges of incompetence.
    As Superintendent, Despard’s brief was to settle the new territory, which he did without considering race and background. So alongside the exclusively British plantation owners were ex-slaves, smugglers, military volunteers and labourers, anyone in effect who agreed to purchase land and farm it. He did this, he said, because according to English law, there was no distinction in land tenure. A free man with enough money had no bar to ownership of property at home, but the Baymen did not see it that way and petitioned the Home Secretary, Lord Grenville, for redress. Cleverly, Despard stood for election as a magistrate and won a landslide victory. The racist Baymen would have none of it, complaining that the Superintendent had only won because he had the backing of ‘ignorant turtlers and people of colour’.
    The people of colour arrived with Despard in London on his return in 1790. One was his wife, Catherine; the other his son, James. A great deal of research has been carried out in recent years on the black history of Britain and Catherine Despard deserves her place in it. Unlike the wives of the Cato Street conspirators, when her husband was accused of high treason, Catherine fought on his behalf. It is highly likely that the Despards were a unique example of a mixed marriage in England at that time. The slave trade would not be abolished for another seventeen years; the ownership of slaves not for another twenty after that. Relatively speaking there was a large number of blacks in the country, especially in London and Bristol, but they were not free (unless they had been enfranchised by liberal owners) and usually appeared in the roles of servants, boxers, prostitutes and menials.
    The arrival of the Despards probably filled most whites with horror. It was one thing for British soldiers and administrators of empire to take black mistresses in the colonies and even produce mulatto or half-breed children (William Davidson belongs to this category) but actual marriage was something else. The extraordinary ex-slave Olaudah Equiano had already produced the first edition of his autobiographical The Interesting Narrative the previous year and in it he wrote:
    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?
    Two years later, Equiano himself married a white girl from Cambridgeshire.
    Race did indeed lie at the heart of Despard’s problems. The government refused to back him, anxious to keep the plantation owners sweet in any colonial sphere and he found himself dragged through any number of claims courts by the Baymen who wanted recompense for what they imagined was criminal mishandling of their affairs. The colonel found himself in the King’s Bench prison for debt in 1792.
    The prison itself was new, the old one having been burnt by the mob in the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots twelve years earlier. Long before the attack on the Bastille, the English had a reputation for gaol-wrecking. The King’s Bench had been destroyed three times by the time Despard found himself there. Like most London prisons, it was all things to all men. It had its own ‘Rules’ by which better off prisoners (who would have included Despard) lived relatively comfortably, whereas the poor wallowed in the filth they had known on the outside in the reeking rookeries of St Giles, Wapping and St James. It was here that the disgruntled colonel read the new book by Tom Paine . . .
    On his release two years later, Despard joined the London Corresponding Society and shortly after that the United Englishmen, the offshoot of Wolfe Tone’s