Edward Marcus Despard (1751 – 21 February 1803), an Irish officer in the service of the British Crown, gained notoriety as a colonial administrator for refusing to recognise racial distinctions in law and, following his recall to London, as a republican conspirator.

[2] Despard was boarded at the Quaker School in Ballitore, County Kildare,[1] which, looking beyond basic literacy, instructed children in mathematics, the classics and, uniquely in Ireland, modern languages.

[13][14] Despard also set aside lands for common use (a reversal of the enclosures to which his family had been party in Ireland)[2] and sought to keep food prices down “for the poorer sort of people”.

[15] 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".

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.

[20] 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".

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?

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.

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.

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 December 1797 Coigly returned from France with news of French plans for an invasion, but on 28 February 1798, when seeking again to cross the Channel in a party of five he and Arthur O'Connor were arrested.

[29] Despard, who at his trial Coigly had admitted meeting, remained in contact with United Irishman Valentine Lawless, and was reported as frequenting seditious conclaves in various London ale houses.

With Thomas Russell and other state prisoners, Dowdall had been in contact with the young militants Robert Emmet and William Putnam McCabe who were determined to reorganise United Irishmen on a strict military-conspiratorial basis.

[35] Meanwhile, in England, the influx of refugees from Ireland, the angry response of workers to the Combination Acts, and continued protest over food shortages encouraged renewed organisation among former conspirators.

A military system and pike manufacture began to spread across the mill districts of Lancashire and Yorkshire, and regular meetings resumed between county and London delegates.

[31] On 16 November 1802, not long after again meeting Dowdall[36] (who on his return to Ireland, had spoken openly of an insurrectionary conspiracy in London, at a dinner party)[37] Despard was arrested.

Government informers named him as the ringleader of a United Britons conspiracy that engaged, alongside day-labourers and journeymen, no fewer than 300 Grenadier Guardsmen[38] in plans to assassinate King George III and seize the Tower of London and Bank of England.

[39] 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 Englishmen committed to rise on news of a coup in London.

[31] Lord Nelson, then famous for his victory in 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.

This he claimed had been not only to rend the new union between Great Britain and Ireland, but also to affect "the forcible reduction to one common level of all the advantages of property, of all civil and political rights whatsoever".

Seated for the purpose of the drawing backwards upon hay bales and bumped across the cobbled courtyard of Horsemonger Lane Gaol, Despard burst out laughing.

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.

He averred 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".

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:[50]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 of which I protest I am not guilty.

On the day of the funeral (held 1 March to allow their son James, who was serving in the French army, to return from Paris), people lined the street from their last residence in Lambeth, across Blackfriars Bridge, towards St Paul's, at which point they dispersed in silence.

[55] Madame Tussauds famous waxworks in London showcased an effigy of Edward Despard, using him as one of the first British criminals to be featured in her ‘Adjoining Room’, now known as the Chamber of Horrors.