Thomas Evans (conspirator)

Evans had a number of trades, including baker, and shortly an income enough to rent space there adequate to host radical meetings.

[11] Robert Cutlar Fergusson, a barrister involved in the defense of Binns, O'Coigly and O'Connor in May 1798, in 1799 tried unsuccessfully to argue that a house of correction was unsuitable as a place of custody for Evans, accused of high treason.

[15] There was also an out-of-doors publicity campaign by a radical group including Peter Finnerty, J. S. Jordan, John Horne Tooke and Robert Waithman.

[17] In 1803, not long after the execution of Edward Despard, police arrested Arthur Seale, a printer in Tottenham Court Road, for publishing a subversive handbill "Are You Right".

Spencer Perceval and Sir Richard Ford offered Seale a chance to escape prison if he incriminated Evans.

[20] In 1814 the radical Thomas Spence died, and Evans assumed his mantle, including his championing of common ownership as the basis of land reform.

[21] Within two years, the Society of Spencean Philanthropists had become a revolutionary group, including the Burdettite Thomas Preston (1774–1850), Arthur Thistlewood and James Watson (1766–1838).

[22][23] Evans himself engaged in political debate with Christian Policy: the Salvation of the Empire (1816), which was answered by Thomas Malthus and Robert Southey.

[29] Evans attended the post-Peterloo meeting at the Crown and Anchor, Strand of September 1819 for the "Westminster Committee of 200" with his son, Richard Carlile also being there.

[30] In the aftermath of the failed Cato Street conspiracy of 1820, led by Thistlewood and other Spenceans, Evans raised funds for the families of the arrested plotters.

In relation to a London power struggle in 1816–1817, E. P. Thompson commented in The Making of the English Working Class that "Place is not a disinterested witness"; and that the Spenceans prepared the ground for Robert Owen and his New View of Society.

[32] Evans, with John King (Jacob Rey) the moneylender and Duffin, were in a group who attempted blackmail of Place over his part in the outcome.

He travelled to Paris in 1814, and in February 1820 took over as editor of the Manchester Observer from James Wroe, with backing from Francis Place and his uncle Alexander Galloway.