He was first conveyed to Bow-street, and there shortly examined by Sir R. Birnie, by whom he was subsequently conducted to Whitehall, where he was introduced to the presence of the Privy Council. He was still handcuffed, but he mounted the stairs leading to the council-chamber with great alacrity. On his being informed of the nature of the charges made against him, by the lord chancellor, he declined saying anything and was remanded to prison. In the course of the week several other persons were apprehended as being accessories to the plot; and on the 3rd March, Thistlewood, Monument, Brunt, Ings, Wilson, Harrison, Tidd, and Davidson, were committed to the Tower as state prisoners, the rest of the persons charged being again sent to Coldbath-fields prison, where they had been previously confined.
The case of the parties to this most diabolical conspiracy immediately received the attention of the law officers of the crown; and on the 15th April 1820, a special commission having issued, the prisoners were arraigned at the bar of the Old Bailey on the charge of high treason, and also of murder, in having caused the death of the unfortunate Smithers. There were eleven prisoners, Arthur Thistlewood, William Davidson (a man of colour), James Ings, John Thomas Brunt, Richard Tidd, James Wilson, John Harrison, Richard Bradburn, John Shaw Strange, James Gilchrist, and Charles Cooper, and they all pleaded Not guilty to the charges preferred against them.
Counsel having been assigned to the prisoners, and the necessary forms having been gone through, Thistlewood received an intimation that his case would be taken on Monday morning the 17th of the same month, and the prisoners were remanded to that day.
At the appointed time, accordingly, Arthur Thistlewood was placed at the bar. He looked pale, but evinced his usual firmness. The jury having been sworn, and the indictment read, the attorney-general stated the case at great length, and twenty-five witnesses were examined in support of the prosecution, among whom were several accomplices, whose testimony was satisfactorily corroborated. Some of those who appeared to give evidence had been apprehended on the fatal night in Cato-street, but were now admitted witnesses for the crown. After a trial which occupied the court four days, Thistlewood was found Guilty of high treason. He heard the verdict with his wonted composure, seeming to have anticipated it; for when it was pronounced he appeared quite indifferent to what so fatally concerned him.
The evidence against Tidd, Ings, Davidson, and Brunt, whose trials came on next in succession, differed little from that upon which Thistlewood was convicted, and they were also found Guilty. Their trials being separate, occupied the court six days. On the evening of the tenth day the six remaining prisoners, at the suggestion of their counsel, pleaded Guilty, having been permitted to withdraw their former plea, by which they eventually escaped capital punishment.
On Friday, April the 28th, the eleven prisoners were brought up to receive sentence. When the usual question was put to Thistlewood by the clerk of arraigns, why he should not receive sentence to die, he pulled a paper from his pocket, and read as follows:—
“I am asked, my lord, what I have to say that judgment of death should not be passed upon me according to law. This to me is mockery—for were the reasons I could offer incontrovertible, and were they enforced even by the eloquence of a Cicero, still would the vengeance of my Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth be satiated only in the purple stream which circulates through a heart more enthusiastically vibrating to every impulse of patriotism and honour, than that of any of those privileged traitors to their country, who lord it over the lives and property of the sovereign people with barefaced impunity. The reasons which I have, however, I will now state—not that I entertain the slightest hope from your sense of justice or from your pity.—The former is swallowed up in your ambition, or rather by the servility you descend to, to obtain the object of that ambition—the latter I despise; justice I demand; if I am denied it, your pity is no equivalent. In the first place, I protest against the proceedings upon my trial, which I conceive to be grossly partial, and contrary to the very spirit of justice; but, alas! the judges, who have heretofore been considered the counsel of the accused, are now, without exception, in all cases between the crown and the people, the most implacable enemies of the latter.—In every instance, the judges charge the jury to find the subject guilty; nay, in one instance, the jury received a reprimand, and that not in the genteelest terms, for not strictly obeying the imperious mandate from the bench.
“The court decided upon my trial to commit murder rather than depart in the slightest degree from its usual forms; nay, it is with me a question if the form is usual, which precluded me from examining witnesses to prove the infamy of Adams, of Hieden, and of Dwyer. Ere the solicitor-general replied to the address of my counsel, I applied to the court to hear my witnesses: the court inhumanly refused, and I am in consequence to be consigned to the scaffold. Numerous have been the instances in which this rule of court has been infringed; but to have infringed it in my case would have been to incur the displeasure of the crown, and to forfeit every aspiring hope of promotion. A few hours hence I shall be no more, but the nightly breeze which shall whistle over the silent grave that shall protect me from its keenness, will bear to your restless pillow the memory of one, who lived but for his country, and died when liberty and justice had been driven from its confines, by a set of villains, whose thirst for blood is only to be equalled by their activity in plunder. For life, as it respects myself, I care not—but while yet I may, I would rescue my memory from the calumny, which I doubt not will be industriously heaped upon it, when it will be no longer in my power to protect it. I would explain the motives which induced me to conspire against the ministers of his majesty, and I would contrast them with those which those very ministers have acted upon in leading me to my ruin. To do this, it will be necessary to take a short review of my life for a few months prior to my arrest for the offence for which I am to be executed, without a trial, or at least without an impartial one, by a jury of my peers. ’Tis true the form, the etiquette of a trial, has been gone through; but I challenge any of the judges on the bench to tell me, to tell my country, that justice was not denied me in the very place where justice only should be administered. I challenge them to say that I was fairly tried; I challenge them to say if I am not murdered, according to the etiquette of a court, falsely called of justice? I had witnesses in court to prove that Dwyer was a villain beyond all example of atrocity. I had witnesses in court to prove that Adams was a notorious swindler, and that Hieden was no better; these were the three witnesses—indeed almost the only ones against me—but the form and rules of court must not be infringed upon to save an unfortunate individual from the scaffold. I called those witnesses at the close of Mr. Adolphus’ address to the jury, and before the solicitor-general commenced his reply, but the court decided that they could not be heard. Some good men have thought, and I have thought so too, that before the jury retired all evidence was in time for either the prosecutor or the accused, and more particularly for the latter; nay, even before the verdict was given, that evidence could not be considered too late. Alas! such people drew their conclusion from principles of justice only; they never canvassed the rules of court, which have finally sealed my unhappy doom.
“Many people, who are acquainted with the barefaced manner in which I was plundered by my Lord Sidmouth, will, perhaps, imagine that personal motives instigated me to the deed, but I disclaim them. My every principle was for the prosperity of my country; my every feeling, the height of my ambition, was the securing the welfare of my starving brother Englishmen. I keenly felt for their miseries; but when their miseries were laughed at, and when because they dared to express those miseries, they were cut down by hundreds, inhumanly massacred and trampled upon, when infant babes were sabred in their mothers’ arms, nay, when the breast from whence they drew the tide of life was severed from the body which supplied that life, my feelings became too intense, too excessive for endurance, and I resolved on vengeance—I resolved that the lives of the instigators should be the requiem to the souls of the murdered innocents.
“In this mood I met with George Edwards, and if any doubt should remain upon the minds of the public whether the deed I meditated was virtuous or contrary, the tale I will now relate will convince them, that in attempting to exercise a power which the law had ceased to have, I was only wreaking national vengeance on a set of wretches unworthy of the name or character of men.