Thistlewood and other members of the Spencean Society—which might almost be described as the prototype of latter-day Bolshevism—conceived the mad idea that they could capture, among other strongholds, the Bank of England, the Mansion House, the Tower of London, and Coutts’s Bank; but they found that the public sympathy on which they counted did not exist. Thistlewood was thrown into gaol for treasonable utterances, and instead of imprisonment bringing him to his right senses, he became more fanatical than ever.
The crowning act of infamy on the part of this nineteenth-century “Guy Fawkes” and his followers was to hatch a plot for the assassination of Ministers at a Cabinet dinner in Lord Harrowby’s house, Grosvenor Square. The conspirators took a loft over a stable in Cato Street, Marylebone, where they accumulated arms, bombs, and hand-grenades, vainly imagining that the police knew nothing of their movements, whereas the authorities were only waiting the right moment for action.
Thistlewood and his gang of desperadoes were arrested in the act of arming themselves for the wholesale assassination of the heads of the Government. In the scuffle Thistlewood killed a police-officer with his sword. The ringleader and four others, named Brunt, Davidson, Ings, and Tidd, were executed on the evidence of one of their own associates, who told the court that it was intended, in the first instance, to set fire to the King Street Barracks and either take the Life Guardsmen prisoners or kill them as they sat in their mess-room. This mess-room, fifteen years later, was occupied by Madame Tussaud’s Exhibition.
Few, if any, of the thousands of persons who mount and descend the marble staircase which adorns the entrance-hall of Madame Tussaud’s are aware that it originally formed part of a lordly pleasure house which was erected by the late Baron Grant on the site of what was one of the vilest slums (then known as “The Rookery”) in Kensington.
Who was Baron Grant?
The late Baron was born in Dublin in 1830. His real name, it appears, was Gottheimer. His parents were poor, and he had a hard upbringing. By dint, however, of industry, the sharpness of his wits and his great aptitude for business, he acquired wealth and a reputation in the City of London.
At the age of thirty-five he was elected M.P. for Kidderminster, standing as a Liberal-Conservative and defeating Lord Annaly, who was at that time a Lord of the Treasury. In 1868 he was appointed a Deputy-Lieutenant of the Tower Hamlets, and in the same year the King of Italy conferred upon him the hereditary dignity of Baron and appointed him a Commander of the Order of St. Maurice and Lazare.
These distinctions were well deserved by the then Mr. Grant for the services he had rendered in connection with the completion of the famous Victor Emmanuel Gallery in Milan, though in one of the burlesques of the period the decoration was scathingly referred to in the following couplet: