Enemies of the State by M. J. Trow Page B

contemporary 18 said: ‘Why Fred Robinson is in the Cabinet I don’t know.’
    Frederick John Robinson was born to a titled family in Yorkshire, went with the usual monotony to Harrow and Cambridge and was MP for Ripon at the age of 25. As Chancellor of the Exchequer under Liverpool, his name is forever associated with the hated Corn Laws of 1815, the symbol of the greed of the landed interest. To be fair, the man was far from happy about the legislation, but a London mob attacked his house in Old Burlington Street and slashed valuable paintings. There was already a military guard there and two people were killed. In relaying all this to parliament,Robinson broke down in tears and earned the nickname ‘the blubberer’. He was Treasurer of the Navy by the time of Cato Street.
    Nice men, with wives and children, families and friends. Adolf Hitler liked dogs and children and he worried about killing lobsters. The same man (although there is famously no hard evidence for this) advocated the murder of every Jew in Europe.
    It is unfair to link Liverpool’s Tory Ministry of 1820 with the monster of the twentieth century, but we have to see these men from the perspective of the Cato Street conspirators. To them, the Ministry itself was a conspiracy; one bent on punishing the poor for being poor, of keeping the cost of bread artificially high; of imprisoning, transporting and hanging those who complained.
    And on its part the government saw conspiracies everywhere. ‘A Plot! A Plot!,’ wrote Cobbett of them. ‘How they sigh for a plot!’
    It was on its way.

Chapter 6
    Pig’s Meat
    If His Majesty’s Government wanted a plot, they needed look no further than the ideas of Thomas Spence. Whereas most members of the London Corresponding Society dreamt of universal suffrage, a free education and some vague notion of a better deal in life, it is likely that some of them were prepared to go further.
    Spence himself seems a straightforward man, but his legacy is confused. Because he operated latterly almost exclusively in London and one of his supporters was the Cato Street conspirator William Davidson, we have to evaluate his contribution to the most brazen assassination plan in British history.
    Spence was born in Quayside, Newcastle, in June 1750. The city was one of the rapidly growing industrial centres of the North, with coal and iron challenging the older, still medieval work of the woollen and worsted weavers. Spence’s family came originally from Scotland and his father was a net and shoemaker who sold hardware in a booth on the Sandhill. Young Spence had eighteen full and half brothers and sisters, and his father taught him to read and write sufficiently well for the boy to become a schoolmaster.
    In his twenties, Spence became fascinated by a land dispute in Newcastle over common rights and he wrote a pamphlet which was hawked around the city, advocating his ideas which, many years later, came to form the basis of Spencean philanthropy. Since land was the currency of conquerors and the symbolic cornerstone of power, Spence decided that it should be distributed in a different way. Based on the parish, long the centre of social life, land must be returned to the people. In fact, his tract of 1800 was called just that – Restorer of Society to its Natural State . Inevitably, Spence’s proposals did not end there and he had a rather rosy, optimistic view of how easily it would all happen:
    The public mind being suitably prepared by reading my little Tractsand conversing on the subject, a few Contingent parishes have only to declare the land to be theirs and . . . other adjacent parishes would immediately follow the example . . . and thus would a beautiful and powerful New Republic instantaneously arise in full vigour. 1
    All land would be held in common by each parish and profits from rents would be ploughed back into the parish to build and sustain schools and libraries. Each