Requiem For A Patriot

by Alexander Cordell

Genres: Historical Fiction; Victorian Romance

Synopsis

1839. The queen's realm is in the grip of revolutionary fervour. John Frost, idealistic and charismatic leader of the South Wales Chartists leads his dispossessed followers to Newport. Similar risings are planned throughout the land. these will signal a new dawn: one that heralds the end of opression by a tyrannical ruling class. But the tide of history is not turning the rebels' way. And in the depths of his struggle against a power that will severly punish him, John Frost finds succour in his passionate and enduring love for his wife.

Release date: September 4, 2014

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton

Print pages: 352

Sample

British historians have consistently relegated the Chartist Rebellion into minor importance, presumably in service to an anxious Establishment eager to allay public apprehension. Ask the average student what he knows about Chartism and the answer will be lacking. Indeed, the role of most contemporary historians (save D. J. V. Jones – The Last Rising) has been that of ‘follow my leader’ ever since one early eminent among them stated that the attack upon Newport was little more than a march of a few malcontents who didn’t know where they were going and what they were going to do when they got there. In contrast, lesser public disturbances have been elevated in historical importance.

For example, the Merthyr Riots of 1831, while but a curtain-raiser to the drama of nationwide Chartism, have been promoted to the stature of a Rising: of this event I have written extensively, and know that its significance was the hanging of its leader, the innocent Dic Penderyn, and the raising of the Red Flag for the first time in Britain: it was never more than a local disturbance.

Rarely is history provided with such clear documentary proof of Chartist intentions as on that tragic day of November 1839. Zephaniah Williams, John Frost’s lieutenant, has left behind signed documentary proof of an insurrection – ‘to occupy Newport as a preliminary to an attempt to remove the Queen from the throne and form a republican government’. According to trial prosecution witnesses, Frost himself, while on the march, stated the same. Finally, the death sentence of Lord Justice Tindal upon the accused leaders was positive:

It has been proved that you combined to take possession of the town and supersede the lawful authority of the Queen, as a preliminary step to a more general insurrection throughout the kingdom.

It is no part of the historian’s role to make judgement based upon supposition, and this is what has happened in Chartism’s case. While it may not be in the public interest to learn how narrowly Britain came to losing a queen and getting a republic, it is inexcusable – even as an attempt to discourage future revolutionaries – to dilute historical facts.

And so, whatever one’s opinion of armed insurrection by the people to gain their ends, let it today be accepted that the statue about to be erected in Westgate Square, Newport, is dedicated not to a discontented rabble, but to forbears who were prepared to die for the Utopia in which they believed. Out of their sacrifice came the Six Points People’s Charter, five of which we enjoy today … despite the denial of one of these same laws by successive Governments – they who insist that we, the governed, should keep the laws they violate. The abandonment of Equal Electoral Districts, in itself, and the subsequent ‘rigging’ of electoral boundaries, is perverting the success of democracy in our country.

Alexander Cordell

Rhosddu, Wales

March 1988

The prisoners, John Frost, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones were placed at the bar.

SPECIAL ASSIZE, MONMOUTH Thursday, 16 January 1840

The Trial of John Frost, Zephaniah Williams and William Jones.

The Sentence by Lord Chief Justice Tindal. He saying:

‘John Frost, Zephaniah Williams, William Jones, after the most anxious and careful investigation of your respective cases, before juries of great intelligence and almost unexampled patience, you stand at the bar of this court to receive the last sentence of the law for the commission of a crime, which, beyond all others, is the most pernicious in example, and the most injurious in its consequences, to the peace and happiness of human society – the crime of High Treason against your Sovereign. You can have no just ground of complaint that your several cases have not met with the most full consideration, both from the jury and from the court. But as the jury have, in each of these cases, pronounced you guilty of the crime for which you have been charged, I should be wanting in justice to them if I did not openly declare, that the verdicts which they have found meet with the entire concurrence of my learned brethren and myself …

‘It has been proved in your case, that you combined together to lead from the hills, at the dead hour of night, into the town of Newport many thousands of men, armed, in many instances, with weapons of a dangerous description, in order that they might take possession of the town, and supersede the lawful authority of the Queen, as a preliminary step to a more general insurrection throughout the kingdom.

‘It is owing to the interposition of Providence alone that your wicked designs were frustrated. Your followers arrive by daylight, and, after firing upon the civil power, and upon the Queen’s troops, are, by the firmness of the magistrates, and the cool and determined bravery of a small number of soldiers, defeated and dispersed. What would have been the fate of the peaceful inhabitants of that town, if success had attended your rebellious designs, it is impossible to say. The invasion of a foreign foe would, in all probability, have been less destructive to property and life. It is for the crime of High Treason, committed under these circumstances, that you are now called upon yourselves to answer; and by the penalty which you are about to suffer, you hold out a warning to all your fellow subjects, that the law of your country is strong enough to repress and punish all attempts to alter the established order of things by insurrection and armed force; and that those who are found guilty of such treasonable attempts must expiate their crime by an ignominious death.

‘I therefore most earnestly exhort you to employ the little time that remains to you in preparing for the great change that awaits you, by sincere penitence and fervent prayer. For although we do not fail to forward to the proper quarter that recommendation which the jury have entrusted to us, we cannot hold out to you any hope of mercy this side of the grave.

‘And now, nothing more remains than the duty imposed upon the court – to all of us a most painful duty – to declare the last sentence of the law, which is that you, John Frost, and you, Zephaniah Williams, and you, William Jones, be taken hence to the place from whence you came, and be thence drawn on a hurdle to the place of execution, and that there each of you be hanged by the neck until you be dead, and that afterwards the head of each of you shall be severed from his body, and the body of each, divided into four quarters, shall be disposed of as Her Majesty shall think fit, and may Almighty God have mercy upon your souls.’

Monmouth Gaol. Condemned cell.

Thursday 16 January, 1840.

I could not sleep.

‘You are awake, Frost?’ asked Zephaniah.

I said, sitting up, ‘How many more times will you ask that? Of course I’m awake. The prospect of being hanged does nothing to induce sleep.’

‘You are also worried about your stepson?’

‘Scarcely, at a time like this.’

Zephaniah said with sincerity, ‘Your stepson, William Geach, is an astonishing young man. Were he my own, I would be worried.’

‘Astonishing,’ said William Jones from his corner, ‘but a fool. If I had managed to salt away twenty thousand, you wouldn’t find me hanging around to answer to creditors. That’s where the fool is, not in the fraud.’

Zephaniah added, ‘He’ll get twenty years – a year’s transportation for every thousand. You can insult their daughters and rape their wives, but touch a penny of their money and they’ll burn you alive.’

I said, ‘Why did he do it?’

Zephaniah grunted. ‘Some might suggest he did it for you.’

‘A reasonable assumption, Frost?’ asked Jones.

There was a silence between us, broken only by the sounds of distant hammering and the grumbling of saws; the carpenters were erecting the scaffold.

Zephaniah said with a chuckle, ‘There’s something wrong with this conversation. At a time when we are about to be gibbeted, we’re discussing a solicitor who has run off with the funds, a situation that is happening twice a week in Monmouth.’

Together, we listened to the carpenters, and William Jones said, ‘The whole thing is unethical. Had we won the day, and removed this bloodstained Victoria from the throne, this is one of the first things I’d have altered. No scaffolds to be erected until after the guilty verdict – this lot have been at it since the start of the trial.’

‘It is the way the Establishment does things.’

‘More,’ added Jones, ‘only yesterday I learned that the butchers come from Pontypool, my home town.’

‘Insult to injury in more ways than one.’

I said, ‘The butchery is an outrage upon the dead. It is typical of the Whigs and Tories. Initially, of course, the Anatomy Bill was intended to frighten the life out of our colonial savages, who preferred to be arraigned before their gods in one piece; finding it worked abroad, they extended the privilege to us.’

Jones said, ‘You talk with levity.’

I answered, ‘Personally, I care little what happens to my carcass after the soul has fled,’ and Zephaniah said:

‘Do you think we could have more sleep and less philosophy?’

‘Well said. By the sound of what’s going on outside, we’ve got to be up in the morning.’

I lay there in the light of the coming dawn; the single window of the cell reflected prison bars on the whitewashed wall with terrifying perceptibility. There was no sound now but the distant hammering and the steady breathing of the others.

The prospect of death did not terrify me; it frightened me into cold sweats of anticipation, but not the extremity of fear. So much had happened; catastrophe had followed calamity with such monotonous precision in the past weeks, that little more could happen to us. And the denouement to the tragedy, confronted as I was with it on the very day my guilt of High Treason was pronounced – my stepson’s attempts to obtain false credit – had proved the final catalyst. God knows, I thought, what the effect on Mary would be. And God knows, also, what the effect of the Anatomy Bill would have upon her and the family … upon my sons, John and Henry and upon the girls, too – Elizabeth, Sarah, Catherine, Ellen and Anne, aged thirteen, a most impressionable age.

I tried to pray, but could not.

Lying there I began to analyse the talk between Zephaniah and William Jones, who, at the best of times, though coherent in oratory, was unusually flamboyant: now his speech, like Zephaniah’s, through some diverse psychology, was couched in the same legal grammar and tonality that graced the defending counsel in court. I smiled as I lay there, and wondered why I was smiling.

Monmouth Gaol. Condemned cell.

Thursday 30 January, 1840.

Just before being apprehended, I read with disgust a pamphlet smuggled out of the women’s prison in Cascades, Van Diemen’s Land. ‘This,’ I told my companions, ‘was a statement by a prominent magistrate in England that, when ordering a child to be whipped, he took care that when a gaol sentence was also involved, the corporal punishment should occur at the end of the prison term; thus the child would be able to “look forward to it in a torment of expectancy”.’

‘Great people, our magistrates,’ observed William Jones, and Zephaniah said:

‘The theorem is being practised upon us, is it not? The erection of the scaffold before the trial even began, is Melbourne’s private message that he intends to murder the three of us. When, by the way, is Victoria’s marriage?’

‘Our gracious Queen and Albert? February the tenth.’

‘About ten days from now, eh? Is it the Whigs’ ambition to lay three bloody heads on the pillow between Vicky and her lover?’

‘It’s a point,’ I said reflectively.

‘Really?’ Zephaniah sat up. ‘When have they ever been sickened by the sight of blood – on the gallows or on the hunting field – the political parties or the monarchy?’

Jones said, ‘But now the country is in a ferment about us, and heads are dangerous things to bowl around.’

‘Melbourne is the true enemy …’

I added, ‘And Lord John Russell. His squeaky voice has ever been my enemy. Anything that stands before him and his perverted interests are anathema – remember Dic Penderyn?’

Jones asked, ‘What the hell’s an anathema?’

‘Dic Penderyn?’ echoed Zephaniah. ‘Innocent? He was hanged because he was a Welshman. But don’t range yourself alongside innocence, Frost. Or are you telling me that you marched down Stow Hill with pistols looking for ducks?’

It raised me. ‘Did you not also enter a plea of Not Guilty?’

‘That’s because I tried to save my neck, or would you prefer to lay your head on a platter for a Whig Salome? Let us plead what we like in public, mun, but let’s have the truth of us in private. We’re as guilty as bloody hell, all three of us, and you know it.’

‘Perhaps, but it will do us no good to become auntie confessionals at this late stage. The public fight for us because they believe us innocent. Lay a finger on a fencing post belonging to their precious Victoria, and they would bay for blood.’

William Jones said placidly, ‘It is a state of education of the masses that will take another century,’ and Zephaniah grunted.

‘Longer. In the year two thousand the fools will still be at it.’

Nerves were becoming frayed, and a knock at the door put an end to the discussion; moments later Sir Frederick Pollock, one of my defending counsel, entered the cell preceded by the gaoler.

This, the son of a saddler and one of the most learned advocates of the day, had been retained by our Chartist friends; a year later, with the return of a Tory government, he became Attorney-General, and let this be recorded: none of us had complaint in respect of our defence, nor of the judges who condemned us. In retrospect, even when faced with the horror of such a death, I did not blame the judicial system in my country. Only in the selection of the jury did I take exception, and this was largely influenced by representation from London. Indeed, my lasting memory of the trial is the efforts of Lord Chief Justice Tindal to save us.

With Sir Frederick Pollock came William Foster Geach – one of my wife’s two children by an earlier marriage; from where sprang his legal brilliance I shall never know – this, the Newport solicitor to whom the best brains of the legal profession had turned in defence of his stepfather, now deeply in trouble on his own account.

Sir Frederick said, ‘Again, my condolences upon the verdict. The jury ran in the face of the Lord Chief Justice’s summing up – clearly he was working for an acquittal …’

Jones interjected, ‘And this is what you’ve come to tell us?’

William, my stepson, released me from his arms, and Sir Frederick answered, ‘The importance of the judge’s remarks cannot be emphasized too much. The embarrassment he has caused to the Crown prosecution is far reaching,’ and William my stepson, added:

‘The Attorney-General himself has criticized Lord Tindal, but the fact remains. Any jury but the one we were landed with would have acquitted all of you in the face of such advice,’ and Zephaniah said:

‘Then we are to die because of a crooked jury? It would be better had you come to tell us not what might have been, but what is,’ and he rose in growing anger. ‘Does this not come of employing bankrupt solicitors? For, if I recall correctly, you yourself were in charge of the jury selection!’ And my stepson lowered his face.

Sir Frederick snapped, ‘Mr Geach was in charge of nothing – I employed him to help your cause, and this he has done!’

‘Help?’ cried Jones. ‘Christ, we’re sentenced to death!’ He thumped the table with his fist. ‘Lord Granville Somerset? Octavius Morgan, the son of Sir Charles of Tredegar – Frost’s enemy? His grandson, the Honourable William Rodney – Sam Homfray, Bailey of Nantyglo and Ben Hall of Llanover – all three bloody ironmasters? God, had the Devil cast his net he’d have had a haul! What a hearing these would give to a favourable summing-up!’

Sir Frederick said softly, ‘Shouting and threats of violence will do nothing to assist you – this is why you are in your present position, all three of you,’ and he waved down Jones’s further shouting. ‘Mr Geach here has worked long and arduously to save you. He has travelled the length and breadth of the country to raise Chartist support, it was he who arranged for Feargus O’Connor to visit you …’

Zephaniah Williams interjected, ‘That was a death sentence in itself – don’t talk to me of O’Connor!’

Untouched, Sir Frederick added, ‘Palmerston and Macaulay are speaking for you. I myself am about to see the Prime Minister; Mr Geach here has petitioned the Queen.’

‘She’ll make a bloody good ally, the bitch,’ said Jones, and Sir Frederick sighed, saying:

‘This has been our greatest difficulty – allies and witnesses; even Daniel O’Connell has refused to speak for Chartism, saying that he had no available evidence.’

‘It isn’t unusual,’ said I. ‘Who are the traitors? The victims in the dock or the witnesses in the ale houses?’

‘We must go,’ said Pollock quietly.

‘My mother sends her love to you, Father,’ said William Geach. ‘To you, Mr Jones and Mr Williams, she sends her respects, and will give her prayers.’

‘We can do with all the praying we can get,’ announced Jones. ‘From what I can see of it we’re already on the scaffold.’

‘That’s graveyard talk, and we can do without it!’ I said.

‘Aren’t we already dead?’

‘The time is up, gentlemen,’ said the gaoler; with his lanthorn and ring of jangling keys, he had the person of an Irish leprechaun.

Before he left the cell, William handed me a letter: opening it, I read:

My dear Stepfather,

Friends have deserted us, allies have been discovered. O’Connell is a great disappointment: he who often boasted he could raise half a million United Irishmen, has condemned you as traitors. Sam Etheridge, your printer friend, originally committed for High Treason, has been released on the reduced charge of conspiracy: there has been an attempt to implicate the preacher of Hope Chapel; it failed, and it will raise your spirits to know that ever he prays publicly for your liberation and the downfall of your enemies.

I have taken the liberty of transferring all your remaining property to my mother, lest this letter should find you unfairly condemned; which, you will recall, is a procedure which we earlier agreed, though it pains me much to do it.

Believe me when I say that I will labour ceaselessly in all your interests, and remain,

Ever your faithful stepson,

William Foster Geach

It saddened me to hear this of O’Connell, one who held my esteem and admiration: doubtless, this attitude was a direct result of the eternal animosity between the labouring Welsh and Irish; an unhappy divide between fellow Celts I had always striven to bridge. As early as 1798, at the time of the Irish Rebellion under Father John Murphy, Welsh regiments under English officers had suppressed Irish peasantry and joined with German Hessians in committing outrages against defenceless Irish populations: from those days, and earlier, to today when Irish escaping from the famines would work until they dropped for a sack of potatoes to undercut the wages of the artisan Welsh, this acrimony boiled and simmered.

It was a bitter situation that O’Connell should prove so ineffective in our hour of need … he who could have done so much to save us.

I was further saddened by the situation in which my young stepson found himself. His appearance was now sinewy and haggard; the worry of his recent bankruptcy, his trial for embezzlement and conviction on exactly the same day as my own, had reduced him from the confident young advocate of scintillating oratory, to a broken man: yet, despite his own tribulations, not once had he deserted my cause. Soon, like me, he would pay for his guilt; even while I climbed the steps to the scaffold, he would be removed to the hulks and the fate of Van Dieman’s Land.

The fortunes of the family of Frost were at a low ebb, to say the least of it.

After the visit of the lawyer and my solicitor stepson, we continued to languish in a torture of expectancy: sometimes, even in the long hours of the sleepless nights, we would awake to argue vociferously of where our tactics and policies went wrong – these hastened away the waiting; then, with the coming of each careless dawn, the first red fingers searching through the bars, we would awake from the shuddering, sweating drowse which some call sleep: awake to renewed hammering on the scaffold: in quieter moments, between the crowing of distant cocks, came the unmistakable sharpening of the knives.

‘Well,’ announced Zephaniah, sitting up, ‘I wish them a fine edge to the steel. Having been a publican all my life, they are going to find my liver irresistible.’

‘Tell him to shut his mouth,’ said Jones from his blanket.

I rose, gripped the cell bars and looked out on to the wet drizzle of a morning: the peak of distant Pen-y-fal, I thought with my mind’s eye, would be shrouded in mist now; the roaming Usk, wandering in the valley with all the mystical symmetry of her years, would soon be garlanded with winter ice.

Strangely, Zephaniah’s humour, in all its brave obscenity, did little to annoy me; in some obscure way it dulled the incessant turning of my stomach, which, as if no longer a portion of my being, was already being searched by the knife. The effect of this was to turn my bowels to water: I spent more time on the bucket in a corner of the cell than off it. The purge was enervating, and I was sweating badly.

Jones said suddenly, ‘Rumour has it that if you don’t bribe the hangman, he doesn’t hang you dead, but calls in the butchers before life is extinct.’

‘Carry on like that and you’ll expire from a heart attack,’ said Zephaniah. ‘Next you’ll be applying to be drawn, too, but fortunately for us, Judge Jeffreys is deceased.’

I said, still staring up at the window, ‘Stay in date, Jones, and stay calm, too. The big thing here is to keep our dignity.’

‘It could happen,’ said Jones in a whisper.

‘It could not happen. The surgeon is called in to pronounce one dead and nothing more is done until he signs the death certificate,’ but he persisted, and I remember thinking that if he carried on like this he would crack and infect the three of us. Chartism was disgraced enough without the gaolers having to carry us, shrieking, to the scaffold. Now, biting at his hands, Jones said, in gasps:

‘One of the last of the Jacobean rebels to be drawn was of the Tredegar family …’

‘For which they ought to be inordinately proud,’ interjected Zephaniah. ‘Had I known this, I’d have paid his relatives more respect.’

‘They behaved well at the Bloody Assizes,’ I added. ‘Would that we can follow their example,’ and Jones cried:

‘Even while he was being drawn, he cried, “God bless the Duke of Monmouth!”’

‘That’s where he made another mistake,’ said Zephaniah. ‘One pig in exchange for another. He must have been an appalling idiot.’

At that moment – it was two days before our execution was due – the cell door grated open and the keeper of the gaol entered with the turnkey. This, a wizened shrew of a man in faded blue uniform, stood before us with a paper shaking in his fingers, and announced, reading:

‘By order of the Home Secretary, the law having sentenced you to death by hanging and quartering, I am to ask you to instruct me as to the disposal of the portions of your bodies.’

‘Oh, God,’ whispered Jones, and sat down, weeping.

I asked, steadying my voice, ‘Better we thought you had come to reprieve us. Is this not the third time you have asked us for this disposal?’

It was always my belief, and still is today, that this harassment about the disposal of our bodies was an attempt by the Government to induce us to suicide. Further, we had the means: while knives and forks had been withdrawn from our eating trays, we had been allowed to retain our belts; at least, Jones and Zephaniah had been so allowed, but I didn’t possess one. The turnkey said, jangling his keys:

‘Show respect to the keeper, gentlemen. He wishes to know your answers.’

‘If he gives some replies himself,’ said I, and to the keeper said, ‘Come, sir, be kindly. Is it true that a petition is being raised to save us?’

‘It is true,’ said he.

‘Where?’

‘In Merthyr and Blackwood, Abercarn and Risca; many are signing.’

‘Does Macaulay still speak for us?’ asked Jones.

‘Not now. Only yesterday in the Vindicator he said that your intention being to knock democracy on the head, the same should be done to you.’

‘Well done,’ said Zephaniah. ‘I always trusted that sod. And Disraeli?’

‘The Jew says that you are being treated with the utmost severity.’ And Zephaniah replied:

‘The man has imagination, doubtless. Well, keeper, dispose of our steaks mainly as you wish, this is the answer I send to the High Sheriff and the Lord Lieutenant of the Country. One leg I should like nailed over the door of Lord John Russell’s office; the other on the entrance to the Prime Minister’s country seat. My head you can set on a spike in Parliament Square to delight the Whigs and Tories, and my two arms, suitably crossed, laid on the counterpane between Albert and his Queen.’ He went to the door. ‘Now go to hell, we’ve had enough of you.’

I envied Zephaniah his brash courage in the face of the obscenity, and despised the whining of William Jones; one moment the romantic revolutionary who was fleshing swords to the hilt on the road to Malpas, but never arrived at Westgate Square; cocking his snoots at watching onlookers and now lying face down on the straw in tears.

As for myself: beneath the outward calmness which I fought to portray, I was very frightened.

The keeper of the gaol came again, with another paper in his hand.

‘Gentlemen,’ said he, ‘the Home Secretary desires the prisoners to know that the Queen has been graciously pleased to respite sentence of death for a further week; but …’ And at this he paused and smiled around the cell … ‘that after the expiration of that period, sentence of death will certainly follow.’

Zephaniah stood like a rock. Jones burst into tears.

The knives turned again within me.

If this continued, I thought, it would be death by torture.

What we did not know was that the Queen had already reprieved us, and had remitted the death sentence to one of life imprisonment by transportation to Van Dieman’s Land.

Presumably it was Lord John Russell, my old enemy, getting his pound of flesh, and afterwards Zephaniah said bitterly:

‘It is a pity, I think, that all three of us should suffer so much for the revenge of one bloody Shylock.’

But others, thank God, abounded in the cause of justice, and one of these was the Lord Chief Justice Tindal, who had tried to save us at the trial.

Not less than tw. . .