The voice of Robert Wedderburn:
‘My father was a plantation owner, by name, James Wedderburn. My mother, Rosanna, was the other side of a cankered coin, born in Africa, before her enslavement. Rosanna! Hosanna! How I weep for thee!
My father sold dear mother when I was some four months away from birth – how free the union was that led to my entry into the world I leave you to conjecture upon. My mother was sold again after I was born. This was my early life: an innocent victim, like so many millions, of vile slavery’s ledgers and transactions.
Dear mother! My heart has never stopped aching for Rosanna.
After she was abruptly snatched from my embrace, I was brought up by her own mother: ‘Talkee Amy.’ Amy knew well the ways of the old religion as well as she knew all of the Christian faith too. Jesus did not protect her, however. I saw her flogged for so-called witchcraft when I was barely more than ten years of age. This was my early life.
I may have been free, but I was scarred within. And as for education, I received no reading and writing lessons after the age of five. But seeds were sown, as I shall later recount.
But with no prospects and, despite my free status, a slave heritage, I decided to join the Navy, in Kingston. That must have been some five years after I saw my grandmother flogged. I would serve the King faithfully in battles against both the Spaniards and the French, but in truth my loyalty needed little to help it wane. When I heard of our ‘floating republic’ and mutiny at the Nore and Spithead in 1797, I saw the light.
As did my fellow negro mate, William Davidson. William would become a martyr in time, of course. Executed in 1820 for his daring courage with the Cato Street plan to assassinate the cabinet. He spoke for so many of us ‘blackbirds’ living in the rookeries of St Giles with those words before he faced the scaffold: ‘A stranger in a strange land.’ I know full well just what he meant and means.
They called me Nigger. Mulatto. Illiterate. Uncouth. "The Devil's Engineer." But never a Jolly Jack Tar even though I had been such.
But the facility I had developed with the stitching of rigging, sails and netting held me in good stead when I found myself in London. I found a position as a jobbing-tailor. A similar fortune to my comrade, Allen Davenport, I suppose, who picked up the rudiments of shoemaking when he was in the army.
Money was never in abundance in the capital but my work down at my patch down by St Matthew’s Church, together with the supplementing of the pocket by the sale of my pamphlets on the side - and later charging entrance for my popular preaching, as well as my bawdy house got me and mine just about by.
While I was at St Giles, I took my first faltering steps towards printing my religious tracts and becoming a Methodist preacher. For as the good Thomas Spence would often tell us: ‘God was a very notorious Leveller!’ And who wants to live the life of the high and mighty? I preferred the life of high ideals and integrity.
It’s true that many of my Spencean associates were of a higher standing than mine: men of law; of medicine; surgeon-apothecaries; shopkeepers, and even former army officers. William Davidson’s Cato Street comrade, the notable ’Doctor’ Watson, kept surgeon-apothecary shops in the Strand, and later out at Somers Town, I recall.
And so it was that I joined the Spenceans just one year before the death of brave Tommy Spence. It must have been some four years later that I penned my Axe Laid to the Root (or to give it it’s full title, The Axe Laid to the Root, a Fatal Blow to Oppressors, Being an Address to the Planters and Negroes of the Island of Jamaica) and just as Tommy himself was regarded by our oppressors as a lunatic, so I carried that mantle into my pages, too. But I stole their reason and subverted their condescension with my cry: ‘Proud to wear the title of madman!’
Why so? Because I knew that God’s Word and Tommy Spence’s Plan would redeem us all. From the rookeries of St Giles and the backstreets by the docks and thence to the plantations in the West Indies: ‘Ye Africans and relatives now in bondage, I offer you the only tribute the offspring of a slave can give for a simple Spencean who cannot write his name, will receive his opponent as David did the giant Goliath and with simple means destroy his gigantic impositions.’
I knew that the Jubilee was heralded and know it will come as surely as The Day of Judgement. By instruction and education; but, if need be, by the sword rather than the ploughshare. Remember well the Maroons of St Domingo for is it not true that ‘My heart glows with revenge’?
And yet, I concluded my tract of prophesy with these more ameliorative words: ‘Will not priests follow their princes and sing the solemn dirge of tyranny and corruption falling into contempt, and hail the Kingdom of Christ forwarded by Spence, and experience the new birth, ‘for a nation shall be borne in a day.’ Then shall the worthless kings who thirst for human blood to support their tottering thrones turn their swords into ploughshares and pruning hooks, then will it be said, and not before, as the apple tree of the wood, so is my beloved sovereign amongst the sons. I sat down under its shadow with great delight, and its fruit was pleasant to my taste.’
RW, A Spencean enthusiast
‘Hundreds used to attend my chapel meetings at the corner of Hopkins Street in Soho. It might have been a hay-loft, with a steep ladder, but that ladder and a shilling a ticket for entrance presented no obstacle to attendance. The accusations of blasphemy and sedition were music to mine ears. They might have derided me as ‘The Hay-Loft Preacher’ but the authorities quaked at their knees when they read their spies’ reports of my meetings. Especially in the days after Peterloo.
Fighting men in abundance there, quite different from the Evans’ chapel, I can tell you. It was the Evans’ search for respectability that drove me towards Doctor Watson, Arthur Thistlewood and the other London Ultras such as dear William.
When Evans evicted me from his chapel, I took the benches with me. He tried to get me arrested for that! But I not only took the benches, I took most of the best Spenceans with me too! Evans ended up with just a few loyalists back at the Mulberry Tree.
I stuck to my guns. London radicals might have been preparing a welcome for Mr Hunt, but I called for revolution and the subverting of the soldiery with Tommy Spence’s Plan of giving them land. I also called for drilling by our own selves so as to be prepared: “We must learn how to form the solid square and from that to extend our centre”. Such exhortations led to our practises at Chalk Farm, behind Primrose Hill, and in the vicinity of Paddington, at Harrow Road.
That year of 1819 was a vexing one and more so than I bargained for. But I’m proud to say I was charged with sedition and blasphemous libel within a week of the passing of the damnable Six Acts. The cause? This speech: “ Seeing that his Majesty’s Ministers have ordered all Pices of Ordinance and Military Stores which are in the possession of private individuals to be deposited in their own Depots, would it not be advisable for them to take down all their Iron Pallisading throughout the Empire and to destroy the Gas-Works to prevent the Radicals making use of them in case of Civil War?”
Not a bad speech for this “low vulgar man”; not a bad bit of extemporising at the drop of the proverbial cocked hat. Other spontaneities of mine were written down too as evidence of my nature. “ The rich are always enemies of the poor, they not only despise us themselves, but they teach their servants to do so.” “We should think no-one greater than ourselves.”
I worked my brethren well with such talk at Hopkins Street, alongside my comic, burlesque co-operator, the Spencean Samuel Waddington. But those damnable Six Acts, and the tragedy of my martyr friends after the failure of the Cato Street plan, led me regretfully to have to close down my chapel, and insinuate myself at the Spotted Dog in Clement Lane in the spring of 1820.
There we returned to our old, tavern, free and easy ways: toasting, carousing, and often finishing the night with a ceremonial rendition of Ca Ira:
Ah! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine aristocrats to the lamp-post Ah! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine the aristocrats, we'll hang them! If we don't hang them We'll break them If we don't break them We'll burn them Ah! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine aristocrats to the lamp-post Ah! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine the aristocrats, we'll hang them! We shall have no more nobles nor priests Ah! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine Equality will reign everywhere Ah! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine And their infernal clique Shall go to hell Ah! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine aristocrats to the lamp-post Ah! It'll be fine, It'll be fine, It'll be fine the aristocrats, we'll hang them! And when we'll have hung them all We'll stick a shovel up their arse
Then we would grasp each other’s hands and assert in unison, over and over: “We will die for Liberty.” The rafters rattled to that, I can tell you. We would then relinquish hands, so each could raise a glass for the ceremonial toast: “May the barren land of our country be manured with the blood of our Tyrantry.”
Alas! It was the precious, sweet blood of William and the other Cato Street Martyrs that would feed the ground, not the tyrants of our land. But that was in 1820; I speak now of 1819.
I was charged with blasphemous and seditious libel on the 16th day of August: the day of Peterloo. London was quickly awash with Peterloo handbills, but there was one for yours truly, too. “Philanthropists of every Denomination” it proclaimed. And the print went on to urge readers to contribute to the bail fund for “Robert Wedderburn, a prisoner in Newgate – for what he knows not!” The ‘bill went on to describe me as “A man well known the World through” for “his Exertions at Hopkins Street.”
I was out on bail in just days! And within days this report duly followed! “Principal Speaker was Wedderburn, who dwelt chiefly on the late Affray at Manchester; that the bloody Revolution had begun there, & it must now end in blood …”
The informant, I am told, also eavesdropped one of our conversations at Hopkins Street, and reported thus: “If the soldiers should make or offer to make an attack upon The People of London, we have some good friends beside the Gass & Railing – there is a Great number of Bakers Ovens that runs under the street which can be easy blown up & the best of all the Bakers are almost to a man Radicals or & Spenceans. London stands upon nothing, it has foundations but Vaults, Stoves, Ovens, Pipes, Cesspools So that One shock whould fall like unto the tower of Babel.”
We had somewhat half-cocked planned for an uprising of protest on All Saints Day, 1819, but I perceived the necessity of withdrawing my support for intelligence informed me that our numbers probably did not exceed 2,000 in the capital, and not all of these had been able to procure arms. All was gloom in the meeting at the White Lion afterwards and that’s when the physical force Cato Street martyrs took over the ascendency from us Spenceans. But on that night, I exerted myself beyond reproach with my speech. That speech alarmed the authorities.
In consequence, I was arrested in the December of 1819 and then imprisoned in May of the following year.
And so I received a two-year sentence and subsequent incarceration in Newgate. But that was no hardship, for as I informed the court: “I am so extremely poor that prison will be a home to me and as I am so advanced in life I shall esteem it an honour to die immured in a dungeon for advocating the cause of truth.”
Strange to relate, I would be visited there by Mr William Wilberforce. Not because he was intrigued by my preaching, my politics, or my bawdy house but because of my resolute revelations of the iniquities of vile slavery. He was moved to mournful silence, head bowed, as he listened, a captive himself, in my crepuscular cell.
But to return to my life beyond incarceration, Bell’s Weekly published my memoirs of my slave and plantation tyrant father. And this was followed by my autobiographical account: The Horrors of Slavery. These publications proved to be popular, as did my preaching – though not always to the converted or the convertible.
I had many visitors to my sermons who were curious rather than sympathetic, of course: hear the Reverend Chetwode Eustace vituperate about our chapel at Hopkins Street: “I had some difficulty to discover the place for it is apparently a ruinous loft to which you will ascend by a step-ladder – the assemblage was perfectly suitable to the place for both Orators and Audience were with few exceptions persons of the very lowest description. The Doctrines were certainly of the most dreadful nature and two persons particularly distinguished themselves by expressions which appeal to the most violently seditious and treasonable – One of these men (who appeared to be the principal…) is a Mulatto & announced himself as the descendant of an African Slave.”
A shame he was not present to feel chastened by my earlier words: “We must learn to use the gun, the Dagger, the Cutlass and the Pistol. We shall then be able to defy all the Yeomanry of England.” That would have put him to run.
Of course, I was not the only black friend of freedom who commanded a reverential audience – let us raise a toast in memory of our dear friend and martyr, William Davidson. None of our class and persuasion thought about colour with any condescension; all we all ever saw were equal citizens bonded in the indissoluble links of equality. It was only our so-called betters who displayed contempt towards the ‘blackbirds’ of St Giles, of London, the country and the world beyond these shores.’
The voice of Robert Wedderburn:
‘I read the Black Dwarf, delivered to me surreptitiously, for the news of dear William’s execution. It said that William’s head, after his hanging and decapitation, ‘remained in death exactly what it had been while he lived’, despite the blood gushing ‘profusely’ while the ‘hisses and groans of the crowd were repeated.’
The hisses marked, of course, the opposition of the populace to the executions and were issued forth in unison, to show collective will. The groans too, were issued forth in unison, and were to indicate collective sympathy for the martyrs.’
Allen Davenport:
‘I last saw Robert in 1834. I think he probably died the next year. He would have been pleased to have his name missed being recorded on the new registers of births, marriages and deaths, after the 1836 Act, I think. Such record keeping would probably have reminded him of enslavement and all its statistical details.
I know the spy, George Ball, saw him in ’34 at the service of the ‘infidel’ (as Ball would say) Robert Taylor, at the Theobald Road chapel. He wrote that Robert was there, along with ‘others of that school ‘to hear Taylor preach with a message and vocabulary ‘the most impious I have ever heard’.
Robert was there for his final meeting, as always, a citizen amongst friends. He would have been pleased, as a quondam Methodist minister, to hear the last sermon and lesson he ever heard on this earth, described as ‘the most impious I have ever heard.’ And so ended the days and life of the great Robert Wedderburn. It was an honour to have known him.’
Concluding, narrational voice:
‘And so, we see that the only people to comment upon colour when writing or talking about William and Robert, were government spies, informers, agent-provocateurs, or members of, or those sympathetic to the ruling class.
It didn’t enter the minds of the radicals, the revolutionaries, the Spenceans, the crowds and the onlookers, despite the development of an ideology of racial distinction by philosophers of the so-called Enlightenment.
And a generation later, we find another popular leader of the working class who happens to be black: William Cuffay, the Chartist.
And so we note, in conclusion, that there seems to be a palpable absence of racism during this radical period – before the later 19th century Age of Empire and the European ‘Scramble for Africa’.
And doesn’t that tell a story?
