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1 results

  • Chapter 15 - Men of Colour: Wedderburn and Davidson

  • from Part Four - Ordinary Britons
  • Vic Gatrell, University of Cambridge
  • Book:
    Conspiracy on Cato Street
    Published online:
    06 April 2022
    Print publication:
    12 May 2022, pp 321-340

  • Summary

    Some 10,000 people of colour lived in London around 1800, and none escaped white people’s antipathy and prejudice. Thistlewood’s fellow Spencean Wedderburn and the conspirator Davidson were both born of enslaved mothers on Jamaica plantations. Long settled in England, they were mocked in person as well as in satire, though in his Soho ‘chapel’ Wedderburn returned as good as he got.Davidson’s dramatic life story was in good part invented (it is still falsely alleged that his father was Jamaica’s attorney general), but though he was latterly reduced to beggary he was fully literate and well schooled in the Bible. He was the only conspirator who went to his death in terror and penitence.