The Unfortunate Colonel Despard

The Unfortunate Colonel Despard

by Mike Jay (Author)

Synopsis

Colonel Edward Marcus Despard was the last person to be sentenced to hanging, drawing and quartering for high treason. At his execution on 21 February 1803, the streets of London were packed with twenty thousand ominously silent onlookers. Few of them believed he was guilty. Despard's execution was the climax of an extraordinary life. He had served as a soldier in Jamaica, and fought in Nicaragua alongside savage Miskito Indians - and a young Horatio Nelson - in one of the most hellish jungle campaigns in the history of warfare. Rewarded with command of the British settlement of Belize, he had married a black woman and staked his reputation on giving the same rights to freed slaves as to white settlers. Summoned back to London to explain himself, and finding his career put on hold, he joined the revolutionary underground. The Unfortunate Colonel Despard moves from high adventure on the Spanish Main to the political tumult of the London underworld in the 1790s, when many believed that, as in America and France, the old elite were on the verge of collapse. Despard's personal drama unfolds against a background of voodoo slave revolts and naval mutinies, the French Revolution and the Irish Rebellion, the democratic ideals of Tom Paine and the ruthless political clampdown of William Pitt's 'Reign of Terror'. Despard's contested fate was the sensational climax to a British revolution that never happened, but it also presaged the birth of modern democracy.

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 379
Edition: New edition
Publisher: Bantam Books (Transworld Publishers a division of the Random House Group)
Published: 01 Sep 2005

ISBN 10: 055381608X
ISBN 13: 9780553816082
Book Overview: Hugely readable and unusual story of the life and death of a classic British hero who was executed as Britain's 'first terrorist'...

Media Reviews
'A gem of a book...was Despard a hero or villain? In answering this question, Jay has also produced a powerful and energetic study of the political complexity of the 1790s' - Sunday Telegraph 'Compelling...Jay weaves a complex variety of themes, many with overtly topical resonances, into Despard's journey from hero to traitor' - Sunday Times 'Beautifully crafted...as thrilling as any novel. The Colonel's fast-paced adventures are matched by Jay's equally breathless narrative' - Good Book Guide
Author Bio
Mike Jay is the author of The Air Loom Gang, Emperors of Dreams- Drugs in the Nineteenth Century, Blue Tide- The Search for Soma and Artificial Paradises- A Drugs Reader, and editor of 1900- A Fin-de-Si cle Reader. u>www.booksattransworld.co.uk