William
Oliver was a building surveyor who, as a result of an unpaid debt,
was sent to Fleet Prison in May 1816. While in prison Oliver was recruited
as a Home Office spy. Once released, Oliver became friends with Charles
Pendrill, a radical shoemaker who had been a known associate of Colonel
Edmund Despard, the leader of a gang who had been executed in 1803
for plotting to kill George III.
Pendrill introduced Oliver to Joseph Mitchell and in April 1817 the
two men travelled to met leading reformers in the industrial districts.
On 4th May, Mitchell was arrested by the authorities and sent to Cold
Bath Fields Prison. Oliver continued his journey and began informing
the reformers that Radicals in London were
planning an armed uprising in London on 9th June and asked them to
organise local workers to join the rebellion. This was untrue and
it is now believed that Oliver was working as an agent provocateur
for Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary.
On 4th June Oliver was seen by a reformer in Wakefield conversing
with a man who worked for Major-General John Byng, the army commander
of the Northern District. Word was quickly sent out to all reforming
groups that Oliver was setting a trap. However, some of the radicals
did not receive the information and on 9th June, Jeremiah
Brandreth, led 300 men on a march on Nottingham.
Brandreth told his followers that hundreds of thousands of men all
over England were rising that day. Brandreth was wrong and he was
quickly arrested by the army when he approached the city.
Thirty-five
of the men were charged with high treason. Brandreth and two others
were sentenced to death and another eleven men were transported for
life. The men were originally sentenced to being hung, drawn and quartered,
but the quartering was remitted. On the scaffold one of the men shouted
out that they were victims of Lord Sidmouth
and Oliver the Spy. Edward Baines of the
Leeds Mercury investigated
their claims and was able to find enough evidence to implicate the
government in the conspiracy. In his article exposing William Oliver,
Baines described him as a "prototype of Lucifer, whose distinguishing
characteristic is, first to tempt and then to destroy."
The execution of
James Brandreth
(1)
A government spy reported on Jeremiah Brandreth
on 1st June, 1817.
I went to Jerry Brandreth's between six and seven this evening.
We left his house and met Stevens and walked up Sandy Lane. Stevens
said I should have been here on Monday night. He stated that there
was a London Delegate, who reported that there was about 70,000 in
London ready to act with us; and that they were very ripe in Birmingham.
(2)
William Stevens, a radical reformer from Nottingham, gave his account
of William Oliver's visit in William Cobbett's Political
Register (16th May, 1818)
On the 1st or 2nd of June, Oliver came to Nottingham. He said, that
all would be ready in London for the 9th June. Oliver had a meeting
with us now, at which meeting Brandreth and Turner, and many others
were present. At this meeting he laid before us a paper which he called
a plan of campaign. When Oliver had thus settled everything with us,
he prepared to set off to organise things in Yorkshire, that all might
be ready to move in the country at the moment that the rising took
place in London, where he told us there were 50,000 men with arms
prepared, and that they would take the Tower of London.
(3)
William Cobbett, Political
Register (16th May, 1818)
Oliver drew towards London, leaving his victims successfully in the
traps that he had prepared for them. The employers of Oliver might,
in an hour, have put a total stop to those preparations, and have
blown them to air. They wished, not to prevent, but to produce those
acts.
(4)
Archibald Prentice, Historical Sketches
and Personal Recollections of Manchester (1851)
The
employment of spies on the part of government had done as much to
produce a change of opinion as the harsh
exercise of authority. There might have been some credit reflected
on the government by their prevention of the projected mad march of
the blanketeers on London, by their putting down the insurrection
in Derbyshire, and by their suppression of the rising in Scotland,
which resulted in the capture of the rebels at Bonnymuir; but it was
known that Oliver, a paid government agent, had counselled the blanket
meeting and the Derbyshire outbreak, and in Lancashire it was well
known that representations of the country being ripe for revolt, which
occasioned the rising in Scotland, were the work of spies; that although
it was to have been simultaneous, not one, even of the most foolish
and rash Lancashire men gave credence for a moment to the government
agent; and an incendiary placard, posted in Manchester on the 2nd
of April, calling on the people to effect a revolution by force was
laughed to scorn. Even the wicked conspiracy of Thistlewood and his
confederates to assassinate the king's ministers at a cabinet dinner,
had no effect in exciting sympathy in favour of the latter, for there
was the strongest evidence to prove that Edwards, a government spy,
was the originator of the scheme, and that
he had provided the arms with which the murders were to have been
effected.
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