Edward Marcus Despard

Edward Marcus Despard

The last man to be sentenced to be Hung Drawn and Quartered.
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.

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Lady Charlotte Despard

Famous suffragette and one of the three widow-leaders of the Votes for Women movement. She was a friend of Keir Hardie, a parliamentary candidate in 1918 and Maud Gonne's companion in her IRA safehouse. She was simultaneously a Theosophist and a Catholic, a pacifist and a revolutionary, a philanthropist and a socialist, as well as being a feminist and a vegetarian.
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William Frederick Despard

William Frederick Despard of Lacca Manor: The Last Despard Patriarch Follows the life of a well-to-do Irish landlord living in the 19th/20th centuries. Despard people of that country were starving from the effects of The Great Famine. Revolution was in the air much of it focused on elimination of the landlord class. The story about William Despard describes how his Huguenot forebears had to flee from France to Ireland due to religious persecution by French Catholics.
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The Despards in Ireland, 1572-1838

Written in 1838, Ms. Jane Despard points her acid pen at the lives of her family members living in Ireland for the previous 250 years. Jane herself is very well educated, has a sterling intellect and uses it to devastating effect on her ancestors and peers. Her social outlook is strictly upper middle class English and she is very concerned about social standing, income, “improving property.” and morality.
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