Mike Jay – The Unfortunate Colonel Despard
|
Mike Jay – The Unfortunate Colonel Despard
[Bantam Press 2004] buy new or used at abebooks.co.uk If you use this link to purchase this item breviary stuff will receive 5% commission Britain is in the grip of a divisive war on terror. The government is forcing through new emergency powers to imprison suspected terrorists without trial. Dissent is spilling on to the streets, where mass popular opposition to the war is suppressed with violence. Secret intelligence sources whisper of a vast international terrorist conspiracy. The year is 1798. And Colonel Edward Marcus Despard is shortly to become the last man to be sentenced to public hanging, drawing and quartering for high treason. Despard's execution was the culmination of an extraordinary life. He had served as a soldier in Jamaica, and fought along side 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 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, he found his career put on hold. At a time when many believed that, as in America and France, the ruling elite was on the verge of collapse, Despard, cast aside by the establishment, 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. 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 Thomas 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 was also to presage the birth of modern democracy. Contents
|
