William Davidson

William Davidson was born around 1781 in Kingston, Jamaica, the illegitimate son of a local Black woman and, most historians believe, Robert Sewell, the island's Attorney General; sent to Britain around age fourteen, he studied law in Glasgow before training in mathematics in Aberdeen.

Davidson pursued a varied career including naval service and cabinet-making in Birmingham and London, and his political radicalisation intensified after the 1819 Peterloo Massacre, when cavalry charged a peaceful rally for parliamentary reform in Manchester, killing several protesters.

Outraged by Peterloo, Davidson joined the Spencean Philanthropists, a radical group advocating land reform, and became associated with Arthur Thistlewood's circle, meeting fellow Jamaican-British radical Robert Wedderburn, though Wedderburn ultimately opposed the plot that followed.

Unknown to Davidson and his associates, the group had been infiltrated by government spy George Edwards, who helped orchestrate a plan to assassinate the entire British cabinet at a dinner party in February 1820; Davidson was made responsible for guarding the group's Cato Street hayloft headquarters and acquiring weapons.

When police raided the hayloft on 23 February 1820, Davidson was captured armed with a sword; convicted of high treason alongside four co-conspirators, he delivered an eloquent but unsuccessful speech from the dock before being publicly hanged and decapitated outside Newgate Prison on 1 May 1820, among the last people in England to suffer this punishment.