http://worldcat.org/entity/work/id/2935185

The unfortunate Colonel Despard

"Beautifully crafted and as thrilling as any novel, this is the extraordinary story of a classic British hero who was executed as Britain's "first terrorist." Colonel Edward Despard was the last person in Britain to be sentenced to hanging, drawing, and quartering for high treason. At his execution in 1803, 20,000 citizens looked on silently. Few of them believed he was guilty. He had fought in Nicaragua alongside Horatio Nelson in one of the most hellish jungle campaigns in the history of warfare. While in command of the British settlement of Belize, he married a black woman and staked his reputation on granting equal rights to freed slaves. Summoned to London to explain himself, and finding his career put on hold, he joined the revolutionary underground. Despard's personal drama unfolds against a backdrop of voodoo slave revolts and naval mutinies, the French Revolution and the Irish Rebellion. His fate was the sensational climax to a British revolution that never happened--but it also presaged the birth of modern democracy" -- publisher website (February 2007).

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