any armed enterprise. By great dexterity, and by means of a month's visit to Ireland paid at this exceptionally dangerous moment, he managed to be the last of the earlier Chartist leaders to come under the ban of the law. There is every reason to believe he was suspected by the physical force extremists before the Newport affair,[1] and it is very probable that he was deliberately prevented from taking an active part in it. He afterwards denied all knowledge of it, which is absurd on the face of it, as Gammage argues.[2] Lovett declares that O'Connor put a stop to the affair except in Newport, and this is confirmed by William Ashton, who says that O'Connor could have stopped Frost's rising too, but preferred to sacrifice him out of jealousy.[3] This is scarcely to be believed, though O'Connor was not incapable of unscrupulous methods of eliminating rivals.
At any rate, O'Connor took this opportunity of quitting the country. He was engaged to lecture and agitate in Lancashire from October 7 to 12, but on October 2 he wrote to cancel this engagement on the ground that he was going to found Radical Associations in Ireland, and to array the people of Cork against the aristocracy in view of the next General Election.[4] He arrived in Dublin on October 6,[5] and was back in Leeds on November 6, two days after the events at Newport. On a later occasion he said that he went to Ireland to raise money on his property there.[6] Both versions appear equally unsatisfactory, and even if O'Connor was not really implicated in the plot, he must remain under the gravest suspicion of having run away and allowed his friends to engage in a futile and dangerous enterprise which a word from him could have stopped.[7]
Meanwhile preparations were going on for a second rising to take place in the event of Frost's condemnation. The Newport authorities were on the alert. About ten days after the rising, the presence of Beniowski, Cardo, and Taylor in the district was known or suspected. Cardo was actually arrested outside the Westgate Hotel on November 15, and his papers searched. He declared that "he did not believe that Mr. Frost headed the mob, and attributed the outbreak to Russian
- ↑ Parkes at Birmingham expressed his suspicions on October 30 (Home Office, 40 (49), Birmingham).
- ↑ History, ed. 1854, p. 282 et seq.
- ↑ Northern Star, May 3, 1845.
- ↑ Ibid. October 5, 1839.
- ↑ Ibid. November 9, 1839: account of his trip.
- ↑ Ibid. May 3, 1845.
- ↑ Cf. Lowery's statement in Gammage, ed. 1854, p. 287.
