EDWARD Marcus Despard was the last person in Britain sentenced to be publicly hanged, drawn and quartered.

From being a hero he ended up a traitor.

Despard rose to fame in Jamaica in the 1780s in campaigns against the Spanish. It all turned sour when he was made a commissioner and angered British merchants. When he came back to Britain he failed to clear his wrongly-besmirched name and he took up the cause of changing the social order.

Admiral Nelson, who knew him well from his service in the Caribbean, spoke up for him at Despard's trial for treason and it was probably the great sailor's testimony which led to the sentence being reduced to hanging and then beheading in 1803. Despard was the first of Madam Tussaud's waxworks modelled from the face after death and his was one of the founding models of what became the Chamber Of Horrors.

Many details of Despard's life are sketchy and he often disappears from view in the text because the author spends much of the book explaining the political and commercial state of Britain.

One of Mike Jay's earlier books, The Air Loom Gang, is now also available as a Bantam Books paperback (£7.99). This is the bizarre story of a man locked away in Bedlam mental hospital for believing that French revolutionaries had a machine which was literally poisoning the minds of British politicians and generals.

But many of his conspiracy theories turned out to be real.

Updated: 09:01 Wednesday, September 01, 2004