His
mission was, he said, to restore the land to the people, to take it
away, that is to say, from the great rascal families of the sixteenth
century, the Russells, Cavendishes and so forth, who had appeared like
vermin to feed upon the dead body of the Church, to gorge themselves
upon her lands and to lord it in her Abbeys and Priories. In the minds
of these people Tom was not only mad but dangerous. Mad he certainly
was, for all his dreams. Nevertheless he stood for Canterbury in the
year of the Reform Bill and polled 275 votes, and in the following
year he started a paper called the _Lion_ which ran to eighteen
numbers. Five years later, however, he had become such a nuisance
that a warrant was safely issued against him "on the charge of
enticing away the labourers of a farmer." Tom shot one of the
constables who served the warrant, and on the afternoon of the last
morning of May in 1838, two companies of the 45th regiment were
marched out of Canterbury to take him. They found him here in Blean
Wood, surrounded by his followers. He, however, was a man of action,
and he promptly shot the officer in command.
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