Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London

The “most sensational of all plots aimed at the [British] state between the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the Irish Republican Army’s Brighton bomb attack on Thatcher and her party in 1984” is recounted in this exhaustive chronicle by Cambridge University historian Gatrell (The First Bohemians). In February 1820, 25 impoverished craftsmen gathered in a stable on Cato Street in London, planning “to massacre the whole British government as it sat down to dinner in a Grosvenor Square mansion.” The group had been infiltrated by a British government spy, however, and the dinner they planned to ambush was a ruse. Arrested and charged with treason, five of the group’s leaders were publicly hanged and decapitated. Gatrell mines a treasure trove of primary sources to examine the plotters’ motivations and contextualize the era’s radical politics. Particular attention is paid to conspiracy leader Arthur Thistlewood, the charismatic if feckless son of a tenant farmer, who “bristled with a sense of exclusion and thwarted entitlement,” and “agent provocateur” George Edwards, who made a living “casting about for dupes whom he could induce to attempt subversions which he could then expose and profit from.” Enriched by Gatrell’s observation that “the inequalities and deprivations that moved the conspirators, and the privileged interests and powers that contained them, still operate,” this is a fine-grained study of political extremism in action. Illus. (June)