A botched coup: the desperate Cato Street conspiracy

Almost half of the terrorists hadn’t even turned up. Still, on the night of 23 February 1820, 25 men, including a butcher, several shoemakers and a cabinet maker, met in a hayloft on Cato Street, just off the Edgware Road in central London. Led by the semi-respectable son of a tenant farmer, Arthur Thistlewood, their plan was to assassinate the prime minister Lord Liverpool and his cabinet, who were thought to be dining together at the Grosvenor Square mansion of Lord Harrowby, the president of the privy council. The butcher, James Ings, would decapitate everyone at the table, putting the severed heads of Lord Castlereagh and Viscount Sidmouth (foreign and home secretary, respectively) into two bags before impaling them on pikes and parading them through the streets as artisanal revolution was unleashed. Except it didn’t quite work out like that.

This was because the cabinet dinner was a set-up provoked by an impoverished government spy, George Edwards, who had infiltrated the conspirators’ ranks; in the event, the authorities intercepted most of the insurgents at the hayloft and within three months had executed five of them and transported another five to Australia.

Vic Gatrell’s terrific new book is the richest account of the Cato Street conspiracy ever written. He provides a gripping contextualisation of the events which led up to and ensued from that strange night in a shabby London stable, using spy reports, trial transcriptions, maps and, most impressively of all, dozens of contemporary prints, paintings and sketches. Historians of all stripes have, up until its bicentenary in 2020, given the conspiracy relatively short shrift, often treating it as a historical dead end – an anti-climactic interlude which, in its very failure, says little about the progress of parliamentary reform, the emergence of the labour movement, or the making of the working class.