In our own troubled times it is useful and comforting to recollect that ’twas ever thus. Violent threats against prominent politicians? Jenny Uglow reminds us that in 1802 Colonel Edward Despard, a British officer turned radical agitator, was the last person in England to be sentenced to be hanged, drawn and quartered, for a plot to kill King George III and the cabinet; while in 1812, the wildly unpopular hardline Tory Spencer Perceval became the only prime minister (so far) to be assassinated, the victim of John Bellingham, a deranged bankrupt.
Threats to civil liberties? The first Defence of the Realm Act was passed in 1798 by the younger William Pitt’s administration, extending the Treason Act to cover any political meeting and giving magistrates the power to detain without trial those they suspected of sedition, up to and including the leader of the Whig opposition, Charles James Fox.
Financial crises? In 1810 the bank Brickwood, Rainer & Co.
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