Terror plots, threats to liberties, banks in crisis: welcome to Britain during the Napoleonic Wars
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