Cato Street Conspiracy

Cato Street Conspiracy, an attempt to assassinate the British Cabinet. On February 23, 1820, a politically and socially disturbed year in British history, the announcement of a deep-laid plot to murder Cabinet ministers in the government of Lord Liverpool while they were dining at the Grosvenor Square house of the Earl of Harrowby, the President of the Council, added drama to the tension. For the Liverpool government sedition, metropolitan and provincial, was treasonable. For the conspirators, small in numbers, it was the government that was repressing the activities of free men, using informers to do so, some of them agents provocateurs.

The leader of the plotters in 1820 was Arthur Thistlewood, illegitimate son of a Lincolnshire farmer who had first imbibed his revolutionary ideas from Thomas Paine. After visiting America and France, he was converted to the radical principles proclaimed by the London bookseller, Thomas Spence, who demanded the appropriation of all privately owned land and its transfer to parishes and municipalities with rent as the single tax.

The Spenceans, organized for political action only after Spence’s death in 1814, were divided, as were radicals more generally. Thistlewood, described as a “gentleman”, and Dr James Watson, an impecunious surgeon, demanded an “insurrection”, making their first attempt in December 1816 when they turned demonstrations in Spa Fields, in Islington, London, into a riot. Bearing tricolour flags, they marched beyond Clerkenwell towards the Bank of England, on the way pilfering from gun shops before being captured and lodged in the Tower of London. At the ensuing trial for treason Watson was acquitted, and no evidence was then offered against Thistlewood. Charges for rioting might have been successful.

Thistlewood was soon planning other insurrections, but all his moves were watched by government spies, whose actions were financed by the home secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, whom he boldly challenged to a duel in 1818; and after a brief spell in prison for threatening a breach of the peace he was encouraged by an agent provocateur, George Edwards, who became his confidant, to go ahead with the plot to assassinate the Cabinet. He acquired a stable and loft in a dilapidated court in Cato Street, not far from Grosvenor Square, and it was there that the conspirators were apprehended. Although he escaped after killing a policeman, Thistlewood was captured the following day, and subsequently convicted of treason and hanged. A very different kind of radical, William Cobbett, published an account of Thistlewood’s last two speeches, the first of them devastatingly condemning Edwards, and the second eloquently proclaiming that he died “in the cause of liberty”.