Dan Snow's History Hit - The Secret Plot to Kill the Government

Episode Date: May 15, 2022

On the night of February 23 1820, twenty-five impoverished craftsmen assembled in an obscure stable in Cato Street, London, with a plan to massacre the whole British cabinet at its monthly dinner. The Cato Street Conspiracy was the most sensational of all plots aimed at the British state since Guy Fawkes' Gunpowder Plot of 1605.Historian Vic Gatrell joins Dan to explore this dramatic event. They discuss how one of the most compelling episodes in British history ended in betrayal, arrest, and trial, and with five conspirators publicly hanged and decapitated for treason. Their failure would end hopes of revolution for a century.Produced by Hannah WardMixed and Mastered by Dougal PatmoreIf you'd like to learn more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad-free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download the History Hit app please go to the Android or Apple store.

Hi everyone, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit, the second half of the second decade of the 19th century. The 18-teens were a tough time. The Napoleonic Wars, the greatest war in British history, had just come to an end. Soldiers and sailors had been demobbed in a kind of helter-skelter chaotic way. The economy was unbalanced. There was a recession. The flow of public money was tightened up by fiscally hawkish politicians. And also the Industrial Revolution was going on. So working practices were undergoing gigantic changes, probably some of the greatest changes in history. And as a result, those years saw upheavals, revolutionary murmurs within Britain and elsewhere. People, of course,

revolutionary murmurs within Britain and elsewhere. People, of course, listening to this podcast will know all about the Peterloo massacre, when 60,000 non-violent demonstrators in St Peter's Field in Manchester were attacked by the militia, by British soldiers, many killed and wounded, but perhaps less famously, but fascinatingly, there was also a conspiracy that was hatched in London. It's probably the most important revolutionary conspiracy in British history in the last 500 years after Guy Fawkes. It's known as the Cato Street Conspiracy. A group of men got together and planned to kill the most senior members of the government. It is a remarkable tale.

You're going to love it. And I've got the man to tell us all about it. He is called Vic Gatrell. He's a historian. He spends his time in the archives. He spends time writing books. His latest book is about the Cato Street conspiracy. He joins me on this podcast to talk all about it. In the meantime, I mentioned the Battle of Waterloo earlier. One of our most successful films ever on History Hit TV is the Battle of Waterloo film, but it's being overtaken by Elna Janneger the unstoppable Elna Janneger the medieval historian

who's on History Hit TV with her new series on sex in the medieval period on drinking on pastimes of hobbies and they're doing very very well indeed they're smashing all the records on History Hit TV you can head over there if you just follow the link in the information of this podcast

you can go right there it takes you there it's magic it's the internet it's a wonderful thing it's clicking it with your thumb you get taken straight there and you get 14 days free if you sign up today and you can binge watch all elmer janager's shows so do go and check that out but in the meantime folks here is the Cato Street Conspiracy. Enjoy. Vic, thank you very much for coming on the podcast. Thank you for inviting me. Tell me about the difficult 18-teens. What's the backdrop? What's going on in Britain in the build-up to 1820? Well, the point of my study is to undermine a kind of cosy view of the Regency and to connect with the usually unmentioned and undiscussed underdogs and their

view of the Regency, which was much darker than Jane Austen's or Lucy Worsley's. And it's odd that if you go to Amazon and look up Regency Romance, you'll get 50,000 titles. But if you look up Regency Poor or Regency Working Class, you'll get none. And actually, I'm kind of correcting that by reminding us that it was a bleak time for poor people, especially for poor craftsmen like shoemakers, who had suddenly hit the dirt, if you like, because their apprenticeship controls were collapsing after the war, and because of the high food prices and low employment in London and elsewhere. And so it's, oddly enough, nearly a shoemaker's revolution because about 60%, 70% of them are underemployed or unemployed shoemakers.

And they're fairly literate. They can write adequately, although misspelling. They're highly opinionated, as shoemakers always have been in history, politically. And they're kind of on the side of the angels in modern terms, in that they want the vote. They don't really want to take the king's head off, although there are a few men of violence who do. But there's a very powerful radical movement in London and in the North too, triggered, needless to say, by the French Revolution and the model of events in France. So we've got 1815, Battle of Toulouse, Napoleon at war has finally come to an end, gigantic economic depression afterwards, the

industries all need to recalibrate to peacetime use hundreds of thousands of sailors and soldiers suddenly demobbed terrible harvest because of the indonesian volcano the year without the summer so the teens were a bad time absolutely it's a very bad time let me just begin by saying that how i got into this, and it was almost accidental, as a lot of my work has been, accidental discovery in the archives. One day, many years ago, I was working on another subject entirely. And as one does, one gets bored and you go scratching about the National Archives and the boxes and the reports. And I ordered a book from the so-called treasury solicitors' papers, which had in it something knocking and hard and heavy. And I tipped out three handmade spikes, which were about a foot long, files basically, which could be inserted in the end of broomsticks and so on

to manufacture pikes, as they called them, on which, as it turned out, they were intending to impale the heads of Lord Carthory and Lord Sidmouth, parade through London, and bring about a revolution. Now, the kind of concreteness of this evidence was shocking and gobsmacking to me because historians usually look at abstract ideas and documents. And here was something real that was made by them that comes from 200 and odd years ago, which was meant to kill the cabinet. And so I tumbled on this extraordinary story of the Cato Street conspiracy, which expresses, of course, the poverty of the time and the ambitions of the time, and probably the madness of some of the participants, and certainly the innocence and ignorance of some of the participants who joined it.

They had no idea what they were up against, which was, of course, a military power that had just beaten Napoleon, and which was forceful in the form of soldiers and barracks throughout the whole kingdom. Nonetheless, they had this fantasy that a few of them could overturn the government and possibly take off the king's head. Needless to say, the story, in a nutshell, turns on the fact that they were infiltrated by spies, that everything they did and said was reported to the Home Office and the Bow Street Police Office, and they were caught after a spectacular hunt in Cato Street, a tiny little muse alley off Edgware Road, more or less the edge of London then. They were caught and imprisoned, tried and punished in ways we'll talk about. You point out the government's from military superpower.

It's nervous, though, as well, the government, isn't it? Because the Tories under Lord Liverpool enact some pretty punitive legislation. They're worried about revolution from below. They are, absolutely, with justification given what happened in France. What kind of legislation have they passed in the teens to suppress popular revolt? What they're up against is essentially soldiers and bullets. And if it comes to the worst, Peterloo, the massacre in Manchester's St. Peter's Field, shows what was possible if violence was unleashed on the part of the state.

But apart from that, there is a barrage of acts against sedition, against free opinion, free publication of newspapers, sedition, as it's called, and treason, around which most opinion makers at the time of a liberal kind had to tread with great care. It wasn't a police state, as some historians have said, because there were compensatory liberties which the British rightly prided themselves on, like the trial by jury, for example. And the jury was a bastion of defence against inappropriate legal power or vicious legal power. And time after time, the juries acquit the people that government want to imprison. So it's not entirely vicious, but it still remains true that the government at the time, all of it Tory, consistently Tory, time, all of it Tory, consistently Tory, from Pitt on to Lord Liverpool, was defensive, anxious,

nervous, terrified. Even on the part of heroes like Wellington, after the war was over in 1815, a continual sense that the world was very fragile, their comforts were very fragile. And so there was a kind of paranoia in some parts. Carthory, for example, who had been the Irish secretary and was probably the most hated man in England, went to dinner with pistols in his pocket, just in case he had to defend himself. There's this paranoia that spreads all the way through to 1819, especially after Peterloo, the Manchester episode, which generates a plethora of acts that stay in force until well after Cato Street. And the most vicious of them is the act that entitles the king

to take off the head of a traitor. The violence of the state is perhaps best symbolized in the executions of the Cato Street conspirators, as we'll see. We'll come to them. Talk to me about who they were. Who are these men who gathered around and plotted revolution? So, as I say, a good percentage of them, 40-50% of the 25 men who gathered in the event were poor shoemakers, underemployed shoemakers, skilled men, literate men, well informed about the French Revolution, but crazy in their fantasy that their plot was going to succeed. And the plot was simply to gather one dark knight in February 1820 in this tiny little stable in Cato Street, a battered, more or less derelict stable even then, even though it had been built only 20 years before then. They were to assemble upstairs in the stable with their pikes and their blunderbusses and their rusty cutlasses and have some bread and cheese. And at eight

o'clock, they were going to walk through the dark streets down Cato Street, across Portman Square to Grosvenor Square, where the whole cabinet would be sitting for its regular dinner, they thought, in Lord Harrowby's house, which was in the finest square in London, which was next to the Archbishop of Canterbury's. I'm laughing because it was such an extraordinary fantasy that 25 men could walk even through the dark down to Lord Harrabee's, bang on the door, throw hand grenades, storm in past the servants, cut off heads, and stage a revolution. They're desperate men. They're also led and probably misled by their leader, who is himself a peculiar man. He's a quasi-gentleman, nearly a gentleman from Lincolnshire, a country farmer, a tenant farmer from a fairly wealthy tenant farming family, whose uncle, by the way, was a famous slave owner, Thomas Thistlewood in Jamaica.

And there was probably slave money in the family. But Arthur Thistlewood, this young man, was a bit of a tearaway. He was a desperate figure in many ways. He didn't have many talents. I suspect he had certain kinds of mental illness we'd probably discern today, but wasn't seen then, although many people thought he was mad. I suspect he was bipolar, as we might say today. His moods went up and down. He was a gambler. He was a womanizer. He was after out of the militia that he joined in the 1790s as a young man, for reasons we don't know, and probably gambling debt. illegitimate child, a boy called Julian, who was then aged about 11, who Susan has taken on and conscientiously mothered, even though she wasn't his real mother. Anyway, this family settles, oddly enough, in Edgeware Road, long before the conspiracy was thought of, and slowly infiltrates itself, Arthur particularly, into the favours of the leading and often aristocratic radicals, radical whigs of the time, and certainly early on identifies himself as a liberal and as an advocate of reform. and as an advocate of reform.

He, however, gets more and more extreme as the years go on. And there's a long story of how he gathered a lot of madcaps around him increasingly, joined a thing called the Spensian Philanthropists, which is a community of Spensian socialists committed to the redistribution of land, but without explaining how they would redistribute the land. And Sloany finds his only audience is an audience of desperate poor men. The aristocrats, the veterans of the 1790s, the veteran radicals, tend to discard him and wash their hands of him. You listened to Dan Snow's History End, talking about the Cato Street conspiracy more coming up. Ever wanted to know more about some of the greatest stories in history? Kings, queens, knights, monks, peasants, battles, castles, love, hate, treachery and revenge?

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And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. So the plan is they just go to this house, they storm it, throw hand grenades, and then start chopping people up. Yeah.

Well, one has to be careful here, but there is a kind of pattern in the lone wolf terrorists of today. People who may have no real idea of what they're up against, but nonetheless commit themselves to this act of mad violence without the slightest chance of success. Far more terrorist attacks are defeated by spies and by police infiltration than ever succeed in the here and now. Well, so too, it's the same kind of mechanism,

the same kind of impulse, I think, of desperation, of anger, of wishful thinking, efforts to change the world at one fell blow. It's a familiar pattern. And in many ways, this, apart from Guy Fawkes' efforts in 1605, in many ways, this is the first big terrorist plot to destroy government since Guy Fawkes, apart from the Civil War. And in its failure, which we'll come to, really determines the relative peace and freedom from revolution that Britain enjoys for the next century. It's defeated. It's the last fling, really, until the IRA

gets to work in the 20th century. So it's led by a semi-gentleman packed with sometimes hungry, literally hungry, desperate, unemployed men, not many of them, because the majority of the London population is very wary of prosecution because of the power of legislation which is against them. And the knowledge that there are spies around everywhere, a knowledge that Thistlerwood and Chums kind of swept under the table. And there are very few of them, therefore, and into the stable assemble no more than 25 men. And they had thought that they might get 40, but Thistlewood had this notion that the great revolutions of the past really were Roman revolutions.

And the overthrowing of a Roman tyrant was usually the act of one or two men, Brutus and others. And he read Gibbon, he knew his Gibbon decline and fall of the Roman Empire. And he had a sense of that remote history, more acutely, I suppose, than he had a sense of campaign on the rights of man and the declaration of the rights of man. He wasn't an Uckish chap at all, but he had a kind of grammar school education which introduced him to Roman history at least. And the idea was that like Brutus, or it's not a particularly useful parallel for him, but like Brutus and Cassius, he would go to the Forum saying,

the tyrants are dead and the people of Rome would rally around. Yeah. Well, I'm laughing because it is so ridiculous, I suppose, in retrospect. But from their point of view, it was a rational decision against a government that couldn't otherwise be shaken. It wasn't entirely stupid, as many historians have said. It was also on the side of democracy and the vote and liberty. So I don't mean to laugh at them. I laugh at them almost in incredulity at their courage, as well as their absurdity. It's a very mixed story. It's got layer upon layer of meanings to do with liberty, to do with stupidity, to do with fantasy, to do with anger, all sorts of things. Just as we encounter in the IRA or in Islamist protests today and atrocities today.

So Castle Ray and Sidmouth in particular, the two ministers, were going to have their heads put on spikes on Westminster Bridge. Why didn't they? Why did they not end up on spikes on Westminster Bridge? What happened? So we come to the fateful night of the 23rd of February, bitterly cold night, bitterly cold winter. These 25 men assemble in Cato Street, up a ladder at the back of a stable, and lay out their arms on the table. Opposite the stable, there's a tavern in which a police spy is monitoring everything that moves, gives a whistle, and the Bow Street police force, 10 of them anyway, turn up with great efficiency. Lifeguards are supposed to come from the Portland Street barracks, but they're

misled and they get lost on the way, which takes some doing and measure of extraordinary inefficiency on the part of the commander. So it was the policemen, the humble policemen, with their own cutlasses and pistols who had to do the job of arresting them. So in they go, charge into the stable at eight o'clock, just before the conspirators are about to make their way down to Grosvenor Square, charge up the ladder, one poor policeman gets penetrated by Thistlewood's sword and dies on the spot. All hell breaks loose, there's a mighty fracas. Candles are put out. There's smoke everywhere. Pistol shot noises all over the place. And the cry from the conspirators or one of them, kill the buggers, throw them down the steps. And they do charge the police and force them back

down the steps, down the ladder. And there's a battle at the bottom. And slowly, one by one, nine of the conspirators are arrested with some near misses, with bullets going through helmets and bullets going through sleeves. It's a wonderful cinematic scenario, actually, very Wild West. The rest of them escape, including Thistlewood, through an attic window and disappear into the night. But within a couple of days, Thistlewood and several others are arrested. They're all taken down to Bow Street in the dark, accompanied by soldiers that have turned up by now, charged, put into Cold Bath Fields Prison for safekeeping. And then the government congratulates itself on its success in achieving stability.

Vic, who betrayed them? Well, the key figure is a man called George Edwards. We have no portrait of him. We have no sense of him except that he was short, five foot two. A lot of these people were very short, by the way, stunted, ill, various limps and diseases. as a statue maker in Eton of all places. He used to make statue heads of the headmaster of Eton so that the boys could use it as target practice on the quiet. He goes to London in great poverty, barefoot apparently.

Thistle meets him at one point where he's living in a kind of squalid lodging behind the Strand, sleeping on straw. When Thistlewood next meets him, he is actually quite affluently dressed, and Thistlewood doesn't realise this is because he's being given money at last by the Bow Street magistrate to report on Thistlewood. And so he makes a living by reporting nearly every day on thin strips of paper, detailed records of the conversations, the meeting places, the names of people who attend, which he manages to smuggle to Bow Street

and from Bow Street into the home office, where Sidmouth is a happy receiver of this information. Day by day by day by day, the stuff accumulates now in the Home Office papers, a wonderful archive. And one has to say that it took some courage, I think. Although he was a traitor to the cause, although he lied, he must have been a great actor because he persuaded the conspirators that he was absolutely on their side and that he was as bloodthirsty

as they were and as desperate for Cossary's and Sidmouth's heads as they were. He was persuasive. He managed to conceal his reports completely to the very end. Nobody suspected him for over two or three months. These daily reports accumulate. And of course, he's told Bow Street exactly where they're meeting on that night of 23rd of February. How many would be there? Who would be there? And hey, presto, that's the end of it.

And he also reports where Thistlewood hides so that he's picked up the next morning, still in bed, but fully dressed, ready to scarper with his sword in bed with him in case he was arrested. But he's arrested. And it's all thanks to this extraordinary spy who historically and afterwards

was one of the most execrated men, of course, among radical opinion makers in the whole of England in the whole century. Like Guy Fawkes, the remarkable thing about this is, well, unlike Captain Blood, as we learnt on the podcast, who stole the crown jewels, they end up meeting, the Privy Councils end up kind of cross-questioning these people in person. The conspirators and their potential victims end up meeting.

I know. Every one of these episodes are cinematic, I'm afraid. There's this wonderful scenario in the Home Office where the Privy Council, the whole of the Cabinet are cinematic, I'm afraid. There's this wonderful scenario in the Home Office where the Privy Council, the whole of the Cabinet pretty well, is assembled and the men are brought in one by one. We know that there's a fair amount of intimidation and persuasion because three or four of them turn Crown witness and betray their colleagues under some kind of pressure.

Goodness knows what pressure it is, whether it's physical or emotional, but they have their wits scared out of them and they turn coats. But others are defiant and mock the Privy Council. They're handcuffed and taken one by one. And one or two are hugely contemptuous of the government dignitaries as they walk past them into the Privy Council chamber and the interchanges are verbally violent. It would be wonderful to have been a fly on the wall and to see just what happened and how Sidmouth and his friends questioned these guys, but unless we will never know. a fly on the wall and to see just what happened and how Sidmouth and his friends questioned

these guys. But unless we will never know. So we have no records of those meetings? No. Well, not that I've found. There may be. There may be. Well, one day. One day we'll have that information. Was there any legacy? Was there any lasting effect of this conspiracy? Well, I think subliminally there was, in that we're free of a revolution throughout the 19th century. Even the charters, the more violent charters of the 1840s, drew the line at revolution, having learned the lesson that the power of the state was almost insurmountable, not only because of spies, but also because of soldiers. I mean, the background of the story is to do with not

only Peterloo, but also the rest of Luddites and sundry insurrectionaries in Scotland, as well as in England. So time after time, the efforts of the working class poor are thwarted by the power of the military, if not only by the power of spies, by both really. So its effect is really implicit. It's not that they achieved anything. It's not that they achieved anything. And it's because they failed, I think, that they've been marginalized, historically speaking. On the left wing, historians have tended to dismiss them. Even great historians like E.P. Thompson give them only 10 pages and an 800-page book because they failed, because they simply did not contribute to the onward march of labour, or because they didn't contribute visibly to the making of the English working class. And so the kind of rich textured history has been ignored. On the right wing, to simplify tremendously,

they're dismissed as demagogues, as fools, as madmen, and have been treated with general contempt. So one, the history hasn't been written imaginatively, by which I mean it hasn't been written with reference to wives, children, hunger, shoemaking, ideas, literacy, living places, London itself, the topography of it. It hasn't been attended to. So it was a failure and left no historical memory, unlike Guy Fawkes. Now, Guy Fawkes also failed, of course, but there's a political point I want to make here. Guy Fawkes was a gentleman's rebellion. It was a religious issue. And I think historians on the whole in our country, especially in the

universities, have shown more respect for high-born conspirators than they have for low. So it's a failure, and there's no getting away from the fact that the whole plan was based on a kind of terrorist fantasy, which is contemptible. But I insist, had beneath it, as one contemporary put it, goodness at heart, in that whatever one's politics now may be, one has to acknowledge that at least they were on the side of liberty and democracy. Quick question at the end. Did any of the individuals involved, or any of the ruling class,

that, you know, in 1832, not long after this, we have quite a conservative reform measure designed to kind of shore up and defend the Constitution rather than transform it. Do we think the fact that the Cato conspiracy had taken place, did that have any impact, do you think, on the Whigs or the Tories in the build-up to 1832? At the time, it's certainly taken as a dire warning of what might happen, what was imminent under the surface in British culture, because it was Scottish as well, that there was a potential for violence on the part of the poor that would easily

match the violence of the Parisian poor, for example, if it was given its head. There's no doubt anxiety. There's no doubt that some people take lessons from this event, as well as from Peterloo. And the liberal Whigs are reformist because of it. So it does, of course, have that effect. But in the short term, the debate about the meanings of the conspiracy are very quickly obliterated. In 1820, they are executed in May. But in June, Queen Caroline lands in Dover and comes to claim her crown from the newly crowned George III, who loathes her guts, of course. And a tremendous wave of sentiment, plebeian sentiment, moves behind the queen against the king and more or less checks the debate about redistribution of land, redistribution of wealth and of political power,

more or less checks it through the 1820s, although not without radical effects. I mean, there's no doubt that the attack was on a corrupt, fat, wenching, fornicating, self-indulgent king, the most loathed king in history, probably. indulgent king, the most loathed king in history, probably. I do think it has its effects. And you do meet people in Parliament and out who are saying we've got to get better, we've got to clean up our act. Even William Wilberforce, I say even because he's a hardline Tory, is saying that we must have some reform. And he's saying this a year or so after Cato Street. A defensive measure of reform. That's a quote that I can remember from my undergraduate days.

It may even have been said at the time. Thank you very much, Vic, for coming on the podcast. What is the name of the book? The book is Conspiracy on Cato Street with the subtitle, A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London, and it's published by Cambridge. Lovely. Good luck with it, Vic. Thank you very much. Thanks, folks. You've been doing a good episode. Congratulations.

Well done, you. I hope you're not fast asleep. If you did fancy supporting everything we do at History Hit, we'd love it if you would go and wherever you get these pods, give it a rating, five stars or its equivalent. A review would be great. Thank you very much indeed. That really does make a huge difference.

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