Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London Vic Gatrell (Cambridge University Press, £25)
‘‘WHY DID BRUNT DIE crying ‘long live liberty’?” asked the wife of the Russian ambassador to London on May Day 1820.
Dorothea Lieven had just seen five British tradesmen hanged outside Newgate Prison. After the twitching stopped, their bodies hung in the air for half an hour. What kept the crowd from drifting off to the maypoles? The prisoners had been given oranges to suck in their last moments. Was tea served?
The hangman cut down one corpse, dragged it through a heap of sawdust, and propped its shoulders on a block. Then another man with handkerchiefs around his face decapitated it
