The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, counter-intelligence and the revolutionary tradition in Britain and Ireland

By Manchester University Press

On 23 February 1820 a group of radicals were arrested in Cato Street off the Edgware Road in London. They were within sixty minutes of setting out to assassinate the British cabinet. Five of the conspirators were subsequently executed and another five were transported for life to Australia.

The plotters were a mixture of English, Scots and Irish tradesmen, and one was a black Jamaican. They were motivated by a desire to avenge the ‘Peterloo’ massacre and intended to declare a republic, which they believed would encourage popular risings in London and across Britain.

This volume of essays uses contemporary reports by Home Office spies and informers to assess the seriousness of the conspiracy. It traces the practical and intellectual origins of the plotters’ willingness to use violence; describes the links between Irish and British radicals who were willing to take up arms; makes a contribution to early black history in Britain; examines the European context to events, and follows the lives and careers of those plotters exiled to Australia.

A significant contribution to our understanding of a particularly turbulent period of British history, these well-written essays will find an appreciative audience among undergraduates, graduate students and scholars of British and Irish history and literature, black history, and the related fields of intelligence history and Strategic Studies.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Release date: Dec 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781526145000

Book preview

Introduction ‘We only have to be lucky once’: Cato Street, insurrection and the revolutionary tradition

Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy

It was the early evening of 23 February 1820. By 7.30 p.m. around twenty men had gathered in a hayloft measuring no more than fifteen and a half feet by eleven feet above a small stable in Cato Street off the Edgware Road in London. The men planned to set off within the hour for Grosvenor Square, where they intended to assassinate the Prime Minister and the cabinet as they dined together at the house of Lord Harrowby, the President of the Privy Council. The conspirators were filled with an implacable hatred for the ‘arch fiends’¹ whom they held responsible for the murders of fifteen men and women only six months earlier at a peaceful demonstration for reform at St Peter’s Fields in Manchester. They sought bloody revenge for ‘Peterloo’ and planned literally to decapitate the guiltiest ministers – Viscount Sidmouth and Lord Castlereagh, in particular – before publicly parading their heads around London in a gruesome parody of the punishment traditionally meted out to traitors. They also hoped that their righteous justice, their tyrannicide as they saw it, would encourage all those who were dissatisfied with political corruption and economic mismanagement to rise in sympathy with them to effect fundamental and far-reaching change. If all went to plan in Grosvenor Square, the conspirators intended to create confusion by setting fire to several buildings across the capital; to seize weapons in private dwellings and public places, including several cannons at the Artillery Ground in Finsbury; to capture the symbolic sites of the Mansion House and the Bank of England; and to issue a declaration establishing a provisional government. The plotters believed, or hoped, that a cadre of London radicals who were not directly involved in the conspiracy would follow them into the streets, and this would encourage Londoners more generally to rise against their oppressors, which in turn would spur impoverished and alienated men and women across the urban areas of the Midlands, the North and Scotland to strike quickly and seize power in support of the new English republic.

Unfortunately for the men who gathered in the Cato Street hayloft, the planned dinner that night at Lord Harrowby’s residence in Grosvenor Square did not take place. They had been lured into a trap by an agent provocateur among their number, a man called George Edwards, who had provided them with information of a planned social gathering of the entire cabinet at the exact point in time at which, after months of discussing different plans, they had determined to assassinate within the next few days as many individual ministers as they could find at their homes. Edwards’s information seemed fortuitous, even providential, in that it enabled the plotters to maximise the number of ministers they could kill, and Edwards’s unsuspecting comrades took the bait. As they gathered in Cato Street readying themselves to strike, the trap was sprung by the authorities. At 8.30 p.m., a group of plain-clothes law officers known as the Bow Street Runners charged into the ground-floor stable and climbed the ladder to the hayloft on the first floor, ordered everyone present to remain still and informed them they were under arrest. Despite the undoubted bravery of the officers, a number of things went wrong during the raid. They were expecting military assistance in conducting the raid, but the delegated detachment of the Coldstream Guards was late and the Bow Street Runners had to enter without support. As the police entered the shed, they met a look-out on the groundfloor named William Davidson who made a concerted effort to prevent them from climbing the ladder, thereby giving some of his comrades time to escape through a back window. Davidson’s pugnaciousness also meant that, when several Runners did eventually reach the top of the ladder, those still within the hayloft had readied themselves for a fight. The conspirators extinguished the candles in the hayloft and in the ensuing melee one of the officers was fatally stabbed by the ringleader, Arthur Thistlewood. When the army unit arrived into the small alley that constitutes Cato Street soon after the raid had begun, they found a scene of chaos; some plotters were apprehended by the troops while trying to escape or hide in the immediate vicinity, but others successfully used the cover of darkness to flee. Those Bow Street Runners who had made it up the ladder were joined by several troops and all were involved in a desperate fight in the dark against the conspirators trapped within the confined space, while others tried to subdue Davidson and other escaping plotters on the ground floor of the stable and in the alleyway.

We can never know with absolute certainty, but it seems that all of those who were present in the stable and hayloft on that cold, dark night were eventually arrested. The authorities were interested in dispensing justice as swiftly and efficiently as possible, so several plotters against whom the evidence was less strong were released without charge over the following weeks. Of the eleven men who faced trial at the Old Bailey in late April, five were hanged on 1 May and had their severed heads raised aloft by the hangman and shown to the assembled crowd with the traditional invocation ‘Behold the head of a traitor!’ The five were John Brunt, William Davidson, James Ings, Arthur Thistlewood and Richard Tidd. Six of the eleven prisoners changed their pleas from ‘not guilty’ to ‘guilty’ during the trial and threw themselves on the mercy of the court. Five of the six were sentenced to be transported to Australia for life. These were Richard Bradburn, Charles Cooper, John Harrison, John Shaw Strange and James Wilson. The sixth defendant, the Scottish bootmaker James Gilchrist, despite pleading guilty, maintained throughout his trial that he had been starving and was lured to the Cato Street barn by the offer of a free meal from Cooper. The authorities appear to have believed him, as his death sentence was respited to a period of short-term imprisonment. The executions of 1 May 1820 proved to be a defining moment in British radical history, as they brought to an end a tradition of violent English Jacobinism which stretched back to the early 1790s.

Many great social movements and revolutions are associated with at least one song which can either give heart to the belligerents or serve as a lament to rally one’s scattered forces in time of defeat. In subsequent generations, these songs have the power to coalesce into an emotional statement about, or evocation of, the period in which they first appeared. What song might epitomise or encapsulate the Cato Street Conspiracy? It was certainly not the hopeful revolutionary tune ‘Ça ira’ (‘it will be fine’),² given the desperate nature of the plot in the wake of the defeats inflicted upon the radical movement by Peterloo and the repressive Six Acts. As he awaited execution on the scaffold on 1 May, James Ings sang in a discordant voice, choked with understandable emotion, a portion of the radical ballad ‘Give Me Death or Liberty’.³ But if there is one tune that evokes the conspiracy it is surely Robert Burns’s ballad ‘Scots Wha Hae Wi Wallace Bled’. This is the song the look-out William Davidson sang after he was overpowered and quickly led across the road to a nearby tavern, where the prisoners were to be secured and searched before being sent on to the cells in Bow Street. The Home Office files concerning the conspiracy report that as Davidson was dragged bound into the pub, presumably struggling against his captors, he was shouting this song. He was soon silenced.⁴ The files do not record how Davidson was silenced, but we can be confident that his captors did not confine themselves to polite requests to their prisoner to desist.

Davidson’s choice of song is significant. Written in 1793 by the Scottish bard Robert Burns, it reads as a speech given to his troops by Robert the Bruce (1274–1329) before their famous victory over King Edward II (1284–1327) and the English army at Bannockburn in 1314. ‘Scots Wha Hae’ has been described by one Scottish historian as ‘the nearest thing we have to a national anthem’:⁵

Scots, wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,

Scots, wham Bruce has aften led;

Welcome to your gory bed,

Or to victory!

Now’s the day, and now’s the hour;

See the front o’ battle lour;

See approach proud Edward’s power –

Chains and slavery!⁶

‘Scots Wha Hae’ certainly had Scottish Jacobite contexts which look backwards in time but, written as it was in 1793, it also had dangerous contemporary Jacobin meanings. Burns’s condemnation of slavery – by which he meant a state of unfreedom common to all those deprived of their liberties whatever their colour or ethnicity – and his celebration of the concept of freedom and the need to fight to secure that freedom meant that the song was very popular with radicals across Britain.⁷ In late 1819, for example, a banner at a rally held in Sheffield in the wake of the Peterloo massacre was emblazoned with the simple motto: ‘Scots Wha Hae’.⁸

Davidson had been born in Jamaica but his father was Scottish, and as a teenager he was sent to the old country where he studied unsuccessfully at Glasgow and Aberdeen before following the trade of cabinet maker in Birmingham and eventually making his way to London.⁹ Davidson certainly had a Scottish heritage to connect him to Burns’s ballad, yet he probably brought other dimensions to his understanding of the song; his father was a white Briton of high social status, but his mother was a free, black Jamaican. He may well have had a rare combination of a radical, a British and a black perspective on the song, particularly its concept of slavery:

Wha will be a traitor knave?

Wha can fill a coward’s grave!

Wha sae base as be a slave?

Let him turn and flee!

It is impossible to discern whether Davidson approached the song as a Scot, a black man or a revolutionary internationalist, or what admixture of these components determined his understanding of the text. It may even be misleading to approach the issue of identity in such a reductive way. Perhaps one of the most striking things about ‘Scots Wha Hae’ in the context of Cato Street is its sense that one could sacrifice oneself in order to make others free:

By oppression’s woes and pains!

By your sons in servile chains!

We will drain our dearest veins,

But they shall be free!

Lay the proud usurpers low!

Tyrants fall in every foe!

Liberty’s in every blow!

Let us do or die!

‘Scots Wha Hae’ has a certain fatalism that must have seemed very appropriate to a man caught red-handed by the forces of the state in the commission of an act of armed rebellion. The ballad is clear that when rebels embark upon their chosen course they must ‘do or die’. Once the game has begun and the dice have been rolled, their reward will either be liberty or a blood-soaked grave:

Welcome to your gory bed,

Or to victory!

Detection and defeat meant that Davidson and his comrades did indeed suffer the indignity of a ‘gory bed’. The executioner used a lot of sawdust to try to soak up the copious amounts of blood that spewed all over the scaffold from the corpses when they had their heads cut off, but there was plenty enough to attract flies and other noxious creatures on that warm May morning. The executed men then faced the further indignity of being bundled into an unmarked grave strewn with quicklime within the walls of Newgate Prison. The exact location of their final resting place has been lost to history.

There was much fevered news and comment concerning the Cato Street Conspiracy in the months after the raid of 23 February, and then later around the time of the executions, but the incident soon faded from the British popular, political and historical consciousness. Biographers of those ministers who were targeted by Thistlewood and his comrades have long taken the plot seriously, but it has received surprisingly little scholarly attention from historians and other commentators.¹⁰ There has been a tendency among those who have examined Cato Street to dismiss it as an isolated, forlorn, foolhardy and – ultimately – unimportant event. The violent intent of the conspirators sits uncomfortably with notions of what it was (and is) to be English or British.¹¹ John Stanhope commented in 1962 that ‘A more unheroic lot of conspirators than those who met together that night in an upper room of a stable near the Edgware Road could scarcely be imagined’. He also asserted that the core conspirators could not be regarded as ‘reliably sane … they had the knack of accumulating round themselves a floating population of psychopaths, with a grudge against society’. For him, the conspiracy was both ‘ridiculous and outrageous’.¹²

In 1972, a year marked by radical social politics in Britain and violent insurrection in Ulster, the illustrated children’s newspaper Look and Learn carried an article on this ‘insane murder plot’ which introduced its young readers to the ‘stupidity’ of the ‘mentally unstable’ Arthur Thistlewood who somehow managed to convince some ‘simple and gullible’ people to engage in a ‘vicious and ridiculous plot which had not the slightest chance of being successful’.¹³ Cato Street also sits beyond the pale of ‘mainstream’ radical history in Britain, which tends to be framed in terms of the labour movement, trade unions and evolution rather than revolution. For example, R.K. Webb’s Modern England, a set text of the Open University in the 1970s, condemned the ‘grotesque’ and ‘insane’ group of ‘wretched conspirators’ whose ‘wild revolutionism was … irrelevant to the future course of working-class politics’.¹⁴ Even within a revolutionary framework, Cato Street can be discussed as the fantasy of isolated adventurists who had no contact with, or influence upon, the masses or the proletariat.¹⁵

Since the mid-1980s there has been a great deal of work on the political and cultural history of radicalism in early nineteenth-century Britain, but Cato Street has remained decidedly marginal within this historiography. Ann Hone mentioned the plot in passing in For the Cause of Truth (1982) and Iain McCalman provided invaluable context and background in his magnificent Radical Underworld (1987). By way of contrast, James Epstein’s Radical Expression (1994) did not mention the episode at all and Marcus Wood’s uncharacteristic error in Radical Satire (1994) of only referring in passing to ‘the Cato Street conspiracy of 1817’ says much about its lack of interest even to historians of radicalism.¹⁶ It is very telling that two historians who have recently written general histories of the period dismiss the plot as a contrivance of the government. David Andress sees ‘the whole plan [as] being more or less a provocation by the authorities’, and Adam Zamoyski suggests that ‘the discovery of the conspiracy was highly convenient for the government’ and ‘there is some reason to believe that the whole enterprise had been set up’ by the agent provocateur George Edwards.¹⁷

John Gardner and Malcolm Chase (both of whom have written a chapter for this book) have produced important contextualising studies of Cato Street within the past decade, but there is much that is still unclear about the extent of the plot and its links to wider currents of London and British radicalism. The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, counter-intelligence and the revolutionary tradition in Britain and Ireland examines the events of 23 February 1820 through a number of lenses which shed new light on the mechanics of the plot, its significance at the time and its place in the longer history of radicalism and revolutionary movements. Taking inspiration from Roger Wells’s study of British insurrectionaries in the years between 1795 and 1803,¹⁸ the editors and contributors are particularly interested in drawing out comparisons and contrasts between the underexplored British insurrectionary tradition and the history of Irish revolutionary violence. One of the central concerns of this volume is how a consideration of revolutionary violence in Britain and Ireland modifies what we think we know about the history of radicalism on each island and further afield. Chapters in this book examine the structure, organisation and nature of the conspiracy; the use of spies and agents provocateurs by the authorities; the response of different types of radicals to the unfolding of the plot; and the effect of the failure of the plot upon the radical movement in London, and across Britain more widely. The contributors also consider broader issues, such as the revolutionary internationalism of Thomas Spence and his followers; the deployment of spies against the United Irishmen; the central role of Irish workers in building British radicalism during the early nineteenth century; French and international understandings of this period of British history; issues of race and ethnicity in the context of the British Empire and black Caribbean revolutionary politics; and the experience of the transported Cato Street plotters in Australia.

The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, counter-intelligence and the revolutionary tradition in Britain and Ireland considers broad questions facing scholars about the writing of radical history and the careful use of government-sponsored intelligence. The 1820 plot provides students of history, intelligence and strategic studies with an almost perfect study of a recognisably modern plot to assassinate politicians which was foiled by the judicious use of intelligence. It might stand as an exemplar, a synecdoche, of how to detect, deflect and destroy an insurrectionary movement. At Cato Street, the authorities destroyed a revolutionary cell which believed it was within sixty minutes of striking against the cabinet, but they also had an important and discernible effect on the nature and course of the broader radical tradition in British history across the nineteenth century and, by extension, into the twentieth century.

Ever since 1820 it has been commonplace to dismiss the Cato Street Conspiracy as the work of deluded fantasists, but this would be to mistake the seriousness of the plotters’ intentions. There had been widespread fears in October and November 1819 that radicals would use either a mass demonstration for reform or against repressive legislation as a pretext to organise a rising in London which would enable several hundred determined men to strike: one nervous report suggested as many as fifteen hundred were ready to take up arms.¹⁹ As late as Christmas 1819 the authorities were still being warned about plans for a rising in England and Scotland at or just after New Year²⁰ and, as Malcolm Chase and John Gardner have shown, the government was far less sure in 1820 about the impossibility of serious violence across the kingdom than many later historians who have written from the comfort of their offices.²¹ Be this as it may, the balance of forces did tilt slowly but steadily in favour of the authorities in the last quarter of 1819 as it became clear that the violence at Peterloo was dissuading many people from taking part in public protests. Reformers and radicals were increasingly divided on the next steps to take, and during December repressive legislation in the form of the Six Acts moved steadily through the Houses of Parliament.

It is significant that during November 1819 the hard core of Spencean extremists who had coalesced around Arthur Thistlewood and Thomas Preston began to focus less on the possibility of mass action and more on the necessity for political assassinations which it was believed might stimulate the masses to act. Thomas Preston initially seems to have wanted to target the Prince Regent, Sidmouth and Castlereagh,²² but the Prince Regent soon disappeared from their plans and the conspirators settled on trying to kill leading ministers. There was a difference of emphasis between the plotters as to whether they should attack one or two individuals immediately or wait and hope to catch as many as possible at an event some time in the near future. In general terms, John Brunt and James Ings were for striking as quickly as possible and Arthur Thistlewood cautioned patience in order to maximise the number of targets.

The gradually declining numbers of those who turned up to the meetings organised by Thistlewood, the regular reports of George Edwards from within the core group²³ and the seeming ease with which the plotters were finally rounded up have tended to obscure the very dangerous situation in which members of the cabinet found themselves in the three months before 23 February. The plotters were determined men; even though a quantity of their weapons was seized in early January, they still managed to amass a cache of arms which included one firearm, 24 hand grenades, one large bomb, 20 pike blades, 6 lb of gunpowder, 2000 rounds of ammunition and a range of knives and cleavers. In the event of the initial strike being successful they aimed to seize more advanced weapons from private and commercial premises in the City.²⁴ Thistlewood and his associates had also assembled what would now be called a ‘hit list’: the names and addresses of more than thirty ministers and leading government officials.²⁵ It must have been extremely chilling for the Home Office to know that the conspirators were in the habit of monitoring the movements of their intended targets. For example, on 31 December several of the men watched Castlereagh’s house and on 25 January Lord Harrowby’s house was scouted. James Ings spent the afternoon of 5 February following Castlereagh around London and subsequently told Thistlewood he ‘would be D___D if he Didn’t kill him and one or two More before long’. Thistlewood steadied Ings by arguing it was better to kill as many as possible in one swoop, but a few days later Ings and Abel Hall followed the Earl of Mulgrave’s carriage for one and a half miles from Whitehall to 72 Harley Street. Brunt was adamant at this time that ‘we must go in threes or fours and Destroy them at once or as Many as can be found of them’.²⁶ The discussions between Thistlewood and his most exuberant comrades were heated, and it is no exaggeration to say that at any point one or more of these men might have decided to attack and kill those they were following.

The Home Office seems to have been trying to secure as much evidence against as many people as possible without having to rely in court on the testimony of the paid informer George Edwards, but this was a dangerous strategy. The Home Office and the police could never be sure that some of the more hot-headed conspirators would not break ranks, or that Thistlewood would not be persuaded by his friends to change the plan before Edwards the informer could provide the necessary warning. There must have been real fear on the part of the authorities when, on 20 February, at Brunt’s suggestion, it was decided finally to kill Sidmouth and Castlereagh as soon as possible, and hope that other individuals might also be struck by other plotters intent on killing as many on the ‘hit list’ as possible.²⁷ Historians know that the plotters took the bait when the informer within their midst miraculously happened to provide them with information about an imminent dinner in Grosvenor Square at which they could attack the entire cabinet, but had they not done so the authorities would have faced the terrible prospect of small ‘cells’ of armed and desperate men roaming the capital with the means and motivation to kill ministers, leading officials or other officers of the state.²⁸ Individuals engaging in terror certainly seemed anachronistic in the mid-twentieth century,²⁹ a throwback to the anarchists of the late 1800s, but in the third decade of the twenty-first century, an age in which news media often find themselves reporting on the carnage caused by ‘lone wolf’ terrorists armed only with rudimentary weapons, we perhaps have a greater appreciation of the dangers posed by small numbers of determined men and women. Small groups of determined ideologues can sometimes change the course of history through ‘the propaganda of the deed’.³⁰ The terrorist may be thwarted numerous times, but even in failure he or she will find comfort in the chilling warning issued in the wake of a failed attempt to assassinate the British Prime Minister and her entire cabinet 164 years after the Cato Street Conspiracy: ‘Today, we were unlucky, but remember we only have to be lucky once – you will have to be lucky always.’³¹

If the potential of the coup de poing against the cabinet in 1820 should be taken seriously by historians, what of the broader coup d’état envisaged by the plotters in their most optimistic moments? This was to include the establishment of a provisional government, the reading of a proclamation in the name of this entity calling on the soldiers to side with the people, the seizure of artillery pieces and small arms around London, the capture of symbolic buildings and an appeal to the people to rally to the side of the new republic. It was hoped that, with London in the hands of the new power, the cities of the Midlands, the North and Scotland would soon rise on the side of the revolutionaries.³² If the plotters had managed to kill several ministers or even the entire cabinet, how likely is it that their more ambitious plans might have been attempted? The first thing they would have needed was a greater number of active conspirators in London than the twenty men who gathered in Cato Street on that fateful February evening. Malcolm Chase’s 1820: Disorder and stability in the United Kingdom identifies nine hitherto unknown Cato Street conspirators,³³ and the chapter by Jason McElligott in this collection suggests that there were other sites in London at which men may have gathered to attack the state on 23 February.³⁴ He has also suggested that the prominent radicals Thomas Wooler and William Cobbett may have been associated with the plot. This tends to corroborate the sense that there was a broader number of radicals prepared either to countenance the use of violence or to side with the conspirators in the event of their plans coming to fruition.

However, nobody has yet come across the mainstay of any revolutionary endeavour: a group of young men aged between 16 and 25 without wives and dependent children. This demographic formed the core of the 474 men arrested in connection with the Fenian rising in Dublin in 1867 whose ages and occupations were logged by the police.³⁵ Of those rebels who were in the General Post Office in Dublin during Easter Week 1916, no fewer than 29 per cent were under the age of 20, and a further 44 per cent were between the ages of 20 and 30.³⁶ Fearghal McGarry has calculated that during the Irish War of Independence of 1919–21 the median age of the members of Óglaigh na hÉireann who saw action against British forces was a youthful 23, and many of them were single.³⁷ By contrast, the known Cato Street conspirators (and those radicals who it is suspected sympathised with them) were almost all married men over the age of 30, and many of them had children. Cato Street might best be understood, then, as the hardwood of a generation defined by the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars rather than the green shoots or new buds of widespread revolutionary plotting in the world of London radicalism.

The most unusual thing about the Cato Street Conspiracy is not that it was penetrated by an agent provocateur who provided full details to the Home Office. The historian and political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli long ago commented on the inevitability of an informer turning up whenever a plot ‘has been communicated to two or three people’. He thought it ‘a marvel if a plot which has been communicated to many people, remains secret for any length of time’.³⁸ Indeed, when faced with Thistlewood’s plan to attack the cabinet and foment a rising, at least one plotter claimed that he did not ‘much like to join in anything where so Many [conspirators] are concerned’.³⁹ Once they were arrested and tried, it was only to be expected that the leading Cato Street conspirators would be executed