Vic Gatrell is that rarest of people; an academic historian steeped in the archives who can write the most beautiful prose. Conspiracy on Cato Street brings his trademark erudition and style to bear on a now largely forgotten plot to assassinate the British cabinet which was as significant in its day as the Guy Fawkes plot of 1605 or the Brighton bombing of 1984.
On the bitterly cold evening of February 23rd, 1820, two dozen armed men gathered in a cowshed in Cato Street off Edgware Road in west London. Their aim was to avenge the killing six months earlier of 18 unarmed civilians who had been attending a peaceful rally for democratic reform at St Peter’s Field in Manchester. The Cato Street plotters were waiting for members of the British cabinet to take their places at a formal dinner nearby. They aimed to attack with firearms and hand grenades. After killing the cabinet, they planned to declare the establishment of a provisional government which would offer universal adult male suffrage and Catholic emancipation.
As the plotters waited nervously for the signal to strike, their hiding place was raided by the police. They had, inevitably, been betrayed by a government spy in the group. Five men were executed for involvement and a further five were transported for life to Australia. The core plotters were a mixture of impoverished tradesmen living in London: English, Scottish and Irish, as well as two black Jamaicans. These men spent much time and effort in early 1820 negotiating with a broader network of Irishmen who had fled to London after being involved in the Irish rebellions of 1798 and 1803. About half a dozen women were also involved in the plot, most of them “staunch” members of well-known radical London families.
This multinational and multi-ethnic plot has long been dismissed by the few historians who have deigned to notice it as a quixotic oddity dreamt up by deluded dreamers and marginalised psychopaths. It has taken more than two centuries but in Gatrell’s wonderful book we have the first convincing full-length study of how and why this motley crew of British, Irish and Jamaican revolutionaries found themselves armed to the teeth in a dingy cowshed dreaming of a new world.
Jason McElligott is the director of Marsh’s Library, Dublin.
