The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, Counter-Intelligence and the Revolutionary Tradition in Britain and Ireland, ed. Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, 197 p.
The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, Counter-Intelligence and the Revolutionary Tradition in Britain and Ireland, ed. Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy, Manchester: Manchester University Press, ISBN 978 1 5261 4498 0, 197 p.
Index terms
Mots-clés :
conspiration de Cato Street, espionnage, guerres napoléoniennes, massacre de Peterloo, Society of Spencean Philanthropists, rébellion irlandaise, réforme radicale, tradition révolutionnaireKeywords:
Cato Street conspiracy, espionage, Irish Rebellion, Napoleonic Wars, Peterloo massacre, revolutionary tradition, Six Acts, Society of Spencean Philanthropists, ultra-radicalismEditor's notes
Index Nominum Malcolm Chase, William Cobbett, Martin Conboy, William Davidson, Marianne Elliott, Mary Fildes, John Gardner, Richard A. Gaunt, Ryan Hanley, Keiran Hannon, William Hone, Lord Liverpool, Jason McElligott, Timothy Murtagh, Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid, Martyn J. Powell, Colin W. Reid, Robert Shaw, Thomas Spence, Arthur Thistlewood, E. P. Thompson, Malcolm Thomis, Ajmal Waqif, Robert Wedderburn, Roger Wells, T. J. Wooler
Full text
1On 23rd February 1820, a plot concocted by a group of London ultra-radicals to kill members of the Tory cabinet was foiled, thanks to a combination of internal disunity, ministerial alertness, and the timely intervention of an agent provocateur. Reports by informants, whose precise role and dealings with ministers is meticulously traced by Richard A. Gaunt in the opening chapter of this collection, led to a raid by Bow Street Runners on a hay loft in Cato Street. It was at this location that Arthur Thislewood and others had gathered to prepare for the assault on a dinner which the Prime Minister, Lord Liverpool, was due to attend. Five of the men arrested in the wake of the plot were hanged outside Newgate gaol on May Day 1820 and five others were transported to New South Wales. Despite the immediate threat to established authority that the plot appeared to represent, particularly as further risings were put down in Scotland and Yorkshire in the weeks that followed, as Malcolm Chase notes, “in the medium and longer term Cato Street was distinctly advantageous to the British government” (76), at once vindicating its decision to pass repressive legislation in December 1819 and galvanising the Tories’ election campaign of 1820.
2The doomed plan has a contested place in the history of British radicalism. Some historians barely mention Cato Street, while others have seen it as the desperate act of a group of disaffected outcasts, set apart from a ‘respectable’ strain of British constitutional radicalism. In this reading, it was a plot forged in the shady underworld of metropolitan insurrectionism with links to a violent revolutionary underground rather than part of a broader patchwork of oppositional culture after the Napoleonic Wars. As a number of the authors in this collection highlight, such an interpretation reflects, in part, the efforts of the ruling ministry to shore up the government’s appearance of robustness, and cover up its reliance on a wide spy network. John Gardner argues that the plot was “scripted”, not by the convicted men themselves, but by the authorities.
3What the editors and authors of this volume seek to do on a broad level is, as well as taking the actors in this plot seriously rather than dismissing them as unwitting dupes of the Home Office, to make the case for seeing the conspiracy as part of a strategy of direct action, in the wake of the bloodshed at Peterloo, which garnered a wider following among reformers than has traditionally been admitted. In different contributions, scholars such as Malcolm Chase, as well as McElligott himself, in a piece of detective work carried out deep in the Home Office archives, advance the evidentially solid argument that those arrested in the early evening of 23rd February were far from alone. Had their plot to assassinate the cabinet come off, they could more than likely have tapped into a much wider network of sympathisers to broaden the insurrection to other targets around the capital and country. One of the most arresting claims made by McElligott, and to a more cautious extent by John Stevenson, is that influential figures of the post-war radical reform movement–William Hone, Black Dwarf editor T. J. Wooler, and perhaps reformer and journalist William Cobbett–may have been aware of the plans, and might have been ready to back the actions, had the plot succeeded.
4The second major contention is that the conspiracy had resonance beyond the London radical scene and, as Ryan Hanley suggests in an incisive article, its very conception may have had its roots in a broader international culture of anti-slavery militancy and armed slave insurrection in the Caribbean, given the probable involvement of two Black men of Jamaican-Scottish heritage, William Davidson and Robert Wedderburn. Ajmal Waqif also makes the case that the interest shown by radical thinker Thomas Spence (and the ‘Spencean Philanthropists’ who perpetuated his ideas after his death), in forms of dispossession at work in the colonial world, forged the conviction among some radicals that political violence was required at home.
5Further contributions also demonstrate the transnational impact of Cato Street and its pivotal place in (Malcolm Chase’s words) “the international radical imagination” of 1820 (65). Chase delves into how the conspiracy was reported on in France and shows how its international appeal–and radicals’ own internationalist perspective–was one factor in convincing the government that a show trial of the leading conspirators was necessary. Keiran Hannon looks at the fates of the five transported convicts after their arrival in Australia in what is another careful navigation of public archives, while Martyn J. Powell and Timothy Murtagh both address the wider impact of Irish radicalism on the British reform movement as well as its role in shaping the government’s reaction to Cato Street. Powell contends that the government’s experience of handling armed revolt in Ireland in 1798 may have “provided some portion of the template” (131) for the authorities reacting to the threat of an uprising in 1820. Like Powell, Timothy Murtagh also considers that the Irish rebellion and the spectre of ‘the pikeman’ from across the Irish Sea influenced the reaction of the authorities to the plot.
6The collection fits into a long and illustrious historiographical tradition of studies on a British and Irish revolutionary heritage, which includes the magisterial works of E. P. Thompson, Marianne Elliott, Malcolm Thomis, and Roger Wells, but also provides new food for thought on the relevance of the binary divide between ‘physical force’ and ‘moral force’ radicalism in early nineteenth-century Britain. It also has a lot to say about the use of espionage records and surveillance reports in historical investigation. The reader is reminded that the arena of conspiracy and armed insurrection (and to a certain extent its historiography) was, and often is, a male world. Yet, as some of the authors in this collection highlight, women were central. They petitioned the authorities for the bodies of their loved ones to be returned to them after their execution, they kept vigil in prison cells and they raised and fed children when fathers had been executed or transported. The question remains however–and is admittedly not a central concern of this volume–as to whether women had a more substantial role in British ultra-radicalism in this era than has hitherto been established. The Cato Street conspiracy was foiled less than a year after the first Female Reform Societies were set up in the summer of 1819 and only months after women such as Mary Fildes had walked to Manchester to call for political reform only to be disproportionately cut down by the yeomanry cavalry in the bloodbath which followed. As Fildes wrote in a petition to Parliament on 15th May 1821: “I cannot refrain, however, from calling the attention of the House to a small portion of the deliberate cruelty which it was my heart-rending lot to witness.” It is to be wondered, as Robert Shaw imagined for the 1970s stage, discussed in Gardner’s chapter, whether some women also began to sympathise with the idea of direct action in the wake of Peterloo.
7The book captures the intensity of the days before the Cato Street conspiracy was uncovered and the weeks which followed while establishing refreshing new frameworks of analysis. The meticulous archival research of many of the contributors is to be hailed, and this surely contributes to the success of the book in providing a highly textured and sometimes moving reading of the events and the lives, concerns and fortunes of those involved. The major contentions of the book stand up to scrutiny and a number of chapters respond to each other, unearthing aspects of the conspiracy that remained hitherto understated, often with caveats and calls for further enquiry in a meritorious commitment to methodological transparency. As Caoimhe Nic Dháibhéid and Colin W. Reid note in the afterword, perhaps Britain has its own revolutionary ‘tradition’ after all, a tradition which was largely laid to rest in 1820.
References
Bibliographical reference
Rachel Rogers, “The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, Counter-Intelligence and the Revolutionary Tradition in Britain and Ireland, ed. Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, 197 p.”, Caliban, 65-66 | 2021, 325-328.
Electronic reference
Rachel Rogers, “The Cato Street Conspiracy: Plotting, Counter-Intelligence and the Revolutionary Tradition in Britain and Ireland, ed. Jason McElligott and Martin Conboy, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2020, 197 p.”, Caliban [Online], 65-66 | 2021, Online since 20 October 2021, connection on 17 July 2025. URL: http://journals.openedition.org/caliban/10465; DOI: https://doi.org/10.4000/caliban.10465
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