The Cato Street Conspiracy

Plotting, counter-intelligence and the revolutionary tradition in Britain and Ireland

Jason McElligott, Martin Conboy, Jason McElligott, Martin Conboy

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781526144980
• eBook ISBN:
  9781526145000
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

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.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• Notes on contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction ‘We only have to be lucky once’: Cato Street, insurrection and the revolutionary tradition
• 1 When did they know? The cabinet, informers and Cato Street
• 2 Joining up the dots: contingency, hindsight and the British insurrectionary tradition
• 3 The men they couldn’t hang: ‘sensible’ radicals and the Cato Street Conspiracy
• 4 Cato Street in international perspective
• 5 Cato Street and the Caribbean
• 6 Cato Street and the Spencean politics of transnational insurrection
• 7 State witnesses and spies in Irish political trials, 1794–1803
• 8 The shadow of the Pikeman: Irish craftsmen and British radicalism, 1803–20
• 9 The fate of the transported Cato Street conspirators
• 10 Scripted by whom? 1820 and theatres of rebellion
• Afterword
• Index