In Conspiracy on Cato Street, Vic Gatrell describes a plan, hatched in early 1820, to murder the members of the British cabinet, including its head, the prime minister...Not since Guy Fawkes’s Gunpowder Plot in 1605—intended to blow up Parliament and assassinate James I for the sake of Catholic emancipation—had there been such a sensational threat of violence against the government...Mr. Gatrell, a distinguished British social historian, conceived of the book, he says, when he came across a box of pike heads—the metal points of a spear-like weapon—while conducting research...They had been archived as evidence in a long-ago treason proceeding...Designed to be mounted on wooden shafts, several such devices, he surmised, would have displayed cabinet minister’s heads had the plot succeeded...Mr. Gatrell deftly traces British radicalism in the decades preceding the plot, starting with the so-called corresponding societies of the 1790s—clubs for debate and discussion among British sympathizers with the French Revolution...Many studies of radicalism highlight key thinkers and writings, but Mr. Gatrell looks at how ordinary people made radical ideas their own.
There is no better guide to metropolitan high and low life than Gatrell...His account of the gory melodrama of the executions is a tour de force, complete with the death-cell portraits and testimonies of the five condemned men...In a final flourish of detective work, Gatrell reveals that the French artist Théodore Géricault, passing through London with 'The Raft of the Medusa,' made unflinching sketches of what proved to be the last public executions of traitors in England...The decision to focus the book tightly on London, and on the few weeks before the conspiracy, pays off handsomely in one way, but it comes at a cost...What remains is nonetheless an enthralling classic of London history.
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.
