Cato Street Conspiracy

The Cato Street Conspiracy was an attempt to murder all the British cabinet ministers in 1820. The name comes from the meeting place near Edgware Road in London.

The conspirators were members of a group of Spencean Philanthropists, named after the British radical speaker Thomas Spence. Some of them, especially Arthur Thistlewood, had been involved with the Spa Fields riots in 1816. Thistlewood came to dominate the group.

Angered by the Six Acts and the Peterloo Massacre, the plan was to assassinate a number of cabinet ministers, overthrow the government and set up a Committee of Public Safety to oversee a radical revolution. According to later prosecutor of their trial, they would have formed a provisional government headquartered in the Mansion House.

When George III died on January 29, 1820, it caused a governmental crisis. In a meeting held February 22, one of the Spenceans, George Edwards, suggested that the group could exploit the political situation and kill all the cabinet ministers. They planned to invade a cabinet dinner at the home of Lord Harrowby, Lord President of the Council armed with pistols and grenades. Thistlewood thought the act would create a massive uprising against the government. Ex-butcher and coffee shop keeper James Ings later announced that he would have decapitated all the cabinet members and taken two heads to exhibit on the Westminster Bridge. Thistlewood spent the next hours trying to recruit more men for the attack. Only 27 men joined the effort.

When Jamaican-born William Davidson, who had worked for Lord Harrowby, went to look for more details about the cabinet dinner, a servant in Lord Harrowby's house told him that his master was not home at all. When Davidson told this to Thistlewood, he refused to believe it and demanded that the operation commence at once. John Harrison rented a small house in the Cato Street as the base of operations.

However, George Edwards was working for the Home Office and had become an agent provocateur; in fact, some of the other members had suspected him but Thistlewood had made him his aide-de-camp. Edwards had presented the idea with the full knowledge of the Home Office, who had also put the advertisement about the supposed dinner in The New Times. When he reported that his would-be-comrades would be ready to follow his suggestion, the Home Office decided to act.

On February 23, Richard Bimie, Bow Street magistrate, and George Ruthwen, another police spy, went to wait at a public house on the other side of the street of the Cato Street building with twelve officers of the Bow Street Runners. Bimie and Ruthwen waited for the afternoon because they had been promised reinforcements from Coldstream Guards. Thistlewood's group arrived during that time. At 7.30 PM, the Bow Street Runners decided to apprehend the conspirators by themselves.

In the resulting brawl, Thistlewood killed a police officer, Richard Smithers, with a sword. Some conspirators surrendered peacefully, while others resisted forcefully. William Davidson failed to fight his way out. Thistlewood, Robert Adams, John Brunt and John Harrison slipped out the back window but they were arrested a few days later.

Eleven men were later charged for the plot. During the trial, the defence argued that the statement of Edwards, a government spy, was unreliable and he was therefore never called to testify. Police convinced two of the men, Robert Adams and John Monument, to testify against other conspirators in exchange of dropped charges. Most of the accused were sentenced to death for high treason on April 28.

John Brunt, William Davidson, James Ings, Arthur Thistlewood and Richard Tidd were hanged at Newgate Prison May 1 1820; death sentences of Charles Copper, Richard Bradburn, John Harrison, James Wilson and John Strange were commuted to transportation for life.

The British government used the incident to justify the Six Acts that had been passed the previous year. However, in the House of Commons, Matthew Wood accused the government of purposeful entrapment of the conspirators to smear the campaign for parliamentary reform. The otherwise pro-government newspaper The Observer ignored the order of the Lord Chief Justice Sir Charles Abbott not to report the trial before the sentencing.