Enemies of the State (22 page)
Was there ever a chance of the Cato Street conspiracy working? That all depends on the existence of the Committee of Two Hundred and their links with the provinces. When the malcontents of Yorkshire and Scotland marched in the spring of 1820 they did so in the belief that a general rising of the people would occur. Arthur Thistlewood seems to have believed this too. All that was needed was the wholesale slaughter in Grosvenor Square and instinctively London would rise. If London rose, so would the rest of the country. One of those on the edge of the conspiracy had assured Thistlewood that he could bring twenty-six disaffected Irishmen out of Gee's Court. If all twenty-five men in the hayloft brought the same number, that would make a little over 600 â possibly enough to equal the scattered police forces in the capital but not the soldiery.
Two things are completely missing from the conspirators' plans; first, the exact mechanics of how London could be taken from the forces that
held it; and second, if this could be achieved, what was to follow? Most historians have dismissed the men of Cato Street as lunatics, misguided madmen who had no clue as to how to proceed. But the same could be said â and was said â of the
sans-culottes
who stormed the Bastille; today, France is a republic run by its people. The same could be said â and was said â of the Irishmen who occupied the British-held Dublin in 1916; today, Dublin is the capital of an independent Eire. The same could be said â and was said â of the men who took power in Russia in the October of 1917; these were the communists who controlled one of the world's greatest superpowers for nearly three-quarters of a century. It is easy to dismiss plots that fail and British history is full of them.
No doubt Arthur Thistlewood, and the men who stood with him that bright May day in 1820 as they faced the mob and ultimately their God in the yard outside Newgate, felt a sense of failure and of being let down. But what they proved, perhaps once and for all, was that conspiracy, assassination and revolution were no longer the British way. The future, of democracy and justice lay instead with Henry Hunt and William Cobbett, with the men of peace who dealt in moral, not physical force. What 1820 proved at last was that the British way was by the ballot, not the bullet, even if it was to take another hundred years for the ballot to arrive.
In that sense, and in that sense alone, the men of Cato Street deserve their place in history.
James Ings, the Portsmouth butcher, promised to cut off the heads of Lords Castlereagh and Sidmouth.
Richard Tidd, radical and conman, endeared himself to the crowd watching his execution.
John Thomas Brunt, the conspirator who took a pinch of snuff before he died.
Robert Adams, the ex-cavalryman who betrayed the men of Cato St by turning king's evidence.
Thomas Hyden, the cow-keeper who claimed to have approached Lord Harrowby with a warning.
John Monument, the diminutive waverer whose evidence helped to hang the conspirators.
