The Cato Street Conspiracy

Urbanization and mechanization, and all the downsides they brought with them, had continued in Great Britain in the years since the Luddite Rebellion. In response, a radical group plotted to assassinate the Prime Minister's entire cabinet.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to Stuff you Missed in History Class from how
Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm Tracy D. Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. Guy Fox
and the Gunpowder Plot, which our predecessors Sarah and Bablina

(00:22):
talked about in a two part podcast back in have
become part of the popular culture on both sides of
the Atlantic, definitely more so in the UK, but here too,
like we have Guy Fox masks at protests and all
of this other stuff. Uh, but that plot to blow
up Parliament was not history's only attempt to violently destroy

(00:43):
the British government and spark a popular uprising. It's just
become way more famous than the one we're going to
talk about today. That incident that we're talking about today
happened more than two hundred years later, but it's not
nearly as well remembered or in some ways popularized, And
that is the Cato Street Conspiracy. And it's been a while,

(01:05):
but we've talked a bit on past podcasts about the
economic and cultural climate of Great Britain in the early
nineteenth century, including in our episode on the Luddite Rebellion.
In the first decades of the eighteen hundreds, the Industrial
Revolution was well underway, and while much of Britain was
still quite rural and agrarian, parts of the nation were
also urbanizing really rapidly. People were moving to cities faster

(01:28):
than the cities themselves could keep up, leading to overcrowding,
unsanitary living conditions, poverty, crime, and the rapid spread of disease.
Food production hadn't kept up with the shifts in economy
and industrialization, leading to food shortages, inflation, and laws meant
to regulate the grain market, which tended to favor landowners

(01:49):
over workers and consumers. As the nation was becoming more urbanized,
work was also becoming more mechanized, and as a result,
skilled craftspeople and agriculture workers were increasingly being pushed out
of their jobs. At the same time, working conditions in
the nation's newly opened factories were often very very poor.

(02:09):
People worked long hours for low pay and conditions that
ranged along a spectrum from unpleasant to unsafe. Disciplinary action
for even minor infractions tended to be really severe, including
everything from withholding people's pay to physical punishments. People who
worked in these factories were prohibited from organizing themselves to

(02:30):
advocate for better conditions, fairer treatment, or better pay. Parliament
had passed what was known as the Combination Act in
sevent which received royal assent on July twelve of that year.
Combination here is a synonym for union. Any two men
who combined or unionized to try to get better pay

(02:50):
or reduced hours could be sentenced to two months of
hard labor, and the same was true of anyone who
tried to convince anyone else to leave work, in other words,
to go on stra Although the Combination Act technically applied
to organizations of employers as well, it was really only
enforced for workers. So not only were people working in unpleasant, difficult,

(03:11):
and sometimes dangerous conditions, but they were also prohibited from
getting together to try to do anything about it. All
of this contributed to things like the Luddite Rebellion that
we mentioned a few moments ago, and a few years
before today's subject took place. The Luddites had been protesting
against mechanization in the textile industry. In eighteen eleven, the

(03:32):
Leddites famously smashed knitting machines, ultimately leading to the deployment
of a military force to stop those protests in eighteen twelve.
Today's conspiracy took place just a little later than that,
in eighteen twenty. The same trends of urbanization and mechanization,
and all of the downsides that they were bringing along
with them, had continued in the years since the Leadite Rebellion.

(03:56):
By then, the Napoleonic Wars and the War of eighteen
twelve had both also ended both of them in eighteen fifteen.
Many of the soldiers and sailors who had previously been
away fighting in the British Empires military were now home again,
and they were all competing for the same very scarce
supply of jobs. Arthur Thistlewood was one of the many

(04:16):
radical voices in Great Britain protesting against all of this.
He was baptized on December four of seventeen seventy four,
and probably born that year to William Thistlewood and Anne Burnett,
who were unmarried. Arthur's father was a stock breeder and
his mother was a shopkeeper's daughter. A lot of the
details about his early life and his upbringing are very

(04:37):
hazy or contradictory, and this continues into his adult life
as well, since he seems to have invented a highly
romanticized and embellished biography for himself. He definitely did serve
in two different militia, first as an ensign and then
as a lieutenant. He may have been in Paris during
the Reign of Terror, although that's a little harder to substantiate.

(04:59):
He claimed to have visited the Americas and the Caribbean,
but that seems less likely. When Thistlewood was in his twenties,
he had a series of brushes with money, each of
them ending abruptly and putting him back where he started financially.
He's reported to have been married twice. One was a
Miss Bruce around seventeen ninety one or seventeen ninety two,

(05:21):
and the other was Jane Worsley in eighteen o four,
although it's possible that that first report is erroneous. In
both cases, these women came from money, but that money
reverted back to each of their families because each of
those women died in childbirth. Yeah, there's there's some speculation
that maybe that seventy one or ninety two uh marriage

(05:42):
was was a mistaken identity or someone else, But it
happened at least once in that pattern, and he did
also have a surviving son named Julian, who was born
around eighteen o four that was either by Jane Worsley
or by another woman, but regardless. When he married again
in eighteen o eight, the time to a woman named
Susan Wilkinson, she accepted the young Julian as her own.

(06:05):
Around the same time, Thistlewood came into an inheritance which
he sold in exchange for an annuity, but his buyer
almost immediately went bankrupt, leaving Thistlewood without his property and
his buyer without the money to pay him. So at
this point he had come into money and then lost
it uh several times, at least two, possibly three times,

(06:26):
and this cycle of coming into money and then losing
it again seems to have made him both bitter and
ready to fight back against a system that he thought
was stacked against him and against the working class. When
Thistlewood made his way to London sometime before eighteen ten,
he found a community of people who were ready to
stoke both his bitterness and his sense of being economically wronged.

(06:49):
Once there, he quickly made connections to some of London's
most radical thinkers and activists, including members of the Jacobin Club,
that formed in the wake of the French Revolution. Another
in thistle Wood's newfound circle was Thomas Spence, who was
the de facto leader of a loose collection of radical organizations,
all of them in one way or another advocating for revolution.

(07:12):
Spence was against the monarchy, state, religion, and the aristocracy,
and he was in favor of true universal suffrage, although
many of his allies advocated universal male suffrage only. Spence
had kept various bookstalls, and he opened a bookstore known
as the Hive of Liberty, where he sold revolutionary tracks,
including ones that he had written himself. He also published

(07:34):
a magazine known as pigs Meat, in which he called
for things like the forest nationalization and equal redistribution of
all the land in Britain. Spence thought that private property
ownership was giving uh the rich a permanent domination over
the poor, and the only answer was to take all
of the land and then divided up equally. At first

(07:55):
this Wood's activities within these circles didn't really get a
lot of attention from authorities, but shortly before the end
of the Napoleonic Wars, he was part of a group
that was trying to send an emissary to France to
essentially invite Napoleon to invade Britain directly and overthrow the monarchy.
This plan completely fizzled out after Thistlewood's promised funding of it,

(08:16):
which was supposed to come from a lawsuit, failed to materialize.
But it was this plan to petition Napoleon that finally
caught the government's eye, and from that point they were
really keeping a pretty steady gaze on Thistlewood. We will
get into what happened after Thistlewood was under the government's
watchful eye after a quick sponsor break. Although Thomas Spence

(08:41):
himself died in eighteen fourteen, his followers, who became known
as the Spencying Philanthropists or just Spensions, were still active
two years later in the midst of a movement for
parliamentary reform, and Arthur Thistlewood had become one of their
key organizers. One of their strategies was to piggyback their
revolutionary efforts on more moderate calls for reform, and this

(09:04):
is what happened at the Spa Fields Riot on December two,
eighteen sixteen. The meeting scheduled at Spa Fields that day
was supposed to be an update on a petition to
reform Parliament. However, Thistlewood was on the planning committee and
he and others were working behind the scenes to use
the meeting to foment rebellion. Ahead of that meeting, the

(09:24):
organizers had visited taverns and barracks to sow the seeds
of a revolutionary riot, and they strategically position their allies
within the crowd to try to incite violence. This didn't
entirely go as planned. Although some in the crowd did
become violent and the riot went on for hours, most
of the attendees at this meeting remained peaceful. Thistlewood's ambitious

(09:48):
goals of taking the Tower of London in the Bank
of England and stealing weapons liberating prisoners did not happen
at all. They did march to the tower, with Thistlewood
leading the way, but order was restored by nightfall. Although
there was sufficient evidence to arrest thistle Would and his
accomplices in the Spa Fields riot immediately, the government also

(10:10):
had a network of spies placed within the spencions and
arrests would have disrupted that intelligence that they were gathering.
So it was May of the following year when Thistlewood
and his family were about to flee to the America's
when he was finally arrested and tried. Sources actually contradict
either he was acquitted or the charge was withdrawn when

(10:31):
the key witness turned out to be a pimp and
a perjurer. Yeah. Unfortunately that trial does not seem to
be in the online records at Old Bailey, so I'm
not sure which is correct. But two different sources said
clearly different things. After this failed attempt to start a
revolution at the Spa Fields riots, this Will would increasingly

(10:52):
believe that only an armed coup would bring the revolution
that he thought England needed. He had yet another plot
to take a for the Bank of England during the St.
Bartholomew's Fair on September six, eighteen seventeen, although that effort
once again failed. At this point a lot of the
remaining Spencians had grown wary of all the overt attempts

(11:13):
to start a violent rebellion. Many of them went back
to advocating for reforms from the taverns in small groups
that were less easily tracked and apprehended. This will Would,
on the other hand, doubled down in eighteen eighteen, he
challenged Home Secretary Henry Addington, Lord Sidmuth, who had previously
served as Prime Minister, to a duel for the first time.

(11:35):
This Will would wound up in prison, starting a year
long sentence for threatening a breach of peace in May
of eighteen eighteen. Not long after this Will was released
from prison, on August six, eighteen nineteen, the Manchester Yeomanry,
armed with sabers, violently broke up a protest for parliamentary
reform and what came to be known as the Peterloo Massacre.

(11:58):
In addition to those who were killed by members of
the Yeomanry, others were trampled in their efforts to escape.
At least ten people were killed and hundreds more were injured.
The immediate aftermath of the Peterloo Massacre did spark outrage
and calls for the types of reforms that the protesters
had been demanding, but in the end the government sanctioned

(12:19):
the way the Yeomanry and magistrates had handled the protest,
and in response to it, Parliament also passed the Six Acts.
This was a set of six separate acts that limited
the rights to do things like assemble and print political material,
while also implementing harsher punishments for printing materials deemed seditious
or obscene. One of the acts, the Training Prevention Act,

(12:41):
made it illegal to have military style training and drills
outside of official organizations like municipal militias. One of their
main proponents for these acts was the Home Secretary. That's
same man that Thistlewood had gone to prison for challenging
to a duel was maybe the last straw. A lot
of theories about exactly what prompted this a Wood to

(13:03):
go from like a radical revolutionary calling for, you know,
a total change in the British government, to somebody who
was literally planning to assassinate the entire cabinet. But at
some point after the Peter Low massacre, this Wood did
indeed start planning to assassinate the entirety of the Prime
Minister's Cabinet and to replace them all with the provisional

(13:25):
government that he thought would truly be both for and
by the people. The cabinet met for dinners on a
regular basis, and he planned to use one of these
dinners to kill them all at once. He and his
co conspirators rented rooms on Cato Street to plan and
to assemble and then to do things like make hand grenades.
This Wood considered figuring out a way to destroy the

(13:47):
cabinet without the convenience of the state dinner after the
death of George the Third On January, following the king's death,
the cabinet dinners were temporarily suspended, but they did resume
fairly quickly. The first one after that was to take
place in the home of the Earl of Harrowby and
Grosvenor Square on February. This Will had learned of it

(14:08):
on the twenty two through an announcement published in the
New Times, and the announcement itself may have been brought
to his attention by a man named George Edwards. The
plan was to go to Grosvenor Square with a note
for the Earl, and then once the servant had opened
the door, rush in, brandishing pistols, subdue all the servants,
block their escape roots, and if any of them tried

(14:29):
to escape, they would use hand grenades to kill all
the servants in the household. Then, according to court testimony,
they were planning to go onto the dining room and
quote the men who were to go into the room
were to rush in directly, and to murder all they
found in the room, good or bad, and if there
were any good ones, they would murder them for keeping

(14:50):
bad company. One of the conspirators, James Ing's, volunteered to
rush the room first and behead everyone there and take
the heads of the Lord Castlereay and Sidmouth for later display.
They were the Secretaries of State for Foreign and Home Affairs.
Once this mass assassination was complete, the conspirator's plans to

(15:11):
move on to loot and destroy nearby barracks and stables,
and then take over the Lord Mayor's residence to use
as a seat of their provisional government. That done, they
were going to raid the bank and if all, if
at all possible, come away with the books still intact
so they could use them as evidence for wrongdoing within
London's more affluent class. But once again Thistlewood's attempt to

(15:35):
start a rebellion was thwarted. Thomas Hayden, one of the
men Thistlewood had tried to recruit, wrote a letter to
Lord castle Reay detailing this plot, which he gave to
Lord Harrowby in a park. Lord Harrowby immediately canceled the
dinner and informed the Bow Street Runners that something was afoot.
Hayden wasn't Thistlewood's only undoing, though. George Edwards, one of

(15:58):
the Wood's co conspirators, was really a spy for the government.
He had been passing information about Thistlewood's activities to the
Bow Street Runners the entire time. There's even some suggestion
that he set thistle Wood up in all of this,
not only calling his attention to the advertisement about the dinner,
but actually placing that advertisement in The New Times himself.

(16:20):
At trial, the court reporter who usually posted those sorts
of announcements testified that he had not placed one for February,
and that the one that appeared in The New Times
that day or the day before didn't even sound like
when he had written. Regardless of how it all came about,
Bow Street Runners raided the conspirators loft before they even

(16:41):
left their Cato Street lodgings. In the ensuing melee, Thistlewood
killed one officer, Richard Smithers, with his rapier, before escaping
and evading capture until the following morning. We will talk
about the trial and it's aftermath after one more quick
sponsor break. Although there were certainly others involved in the

(17:03):
planning in some way. In the end, thirteen conspirators and
the plot to massacre the cabinet were arrested. Most of
them were laborers or craftspeople. In some ways they were shoemakers, carpenters,
tailors and the like. Two turned King's evidence, which meant
that the trial could proceed without blowing the cover of
George Edwards by having to call him to the stand

(17:25):
to testify. One of the cases was also dropped. The
trials began on April seventeen, eighteen twenty, and the guilt
of most of those on trial was never really in question.
Witness after witness named Thistlewood as the ringleader and key
organizer of the entire operation. The defense of one of
the co conspirators in particular stands out, William Davidson, who

(17:48):
was tried a little later in April. Davidson, born in Jamaica,
was the son of Jamaica's white Attorney General and a
black Jamaican woman. He had been sent to England to
receive an education that would be on are with his
father's position. At trial, Davidson said in his own defense quote,
I was accidentally drawn into Cato Street in the way

(18:10):
I have said, but knew nothing of a plot to plunder,
burn or massacre. I did not know that any such
plot was in existence. I am not such a man.
If my color be against me, I am not void
of all feeling, and would not act the murderer or
the brute. He then went on to suggest that it
was all a case of mistaken identity, that he had
been mistaken for another black man, which had also happened

(18:33):
to him at the Sunday School where he taught. According
to Davidson, all the witnesses who described quote a man
of color, we're talking about some other man and not him.
The judge tried to assuage Davidson's fears that his color
was being used as a strike against him, saying, quote,
you may rest most perfectly assured that with respect to
the color of your countenance, no prejudice either has or

(18:56):
will exist in any part of this court against you.
A man of color is entitled to British justice as
much as the fairest British subject. But Davidson's argument of
mistaken identity did not lead to an acquittal. He and
all the other men on trial for the conspiracy were
all found guilty and sentenced to be taken to their
execution on hurdles, hanged, beheaded and quartered. Five of those

(19:21):
sentences were commuted to transportation to New South Wales, and
the men transported arrived there on September twenty. The executions
of the others, who were Arthur Thistlewood, James Ng's, James Brunt,
William Davidson and Richard Tid were carried out on May one,
eighteen twenty, although the carrying on hurdles and the quartering

(19:44):
afterward were dropped from their sentence for what was framed
as humanitarian reasons. Thistlewood's last statement before the execution was
quote my only sorrow is that soil this Wood's last
statement before his execution was quote my only sorrow is
that oil should be a theater for slaves, for cowards
and for despots. My motives, I doubt not, will hereafter

(20:06):
be justly appreciated. Their execution drew an enormous crowd, and
a railing at St. Sepulcher's Church collapsed under the weight
of all the people who had climbed up onto it
for a better view. The bodies remained hanging for half
an hour before the beheading. An ax was specially made
for the execution, but the actual beheading wound up being

(20:27):
carried out by a barber surgeon wearing a mask and
using a surgical knife. According to William Thackeray's account, James
Brunt's head was dropped while it was being displayed to
the crowd, which was one of the incidents cited in
efforts to get beheading removed from the punishments for traders.
Eventually all the other ancillary steps to the execution itself

(20:49):
were removed in the from the punishments for traders, so
people would just be hanged in the instead of taken
to the gallows on hurdles and then hanged and then
beheaded and then quartered, which was a lot. Although there
was plenty of more moderate activism around the rights of
workers and reforms of parliament and all those sorts of

(21:09):
things after this point, the failed Cato Street Rebellion really
put an end to the most radical and violent arm
of the labor rights movement at the time. The spency
and philanthropists effectively dissolved, and at the same time, the
government pointed to the Cato Street Rebellion as evidence that
the Six Acts and the combination acts that had previously
been passed were all necessary to keep order. The location

(21:32):
where the conspirators were discovered was marked with a plaque
in nineteen seventy seven. It has a historical marker. Uh.
Not the same name recognition though as Guy Fox Plats
blew up parliament. No, not at all, even though they
had the same core objective, which was to destroy the
government and start over. So that was the Cato Street.

(21:53):
Uh conspiracy. Uh do you have less conspiratorial listener? Man?
Kind of Uh A little. I mean it's it's about
the Tuskey U Syphilis study, which uh could be framed
as a conspiracy based on how terrible it was. It
is from Emily. Emily says, good morning, Tracy and Holly.

(22:15):
I'm writing to you about some comments made during the
discussion of the study design for the Tusky U syphilis study.
Please don't get me wrong, someone from Alabama. I feel
a huge amount of shame when people discussed the Tuskey
U Syphilis study. The U S Public Health Service, as
well as the local physicians involved in the study are
beneath contempt for their deception and extremely unethical behavior. There

(22:36):
was no informed consent, which is sacrosanctin research. Now, the
incentives provided to participants were probably coercive, and the UH
and the whistleblower Peter Buxton, made several attempts to have
the study stopped. Both the A M A and N
m A supported the study and it continued. Finally began
coming to an end once it leaked was leaked to

(22:56):
the Associated Press in the early nineteen seventies. I'm more
in interested in addressing a technical point raise during the
discussion of the additional autopsies for control and the term
all the term the term was not used case participants.
I would like step briefly away from the fact that
this was a very bad study and draw a distinction
between that and a bad studied design is not a

(23:19):
bad study design for controls to who become cases to
be considered cases. In epidemiology, we have case cohort designs
developed during the nineteen eighties, which allow for a group
of participants to be sampled at the beginning of a
study and followed for a set period of time. At
that time, they may have originally been cases, remain controls throughout,

(23:40):
or transition from controls to cases at some point. Another
design that would allow. This is called incidents density sampling. Here,
controls are selected at the same time participants become cases.
Time is a matching variable, although you can also match
on race, age sets, etcetera. Here, again, a subject may
be selected as a can troll early on in the

(24:01):
study and a case later. And then she goes on
to talk some more about um, how people interpret study
design um in the in the field of epidemiology. UH two,
get to the last paragraph. The problem with this person
of the Tuskegee syphilis study is that once participants became cases,

(24:23):
they were not provided with essentially life saving treatment, nor
were their families, who were also affected by the disease
possible infections for spouses, sexual partners, and children, loss of
the primary bread winner resulting in even lower financial and
educational opportunities. As a researcher in the health care field,
I daily deal with the aftermath of the study as
it affects our research and participants faith in what we

(24:46):
are doing. Thank you for your very excellent podcast. You
ladies doing amazing job. I've been listening for years and
I've heard every episode at least once, often more than that. Emily,
Thank you so much. Emily for that clarification. UM. The
comment we made about UM how moving from the control
group to the participant group UM was not a good

(25:10):
thing to do, came actually from a report from the
Hastings Center, which is a bioethics organization UM that came
out of nineteen seventy eight, so it would have been
before case co cohort designs were were developed, and that
paper called it quote a strikingly inept violation of standard
research procedure. So when that paper was written, the idea

(25:33):
of someone moving from the control group to the participant
group was viewed very differently than apparently it is now
in the field of eponemiology. So thank you for writing
in UM with that clarification. Emily. Also, we had another
healthcare provider right and ask us to give a shout
out for getting tested. That's a good thing to do.

(25:57):
I'm always happy to give a shout out for getting
tested for it. Number of things right, right, right, You
should be screening your health on a regular basis. Yes,
uh and and uh. Syphilis is definitely a disease that
still exists and because as we talked about its symptoms
can resolve on their own without treatment. A lot of
people become infected and don't realize that they are, so

(26:19):
that is our plug testing is important. UH. If you
would like to write to us about this or any
other podcast where a history podcast at how stuff works
dot com. We're also on Facebook at facebook dot com
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We're also on Pinterest and Instagram at miss in History.
You can come to our parent company's website, which is

(26:41):
how stuff works dot com, where there's a lot of stuff,
more than you might expect about various uh conspiracies that
have happened or are purported to have happened throughout history.
You can also come to our website, which is a
missed in history dot com, and you will find the
archive of every single episode we have ever done show
notes for all of our past episodes Holly and I

(27:02):
have done. We are now publishing the show notes on
the same page as the podcast, so all that stuff
is together, so you can do all that and a
whole lot more at how stuff works dot com or
missed in history dot com for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Is it how stuff works dot com,