The Cato Street conspiracy: 'The first duty of a patriot is to massacre the government and overturn the existing institutions'

The expectation at the end of the Napoleonic Wars (1803-1815) was that a triumphant Britain would embark on a period of unparalleled tranquility and prosperity. However, economic crisis and the continuing appeal of the ideas of Thomas Paine and the French revolution (1789) saw the country in ferment, with increasingly vociferous radical movements and an obtuse governing class fearful of change. The defining event, perhaps, in this tumultuous period, was the Peterloo Massacre (1819), which hardened feelings on all sides. Radicals saw it as evidence of the implacable nature of the elite and the futility of peaceful politics, while the elite believed it demonstrated the need to come down hard on political discontent in case it should take on revolutionary proportions.

The Cato Street conspiracy (1820) – a Guy Fawksian plot to kill the cabinet, overthrow the government and establish a revolutionary government – took place in this climate. The plot was absurdly ambitious, made even more ludicrous by the fact that it was largely guided by government agents, who infiltrated and encouraged the plotters – a band of desperate, destitute outcasts – in order to provide an excuse for the state to scare and rally the population and crack down on dissidence.

With all the talk of tyranny, foreign domination, political polarisation, class war, traitors and patriots – whose narrative truly represents the national interest and what is it to love your country – the parallels between 1820 and now are obvious. However, the Cato Street conspiracy also reveals the human folly and frailty reflected not only in the lives and hopes of the plotters – which climaxed on the gallows – but also in their prime target – the hate figure of the age’s political radicals, Byron’s ‘placid miscreant’, Shelley’s ‘Swellfoot the tyrant’ – Lord Castlereagh, a Shakespearean figure, whose life ended in madness and suicide. 

The Cato Street conspiracy, then, is the tragicomic story of the men who would bring down the British Empire – Arthur Thistlewood, a professional radical from Lincolnshire (‘the first duty of a patriot is to massacre the government and overturn the existing institutions’); Thomas Brunt, a shoemaker from Clerkenwell; Richard Tidd, a shoemaker from Lincolnshire; James Ings, a butcher from Portsmouth; William Davidson, a cabinet-maker from Jamaica; and of the torment and demise of the main object of their revulsion, Lord Castlereagh, who went from national hero for defeating Napoleon to a man derided for his brutal repression of dissent at home, increasingly wracked by doubt and mental turmoil, leading, ultimately, to his suicide.

Castlereagh: enlightened conservative or face of murder?

John Bew’s biography of Robert Stewart, Viscount Castlereagh (1769-1822) – Castlereagh: the biography of a statesman – chief secretary for Ireland from 1796 to 1800, colonial secretary from 1802 to 1805, war secretary from 1806 to 1809 and foreign secretary from 1812 to 1822 – is a brilliantly researched and a conscious, compelling, if not always convincing, effort to restore the reputation of one of the most derided figures in British political history. 

Hated by his fellow Irishmen for overseeing the brutal suppression of the United Irishmen rebellion of 1798, and, through bribery and coercion, pushing through the Act of Union, 1801, between Ireland and Britain, Castlereagh was equally loathed by British political radicals and reformers of the age – Jacobins, the nascent working class movement, opponents of the continuing wars with France – both the counterrevolutionary wars followed by the wars against Napoleon.

However, Bew – who is currently a policy adviser to Boris Johnson, overseeing a review into Britain’s role in the world post-Brexit – rejects the notion that Castlereagh was just an old fashioned Tory, an enemy of the enlightenment, and instead asserts his fellow Ulsterman was an ‘enlightened conservative’.

Castlereagh, Bew says:

‘…travelled widely in Europe, read a broad range of literature and eschewed the anti-Catholicism of many of his peers in England and Ireland. He was convinced that the only approach that government could take towards religion was one of toleration and that each man had the right to make his peace with God on his own terms. True, he was an enemy of political reform, but this was because of the dangers of mob politics which he saw first-hand in Paris during the French Revolution and Ireland during the rebellion of 1798.’

As a diplomat, Bew argues, Castleregh has as much right to be called a hero of the Napoleonic wars as Wellington and Nelson. Castlereagh was the statesman who put together the coalition that led to Napoleon’s defeat and then oversaw the creation of congress-diplomacy, through which the victorious powers arranged to keep the peace in Europe. It was as a proponent of realpolitik, Bew says, that Castlereagh has attracted the admiration of former US secretary of state Henry Kissinger and modern Conservative foreign secretaries, Douglas Hurd and William Haigh.

Of course, having Henry Kissinger as an admirer is more of an indictment than an endorsement – Christopher Hitchens has persuasively argued that Kissinger for his policies in Vietnam, Cambodia, Bangladesh, East Timor, Cyprus, Chile, should have been charged as a war criminal; while the stinging assessments of Castlereagh’s contemporary foes, disgusted by the political repression at home that culminated in the Peterloo Massacre and the Cato Street conspiracy, still ring true.

For Byron, Castleregah was the Irish grim reaper, a ‘placid miscreant’ – a reference to Castlereagh’s notoriously calm, or to detractors, cold, demeanour – while to Shelley he was ‘Swellfoot the tyrant’ – a mocking reference to Castlereagh’s gout – or, in the Masque of Anarchy, written after Peterloo, the very face of murder.

I met Murder on the way
He had a mask like Castlereagh
Very smooth he looked, yet grim;
Seven blood-hounds followed him:

All were fat; and well they might
Be in admirable plight,
For one by one, and two by two,
He tossed the human hearts to chew
Which from his wide cloak he drew.
(Shelley, The Masque of Anarchy, 1819)

Cold-blooded, smooth-fac'd, placid miscreant!
Dabbling its sleek young hands in Erin's gore,
And thus for wider carnage taught to pant,
Transferr'd to gorge upon a sister shore,
The vulgarest tool that Tyranny could want,
With just enough of talent, and no more,
To lengthen fetters by another fix'd,
And offer poison long already mix'd.

An orator of such set trash of phrase
Ineffably—legitimately vile,
That even its grossest flatterers dare not praise,
Nor foes—all nations—condescend to smile,
Not even a sprightly blunder's spark can blaze
From that Ixion grindstone's ceaseless toil,
That turns and turns to give the world a notion
Of endless torments and perpetual motion.

A bungler even in its disgusting trade,
And botching, patching, leaving still behind
Something of which its masters are afraid,
States to be curb'd, and thoughts to be confin'd,
Conspiracy or Congress to be made—
Cobbling at manacles for all mankind—
A tinkering slave-maker, who mends old chains,
With God and Man's abhorrence for its gains.
(Byron, dedication to Don Juan, 1819)