ABSTRACT
First published in The Examiner, XIII, 5 March 1820, pp. 145–7. This article is part of a series on the Cato Street Conspiracy (see headnote above, pp. 231–3), which continues in the Political Examiners for 19 March 1820, pp. 177–8; 7 May 1820, pp. 289–91 and below, pp. 252–6. The Cato Street Conspiracy was led by Arthur Thistlewood, who had imbibed revolutionary principles during an early sojourn in the France of the 1790s. Later joining the radical Spenceans, he actively participated in peaceful protests while also planning armed insurrection. One of the main organizers of the Spa Field riots of 1816 (see above, pp. 76–7), he was twice imprisoned and by 1819 was plotting to assassinate the government’s top ministers. Informed that all of the government’s ministers would be attending a cabinet dinner in Lord Harrowby’s (1762–1847; DNB) house in Grosvenor Square on 23 February, Thistlewood and a group of twenty-seven followers, most of them poor and politically aggrieved artisans, met that night at a nearby loft on Cato Street where they had stored arms and ammunition for carrying out their plot. In fact, the cabinet dinner was a ruse set up by a government spy, George Edwards (1788–1843), who had infiltrated Thistlewood’s inner circle. The conspirators were thus led into a trap and quickly apprehended in the Cato Street loft by government police. Thistlewood was found guilty by trial on 19 April and executed along with four co-conspirators on 1 May. They were publicly decapitated after the execution. Hunt is careful not to condone violent insurrection, but he explains it as a natural outcome of government tyranny. This argument thus extended his ongoing criticism of government resistance to reform throughout 1818–9 and especially following Peterloo (see headnotes above, pp. 144–7, 173–5, 231–3). Hunt similarly continued his fight during these years over the power of the press to sway opinion, challenging the Courier’s efforts to demonize Thistlewood’s group and its charge that liberal papers like The Examiner incite violent conspiracies. To situate this exchange within the politics of Hunt’s overall contention with ministerial writers and their version of ‘truth’, see headnotes above, pp. 203–4, 209.
