ABSTRACT
First published in The Examiner, XIII, 2 January 1820, pp.1–2. The great reform hopes and agitations sweeping across England throughout 1819 had only produced what seemed to many a bleaker political landscape in 1820, and the fate of The Examiner seemed to be heading in a gloomy direction as well. The post-Peterloo government crackdowns had put both Carlile and Henry Hunt in prison. The Six Acts were now in full force as was an effective network of government informants (see headnote above, pp. 173–5), making it more difficult to express opposition in print and forcing reform into the darker corners of conspiratorial plot and insurrection. Arthur Thistlewood (1770–1820; DNB), a radical Spencean active in the Spa Field Riots of 1816, now deemed that a violent overthrow of the government was the only means of effecting political progress. However, he and his small band of followers were caught by government police in a Cato Street loft, and after a swift trial the instigators of what became known as the ‘Cato Street Conspiracy’ were executed on 1 May, their heads publicly decapitated. Government power took on a less gruesome yet still deeply unpalatable appearance several months later. Following the death of King George III in January, the former Regent, soon to be crowned George IV, sought, with the aid of his top ministers and judicial officials, to exclude his estranged wife, Caroline, from the throne by trying her for adultery in a public divorce trial held in August. Although Caroline was not a much-loved figure in the eyes of the general population, the spectacle of a woman besieged by all the weighty power of state officials, many of them – including the new king – not without the blemish of adulterous embarrassments, seemed like yet a different spin on the government’s recent history of hypocrisy, intimidation, and repression. Caroline was eventually acquitted, but she remained excluded from royal functions, including George’s coronation the following July, and she died a broken woman soon after.
