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Regency Britain has been romanticised, but a darker view of the era is told in a new book by Gonville & 91ֱ�� Fellow Professor Vic Gatrell. Jane Austen’s novels have defined the age in the public mind and Bridgerton is among Netflix’s most-watched shows. Yet “the whole industry of Regency elegance is based either on fantasy or on selective representation,” says Vic, whose book tells the story of a plot to massacre the British Cabinet at its monthly dinner.

offers a compelling tale about the most sensational of plots against the British state since the Gunpowder Plot in 1605. On February 23, 1820, 25 impoverished craftsmen assembled in a stable in Cato Street, west London, planning to walk to Lord Harrowby’s Grosvenor Square mansion and there to commit mass assassinations that would have changed the world forever. But spies infiltrated the plot, so the Home Office knew exactly where weapons were hidden and when the revolution would be attempted. Most conspirators were arrested and tried for treason. Outside Newgate prison five were hanged before having their heads chopped off and held up dripping to a crowd of some 100,000.   “So much for the age of refinement, sensibility, and Jane Austen,” Vic adds.  

Vic uncovered the mountain of spy reports that told this story while working in the National Archives on another project. He accumulated a couple of months’ worth of pencilled notes on the case before resuming his other research. Retirement and the Covid-19 pandemic lockdowns duly provided him with the time and space to work up his notes and to write this challenging book. Along with the published treason trial reports, the spy reports enabled him to explore every detail of the conspirators’ movements, actions, meeting places, families, habitats, and opinions. “Such rich material is not to be found for an episode of this kind anywhere else in British history before the 20^th century,” he says.

He argues that the story has been previously downplayed by historians because its failure did not feed into the celebratory left-wing narrative of English working-class history. In E. P. Thompson’s great work, The Making of the English Working Class (1963), Cato Street received no more than 10 dismissive pages, none based on spy reports. Thompson was sympathetic, but like everyone else he simply sidelined the conspiracy as ineffective. 

Of course it was that, Vic insists; but it also takes us into the heart of London’s plebeian cultures in revelatory ways. It exposes the hidden textures of people’s lives who were not only suffering unspeakable poverty after the Napoleonic wars, but who were also contemptuously treated by an insecure and arrogant Conservative government. In 1815-20 the country was a tinderbox; the threat of a Frenchified Revolution was never far away. The massacre of Peterloo in Manchester in 1819 was one portent of further violence. The trouble was that “these poor men had no idea what they were up against,” Vic says.

He adds: “In the last resort they were like peasants armed with pitchforks against the most reactionary government and the biggest and most experienced army in English history.

“Believing innocently in English liberty and the rights of the free-born Englishman, they were driven, desperate, and hungry men, led by an obsessional fanatic. They didn’t have a chance.” 

The conspiracy had important consequences, however. Vic says: “Along with Peterloo and other disasters, it did nudge the government towards reform. Its failure also explains why Britain avoided a 19^th century revolution: the vast majority of subsequent radicals knew better than to attempt one.” 

The conspirators’ story uncovers cruelties and hardships in Regency life that passed Jane Austen and her kind by. It also connects with the present. Vic quotes William Faulkner: “The past is not only never dead; it is not even past.”    

Similarities in modern terrorism are multiple, for instance. Most terrorist plots today fail as miserably as the Cato Street conspiracy, and for similar reasons, he says. But most important, “analogous structures of wealth distribution and power still rule us,” Vic argues.

“When you discard conservative historians’ cosy fantasies about our island story, you realise the complexities of historical experience and perception that give the lie to fashionable complacency about our perfection,” he says.