Conspiracy on Cato Street: A Tale of Liberty and Revolution in Regency London by Vic Gatrell Unavailable

Thanks chiefly to Jane Austen, our abiding sense of Britain’s Regency era (1811–1820) is comforting and mildly comic—a place and a time of squires and spires, quadrilles and calling cards, light romance and heavy repartee. Gatrell’s remarkable book offers a profoundly different and deeply unsettling picture of a savagely hierarchical society ruled by a patrician state at war with the common people. Some of those people were on the verge of starvation during the postwar slump that dominated the second half of the Regency. Desperate poverty did much to turn the popular radical movement of the French Wars into a mass agitation for political rights of unprecedented scope and scale. “Liberty or Death” became a favorite radical rallying cry. The Tory government, alarmed by the prospect of a French-style revolution, made no concessions to liberty while it dealt out plenty of death. Indeed, it hanged its subjects at a greater...