Free Enemies of the State by M. J. Trow

Cartwright’s life was spent travelling, establishing Hampden Clubs in the provinces. His insight into welding middle-class ambition and working-class muscle seriously worried the authorities and he was arrested in Huddersfield in 1813. Three years later, the first club outside London was formed by William Fitton at Royden in Shropshire and in Lancashire the weavers Samuel Bamford and John Knight formed others, as did the semi-literate doctor, Joseph Healey, at Oldham and the brush manufacturer Joseph Johnson in Manchester itself. By the year of Cato Street there were at least twenty-five such clubs across the country, all of them talking various shades of revolution.
    The whole question of what happened at Cato Street depends on our definition of three words. Arthur Thistlewood and others at the 1820 trials talked of reformers. The Shorter Oxford Dictionary defines ‘reform’ as ‘the removal of faults or errors esp. of a moral, political or social kind’. 5
    The problem was – how was the removal to take place? Much later in the century, the group of intellectual socialists calling themselves Fabians took their name from the Roman General Quintus Fabius Maximus, who avoided pitched battles but wore down his opposition gradually. This group worked slowly and patiently for change, always through legal means, by discussion and reason rather than violence.
    Radical is the next word we have to understand. Again, the Shorter Oxford says ‘Advocating thorough or far-reaching change, representing or supporting an extreme section of a party’ – and immediately, we must ask another question – how extreme? The Press in 1811–20 is usually termed radical and some men were imprisoned both for writing and reading it. Tom Paine is usually referred to as a radical, so are William Cobbett, Francis Burdett and Colonel Despard.
    At what point, then, does radical slide inexorably into the last of the ‘three Rs’ – revolutionary? The Shorter Oxford is downright disappointing here: ‘Pertaining to, characterized by, or of the nature of revolution, involving or constituting radical change.’ In other words, we have been thrown back to the earlier word, as if ‘radicalism’ and ‘revolution’ are interchangeable. If we look up ‘revolution’ itself, we get ‘alteration, change, mutation’. In terms of history, however, there is little doubt that revolution implies something sudden, swift and violent. Reformers may take years to effect change; radicals want to sweep away existing systems; revolutionaries arm themselves with swords, guns, hand-grenades and are prepared to die in a hay-loft or on the gallows.

    The Radical map of London, 1820. Many of the meeting places for the Radicals were along Holborn and the streets adjoining.
    What looked like a revolutionary act took place in May 1812. On that day, John Bellingham walked into the lobby of the Houses of Parliament and shot the Prime Minister, Spencer Perceval, dead. Perceval remains the only holder of the office to die in this way, despite the efforts of Thistlewood and the men of Cato Street eight years later. ‘If it had not been for that horrid incident,’ wrote George Malcolm Thomson, his tongue firmly in his cheek, ‘Perceval might be remembered today as the smallest Prime Minister . . . or the prime Minister with the record number of children . . . or the one with the prettiest wife . . .’ 6
    Spencer Perceval was a modest man with much to be modest about. In the portrait by G F Joseph, he has large, kind eyes, a receding hairline and a smirk hovering around his thin lips. He looks like a man a bit too eager to please. The offspring of a second marriage, he had to make a living at the Bar and for a while lived with his young wife above a carpet shop in Bedford Row. As time went on, he veered towards politics and obtained minor posts which boosted his income. Astonishingly, he