Conspiracy on Cato Street - Vic Gatrell

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Résumé :
Shortlisted for the Duff Cooper Prize, and a Daily Telegraph and BBC History Magazine Book of the Year. On the night of 23 February 1820, twenty-five impoverished craftsmen assembled in an obscure stable in Cato Street, London, with a plan to massacre the whole British cabinet at its monthly dinner.?The Cato Street Conspiracy was the most sensational of all plots aimed at the British state since?Guy Fawkes'?Gunpowder Plot of 1605.?It ended in betrayal, arrest, and trial, and with five?conspirators publicly hanged and decapitated for treason.?Their failure proved the state's physical strength, and ended hopes of revolution for a century.?Vic Gatrell explores this dramatic yet neglected event in unprecedented detail through spy reports, trial interrogations, letters, speeches, songs, maps, and images.?Attending to the 'real lives' and habitats of the men, women, and children involved, he throws fresh light on the troubled and tragic world of Regency Britain, and on one of the most compelling and poignant episodes in British history.

Biographie:
Vic Gatrell is a professorial Life Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, who?has taught for most of his career in the Cambridge Faculty of History. His previous books include The Hanging Tree: Execution and the English People (1997) which was awarded the Whitfield Prize of the Royal Historical Society; City of Laughter: Sex and Satire in Eighteenth-Century London (2009) which was awarded the Wolfson Prize for History and the PEN Hessell-Tiltman?Prize; and The First Bohemians: Life and Art in London's Golden Age (2013) which was shortlisted for the PEN Hessell-Tiltman Prize.

Sommaire:
Part I. The simple tale: 1. The Cato Street conspiracy: what happened; 2. Arrests and reactions; Part II. Taking its measure: 3. Interpreting the conspiracy; 4. What they were up against; 5. What they believed; 6. Fantasy, myth, and song; 7. Rebellion's habitats; Part III. Thistlewood: his story: 8. A terrorist in the making: 1774-1816; 9. The Spa Fields insurrection: 1816-17; 10. Thistlewood unhinged: 1818-19; 11. Peterloo in London: 1819-20; 12. Edwards the spy: 1819-20; Part IV. Ordinary Britons: 13. Conspirators and others; 14. Wives, marriages, children; 15. Men of colour: Wedderburn and Davidson; Part V. Executions: 16. Trials and verdicts; 17. May Day at Newgate; 18. Epilogue: G?ricault goes to Cato Street; Historiographical note; The trial reports.