The Plot To Murder The Entire British Cabinet

In February 1820, a small group of desperate men gathered in a hayloft off a narrow London mews called Cato Street, near the Edgware Road, and made a plan of breathtaking audacity: they would murder the entire British Cabinet in a single stroke. And they very nearly tried. Britain after the Napoleonic Wars was a tinderbox — mass unemployment, hunger, and, in 1819, the Peterloo Massacre, where cavalry had ridden down a peaceful crowd in Manchester. Out of that rage came the Cato Street Conspiracy, led by a hot-headed radical named Arthur Thistlewood. The plan was specific and monstrous: the conspirators read in the newspaper that the whole Cabinet would dine together at Lord Harrowby’s house in Grosvenor Square. They would storm the dinner, kill every minister present, seize key buildings, and spark a revolution. Thistlewood reportedly intended to carry away two heads in a bag. What they did not know was that the man feeding them the plan, and even the fake dinner notice, was a government spy and agent provocateur named George Edwards. The plot was betrayed before it began. On the night of 23 February 1820, Bow Street Runners and a detachment of Coldstream Guards raided the Cato Street loft. In the chaos, Thistlewood ran a police officer, Richard Smithers, through with a sword, killing him, and escaped into the dark. He was arrested the next morning. The trials followed swiftly, and by the end of April, five ringleaders had been condemned to death for high treason: Arthur Thistlewood, James Ings (a butcher), John Brunt (a bootmaker), Richard Tidd (a bootmaker), and William Davidson. Davidson deserves to be remembered by name. Born in Kingston, Jamaica, around 1781 — recorded as the son of the island’s Attorney General and a local Black woman — he was one of the first Black revolutionaries in British history, and he went to the scaffold quoting scripture.

The Horror

The sentence for high treason was, in theory, to be hanged, drawn and quartered — but the Prince Regent commuted the more grotesque parts to hanging followed by beheading. Even so, what unfolded outside Newgate Prison on 1 May 1820 was medieval, and it was the last time it would ever happen in England. An enormous crowd packed the street. The five men were hanged first, dropped through the trap and left suspended for around half an hour until they were dead. Thistlewood, contemptuous to the last, had refused a hood and was said to have calmly sucked on an orange as he waited to die. Ings sang and shouted defiance. Davidson prayed. Then came the part that turned the crowd’s mood from spectacle to horror. The bodies were cut down and laid out, and a second figure appeared on the scaffold — not the hangman, but a man whose face was hidden behind a black mask, carrying what witnesses described as a surgeon’s knife. Working over an angled block, he beheaded each corpse in turn. And in a piece of grim theatre, he lifted each severed head high so the crowd could see it, and announced the crime. Raising Thistlewood’s head, he called out, “This is the head of Arthur Thistlewood, the traitor” — and a great groan rolled through the mob. THE BOTCH: The masked man was clumsy. When he lifted the head of John Brunt, he fumbled it — and dropped it. It rolled. And from somewhere in that vast, ugly crowd came a single shouted heckle that has echoed down two centuries: “Ah, butterfingers!” (The line is famously credited to the novelist Thackeray.) It is such a strange, human moment — a masked executioner performing a piece of state terror, and a Londoner in the crowd mocking him for dropping the ball. The crowd, which had come to jeer traitors, ended up jeering the executioner instead, their sympathy curdling toward the dead men. And here is the enduring mystery: no one knows who the masked man was. His identity was deliberately concealed, and it stayed concealed. Contemporaries whispered that he was a surgeon, or a resurrectionist — a body-snatcher — someone with a professional’s ease around a blade and a corpse. But it was only ever rumour. A man performed the last public beheadings in English history in front of thousands of people, and history never learned his name. There is a deeper unease beneath the whole grisly spectacle, and it was not lost on people at the time. The plot had been fed, shaped, and very possibly kept alive by a paid government agent, George Edwards, who then vanished from the story before he could be cross-examined — spirited away, many believed, on a government pension. To a great many ordinary Londoners, that made the five dead men look less like masterminds and more like desperate, angry fools who had been led by the nose into a trap and then hanged for it. That is why the mood of the Newgate crowd curdled so fast — why they groaned at the heads and jeered the executioner rather than cheering. It is also why the authorities were so careful to hide the beheader’s face. The state had just performed a piece of theatre designed to say this is what happens to traitors, and the audience had come away muttering instead about spies and entrapment. The bodies were buried within the prison precincts, covered in quicklime so there could be no grave to become a shrine.

The Modern Relic

You can walk down Cato Street today. It is a quiet, gentrified mews in Marylebone, just off the Edgware Road, and the very stable where the conspirators were arrested still stands — No. 1a Cato Street, a listed building carrying a blue plaque unveiled in 1977. Stand beneath it and you are looking at the actual loft where five men plotted to decapitate the British government and were themselves, in the end, decapitated. Newgate Prison, where they died, was demolished at the start of the twentieth century; on its site now stands the Central Criminal Court — the Old Bailey, the most famous courtroom in the world, built directly over the ground where the last heads fell. The Cato Street men were the last people ever beheaded in England, condemned for a plot that a government spy had helped to build. Whether you see them as would-be assassins or as desperate men entrapped, the scene outside Newgate belonged to a dying age — and somewhere in that jeering crowd, a Londoner’s shout of “butterfingers” marked the moment the old cruelty finally started to look absurd.

← Back to the archive