The Cato Street conspiracy

Abstract

The fi ve men were left hanging by their necks for half an hour before the masked man climbed the scaff old and cut them down in preparation for the next part of their sentence. He started with the ringleader, raising the man’s chest from the wooden fl oor and grasping it fi rmly between his knees. He gripped the felon’s hair with his left hand and with his right cut deeply across the front of the neck, angling the knife towards the atlanto-occipital articulation. Seconds later, he cut around the back of the neck with the same slope of the knife. The executioner put aside his bloodied blade and took hold of the man’s head with both hands and violently twisted it fi rst to the right and then to the left, a manoeuvre that expertly separated the head from the neck without the need to hack through the fi brous ligaments with a knife. The executioner stood up from his crouch and, holding the head by the hair, showed it to the crowd. “This is the head of Arthur Thistlewood, sentenced to be hung, drawn, and quartered for high treason against the crown,” he bellowed. The hushed Newgate crowd, which had gathered on May Day to see the King’s justice done, began to stir restlessly. There were many in the crowd who had sympathy for the fi ve condemned men, the ringleaders of the Cato Street gang who had conspired to murder the unpopular Cabinet, including Lord Liverpool the Prime Minister, on the evening of February 23, 1820. Somehow the botched attempt at assassination had been recast in the collective psyche of the working classes as a glorious attempt at revolution; the stable on Cato Street where the arrests were made and where Thistlewood had killed a policeman while trying to escape had become a major tourist attraction. So the mutilation of the dead bodies off ended the crowd, who began to shout obscenities at the man in the mask as he carried out his grim work on the other four men. “Did you see how easily he took off Arthur’s head?” said John Hobhouse to his son, who stood huddled under his father’s arm, protected against some of the more unsavoury elements in the crowd who started to pelt the executioner with rotten fruit. “How diffi cult can it be to cut off a nob?” replied the boy who was still a little overexcitable after witnessing his fi rst public execution. “Cutting off a head ain’t an easy thing to do lad,” said Hobhouse, a wiry middle-aged man with receding hair and a prognathous jaw. “The executioner only took a few seconds, and that takes a surgeon’s skill and lots of practice.”