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Compelled to turn the world upside down
On May 1, 1820, five of the Cato Street radical conspirators were hanged for attempting to kill the British Cabinet. PETER LINEBAUGH ecommends a gripping new account of their doomed attempt to overthrow a brutal existing order
CLASS AGAINST CLASS: (L to R) Samuel William Fores’s cartoon of the May Day Garland for 1820, with aristocrats dancing under the severed heads of the conspirators and, right, the building where the conspiracy took place

THE Cato Street Conspiracy — named after the meeting place where the conspirators  met near Edgware Road in the West End of London — was an attempt to murder all the British Cabinet ministers and the prime minister Lord Liverpool in 1820.

Most of its  members were angered by the economic depression and political repression of the time and planned to assassinate the Cabinet, which on the night of February 23 was supposed to dine  together in Lord Liverpool’s Grosvenor Square house.

They would then seize key buildings, overthrow the government and establish a committee of public safety to oversee a radical revolution.

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