Funny how often these seem to follow the same storyline.
People calling for more democracy remain intentionally pacifist in face of oppression from tyrants, a small rebel group decides to do something rash, turns out the person pushing it along was on the payroll. They're captured/killed/imprisoned and the corrupt, unelected government continues merrily on it's way.
edit to add:
Some of these same people had been tried for high treason as a result of riots, and got acquitted because the star government witness was an undercover spy who had been the organising committe of the event and had regularly incited treasonous acts.
And then the exact same thing happened again? Including a government spy as second in command of the plot. That's a heck of a coincidence.
> Watson was tried first and the hearing took over a week. The chief prosecution witness was Castle, who had been on the organising committee for both meetings. Hunt appeared as a defence witness and accused Castle of trying to make him commit treasonable acts on at least two occasions.[14] Defence counsel exposed previous instances where Castle had entrapped others into committing crimes and, without naming him as a spy, presented him to the jury an agent provocateur.[5] The jury accepted the defence's case and Watson was found Not Guilty. No further evidence was presented against the other defendants and they were also acquitted.
> The riots marked the start of a period of mass anti-government meetings, marches and riots, including the march of the Blanketeers (March 1817), the Pentrich rising (June 1817) and the Peterloo Massacre (August 1819) and ending only after the failure of the Cato Street Conspiracy (February 1820).[4]
And then the exact same thing happened again in Scotland?
This reminds me of the plot of The Man Who Was Thursday by GK Chesterton: a secret policeman infiltrates an anarchist cell, only to discover that basically all the other members are also undercover detectives/provocateurs.
Britain did reform the Government to give more people the right to vote and fix the "rotten Burroughs". This most likely prevented it from being caught up in the Revolutions of 1848 which engulfed most of Europe.
Well, it said "one of the most notorious". That's perfectly compatible with being virtually unknown in the mainstream populace if the mainstream populace knows very few conspiracies in general. For example the one and only British conspiracy I remember off the top of my head is the Gunpowder Plot.
Cato Street is very close to the Edgware road, easy to find. There's a blue plaque on the wall of the bulding in question. Its a nice area, hard sometimes to mentally project back to what it would have been like in 1820s london. An hours walk or less takes you to primrose hill, behind which Frederic Engels lived for some time. En route you can go past a house J.D.Bernal lived in, an irish-british polymath and socialist. Such a rich historical city. (again, both flagged with blue plaques)
From Cato street If you turned the other way, you'd find a blue plaque on what was the hospital research window where in 1928 Fleming by chance had a petri dish infected with Penicillium mould. Ernest Chain and Howard Flory did the real work later on.
People calling for more democracy remain intentionally pacifist in face of oppression from tyrants, a small rebel group decides to do something rash, turns out the person pushing it along was on the payroll. They're captured/killed/imprisoned and the corrupt, unelected government continues merrily on it's way.
edit to add:
Some of these same people had been tried for high treason as a result of riots, and got acquitted because the star government witness was an undercover spy who had been the organising committe of the event and had regularly incited treasonous acts.
And then the exact same thing happened again? Including a government spy as second in command of the plot. That's a heck of a coincidence.
Spa Field Riots: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spa_Fields_riots
> Watson was tried first and the hearing took over a week. The chief prosecution witness was Castle, who had been on the organising committee for both meetings. Hunt appeared as a defence witness and accused Castle of trying to make him commit treasonable acts on at least two occasions.[14] Defence counsel exposed previous instances where Castle had entrapped others into committing crimes and, without naming him as a spy, presented him to the jury an agent provocateur.[5] The jury accepted the defence's case and Watson was found Not Guilty. No further evidence was presented against the other defendants and they were also acquitted.
> The riots marked the start of a period of mass anti-government meetings, marches and riots, including the march of the Blanketeers (March 1817), the Pentrich rising (June 1817) and the Peterloo Massacre (August 1819) and ending only after the failure of the Cato Street Conspiracy (February 1820).[4]
And then the exact same thing happened again in Scotland?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radical_War#The_%22Radical_War...
> The effect of the crushing of this staged insurrection was to effectively discourage serious Radical unrest in Scotland for some time.