United Kingdom George IV Robert Jenkinson Dudley Ryder Richard Birnie Frederick FitzClarence Arthur Thistlewood   William Davidson The Cato Street Conspiracy was a plot to murder all the British cabinet ministers and the Prime Minister Lord Liverpool in 1820.

[1] Malcolm Chase noted that "the London-Irish community and a number of trade societies, notably shoemakers, were prepared to lend support, while unrest and awareness of a planned rising were widespread in the industrial north and on Clydeside.

"[2] The conspirators were called the Spencean Philanthropists, a group taking their name from the British radical speaker Thomas Spence.

They would then seize key buildings, overthrow the government and establish a "Committee of Public Safety" to oversee a radical revolution.

In a meeting held on 22 February, George Edwards suggested that the group could exploit the political situation and kill all the cabinet ministers after invading a fabricated cabinet dinner at the home of Lord Harrowby, Lord President of the Council, armed with pistols and grenades.

James Ings, a coffeeshop keeper and former butcher, later announced that he would have decapitated all the cabinet members and taken two heads to exhibit on Westminster Bridge.

[citation needed] Edwards had presented the idea with the full knowledge of the Home Office, which had also put the advertisement about the supposed dinner in The New Times.

Birnie and Ruthven waited for the afternoon because they had been promised reinforcements from the Coldstream Guards, under the command of Captain FitzClarence, an illegitimate son of the Duke of Clarence (later William IV).

[citation needed] In the resulting brawl, Thistlewood killed Bow Street Runner Richard Smithers with a sword.

Preparing an address to the King's subjects, containing therein that their tyrants were destroyed, &c., to incite them to assist in levying war, and in subverting the Constitution.

Assembling themselves with arms, with intent to murder divers of the Privy Council, and to levy war, and subvert the Constitution.

Police persuaded two of the men, Robert Adams and John Monument, to testify against other conspirators in exchange for dropped charges.

[citation needed] Thistlewood, Tidd, Ings, Davidson and Brunt were hanged at Newgate Prison on the morning of 1 May 1820 in front of a crowd of many thousands, some having paid as much as three guineas for a good vantage point from the windows of houses overlooking the scaffold.

[7] Infantry were stationed nearby, out of sight of the crowd, two troops of Life Guards were present, and eight artillery pieces were deployed commanding the road at Blackfriars Bridge.

[9] After the bodies had hung for half an hour, they were lowered one at a time and an unidentified individual in a black mask decapitated them against an angled block with a small knife.

However, in the House of Commons Matthew Wood MP accused the government of purposeful entrapment of the conspirators to smear the campaign for parliamentary reform.

However, the otherwise pro-government newspaper The Observer ignored the order of the Lord Chief Justice Sir Charles Abbott not to report the trial before the sentencing.