A Street Named Cato

A Street Named Cato is a fictionalised biography of Regency revolutionary, Arthur Thistlewood, 1774-1820. Detailed here are his unhappy Lincolnshire childhood, his time as a mercenary fighting for republican France, his tortured private life as husband and father, most of all the years spent in London first as a peaceful then as a violent Radical aiming to assassinate Lord Liverpool’s entire Cabinet. This is a tale of wounded pride, continually thwarted ambition and bitter recriminations. Amid a large cast of high and low born characters, Thistlewood’s complex character stays firmly in view as we move inexorably towards the doomed plot of February 1820 and death on a Newgate gallows two months later.