Includes bibliographical references and index.

"Well over a century ago Joseph Conrad gave the most modest of subtitles to The Secret Agent, his novel about London's late-Victorian anarchists. A Simple Tale of the Nineteenth Century, he called it. On the face of it, the story told in this book about an earlier, non-fictional group of terrorists in regency London is a simple tale too. It takes us up-close-and-personal to the conspirators who on the night of 23 February 1820 assembled in an obscure stable on the western edge of London in order to massacre the whole British government as it sat down to dinner in a Grosvenor Square mansion. This was the most sensational of all plots aimed at the state between the Gunpowder Plot of 1605 and the Irish Republican Army's Brighton bomb attack on Thatcher and her party in 1984. Had it succeeded it would have changed our world utterly"--