History has often dismissed the men as ignorant, deluded fools. As the grandchild of railway workers, domestic servants and miners, this enraged me. Working at the BL on another project, I came across the letters, written by the principal conspirators to their families on the night before they were hanged. That was some time in 2007. From that moment, I was compelled to tell the story from the point of view of the participants, including the spy who betrayed them and their families. As well as extensive study of archive I drew from past interviews with activists in Ireland and South Africa as well as family members in a desolate English mining town.

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“No future is achieved until it is first imagined.”

                                                          Ashcroft, 2016 

There’s a strong argument for crediting Machiavelli – and his contemporary Leonardo da Vinci – with fashioning a leadership template which dominates education in the UK to this day.  In grafting together Machiavelli’s ‘Prince’ and Leonardo’s ‘Vitruvian Man’ a hero is born, a David Beckham of his time, a logical űber-human against whom the rest of us are measured and found to be ‘other’. In Europe at least, the ‘natural order’ saw the heroic leader ensconced firmly at the top; there by merit rather than birth, his pursuit of knowledge bringing the desired freedom and happiness of ‘Enlightenment’.  As feminist, postcolonial and posthuman thinkers point out, this adoption of Vitruvian Man as the symbol of ultimate human perfection provided philosophical fertiliser for centuries of oppression and colonization, based on ‘othering’ everyone who by reason of gender, skin colour, economic value or other privilege could not aspire to Vitruvian status.  More