A cottage industry Conspiracy

One thing that the conspirators didn’t have was money.  The only funding they had came from their agent provocateur George Edwards things.  If they wanted pikes and grenades they had to make them themselves. So even though they wore sword belts made of string or left-over leather from ladies’ shoes, they knew how to hammer out pike-heads, as you can see here.  These examples, used as evidence at the trial, can still be seen at the National Archives.  What we witness in these artefacts is a cottage industry poised to do battle with the world’s dominant military state. They even wrote out their revolutionary proclamations by hand, like this as they could not afford to have them printed. This was revolution on a budget.