The Earl of Tankerville stopped for Sunday lunch at the King’s Head Hotel en route for Chillingham Castle, Northumberland. He was accompanied by his daughter, Lady Corisande, and her husband, Lord Malmesbury. Their lordships had just helped defeat the Great Reform Bill, which would have extended the vote to more ordinary people.
Returning to their carriage after lunch, ‘a storm of stones assailed us and a furious mob tried to stop us’, said Malmesbury in his memoirs. ‘When I saw what was coming, I pulled my wife under the seat, which saved her from a large paving stone which struck the place where she had been sitting.’ With Lady Corisande cowering, the coach ‘ran the gauntlet at full gallop until we cleared the town’, but was badly damaged.
‘The outrage was committed deliberately and with preparation for the first Peer who passed Darlington after having voted against the reform Bill,’ wrote Malmesbury, who was Foreign Secretary in the 1850s. ‘The stones stood in heaps ready, piled like ammunition, and the victims were to be thrown into the river.’
But hairdresser Jonathan Dresser recalled that the aristocrats had made incendiary gestures at the crowd. He said: ‘Such unwarranted putting of thumbs, twiddling of fingers and slapping of thighs was enough to inflame even the most mild-mannered of men to riot.’
(Malmesbury: Memoirs of an Ex-Minister)