PROLOGUE

Sky like Blood

‘Such a scene my eyes never beheld, and I pray God I may never again... The sky was like blood with the reflection of the fires’

Lady Anne Erskine, Clerkenwell, 1780

THE STORY BEGINS with violence: in the summer of 1780 London was the scene of the worst riots the city had ever ex-perienced, and which were to prove the ‘largest, deadliest and most protracted urban riots in British history’. The death toll was probably about 1,000 people altogether (in proportion to the population of the capital, this remains the highest percentage of deaths in a riot yet known). The physical damage to the structure of the city would not be surpassed until the Blitz in the Second World War. Known to history as the Gordon Riots – famously commemorated by Dickens in Barnaby Rudge, when he wrote of ‘a moral plague’ running through the city – they were deliberately initiated by the militantly Anti-Catholic son of a Scottish duke, who was a Member of the British Parliament.1

Riots were certainly not unknown in eighteenth-century London: there had been the so-called Wilkes Riots in the 1760s and the Keppel Riots after that; but in degree of violence, the Gordon Riots excelled them. Symbols of the State were attacked. Ten Downing Street, already the official residence of the Prime Minister, Lord North, was assaulted at two o’clock in the morning by protesters bearing lighted flambeaux and faggots: they had to be driven off by twenty dragoons on horseback. Meanwhile the Prime Minister’s dinner guests climbed onto the roof in order to see the fires burning as far as the horizon.

If prime ministers were obvious targets for attack, private individuals were not safe either. Lady Anne Erskine was a Scottish lady living quietly in a house attached to Spa Fields Chapel in Clerkenwell. She wrote: ‘Such a scene my eyes never beheld, and I pray God I never may again. The situation of the place which is high and very open gave us an awful prospect of it. We were surrounded by flames. Six different fires – with that of Newgate towering to the clouds... with every hour we were in expectation of this house and chapel making the seventh. The sky was like blood with the reflection of the fires.’ Ten years later, the literary Ladies of Llangollen, gazing at a fierce crimson sunset, were still irresistibly reminded of the Gordon Riots.2

Susanna, sister of another literary lady, Fanny Burney, was living just off Leicester Fields (the modern Leicester Square); the house had formerly belonged to Sir Isaac Newton and still had his old observatory attached. From here the twenty-five-year-old Susanna heard the violent shouts and huzzas as all the furniture of their neighbour was piled up in the square, and his servant forced to bring a candle to light the bonfire: ‘my knees went knicky knocky,’ she confessed. The next night was worse. She watched another house in her own street totally emptied and set alight. The rioters, covered in smoke and dust, looked like ‘so many Infernals’ in the firelight.3

Suddenly the little group in the window, consisting of Susanna, her sister Esther and brother-in-law, caught the attention of the crowd below: ‘They are all three Papists!’ was the cry. It was a dangerous acclamation. ‘Call out No Popery or anything,’ said Esther urgently to her husband. (They were not in fact Catholics.) In a similar fashion, the Jews in Houndsditch would inscribe ‘This house is a true Protestant’ on their dwellings to preserve themselves. One foreigner simply wrote ‘No Religion’ outside his own house, although he also more explicitly draped himself in the blue ribbons of the rioters in the cause of self-preservation.

The mere word ‘Popery’ was in fact inflammatory in its own style. Many of the ignorant crowd, when not seriously bent on plunder as such crowds tend to be, were aware of ‘Popery’ as an evil which needed to be restrained (with ‘Papists’ being those who practised it) without seeking any further information. There were 10,000 stout fellows, as Daniel Defoe had written earlier in the century in The Behaviour of Servants, who would spend their last drop of blood against Popery but ‘do not know whether it be a man or a horse’.4

An illustration of this was the bewilderment of a certain group at the time of the actual Riots when called to attack a house ‘as there were Catholics there’. They replied: ‘What are Catholics to us? We are against Popery.’ Maria Edgeworth, in her novel featuring these events, Harrington, picked on another area of ignorance. A certain woman observer was amazed at the assault on a particular carriage, and the breaking of the windows of a house; for surely these were not ‘Romans’. When assured they were: ‘How is that, when they’re not Irish? For I’ll swear to they’re not being Irish...’ This particular mob responded with lethal simplicity: ‘We require the Papists to be given up for your lives,’ and then added for good measure: ‘No Jews! No wooden shoes!’ This was the kind of mindless cruelty which was responsible for the deliberate incineration of the canaries belonging to a rich silk merchant named Malo, on the grounds that they were ‘Popish birds’.5

From her observation post, Susanna’s heart ached for her Catholic friends, mainly Italians (she was having a delicate romance with an Italian singer at the time). They could not even venture to complain about the destruction of their houses and property because their religion made them so vulnerable. Instead, they mainly took their suspicious foreign names off the door, and one even put his own No Popery notice on it. The summit of the crowd’s wilful, even absurd destruction occurred when a house was attacked – just because the notices outside were in French.

These ferocious riots were in fact a protest against the Catholic Relief Act which had received the Royal Assent of George III in June 1778. It might legitimately be supposed that this Relief Act had enacted widespread, even revolutionary, relaxation of the Penal Laws against Roman Catholics, to provoke such a scabrous assault. In fact the Relief was relatively mild. It was the reaction which was extreme.

To sum up the actual state of the law in England and Scotland before June 1778:^*1 first of all, no Catholic could receive political office, neither in the House of Lords nor the House of Commons, or engage in anything else of an official nature. No Catholic in England and Scotland was allowed to buy or inherit land. Exercising the function of a Catholic priest or running a Catholic school were both activities punishable by life imprisonment. Catholics could not receive commissions in the army or navy, or officially be soldiers or sailors. In the same way, Catholics who declared themselves as such could not attend universities, let alone take degrees.

There was one prohibition in particular with enormous potential social consequences. Even if both bride and groom were Catholics, they could not get married legally by a Catholic priest in a Catholic church: such a ceremony would have no status under the law, with all the consequent penalties. The Marriage Act of 1753, which had relaxed the rules for other dissenting religions, left out the Catholics. For Catholics, in order to avoid complications to do with inheritance and other matters, there had to be an alternative (Protestant) ceremony, even if the participants by definition regarded these vows as empty.

Inheritance was, in fact, another awkward question. There were penal tax laws. Catholics could not in theory inherit property – giving rise to the unpleasant possibility of one member of the family declaring adherence to the official Protestant religion of the State, and demanding to inherit property otherwise destined for a Catholic heir. Six years before the passage of the Act for Relief, the case of the Widow Fenwick became notorious. The Catholic heiress Anne Benson had married the Protestant John Fenwick. When Fenwick died, his Protestant brother claimed his sister-in-law’s property with no other justification than her proscribed religion. Mrs Fenwick was fortunate: she attracted the attention of the benevolent Lord Camden, and finally she secured a settlement by a private Act of Parliament.6 But the threat remained, and it was a genuine threat under the law.

There were minor issues: religious dress – that of nuns, monks and priests – could not lawfully be worn in the streets. Ostentatious signs of the Catholic religion, such as the sound of bells being tolled at Catholic chapels, were specifically forbidden. Furthermore, there is an important clue to the world which lay beyond the arid sentences of the law: anyone who chose to provide information leading to the conviction of a Catholic priest could expect a payment of £100 (about £7,500 today). Nor had this law been a dead letter in recent years: in 1767 the Informers Act was used to secure the successful prosecution of a priest. The informer was one William Payne, who made a living out of such dubious activities. As a result of this denunciation a certain Father Maloney was sentenced to life imprisonment, although subsequently released after four years with a Royal Pardon on condition he left the country to become ‘an exile for Christ’, in the words of a Catholic bishop.7

What then did this Act for Relief, so savagely resented, provide for? First and perhaps most importantly, the laws concerning the arrest and prosecution of Catholic priests were repealed, and the keeping of a Catholic school was no longer punishable by life imprisonment. Catholics could buy land and inherit it just like anyone else, according to the laws of the country, without the potential menace of a Protestant heir, however remote, intervening. All of this affected the lives of ordinary people, or at any rate those prominent enough in society to attract the attention of the land law.

The existence, however, of that notorious controlling authority, the foreign Pope, was not ignored. Catholics were now explicitly commanded in a new Oath of Allegiance to deny that the Pope had any ‘temporal’ (worldly) jurisdiction as opposed to spiritual authority; which meant that the Pope could not any more declare Catholics able to murder their ‘heretic’ Protestant princes (or princesses) without sin. The Pope was also no longer allowed to absolve Catholics from keeping faith with heretics – in so far as he ever had. On the positive side, there were to be prayers for the King in the Catholic churches and chapels newly freed from their illegal status.

The leader – the initiator – of the ferocious protests against this mild relaxation of the Anti-Catholic laws was a curious individual even to his contemporaries. Lord George Gordon’s unusual appearance – long red hair to his shoulders, and slightly protuberant blue eyes – added to the startling impression which he left upon observers, and inspired Horace Walpole to call him ‘the lunatic apostle’. Whether it detracted from the effect he had, or secretly added to it, Gordon had the reputation of a libertine in his private life. It was significant that when he denounced the Protestant Archbishop of Canterbury as ‘the Whore of Babylon’ for his Catholic sympathies, a wit commented that this particular whore was the only whore that Gordon disliked. 8

Lord George was the sixth child of the Duke of Gordon. His education at Eton College was conventional, a note of eccentricity in his family circle being struck by his mother, the Duchess: on being widowed, she chose to marry a young American soldier. It was the Duchess who decided on her son’s early career in the navy. Lord George was twenty-nine at the time of the Gordon Riots, and had been a Member of Parliament for Ludgershall in Wiltshire since the age of twenty-two: it was a seat, in the unreformed House of Commons, which had been bought for him by General Simon Fraser, the Member of Parliament for Inverness.

Gordon was a complicated character. His fierce hostility to the idea of Catholic Relief should be contrasted with other views which would be considered positively liberal in the modern sense of the word.^*2 Undoubtedly possessing great personal charm, he was kind and tender to his social inferiors. Mistreatment of the sailors during his naval career appalled him and he said so: he was ‘the sailor’s friend’, in the words of a biography written shortly after his death. Visiting Jamaica, he studied the conditions in which the inhabitants lived and was indignant at what he called ‘the bloody treatment of the negroes’. In America, by way of contrast, he admired the free-and-easy way of life and independent spirit which he found in the people. Later, as an MP, influenced by Burke, he was marked by his violent opposition to the ‘mad, cruel and accursed American war’ against the would-be independent colonies.9

This was also a man who, as the son of a duke, felt entitled to call on King George III, and exercised his birthright twice. In the second of the two interviews, he chose to indulge himself in a rant about the historic banishment of the House of Stuart for its encouragement of Popery and arbitrary power, with the obvious implication for the future of the King himself, given the Relief Act he had sanctioned. Unsurprisingly, Gordon was denied access to the royal presence a third time.

As all this demonstrates, as well as the charm and the compassion, there was something deeply erratic in Gordon’s nature. On the one hand, it enabled him to exercise a hypnotic influence over large numbers of people. On the other hand, it could take an extremely aggressive form which brought its own consequences. Horace Walpole’s lunatic apostle was on another occasion described by him as Lord George Macbeth.^*3 There was a saying that there were three parties in Parliament, the ministry, the Opposition and Lord George Gordon – to which the man himself characteristically responded that he belonged to a fourth party, the party of the people. Another reference was made to the ‘whirligig’ nature of his political speeches, which contrasted with the ‘elegant young gentleman of engaging manners’ who went out in Society.

When the Catholic Relief Bill was originally introduced into the House of Commons on 15 May 1778, not many Members were present and interest in it was lacklustre. It was not long, however, before stories began to spread and play upon the susceptibilities of what seemed like a self-perpetuating Anti-Catholic mob. In Scotland a separate bill was proposed in 1779, but met with organized hostility in which Gordon took a keen personal interest. As a result, he was elected leader of the Scottish Protestant Association.

One anecdote seems to sum up that mixture of good manners and ardent Anti-Popery which characterized Edinburgh. As the good Catholic Bishop Hay was returning home, a woman explained to him with great courtesy why the way was blocked: ‘Oh, Sir, we are just burning the Popish chapel and we only wish we had the Bishop to throw in the fire.’10 She evidently believed her behaviour to be perfectly normal, or at any rate to need no further justification. There were torchlight processions in Glasgow and other demonstrations; Gordon was able to report to the House of Commons that many of the Scots were quite sure that King George III was actually a ‘Papist’. The Bill was abandoned in February 1779.

All of this was highly encouraging to the English Anti-Papist zealots: in the autumn of 1779 an English Protestant Association was formed with the declared aim of getting the Relief Act repealed. The title page of the Appeal from the Protestant Association by Bishop Sherlock did not mince words: ‘To design the Advancement of POPERY is to design the Ruin of the State, and the Destruction of the Church, it is to sacrifice the Nation to a double Slavery, to prepare chains for their Bodies and their Minds.’ This theme was continued in the text. Popery had long been ‘chained’ in Britain and the consequences of unchaining it would be dreadful to posterity: ‘to tolerate Popery is to encourage what by Toleration itself we mean to destroy, a spirit of persecution of the most notorious kind’.11 In parallel, Gordon’s speeches in the House of Commons, never calm, became notably wilder as the months passed.

Meanwhile signatures were gathered for Petitions to Parliament, the lawful contemporary method of protest. In London over 40,000 people put their names to one Petition, leading to strange incidents such as the distinguished Catholic Lord Petre calling upon Gordon in Welbeck Street, and having to push through a crowd of people waiting to sign a Petition against all his co-religionists. London Petitioners included a handful of women. Susanna Burney believed in fact that the women were more active than the men, but another commentator cynically blamed the odd female intervention on drink – ‘shocking intemperance’ – rather than political commitment. Personal testimonies were added to signatures: ‘John Castle protests against the Doctrine of Popery’; ‘Joseph Sloane, Cooper and Freeman of London and Popery I do deny.’12

Rumour, Shakespeare’s Rumour ‘painted full of tongues’, was ever present. Benedictine monks in Southwark were said to have poisoned all the flour. Even more frighteningly, there were tales of 20,000 Jesuit priests lurking in tunnels beneath the Thames, only waiting for orders from Rome to blow up the banks and bed of the river in order to flood the whole of London.13 This was a bizarre echo of the details of the Gunpowder Plot 175 years earlier, when Guy Fawkes had reached Parliament via the river, and probably owed something to folk memory of it.

It was the presentation of the London Petition to Parliament on 2 June 1780 which led to the escalation of protest to the next, very different stage. The weather matched the mood of the crowd: it was intensely hot, with occasional flashes of lightning. At least 60,000 people gathered in St George’s Fields in Southwark (now the site of Waterloo Station, then an area notorious for beggars on the one hand and illicit love encounters on the other).

Upon which, ‘King Mob’ took things to another stage and began a massive march on Parliament. There were Scots there too, led by a Highlander in a kilt with a drawn sword, and cockades for sale with ‘No Popery’ on them. At least one fifteen-year-old boy from nearby Westminster School joined in. Naturally, not every member of this growing army was animated by idealism; drink began to play an inevitable part, the drunken merging happily with the zealots.

Finally, the whole vast throng surged into Palace Yard and began hooting at the MPs and peers as they arrived. It was not long before hostile words gave way to deeds: the mob moved to pelting mud, and was soon jostling and even assaulting the law-makers of the country. Lord Bathurst was first insulted as ‘the Pope and a silly old woman’ – surely contradictory – and then hit in the face. The Duke of Northumberland had a bad time when he was mistaken for a Jesuit priest. The Protestant Archbishop of York was manhandled, while the Prime Minister, Lord North, had his hat snatched off his head, with pieces sold off as souvenirs for a shilling each.

Soldiers eventually dispersed the rioters from Parliament itself but the mob simply moved on to what it did best: crude but effective attacks on targets chosen according to their own equally crude prejudices. In this way the chapels of the ‘Catholic’ Embassies were sacked. Most visible was that of Sardinia in Duke Street, Mayfair, ‘the Cathedral of London Catholicism’; then there was the Warwick Street church originating from the Portuguese, then the Bavarian Embassy chapel in Golden Square.^*4^,14 The Venetian, the Spanish and the French chapels all suffered devastation.

If chapels were wrecked, so, at the other end of society, were prisons. Newgate was set on fire, which would result in a dramatic scene as described by Dickens, with Barnaby Rudge himself being held in the prison at the time. Other prisons were attacked, including the Fleet prison and the new prison at Southwark. Houses of prominent Catholics – or supposed Catholic sympathizers like the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield – were destroyed. Sir George Savile, as the initiator of the Bill, had his house completely destroyed even though he was a Protestant. The Catholic Bishop Challoner, the Vicar-Apostolic, who was in his late eighties and had dedicated his life to religion, had to be hustled away from his house in Queen Square to a place of safety in Finchley at the home of a Catholic merchant; he had a stroke as a result and died the next year.15

There were exceptions. A building at Hammersmith which was well known in the neighbourhood to be a Catholic convent was saved by the historical myth that Queen Elizabeth I as a girl had been educated there. Lord Petre was fortunate in that his house at the upper end of Park Street was protected by the encampment of soldiers in Hyde Park just opposite.16 But a certain Catholic gentleman, Thomas Fitzherbert of Swynnerton, physically collapsed after his fearful exertions in fortifying his London house, and died the next year at the age of thirty-seven – with the unintended consequences, for royal history, of leaving his much younger wife Maria Fitzherbert a widow.

Along with these indignities and worse there were instances of admirable behaviour, headed by King George III. ‘My attachment is to the laws and security of my country’, along with ‘the protection of the lives and properties of all my subjects’, was the line he took.17

It may well be questioned why the soldiers took so long to demolish the resistance of people who were certainly not so efficiently armed, if properly armed at all. Officially the soldiery had to wait for the Riot Act to be read by a local authority, according to the rules of the time. But it has to be remembered that the enemies of England against whom wars had been fought sporadically throughout the century were actually Catholics. There were nasty stories that the troops had been bribed with money and, even more importantly, alcohol.18 Lord Stormont, for example, pointed out that since the army’s oath included support for the Protestant Succession, aiding Catholics might actually be illegal.

This is not to suggest that all non-Catholic contemporaries were similarly and lethally bigoted. John Newton was an evangelical Anglican clergyman who had begun life as the captain of slave ships before his conversion and subsequently wrote the hymn ‘Amazing Grace’; he founded the so-called Clapham Sect. Now in his fifties, and the recently appointed vicar of St Mary Woolnoth, Lombard Street, he was horrified by these events and declared himself firmly against the ‘mistaken zeal’ of the Protestant Association. ‘Surely the Son of Man came not to destroy men’s lives but to save them,’ he observed pointedly. Asked to condemn the Papacy by some of its members, he had an acerbic answer: ‘I have read of many Popes but the worst Pope I ever encountered was Pope Self.’ Newton was also dismayed that this should be happening at a time when Protestants were gaining more liberties in Papist countries.19

On the other hand, John Wesley, for the Methodists, as early as January 1780 had deplored the increase in Catholicism in the population in a way that was hardly conducive to peace. In the case of the riots, it was not until 5 June that the Protestant Association came to its senses and proclaimed that all true Protestants be requested to show their attachment to their best interest by ‘a legal and peaceable deportment’. Anything else would only distract the MPs from paying proper attention to the united prayers of the Protestant Petition. It was Lord George Gordon who signed the proclamation. But still the riots raged on.

Gradually peace returned and the fires died down. The wretched Catholics who had been told to lie low and attract as little notice as possible began to creep back into the streets again. In the aftermath, there was general agreement by observers on the strange tranquillized state of the city, although there were soldiers instead of merchants on the Royal Exchange, and red coats instead of black infesting St Paul’s Cathedral. The authorities remained profoundly nervous about possible future explosions. Thus the thirteenth-century church of St Christopher-le-Stocks, with its tower, in Threadneedle Street was deemed to be a potential ‘vantage point’ from which to storm the Bank of England. It was purchased and knocked down (to be replaced by the Bank’s own buildings). It became known that other areas had been subject to similar Anti-Popish violence, notably Bath in the west. Other churches and chapels had been destroyed, such as St Charles Borromeo in Hull.20

As a signification that order was being restored, Lord George Gordon himself was arrested in his Welbeck Street house and taken to the Tower of London. He was indicted for High Treason but subsequently acquitted, thanks to a determined defence who pointed out successfully that Lord George and the mob were two quite different things. And one of his legal defenders was not above invoking the Protestant past in a highly emotional manner: ‘I will not call up from the graves of martyrs all the precious blood that has been spilt in this land to save its established government and its reformed religion from the secret villainy and the open force of Papists.’21

Lord George Gordon’s own Narrative of these tumultuous events is not marked by any regrets: this, despite the colossal destruction and loss of life which had followed the presentation of the Petition which he had masterminded.22 In the face of examination, according to Lord Jersey, he had kept ‘a tolerable good countenance’ and answered all the questions with great cunning; but shrank when his crime was explained to him. In his own account, he describes vividly his fears that he would be attacked by Papists, and his need for guards. He denied strongly having any connection to the rioters: ‘he thanked God his conscience was perfectly easy and at rest’. Had he used the word ‘Persevere’, urging on the people in the lobby of the House of Commons? Lord George admitted that it was possible, but always in the sense of persevering ‘in constitutional measures’. He had certainly continued to supply them with bulletins throughout the proceedings.

Such a conflicted individual, at once liberally far-sighted and morally blind, was not destined for an easy life, despite this particular acquittal. Further troubles led to further imprisonments, and Lord George Gordon finally died of fever at the age of forty-two in Newgate, that prison once set on fire by the crowd he had inspired. For some time before his death, his interest had moved from Protestantism to Judaism. Five years after the Gordon Riots, he wrote from prison to the Austrian Emperor Joseph II about his policy towards the Jews. He was converted in 1787, growing a beard and taking the additional name Abraham.

The story of Catholic Emancipation, then, began with violence, the sky like blood. Lord George Gordon, by his strange life story, symbolized in an extreme form the enormous obstacles which lay in its path, the embedded Anti-Catholicism in England and Scotland. This was the emotion which would animate a preacher at the conclusion of the Riots, who referred to England as ‘the Capital of the Protestant world’. Here was a man who was able to envisage the sufferings of negroes, independent-minded American colonists and Jews, but, far from being able to encompass the need for so-called Catholic Emancipation, felt it his duty to raise the country against it.^*5

The question was whether the story would also end in violence. As the historian Gibbon, who lived through the period, wrote: ‘the month of June 1780 will ever be marked by a dark and diabolical fanaticism which I had supposed to be extinct’.23 There was another question about the fight for Catholic Emancipation: when would it end, if it ever did? One way or another ‘the Catholic Question’ would loom over the next fifty years of British history.