Lord George Gordon was a pathological malcontent. In modern society his invariably erratic and bellicose behaviour would be attributed to the neglect he undoubtedly suffered after the death of his father, the Duke of Gordon, and his mother’s second marriage. He was enlisted in the navy in 1763 without his agreement or even knowledge, and immediately began to display radical – and therefore unacceptable – inclinations. He complained about the treatment received by (often press-gang-recruited) ratings, declared slavery immoral and expressed doubts about the propriety of the war against the American colonists.
After four years’ service he decided – motivated more by perversity than political conviction – to stand for Parliament in Inverness-shire. He approached the election with such manic energy that the sitting Member – General Charles Fraser, son of Lord Lovat – feared defeat. After hasty discussions between the fathers of the two candidates, it was agreed that Lord George would withdraw from the Inverness-shire contest and would be bought a seat elsewhere. At the age of twenty-two he therefore became the Member of Parliament for Ludgershall in Wiltshire. Despite his election, he retained his naval commission. After nine years’ service, and still only a lieutenant, he asked for promotion. When his request was refused, Lord George resigned with the explanation that resignation had always been his intention. He was opposed to the war in North America and would not ‘imbrue his hands with the blood of men struggling for freedom’.1 It was then that he concluded that Scotland’s exclusion from the Relief Act – and the consequent prohibition on Scotsmen bearing arms – was an insult to a nation and a people, and would leave the country defenceless against the long-expected Catholic uprising.
Perversely, in light of its opposition to all things Catholic, the Edinburgh Protestant Association was attracted to Gordon’s strong views on the extension of the Relief Act to Scotland. At its invitation, he visited the city and made a series of provocative speeches. These, in turn, caught the attention of James Fisher, the secretary of the Protestant Association in London. Gordon – fanatic and nobleman – seemed an ideal figurehead for the organisation. His letter accepting Fisher’s invitation to become president mixed aristocratic hauteur with vulgar populism. Gordon’s views on the Relief Act had changed diametrically. The bill had been ‘introduced in a thin House at the end of the session and passed without public debate’. He did not want to ‘raise the apprehensions of the lower classes of people’, but it was necessary to make the threat known. ‘Popery, when encouraged by Government, has always been dangerous to the liberties of the people.’2 Gordon was no longer concerned with the Relief Act’s application to Scotland. The demand now was for repeal.
Gordon’s allegations were reinforced by the increasingly influential John Wesley. In A Letter to a Roman Catholic, published in 1749, Wesley had denounced Popery as sinful. His opposition to ‘the purple power of Rome advancing by hasty strides to overspeed this unhappy nation’ was political rather than theological. In Popery Properly Considered he argued that Catholics had, by swearing allegiance to a foreign power, sacrificed all their civil rights. In a letter to the Public Advertiser, dated January 1780, he was more categorical, though less philosophical. ‘No [Protestant] government ought to tolerate men of a Roman Catholic persuasion.’3
Opposition to the Relief Act became so persistent and strong that Lord Petre – who had become the acknowledged leader of the Catholic gentry – thought it expedient to visit George Gordon and suggest to him, as one gentleman to another, that the Protestant Association was ‘a mean set of people’ and that, rather than follow their lead, Gordon should allow the Act to run, unhindered, for five years to see if his fears about its consequences were justified. Gordon rejected the proposal on the ground that, were he to deny the Association the leadership its members expected, ‘there would probably spring up some Wat Tyler’ (the leader of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt) with the ‘ambition to embroil the country in civil war’.4 He then, gratuitously, added that he expected that Catholics would take the oath which Petre claimed was the guarantee of their loyalty as well as the requirement of their new liberties – but not respect it. Petre’s attempt at reassurance was a disaster. Far from comforting Gordon, the news that the oath had been declared acceptable by a Catholic committee in Paris was greeted with fury. The discussion of British affairs in a foreign, and potentially enemy, capital was an affront to national sovereignty and confirmation that the Papists’ first loyalty was not to King George. Gordon was reinforced in the view that the Act must be repealed. The next step would be a petition to Parliament which demonstrated every true Englishman’s determination to halt the advance of Popery.
There followed a bizarre series of audiences with the King, which Gordon, the son of a duke, was able to demand as the right of his rank. They certainly took place, but for the details of the proceedings, posterity has to rely on Horace Walpole, an elegant essayist but unreliable historian. In his Journal of the Reign of George III, Walpole claimed that, at the first audience, Gordon began, uninvited, to read aloud a pamphlet that he was about to publish. He continued his reading until he received the promise that, if he would stop, the King would finish it himself that evening. The story – true or false – was published in the Morning Post. So the second audience was taken up by the King’s complaints about Gordon’s indiscretions. The third began with Gordon locking the audience chamber doors behind him. Then the captive King was reminded that the last Stuart monarch lost his crown because he was a Papist. Finally, Gordon accused King George of sending Sir John Dalrymple to Edinburgh to strike a bargain with the Scottish Catholics. When George denied the charge, Gordon challenged him to prove the point by instructing his servants to sign a petition calling for the repeal of the Relief Act. The King, at last reacting against Gordon’s impertinence, refused. Gordon stormed out, swearing that he would rally the people of Britain against Roman subversion. If the story is half true, the King deserves great credit for his forbearance. And Horace Walpole was justified in declaring Lord George Gordon to be mad.
Mad or not, by the spring of 1780 Gordon was able to tell a meeting at the Crown and Rolls in Chancery Lane that there were 100,000 signatures on his petition and that he proposed to present it to Parliament at once. Alarmed that the campaign was running out of control, James Fisher, the secretary of the Association, proposed a month’s pause for calm consideration. Gordon would not contemplate delay. It is at least possible Fisher knew that Lord North, the Prime Minister, intended to offer Lord George Gordon a government sinecure and several thousand pounds in return for a promise to abandon the campaign against the Relief Act. The bribe was offered and instantly rejected. Gordon had become obsessed both with the campaign and with the organisation of a giant petition as a method of promoting it.
In May he told a mass meeting in the Coachmakers’ Hall that if the Protestant Association did not accept his battle plan, he would no longer lead the fight. ‘The only way to go is in a bold manner and shew that we are to defend Protestantism with our lives.’5 The meeting – despite the doubts of the campaign’s more prudent leaders – accepted Gordon’s terms and agreed to organise a mass rally in St George’s Field on Friday June 2nd as a prelude to the petition being presented to Parliament. However, Gordon announced that he would only make the presentation if he were accompanied to Westminster by at least 20,000 supporters. The rally attracted more than three times that number. So it was decided, ‘for the sake of good order and regularity’, that the 50,000 who marched in support of the petition should be divided into four separate columns and should approach Parliament by four different routes. Every marcher was to wear a blue cockade so as to be identified as a supporter of the Protestant cause. The Association’s determination to demonstrate its respectability resulted in the composition of a pious statement which set out the way in which the great day was to be organised. The motion ‘Resolved that the Magistrates of London, Westminster and Southwark are requested to attend so that their presence may overawe and control any riotous or evil minded persons who may wish to disturb the legal and peaceable deportment of His Majesty’s Protestant Subjects’.6
Lord George Gordon’s arrival at St George’s Field was greeted by wild cheering and the only slightly less boisterous singing of Protestant hymns. As he walked towards the rough podium that had been prepared for him, he handed stewards bundles of leaflets for distribution to the crowd. Their message, he explained, was designed to encourage ‘inculcation of the same pacific temper’ as had inspired the organisers of the petition from the start.7 But whatever its intention, the brief speech that followed – warning his supporters not to be provoked by Catholic troublemakers in the crowd – excited passions rather than suppressed them. At that moment he was in complete command of his followers. His announcement that he would go at once to the House of Commons in anticipation of the arrival of the petition was greeted by insistent requests to accompany him. But his plan was for the march to follow him an hour later and present the petition to him at Parliament’s door. So the requests were rejected, and the rejection was accepted as if Lord George’s word was law.
There are a variety of explanations why a disciplined, if angry, march degenerated into a lawless mob. The Protestant Association’s explanation exonerated its members, but placed the blame less on Papist agents provocateurs than on other undesirables who infiltrated the columns as they approached Westminster. There is no doubt that a variety of pimps and prostitutes, pickpockets and cut-throats – as well as men and women who had no motive for causing trouble other than the pleasure they found in gratuitous violence – contributed to the mayhem that followed. But the claim that the Protestant Association was blameless is unsustainable. The events of the following week confirm that, from the start, there were Protestants who regarded the march as an opportunity for mounting a Catholic pogrom. Otherwise respectable citizens were caught up in a mood of anti-Catholic hysteria which prevented them from either behaving with discretion or showing respect for the law.
As the four columns converged on the Parliament building, Frederic Reynolds – a fifteen-year-old pupil at Westminster School – abandoned his lessons in order to witness what he described as ‘most novel and extraordinary proceedings’. He identified most of the marchers as ‘honest Mechanics; the better sort of trades people’.8 That was not how they behaved. The marchers became a mob and, according to Reynolds, occupied ‘every avenue to the House of Commons, the whole of Westminster Bridge and extending to the northern end of Parliament Street’ – the greater part of it ‘composed of persons decently dressed who appeared to be excited to extravagance by a species of fanatical phrenzy’. Many of the law-abiding and timid citizens, who had joined the march in St George’s Field, realised that they had unwittingly become part of a potential riot and returned home. But at the climax of that first day, most of the men and women who remained were members of the Protestant Association and the best that can be said about them is that, although they had started the march with no intention but to express their opinions, they had been carried away by mass hysteria.
From then on, it seemed as if a murderous madness had afflicted previously sane men and women and caused them mindlessly to join with whores and thugs in burning whatever they believed to be the property of Papists and their champions. However, much of the viciousness and violence that followed the march was planned, coldly and calmly, by prosperous artisans. After order was restored, shocked Catholics wrote down what they had heard and seen: ‘Macfarlane, who keeps a public house in Church Court in the Strand; Mackenzie, a Taylor; Mackenzie, a cheesemonger; Farquickson, a cabinet maker. On Thursday the 1st or Friday 2nd of June, in company with Mr Bond and Mr Ewen, in the Gallic Language did vow to demolish the Chapels and Houses of Roman Catholics in London and Westminster. Did publically revile His Majesty – saying he was a Papist, had broken his coronation oath, had forfeited his right to the crown.’9 The veracity of that report to a London priest is only slightly diminished by its bizarre postscript: ‘All Highlanders had bagpipes playing.’ But if the account of the event – said to have taken place on the day before, or the day of, the march on Parliament – is correct, the informant’s not-quite-literate conclusion is wholly justified: ‘If this would not amount to treason; and who instigated them but Lord George Gordon?’
Most of the violence, on the first day of what became a riot, was directed at the peers and Members of Parliament who were said to have betrayed the Protestant cause by passing the Relief Act. They were pulled from their carriages and pelted with mud, jostled and threatened with such arcane vengeance as having crosses carved on their foreheads. Attempts were made to invade the chambers of both Houses. Though one of its members, Lord Boston, was held prisoner by the mob, the Lords attempted to continue its noble business in its imperturbable way. The Duke of Richmond, who was in the middle of a long speech in favour of more equal representation in Parliament, refused to give way in order to allow a less composed colleague to ask the government to make a statement on what amounted to a siege. Commons doorkeepers held at bay an invasion by what they claimed to be 14,000 insurgents. So consideration of the Hair Powder Bill and a motion to impose a duty on starch proceeded until Lord George Gordon arrived and immediately moved that he be allowed to present his petition. His proposal was not seconded and he was shouted down.
The confusion continued all day. Magistrates made ineffectual attempts to disperse the crowd. Troops – including Foot and Horse Guards – drew up in front of the mob, as if to charge. But, uncertain of both their powers and their orders, they stood fast and, instead of charging, were charged. Inside the Commons chamber, Members attempted to carry on normal business against the background roar of the mob at the gates of Parliament. From time to time Gordon repeated his proposal that Parliament receive his petition. During the early evening his motion was seconded by Alderman Frederick Bull. The great roll of parchment was dragged into the chamber and Members debated whether or not its contents should be debated. Lord George spoke – or so he claimed – on behalf of the 12,000 of those of His Majesty’s subjects who were ‘praying for a repeal of the act passed the last session in favour of Roman Catholics’.10 The opponents of the Act were, he claimed, as ‘determined to stand up for their religious rights … against the pernicious effects of a religion, subversive of all liberty, inimical to all morals, begotten by fraud and superstition and teeming with absurdity, persecution and the most diabolical cruelty’.
From time to time, during the debate that followed, Gordon left the chamber and addressed the milling crowd outside. His speeches usually identified and denounced Members who had spoken against his motion. At one point a voice from the adoring crowd asked him for guidance. Lord George replied that the marchers must decide for themselves. Although he claimed, against the evidence, that Scotland had saved itself from the effects of a Relief Act by remaining ‘steady and cool’, his description of ‘how the matter stands’ was an open incitement to occupy Parliament and impose the will of the mob on Members. ‘The House is going to divide upon the question whether your petition shall be taken into consideration now or upon Tuesday … If it is not taken into consideration now it may be lost. Tomorrow the House does not meet. Monday is the King’s birthday. Upon Tuesday Parliament may be dissolved.’
The Commons – which had not behaved with great distinction earlier in the day – responded to the threat of mob rule with spirit, if not composure. Colonel Holroyd, asserting that Gordon was bad as well as mad, told him that if he further incited the mob, a resolution would be moved, committing him to the Tower. General Conway – as well as proposing that three Members should defend the narrow entrance to the House, as Horatio and his colleagues defended the bridge across the Tiber – promised that the first fatality in the battle would be the rabble-rouser himself. Others followed Gordon about the chamber, ready physically to prevent him from performing other acts of malice and mischief. After six hours of rancorous argument, the question was put. Lord George Gordon, Alderman Frederick Bull and six other Members voted in favour; 190 Members voted against.
The Guards were recalled to ensure Members a safe passage home, but once again they proved unwilling or unable to disperse the mob. Indeed, they were treated with such good-natured derision that the enterprising Justice Addington, the magistrate who was directing operations, took advantage of the apparent change of mood to make an offer. He would withdraw the troops if the protesters promised, on their honour, voluntarily to disperse. It is not clear how they would have signified their agreement. But Justice Addington, rather than waiting for an answer, immediately instructed the Guards to return to barracks. To Addington’s delight, the rest of the mob began to drift away. His pleasure was misplaced. The men who wanted to storm the House of Commons left Westminster because, having failed in their objective of forcing the petition on Parliament, they had decided to express their anti-Catholicism in a different way. Sometime before midnight a group of men, wearing blue cockades and carrying banners of the sort that had festooned the Protestant Association march, were seen marching down Queen’s Street towards Lincoln’s Inn. They carried pickaxes and spades, hammers and crowbars and flaming torches. They were making for Duke Street and the Sardinian Ambassador’s chapel of St Anselm and St Cecilia, ‘the Cathedral of London Catholicism’.
The ringleader pushed his crowbar through one of the chapel windows. That was the signal for the destruction to begin. The doors were broken down and hundreds of rioters rushed inside and pulled down the altar. The holy statues were smashed into pieces and thrown, together with the curtains and vestments, into the street, where everything that would burn was made into a giant bonfire. Sampson Rainsforth, the King’s Tallow Chandler and an ardent Protestant, attempted to arrest a man he saw carrying off a candlestick. The thief was rescued by his friends and Rainsforth ran to Somerset House Barracks in the hope that the Guards who were stationed there would come to the defence of what was left of the Sardinian Embassy chapel. For the first time that day, military intervention was effective. The chapel itself was on fire and many of the rioters had moved on to find other Catholic premises – as it turned out, houses as well as chapels to destroy. But those who remained were scattered by a bayonet charge. Thirteen men, who loitered rather than ran, were arrested. All of them were in respectable employment and five of them were Roman Catholics.
The destruction of the Sardinian Embassy chapel having been completed to its satisfaction, the mob moved on to the Bavarian Embassy chapel in Golden Square. It was sacked, but not set on fire. Then the cry went up that they should find Richard Challoner – who, in their ignorance, they believed to be one of the authors of the Relief Act – and force him to take part in some sort of sacrilegious ceremony. They found their way to Gloucester Street but could not identify his house. Showing more restraint than they had previously exhibited, the (by now depleted) mixture of hooligans and bigots decided not to burn down the entire road. Exhausted and disappointed, they drifted home. Challoner was sleeping, safe if not at peace, in Finchley under the protection of William Mawhood, a rich woollen merchant.
On Saturday morning a vast crowd waited outside the Savoy Prison in anticipation of eleven of the men, who were arrested at the Sardinian Embassy chapel, being marched to court in Bow Street. When they appeared, the troops who escorted them were greeted with an explosion of booing, but although a few stones were thrown, no serious attempt was made to free the prisoners. After they were remanded in custody, the men and women who watched them being taken to Newgate Prison lined the route in sullen silence. Next day the court concluded that nine of the men were no more than spectators of the arson. They were discharged.
For the whole time that the mayhem continued, Lord George Gordon did not leave his lodging. By early evening it was generally supposed that the riots were over and London could sleep in peace. The general supposition was wrong. The disturbance that was to grow into a ten-day riot began in Moorfields, a part of London which was the home of hundreds of Irishmen. Most of them were vagrants and casual labourers, but among them lived a handful of rich businessmen. The businessmen’s motives for only employing their countrymen were mixed. Some felt a sentimental obligation to fellow Irishmen. Others knew that the immigrants would work longer hours and expect less pay than the native-born Englishmen, who deeply resented the advantage they imagined the Irish enjoyed.
One of the businessmen was a silk merchant named Malo, who was as well known for his ardent Catholicism as for his selective employment policy. And it was probably a combination of both aspects of his reputation that made a restless crowd congregate outside his house on the afternoon of Sunday June 4th. It is because the days of carnage began there that some historians believe the rioting that followed was more about poverty than the Pope. Perhaps. But if that was so, the mob was incited to violence by a handful of fanatics who encouraged the belief that Catholicism – as represented by the Irish – was the cause of their distress. The assaults on Malo’s property and person represented a new aspect of anti-Catholic bigotry. As ‘Papists’ were freed of their legal disabilities and enabled to play a greater part in the economics of the nation, the Irish – whose religion and nationality were always synonymous – came to find work in England in increasing numbers. Catholics, who had always been a threat to England’s national security, became a threat to Englishmen’s prosperity.
At the first sign of trouble, Malo had asked Alderman Brackley Kennett, the Lord Mayor of London, for protection and was rebuffed during a series of conversations which ended with Kennett displaying his prejudice by asking, ‘Surely Sir, you are a Papist?’11 For most of the day, Kennett’s inactivity might have been explained, if not excused, by the crowd around Malo’s house behaving in a way that was offensive but not violent. The violence began at about six o’clock when, at what some observers claimed was a pre-arranged signal, the crowd turned into a mob, moved off into Ropemaker’s Alley and attacked the Catholic chapel. The marshalmen, who were employed by the ward’s alderman to keep order, refused to protect ‘any Popish rascals’. Many of them wore blue cockades.
The assault on the chapel was the beginning of Moorfields’ two days of terror, during which every Catholic chapel in the area was demolished, houses of identified Catholics were burned down and Catholics – men, women and children – were openly assaulted in the streets. Kennett asked for military assistance and a company of Coldstream Guards, under the command of a young ensign, was sent to Moorfields. However the magistrates refused permission for them to clear the streets by force, and they returned to barracks. That at least spared the more cerebral soldiers – both officers and men – from wrestling with a dilemma with which some of them had been presented by their Church of England padres. Having taken an oath to defend a Church of England king against his Roman Catholic enemies, were they entitled to take up arms against Protestants whose intention was to suppress potentially rebellious Papists?
The soldiers’ retreat left open the way for the climax to the Moorfields riot: the sacking and burning of Malo’s house. The family – who had stubbornly refused to leave – escaped over the roof. The furniture, doors and ripped-up floorboards were piled in a heap in the road and set alight. The family’s canaries, in their cage, were put on top of the bonfire. One onlooker – displaying, as Englishmen should, greater concern for birds than for the people – offered to buy them and save them from the flames. He was told, ‘They are Popish birds and should burn with other Popish goods.’12
On the second day, the mob turned its attention to Leicester Fields. Daniel Defoe wrote about the ‘ten thousand stout fellows who would spend the last drop of their blood against Popery that do not know whether it be man or horse’. And they were sustained as much by that ignorance as by prejudice in all sorts of diseased imaginings. Charlotte, the sister of Fanny Burney, heard a man justify ‘having the Catholic chapel destroyed, for they say it is a shame that the Pope should come here’.13 And when the riots spread to Bath, one elderly gentleman’s life was put at risk when demonstrators decided that ‘he must be Pope because he lodges in St James’s Parade and has a nightgown with gold flowers on it’.14 But, obscured by the mindless violence and ingrained ignorance, there was a precise intention to identify and punish the men who had promoted Catholic relief.
Edmund Burke, who had offered to write the preamble to the Act, returned home from Parliament to find that his house had been saved from destruction by soldiers sent, not by the Lord Mayor, but directly by the government. Sir John Savile, who had introduced the bill, was not so lucky. His house was burned to the ground. Sampson Rainsforth, who tried to prevent the destruction of the Sardinian Embassy chapel and had subsequently given evidence that led to the remand of eleven rioters, was unfortunate enough to be described as a hero in some of Saturday’s papers. On him, the mob exacted a special vengeance. He was forced to sit in the road outside his house and warehouse and watch the fire, intensified by the tallow that was his stock in trade, consume both buildings. Sir John Fielding, the only magistrate to make a real attempt to disperse the mob, and Mr Justice Hyde, who read the Riot Act in front of Parliament to legitimise troops clearing the way for Members to return to the House of Commons, were spared until Tuesday night. Then their houses were set alight.
When it reassembled, the House of Commons passed four pious resolutions: setting up an inquiry into the causes, calling for the prosecution of the miscreants, providing compensation for the victims and, of course, condemning the invasion of Parliament as a breach of privilege. Each one was passed unanimously. Lord George Gordon not only voted in favour, but issued a statement on behalf of the Protestant Association. It called on ‘all true Protestants … to show their attachment to their best interests by legal and peaceable deportment’. The sudden conversion to moderation did nothing either to reduce his popularity with the Protestant mob or to limit the vehemence with which it demonstrated its opposition to Popery. When Gordon left the Commons, the horses were taken from the shafts of his carriage and he was pulled home by cheering supporters. No doubt they were less influenced by his conduct in Parliament than by two pamphlets that had been published the previous day and were popularly attributed to Robert Watson, Gordon’s secretary. England in Blood denounced the ‘infernal designs of the ministry’ which had allowed the Relief Act to become law. True Protestants, No Turncoats called for the continued demonstration of Protestant feeling. So the indiscriminate attacks on Papists and Papist sympathisers continued.
The Duke of Devonshire, certain that his family’s history of militant Protestantism would guarantee the safety of Devonshire House, rode out to reinforce the rescue of the besieged Lord Rockingham, whose record was less unequivocal. His coach was stopped in Piccadilly and he was required to step down and cry, ‘No Popery.’ The mob that had attacked the home of Mr Justice Hyde had been led, in so far as any leadership was possible, by a man riding a carthorse and waving a Protestant Association banner. As the flames began to die, he stood in the stirrups and cried, ‘A-hoy for Newgate.’ The rioters’ next objective was the prison in which four of the men arrested during the assault on the Sardinian Embassy chapel were being held. But as they were to make clear when they arrived at the gates, releasing the arsonists was not their only objective. They were bent on destroying the whole prison – a symbol of the establishment which had always been their enemy and had, in their disturbed minds, betrayed the poor of England by giving succour to the Catholic enemy.
The Keeper of the Prison, acting with commendable courage, refused the mob entry and they set about the methodical destruction of the gatehouse in which he lived. The Justices of the Peace, alarmed at the thought of a mass breakout, raised a hundred constables to charge the crowd. They were ambushed and disarmed. The poet George Crabbe – on one of his occasional visits from Suffolk to London – saw what followed. ‘They broke the roof, tore away the rafters and, having got ladders, they descended. Not Orpheus himself had better luck – flames all around them … About twelve women and eight men ascended from their confinement.’ Rather more left through the broken gates. Estimates of the number of prisoners who escaped, some of them still in manacles and chains, vary from 117 to 301. What is certain is that three of them were already condemned to death and awaiting execution at the end of the week.
Drunk with the sense of power that the destruction had created – and with wine and spirits stolen from the Prison Keeper’s cellar – the mob moved on. They first attempted to set fire to houses occupied by the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, and the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Lord Chief Justice had incurred the wrath of the Protestant Association by acquitting James Talbot of the crimes of being a priest and saying Mass. The second charge had been dismissed because the informant had not heard the words of the Mass spoken – and the crime was saying the Mass. The first was thrown out on the grounds that if wearing vestments was proof of a priestly vocation, then every High Court judge was guilty.15 William Markham, the Archbishop of York, was thought, with some justification, to have sympathy for the Catholic cause. Both attempts at retribution failed. So the rioters relieved their frustration by attacking the Bridewell Prison and the neighbouring New Prison. Then they renewed, with greater success than they had previously enjoyed, their plan to punish Archbishop Markham and Lord Mansfield. Both houses were set alight. Neither burned down.
The mob then discussed – in so far as discussion is possible within a mob – whether or not they should burn the Northampton Chapel in Clerkenwell. Its anti-Papist credentials were impeccable. Charles Wesley appeared there from time to time to celebrate Holy Communion with the Countess of Huntington, its owner and the founder of several Protestant sects. But it had previously belonged to a Mr Maperley, who had sided with Sampson Rainsforth, and there was a strong feeling that it deserved destruction on that account. Eventually they decided to leave the chapel, in favour of another prison. So they marched on to the Fleet.
On Monday the attacks on individually identified Roman Catholics confirmed that, although many – perhaps most – of the rioters were motivated by criminal greed and the love of violence for violence’s sake, bigotry still drove on some of the mob. Peter Lyon reported to his priest, ‘On Monday morning the rioters came to my house at half past one when I and my family were asleep and we made our escape over the roof and got out backwards. I lost all our furniture and wearing apparel. My loss is to the amount of four hundred and fifty pounds.’16 By then the riots had lasted four days. On Monday afternoon the King – contemptuous of Parliament’s apparent impotence, angered by the army’s combination of incompetence and timidity and no doubt disturbed by the rumour that Buckingham Palace had been demolished and that he was dead in the rubble – sent a message to the House of Commons urging Members to ‘take such measures as the time requires’. The message was ignored.
A charitable explanation of the army’s inactivity was provided by Archbishop Markham. ‘A fatal error has prevailed among the military that they could not in any case act without the orders of a civil magistrate which is the case when a great mob has assembled but has not yet proceeded to any acts of violence. But when they have begun to commit felonies, any subject [the military with the rest] is justified in Common Law in using all methods to prevent illegal acts.’17 The King reacted to the advice that no formal declaration was necessary by issuing a Royal Proclamation offering a £300 reward (‘and a pardon if necessary’) to anyone who assisted in the prosecution and conviction of ‘person or persons … concerned in pulling down … the chapel of any Foreign Minister’. Perhaps George was more concerned about diplomatic relations or good order and discipline than the civil rights and safety of his Catholic subjects. Whatever the real reasons for his initiative, the King of England – untainted himself by serious suspicions of Popery – had come to the rescue of Papist property, if not Papist persons.
Not everyone followed the King’s lead. On June 7th, the day on which it received the Royal Proclamation, the Common Council of the City of London passed, unanimously, a resolution that called for the repeal of ‘the Act of Parliament recently passed in favour of Roman Catholics’ as the best way of restoring order. Alderman John Wilkes – claiming that Farringdon Without, his own ward, was at the centre of the riots – proposed that the Royal Proclamation be committed for consideration on another day. His motion was intended to be a calculated insult to the King – a gesture Wilkes regarded as more important than a practical proposal to restore order, protect property and save lives. When no one seconded what amounted to parliamentary games, Wilkes withdrew his motion and urged immediate action against the rioters.
The army, in the form of the Adjutant General, had already responded to the Royal Proclamation as duty required. Strategic locations – the Bank of England, the Guildhall, the Royal Exchange and the Inns of Court – were all heavily defended. During the next couple of days, Alderman John Wilkes – changed from dissident into City Father – took formal charge of the Buckinghamshire militia and was joined in defence of the Bank by Lord Algernon Percy, who had led the Northumberland militia on a forced march south. They were both surprised by the arrival of an agitated Lord George Gordon, who attempted to harangue the mob. Against the background noise of rapturous cheering which greeted his appearance, it was difficult to make out what he meant to say, but it seems – and he was later explicitly to claim – that he pleaded with them to go home. Whatever his intention, his speech only increased the crowd’s frenzy, and a young Guards officer pushed him behind the ranks of the increasingly nervous soldiers. The mob charged, the soldiers opened fire and perhaps as many as a dozen rioters were killed.
The rioters then turned their attention to softer targets. First in line was the brewery owned by Thomas Langdale, a Catholic with twelve children to protect. Initially the mob was more interested in sampling Langdale’s produce than in destroying his property but, eventually, the house and the brewery were both set on fire. Several rioters died in the cellar. Some were overcome by the fumes as they tapped the kegs of whisky and gin. Others were too drunk to notice that they were being trapped by the flames. The assault on the Bank was renewed and again repulsed – even though by the time of the attack some of the rioters were armed with stolen muskets. By then the army had belatedly recognised both the size of the threat and its duty to play a part in defeating it. Large contingents of men were stationed on Blackfriars and Westminster Bridges. The rioters were first to be dispersed and then killed, captured or driven back to their hovels.
It is not clear how long it took to clear the streets or whether or not individual acts of arson continued, sporadically, after the riots were generally over. Militant Protestants in Bath, Bristol, Birmingham and Hull heard the news from London and, some days later, felt an obligation to demonstrate their solidarity by behaving in a similarly violent fashion. In Bath, the Catholic community had caused particular offence by acquiring ‘a Chapel in Corn Street … Well furnished with seats [it] has a gallery with commodious pews, a fine altar with an elegant painting of Our Saviour dying on the Cross over it.’18 On June 17th, they were punished for their effrontery by both the destruction of the chapel and assaults on those who worshipped within it. The impression the riots made on Henry Stoner – the six-year-old member of a distinguished Catholic family – was so great that, even in old age, he told the story of his escape from the mob: ‘In the dead of night I was obliged to get up hastily and was led by my father to York House, where we all passed remainder of the night. Early next morning we all set off for Stonor [the Oxfordshire village to which the family gave its name] leaving the Catholic Chapel in flames.’19 The Catholics of Bristol acted with greater discretion. A chapel set up in a warehouse in the mid-1770s was taken down, in anticipation of the Bath riots spreading to the coast.
In London the riots lasted for six days. Even when the worst was over, there were still sudden outbursts of violence, including a moment of madness in Fleet Street when a group of men who had broken away from the main mob charged a picket of Horse Guards. Twenty rioters were killed and twice as many wounded. But by the evening of Thursday June 8th patrols of the hastily mustered London Military Association were patrolling the streets, firing on ‘any four persons collected together who will not instantly disperse’ and searching for the prisoners who had been released from the destroyed gaols. A new rumour – rioters’ corpses hanging from hastily constructed gibbets – was joyously received by respectable Londoners. A few libertarians combined with irreconcilable opponents of the government to complain that ministers, who had failed to act when the riot could easily have been put down, acted too severely when the riots were at their height, by sanctioning the troops to open fire on unarmed civilians.
Relief at the return to the rule of law did not incline politicians towards mercy. During the week of the riots and the days that immediately followed, 450 alleged rioters were arrested, 160 of them stood trial, and 75 were found guilty of offences ranging from causing an affray to murder. Twenty-five of the convicted rioters – including a boy of fifteen and a girl a year older – were hanged. Not one of the 450 suspects was found to have signed the Protestant Association petition. The only defendant who confessed to being motivated by strong religious beliefs was Denis Reardon who, when his wife had come home drunk and shouting ‘No Popery!’, had decapitated her with a carving knife.20
On Friday June 9th two King’s Messengers arrested Lord George Gordon. He was searched and found to be carrying a pistol and large knife, which he described as ‘necessary to defend myself against Roman Catholics’. He was taken to Westminster where a group of Privy Councillors, including Lord North, the Prime Minister, found he had a case to answer and sent him to the Tower to await a formal trial. Gordon waited there until late December. During the half year he was on remand, he was visited by John Wesley, who recorded in his diary that the ‘conversation turned upon Popery and religion’.21 When the indictment was published, the nearest it got to a mention of either subject was the preamble which described the defendant as ‘not having the fear of God before his eyes but being seduced by the instigation of the devil’. The actual charge was purely secular. Among the dubiously judicial description of ‘clubs, bludgeons, staves and other warlike weapons’ was the allegation that Gordon ‘unlawfully, maliciously and traitorously did compass, imagine and intend to raise and levy war against our Lord the King’. Gordon’s defence was that the Protestant Association march of June 7th was a peaceful demonstration of support for the Established Church and that the violence on the days that followed was wholly unrelated to the peaceful attempt to deliver a petition to Parliament. Indeed, the Association had published a statement which condemned the riot and called on the rioters to return home. At one point Gordon himself had risked his life by facing, and admonishing, the mob.
The court was occupied for days with accounts of the damage done by the riots, which linked, or claimed to link, the rioters to Gordon and the Protestant Association. Descriptions of burnings, lootings and pillage were interrupted by the Attorney General demanding to know if the perpetrator of the offence was wearing a blue cockade; and Lord Porchester, in answer to the vital question about Lord George himself, attested, ‘I certainly saw him with a cockade in the House on Tuesday’ – the fourth day of the riots.22 But not even a court over which Lord Mansfield, a victim of the riots, presided was going to find a man guilty of treason because of the rosette he wore in his hat. It took the jury thirty minutes to conclude, unanimously, that Lord George Gordon was not guilty of the charge which had been laid against him.
English Catholics of a pessimistic disposition were entitled to believe that the acquittal of Gordon confirmed that popular prejudice against Rome remained too strong to allow speedy progress towards full emancipation. To them, it seemed that the Protestant king had called out the troops only when it became clear that more than Catholic lives and property were in danger. But Catholic optimists were justified in insisting that there were signs of a slow change of attitude. The Relief Act was – despite the ravages of the London mob – still in place and it had been complemented by parallel legislation in the Dublin Parliament. Irishmen who had taken the oath of loyalty could lease or own land. Priests were no longer obliged to register with the secular authorities. Catholics could open their own schools and were allowed to own firearms.
It was while London was on fire and half a dozen provincial cities and towns were feeling the heat that John Hornyold, Vicar Apostolic of the Midland District, finally came to a conclusion about how to deal with the reluctance – perhaps in modern times the inability – of his flock to attend Mass on all the feast days in the Church’s calendar. Among the rules of conduct that the faithful must respect was the injunction which allowed only one meal on feast days, and rest from menial work. Since days of special obligation included all of Lent, most Fridays and the eve of major feasts, observing the rules of abstinence involved self-discipline of a high order and was out of place and time in a society in which a new industrial proletariat lacked the freedom of the farms and fields. Hornyold solved the dilemma – following consultations with Rome – by relaxing the rule rather than insisting that it be respected. Other Districts followed suit. New ‘Directions for the Faithful of the Northern District touching upon the Observance of Holydays’ began with a slight misquotation from Chapter 1, Verse 4 of the Lamentations of Jeremiah: ‘Sion mourns because there are none that comes to the solemn Feast. The Temple is destroyed.’ Matthew Gibson, of the Northern District, then added, ‘And we may truly say that, at the present time, there are few that come to the solemn feast, whatever the cause of it.’ The remedy to this state of affairs – apparently sanctioned by Pius VI – was not to increase attendance, but to reduce the number of feast days at which attendance was expected, ‘thinking it better not to lay any longer a precept of those [less important feast] days on people who are heavy pressed’. One of the reasons for the survival of the Catholic Church in England was its preoccupation with its own affairs – the product not of egocentricity, but of the certainty that, come what may, it would prevail.