When Wartime Riots Paralyzed London

On 2 June 1780, as I described yesterday, a crowd of over 50,000 people surrounded Parliament while Lord George Gordon presented a petition demanding a return to strictures on Catholics.

The House of Commons dismissed that petition, and the crowd dispersed from that part of London. But that evening people attacked the embassy of Sardinia. They destroyed a chapel connected to the embassy of Bavaria. They attacked neighborhoods of prominent Catholics. Sir John Fielding’s Bow Street Runners and other authorities arrested some rioters and locked them in Newgate Prison.

The next day, 3 June, larger crowds rampaged through Moorfields, a neighborhood where a lot of Irish workers had settled. A mob attacked Newgate Prison, freed fellow rioters and other prisoners, and then basically destroyed the complex. Then people attacked other prisons, and other embassies. They attacked the home of Lord Mansfield, the Chief Justice, who had supported the more liberal law about Catholics.

Violence continued for days, spilling well beyond the original grievances. On 7 June, there was a concerted assault on the Bank of England, stopped only by an upper-class militia unit and regular troops. All in all, the property damage cost up to £180,000, which many historians say was far more than the city of Paris suffered during the whole French Revolution. (I’d like to see the comparable figures, but that’s what they say.)

On that 7 June, the British government clamped down on the rioters with force. It brought in regular troops, including the Horse Guards and Foot Guards, as well as militias from nearby counties—12,000 armed men in all. Soldiers killed nearly 300 people and arrested 450, pacifying the city after a week of chaos. The government put scores of men on trial and sentenced dozens to death for acts of violence and theft, though not all those sentences were carried out.

London’s upper and middle classes, scared by the violence, supported such harsh measures. The Crown fined the Lord Mayor for not reading the Riot Act to the crowds earlier. A former Lord Mayor, John Wilkes, led troops against the rioters, ruining his reputation as a champion of the people and thus his political career. Another radical Whig, the Earl of Shelburne, responded to the uprising by proposing a national police force, but nothing came of that.

As for Lord George Gordon, he was locked up in the Tower and tried for treason, but acquitted. Nevertheless, the disturbances were named after him: the Gordon Riots. He continued to get in trouble with the authorities, eventually locked up again for insulting Marie Antoinette of France and the British legal system. By then he had converted to Judaism—beard, circumcision, and all—and he became quite a curiosity while locked up in the rebuilt Newgate Prison.

The unrest had at least one effect on the American Revolution. Early in 1780 Spain and Britain had started secret negotiations which could have led to Spain pulling its support for the new U.S. of A. The riots convinced Spanish diplomats that Lord North’s government might soon fall, so they ended the talks.

The B.B.C. radio program In Our Time recently hosted a discussion about the Gordon Riots, available as a podcast. The London Historians offers an introduction to the unrest by Prof. Jerry White in P.D.F. form. The episode was also fodder for nineteenth-century British novelists: Maria Edgeworth with Harrington and Charles Dickens with Barnaby Rudge. But of course, unlike the Stamp Act riots in North America and the storming of the Bastille in Paris, the Gordon Riots didn’t lead to revolution.

Lord George Gordon’s Petition to Parliament

The engraving above shows Lord George Gordon, youngest son of the Duke of Gordon, delivering a petition to Parliament in 1780. That document came with over 400 pages of signatures, and there were other copies circulating. Estimates of the total number of people to sign Gordon's petition run as high as 120,000 Britons. In eighteenth-century society, that’s a mind-boggling number.

What did all those people want from Parliament? They asked the British government to repeal the Papists Act of 1778, which had lifted some of the legal restrictions on Roman Catholics imposed after the Glorious Revolution. Not that the new law allowed Catholics to vote or hold office in Britain, but they could now, for example, buy real estate.

One impetus for the new law was the British government’s need to recruit more Irish Catholics into the army to fight the American War. Previously men had to abjure their Catholic faith to become redcoats. After 1778, they simply had to swear allegiance to the Hanoverian king. Lord Mansfield, Britain’s Chief Justice, was one of the main proponents of this reform.

As for Gordon, he was a former Royal Navy lieutenant and Member of Parliament. In the House of Commons he had opposed Lord North’s policies toward the American colonies, but he didn’t get along with the opposition parties, either.

In 1779 Gordon formed the Protestant Association because he believed that British Catholics remained a threat who had to be suppressed. By then two of Europe’s big Catholic powers, France and Spain, had joined the Americans' war against the British Crown. Gordon and many of his supporters suspected that people in the government too sympathetic to the Catholics had brought on the war and were endangering the Empire.

Now we like to think of the American Revolution as connected to freedom of religion. Indeed, it pushed American society in that direction. Even in Massachusetts, where the Congregationalist establishment lasted until the 1830s, the war ended with a Catholic Church in Boston. Virginia adopted Thomas Jefferson’s Statute for Religious Freedom in 1786. And we agree that’s a Good Thing, right?

But in the 1770s, the political lines were drawn differently. Gordon supported political reform within the British Empire, and he saw Catholicism as the worst form of old-fashioned despotism, so he didn’t want Catholics to get any closer to power. Meanwhile, Mansfield opposed the American rebels but was liberal toward religious minorities within the Empire.

On 2 June 1780, about 50,000 supporters of the Protestant Association gathered in St. George’s Field, an open area in South London. (Eleven years before, a rally for John Wilkes at that place had ended in bloodshed.) Many in the crowd blue cockades, the movement’s symbol. Some carried banners that read “No Popery.”

Lord George Gordon led his supporters on a march to Westminster to present their huge petition, as shown above. The crowd grew even larger as it moved through the city streets.

With his genteel status, Gordon made it into the House of Commons and presented the Protestant Association petition. Outside, thousands of people surrounded the Parliament building, roughing up some peers and vandalizing carriages.

Members of Parliament voted to dismiss the petition, 192-6. Gordon went home disappointed but not surprised. Soldiers arrived and dispersed the crowd. The government thought the crisis had passed.

TOMORROW: It hadn’t.