Clan Gordon · 1780
Lord George Gordon and the Riots
On the second of June 1780, Lord George Gordon, third son of the third Duke of Gordon, twenty-eight years old, member of Parliament for Ludgershall and president of the Protestant Association, led a procession of about fifty thousand petitioners through Westminster to present a petition to the House of Commons calling for the repeal of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778. The procession became, within a few hours of the petition being received, the worst civil disorder in London's recorded history. Over the next eight days, the worst nights being the sixth and seventh of June, organised mobs burned the prisons of Newgate, the Fleet, the King's Bench, the Clink and the New Bridewell; the houses of Lord Mansfield (Lord Chief Justice), of the Catholic Bishop of London and of two Catholic chapels; the Bank of England was held by troops on the seventh, when about three hundred rioters were killed by musketry. About two hundred and eighty-five rioters and onlookers were killed in total. About four hundred and fifty were arrested. Twenty-five were hanged. Lord George Gordon was tried for high treason at the King's Bench on the fifth of February 1781, was acquitted in February (defended by Thomas Erskine in his most celebrated jury-trial, the speech being preserved in Erskine's collected speeches as the founding speech of the modern criminal-defence bar). Gordon converted to Judaism in 1787, was sentenced for libel in 1788 to five years in Newgate (the prison the mob he had led had burned eight years earlier), and died there of typhus in 1793.
It is twenty past one on the afternoon of the second of June 1780, on the platform that has been raised at the foot of Old Palace Yard, Westminster, in heavy summer heat with the smell of the Thames at low water coming up Whitehall. He is twenty-eight years old. He is Lord George Gordon, third son of the third Duke of Gordon and Lady Catherine Gordon, member of Parliament for Ludgershall in Wiltshire (a Wiltshire pocket borough he has held since 1774), president of the Protestant Association of Great Britain since November 1779, in his third year of formal parliamentary opposition to the Catholic Relief Act of 1778. He is in a black frock coat and a Geneva collar, with the petition in a roll of leather under his right arm.
On the open ground in front of him, between the platform and the Houses of Parliament a hundred yards distant, are the petitioners. The Association has, in the past three weeks, gathered, by Gordon's own count, about fifty thousand subscribers. The Association's printed Address to the People has been distributed in twenty thousand copies through the Methodist and Independent congregations of London, the Lowland Scottish congregations of the City, and the lower middle-class artisan dissenting ground that runs from Spitalfields to Southwark. The petitioners are mostly respectable. They are dressed plainly. They wear, by the Association's instruction, blue cockades on their hats. They have walked from St George's Fields in Southwark over Westminster Bridge in five separate columns this morning, all five converging on Old Palace Yard at the same hour. They have been singing the metrical Psalms.
The crowd at the back of the assembly, by Gordon's own anxious count, is not the assembly. The crowd at the back is, by his own private letter to his sister Catherine that evening, about ten thousand persons in number, drinking, with no cockades, with carts and hammers and torches, and not part of the Association. The crowd at the back is, by his own letter, the precise group I had not invited.
He thinks: I have presented the petition by my form of arrival. I will go up to the bar of the House in the next half hour. The petition will go on the table for the Speaker to read.
He thinks: the petition will not pass. The Catholic Relief Act will not be repealed. The vote in the Commons will be against me by two hundred to twenty.
He thinks: that is what the political process of the country is. The country will go home in the evening. The petition will be on the record.
He thinks: the crowd at the back is not going to go home in the evening.
He thinks: I have, today, made the worst mistake of my political life. I have brought a respectable petition into a city that has been waiting for a torch. The torch is now in the city. I have brought it in.
He goes up to the bar of the House at twenty past two. Speaker Norton receives the petition with the courtesies. The Commons goes into committee on the question. The crowd outside Old Palace Yard is, within an hour, breaking the windows of the carriages of the bishops. The Lord Mansfield is rescued from his coach in Bloomsbury Square by his own running footman. The petitioners, the actual fifty thousand, by Gordon's own letter, had mostly gone home by sunset and were not the rioters of the evening.
By the morning of the third the riots were no longer the petitioners. By the morning of the seventh, the Bank of England was being defended at musket-point by the Honourable Artillery Company; Newgate, the Clink, the Fleet, and the New Bridewell prisons were on fire; about three hundred rioters were dead in the streets of the City. The army was called in by King George III in person on the seventh, by-passing the Lord Mayor on a constitutional point that has been argued for two hundred and fifty years. The militia under Sir George Savile cleared the City by the morning of the ninth. About two hundred and eighty-five dead in the riots in total. About four hundred and fifty arrested. Twenty-five hanged.
Lord George Gordon was indicted for high treason and tried at the Court of King's Bench on the fifth of February 1781. He was defended by Thomas Erskine, then twenty-nine years old, in the speech which is, by the judgment of the legal historians of the Inns of Court, the founding speech of the modern criminal defence bar in England. Erskine argued, for nine hours, that the indictment under treason required proof of intent to levy war against the king, and that no evidence presented could connect Gordon's petition with the actions of the rioters at Newgate or the Fleet. The jury acquitted in twenty minutes. Gordon was a free man. The verdict was, by every contemporary report, popular. The riots, by every later assessment, had been almost certainly not directed by him in any operational sense; the operational architects of the riots have never been identified to general satisfaction.
Gordon spent the rest of his life as a religious eccentric. He converted to Judaism in 1787, took the name Israel bar Abraham Gordon, grew a long beard, kept a kosher household, and was sentenced in 1788 for criminal libel of the French ambassador and the Queen of France to five years in Newgate (the same prison the mob had burned eight years earlier; rebuilt by 1782). He died in Newgate on the first of November 1793 of typhus, forty-two years old. The Gordon Riots, by the judgment of the historians, were the worst civil disorder in London's history before the riots of 1985, and the central political shock of the late Hanoverian regime. The lessons drawn from them by the Pitt ministry were the foundations of the public-order legislation that runs through the present Public Order Acts. Lord George himself was, by the careful judgment of his most recent biographer Christopher Hibbert, the wrong man at the head of the wrong procession on the wrong day, and was held by the political class of his country as the man who had let the torch into the City. The Bank of England, since 1780, has kept a picket of the Brigade of Guards standing through the night at the entrance to the Court Yard. The picket is on duty every night. It has been there for two hundred and forty-five years.