Lord George Gordon and the Riots

There are men who light a fire believing they are lighting a candle, and who learn, in the hour between the striking of the match and the catching of the rafters, that the difference between the two was the only thing that mattered. The procession is theirs. The crowd at its back is not. By the time they understand which of the two has the city in its hand, the question has already been answered without them.

THE THIRD SON

He is Lord George Gordon, third son of the third Duke of Gordon and Lady Catherine, born in 1751, raised between Gordon Castle and the houses of his mother's second marriage, schooled at Eton, commissioned into the navy at fourteen, and put into the House of Commons for the Wiltshire pocket borough of Ludgershall in 1774 at the age of twenty-three. A third son is a man without an estate and without a regiment of his own; he must find a cause to give his name a weight the title will not give him. He found his in November 1779, when the Protestant Association of Scotland, alarmed at the Catholic Relief Act passed at Westminster the year before, asked him to take the presidency of its sister body in London. He accepted on the floor of the Commons. The Act of 1778 had allowed Catholics who swore an oath of loyalty to inherit land, to keep schools, and to enter the army; the Association held it to be the first opening of a door that had been shut at the Revolution of 1688. Gordon read the door as Knox would have read it, in the long Lowland Presbyterian register; the country read it, by the spring of 1780, as something altogether harder to name.

THE WALK FROM ST GEORGE'S FIELDS

On the morning of the second of June 1780 the petitioners assembled in St George's Fields in Southwark. By the Association's instruction they wore blue cockades on their hats and carried no arms. They were the small dissenting tradesmen of London, the Methodist congregations, the Independent congregations, the Lowland Scots of the City churches, the journeymen and the apprentices of Spitalfields and Bermondsey. There were, by Gordon's own count, about fifty thousand of them. They came over Westminster Bridge in five columns and converged on Old Palace Yard at one o'clock in heavy summer heat, with the Thames at low water and the smell of it coming up Whitehall. They had been singing the metrical Psalms on the bridge. The petition, twelve thousand signatures longer than any presented to the House in living memory, was rolled in leather under Gordon's right arm. He was twenty-eight years old, in a black frock coat and a Geneva collar, and he stood on a platform raised at the foot of the Yard to address them before going up to the bar of the House.

A SECOND IN OLD PALACE YARD

He looks out from the platform and sees, at the back of the assembly, what he has been afraid to see for three weeks. The petitioners in front are his; the men behind them, ten thousand by his evening's count, are not. They wear no cockades. They carry hammers and staves. There are carts among them, and on the carts are torches not yet lit but laid ready, as a carter lays out feed. He understands, in the space of a breath drawn and held, that the Association has been the procession's body and that something else has walked in at its tail; that the door of the City has been opened by his fifty thousand and that what is now passing through that door behind them is not the petition. He could speak from the platform and turn them. He could tell the men at the back to go home, in the voice of the son of the Duke of Gordon, in the voice of the president of the Association, with the petition in his hand. He does not. He has rehearsed his speech to the Commons; he has not rehearsed a speech to the men with the torches; he has been taught, all his political life, that a member of Parliament's business is at the bar of the House and not in the street. He tells himself the vote will go against him by two hundred to twenty, that the petition will lie on the table, that the country will go home in the evening. He writes that night to his sister Catherine that the men at the back were the precise group I had not invited, as though the not-inviting of them settled the matter. It does not settle the matter. He goes up to the bar of the House at twenty past two. The torches, behind him, wait for dusk.

THE EIGHT NIGHTS

Speaker Norton received the petition with the courtesies. The Commons went into committee. By four o'clock the carriages of the bishops were being broken in the streets around the Abbey; by evening the chapels of the Sardinian and Bavarian embassies were burning. On the third the houses of known Catholics in Moorfields went up. On the fourth and fifth the riots were no longer the petitioners at all; they were the city's own waiting kindling, lit. On the sixth and seventh, the worst nights, Newgate was broken open and burned, the prisoners loosed; the Fleet, the King's Bench, the Clink and the New Bridewell followed. The house of Lord Mansfield in Bloomsbury Square, with its library and its judicial papers, went into the flames; he and Lady Mansfield were got out by a back door. The Bank of England was held through the night of the seventh by the Honourable Artillery Company firing across Threadneedle Street; about three hundred rioters fell to musketry there. King George III, in council on the morning of the seventh, by-passed the Lord Mayor on a constitutional point and ordered the army into the City on the royal prerogative alone. The militia cleared the streets by the morning of the ninth. The dead in total were about two hundred and eighty-five. About four hundred and fifty were arrested. Twenty-five were hanged.

THE COURT OF KING'S BENCH

He was indicted for high treason and brought to the Court of King's Bench on the fifth of February 1781. Across the table sat Thomas Erskine, twenty-nine, in his first great brief, who would speak for nine hours and rest the defence on a single hinge: that the treason statute required proof of an intent to levy war against the king, and that no evidence in the Crown's brief connected Gordon's petition with the breaking of Newgate or the firing of the Bank. The jury was out twenty minutes. The verdict was popular in the coffee-houses and in the street. The speech Erskine gave that day stands in the collected speeches of the Inns of Court as the founding speech of the modern criminal-defence bar in England; a son of an impoverished Scottish earl had built, on the back of a Gordon acquittal, the doctrine that a man stands or falls by the specific act charged and not by the company he is held to have kept. Gordon walked out of the King's Bench a free man and was never tried again for the riots. The operational architects of the eight nights have never been satisfactorily named.

NEWGATE REBUILT

The prison the mob had burned was rebuilt by 1782 on its old footprint in the Old Bailey, in heavier stone. Gordon, meanwhile, drifted out of the political class that had used him and through it discarded him. In 1787 he converted to Judaism, took the name Israel bar Abraham Gordon, grew a long beard, kept a kosher household in Birmingham, and refused to appear in court on a libel charge against the French ambassador and the Queen of France until the court appointed his appearance. In 1788 he was sentenced to five years in Newgate, the same Newgate, the rebuilt one. He died there of typhus on the first of November 1793, forty-two years old, his beard by then to his chest. He had outlived the riots by thirteen years and the trial by twelve.

THE PICKET AT THE COURT YARD

The end of a procession is rarely the work of the man at its head. More often it is the work of the men who walked in at its tail, who carried no petition and wore no cockade, and whose names are not on the rolls of the Association. Lord George Gordon was, by the careful judgment of his biographers, the wrong man at the head of the wrong procession on the wrong day; the political class held him for the rest of his life as the man who had let the torch into the City, and the political class was, in its narrow way, not wrong. The lessons the Pitt ministry drew from the eight nights run, through the Riot Act enforcements of the 1790s and the Six Acts of 1819, into the public-order law of the present statute book. And on Threadneedle Street, since the night of the seventh of June 1780, the Bank of England has kept a picket of the Brigade of Guards standing through the dark hours at the entrance to its Court Yard; the picket was withdrawn only in 1973, after one hundred and ninety-three years, and the path it walked is still marked in the stones.