The Gordon riots

by Ray Jones

In June 1780 thousands of people marched through London and started what is said by some to be the greatest riot Britain has ever seen. Led by Lord George Gordon, after whom it became known – an MP for a pocket borough in Wiltshire – the initial cause was a bill set to give very limited rights to Catholics. In the forefront were the middle classes organised in the powerful Protestant Association. Peacefully they marched through London to present a petition against the bill to Parliament.
But Parliament quickly rejected it and the situation swiftly changed. What started off peacefully enough became violent and destructive; the middle classes stepped back (although some liberal Whigs continued to pay lip service to the cause) and the initiative was taken up by the poor. For a week London was held by the ‘mob’. All except one of the prisons were wrecked and the inmates released, Parliament was blockaded. The houses of wealthy Catholics were burnt and looted as were Catholic chapels (most of which were attached to the houses) but poorer Catholics were mostly left alone. The Bank of England was attacked and perhaps this was some kind of turning point.
For a week the magistrates and the authorities were remarkably inactive and for the most part the troops obeyed the law which restrained their actions, not having a magistrate willing to read the Riot Act. The King, George III, stepped in and demanded that the law be reinterpreted to allow the troops to ignore the magistrates and fire at will (that is as they were ordered, because there is a suggestion that before this a lot of fraternisation was going on). Fifteen thousand soldiers had been brought into the city and they opened fire killing between 400 and 700 people and wounding many more.
The riot was effectively crushed. Twenty five rioters were tried and hanged and Lord George Gordon was tried for treason but acquitted (possibly because he had turned against the rioters before the end – and no doubt being a Lord and MP helped).
Although the Gordon Riots are sometimes categorised as purely anti Catholic riots there is much to indicate that they were more complex than that. It’s true that “No Popery” was a common battle cry of the rioters and that anti-Catholicism had deep roots going back before the English Revolution but poor Catholics were not targeted. It was the wealthy and powerful that were mainly attacked and institutions that represented authority.
The change in the law was seen as a means of allowing more men into the army to be used against the Americans in their struggle for independence which many supported. But it was also used to bolster the King’s push for absolutism in Britain – hence the other battle cry of “Liberty!”. The very limited freedoms that people had were cherished and people looked nervously at the rest of Europe and linked Catholicism with the absolutist regimes on the Continent and the even greater poverty they saw there.
The conditions for working people were hard. London was over-crowded, dirty, stinking, poverty-stricken and disease ridden but with tiny islands of immense wealth and enormous class differences. Working class political organisation was in its infancy. It’s not surprising that people struck out in revolt sometimes.
If readers fancy a fictional account of the riot they might try Charles Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge. He is hardly pro-riot and the novel was written years after the event but his liberal attitude (for the time) is clear and being a journalist he did some research.
As for Gordon he later converted to Judaism and died in prison after being jailed for libelling the queen of France, the French ambassador and the administration of justice in England.