In Our Time - The Gordon Riots

Episode Date: May 2, 2019

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the most destructive riots in London's history, which reached their peak on 7th June 1780 as troops fired on the crowd outside the Bank of England. The leader was Lord George Gordon, head of the Protestant Association, who objected to the relaxing of laws against Catholics. At first the protest outside Parliament was peaceful but, when Gordon's petition failed to persuade the Commons, rioting continued for days until the military started to shoot suspects in the street. It came as Britain was losing the war to hold on to colonies in North America.The image above shows a crowd setting fire to Newgate Prison and freeing prisoners by the authority of 'His Majesty, King Mob.'WithIan Haywood Professor of English at the University of RoehamptonCatriona Kennedy Senior Lecturer in Modern British and Irish History and Director of the Centre for Eighteenth Century Studies at the University of Yorkand Mark Knights Professor of History at the University of WarwickProducer: Simon Tillotson

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. Thanks for downloading this episode of In Our Time. There's a reading list to go with it on our website, and you can get news about our programs if you follow us on Twitter at BBC In Our Time. I hope you enjoy the programmes. Hello, in June 1780, thousands of British troops fired on unarmed crowds in London. Several hundreds were killed and more died of their wounds later. The soldiers were putting down riots that had ranged for a week,

originally aimed at Catholic property, it broadened out, storming and burning prisons, as well as chapels. These became known as the Gordon riots, after the man who arguably sparked them off with his petition. And they're said to be both the most destructive riots that London has seen, and, according to some historians,

the closest that Britain has come to a revolution. With me to discuss the Gordon riots are Ian Haywood, Professor of English at the University of Ro Hampton, Katrina Kennedy, director of the Centre by 18th Century Studies at the University of York, and Mark Knights, Professor of History at the University of Warwick. Mark Knights, London was at the heart of the British Empire,

but what were the strains of that empire in the 1770s which related to the riots were about to talk about? Well, those strains were really quite considerable. I suppose the most obvious context actually is in the North American and the Canadian context, which may seem very remote, is actually really important here. So Britain conquered Canada in 1760 and Canada was full of French Catholics

and that created a problem for a Protestant empire and the decision that had to be made was whether those Catholics gained toleration and that was given to them controversially in 1774 but that act created huge waves. Ripples in North America created vast anxieties about the growth of popery in North America, but also back domestically at home, increased anxiety about the growth of popery and authoritarian government, which had ushered it in.

The second sort of big imperial context in the late 1770s is, of course, the American War, which was also in part provoked by that anxiety about popery. And the war in the North American colonies had gone very badly for Britain. 1779, really very disastrous year of campaigning, the southern colonies lost and so on. And this war is not just located in North America, but it's a global war. So it's vastly expensive. Taxation levels having to rise very, very steeply, and that, of course, also increasing a lot of domestic unrest. And as I understand it, many people in England, or quite a lot of people in England, thought the Americans are right.

and many people in England also thought the government was dithering and inept to an extent that was making the whole thing much worse year on year. Absolutely. We could think of that American war as almost a civil war because the colonists thought of themselves as Englishmen and this was very much a divisive war both in the colonies and at home. There are vast amounts of petitions which were collected both in favour of the war and against the war. In this country.

If people were unhappy with anything, most people didn't have the franchise, most people didn't vote, most people couldn't have an influence in Parliament, what did they do? So one of the most important mechanisms for expressing the popular voice was the petition. And that's, of course, what Gordon uses, as you've already alluded to. The petition was in some ways a sort of rival to the parliamentary voice and there was always this tension in British political culture between the elected representatives and the direct voice of the people as expressed through petitioning and that's a very, very long-standing tension

across the 17th and the 18th century. So petitioning was used by those who opposed and were in favour of the American War. It was also used at the time that Gordon was gathering momentum for his campaign was also being used to put pressure on Parliament for parliamentary reform. And this is an ancient and valued right that people thought they had for centuries, literally, for, I'm sorry, I used the word literally, for centuries. It was a valued right.

If you were disquieted, you could get a petition together and take it to Parliament and ask them to consider it. That's right. it stretches right back to medieval times, but it becomes very, very controversial in the 17th century. Without being silly about it, another way they could express their dissatisfaction, sometimes very positively, was by rioting.

Absolutely. There's a whole spectrum of tactics that could be used. So the petitioning is obviously the peaceful route, but you could accelerate through street protests, rebellion, riot, etc. The number of this, Katrina Kennedy, was that the government wanted to bring in a Catholic rube Relief Act. Why did they do that? And why did the Catholics need relief? So Catholics, up until this point, suffer from a range of disabilities that have been in place since the 1690s. So

discriminations as well. Discriminations, yes. So Catholic worship is illegal. Catholic priests who are found performing mass are liable to life imprisonment. Catholic school masters similarly are liable to life imprisonment. Catholics can't vote. They can't practice at the bar. They can't hold public office. They can't buy land. So there's a...

They can't go to Oxford or Cambridge. Exactly. They can't matriculate. So they can't get into the establishment power structure. Exactly. So there's a range of very severe disabilities against Catholics. And the Relief Act actually is quite modest in what it's proposing in terms of Catholic relief. It doesn't grant Catholics full freedom of worship, but it does remove the worst of the disabilities that they suffer.

So it removes the life imprisonment for priests or schoolmasters. It allows Catholics who take the oath of allegiance and modified oath of allegiance to serve in the army and it also allows them to buy land. Now, the reasons for the introduction of the Catholic Relief Act are partly to do with the fact that actually the most severe of the penalties have fallen into disuse by this point by the late 18th century because they're perceived as too harsh.

And there is an increasing attitude on the part of English elites, Protestant elites, in favour of a degree of toleration. for Catholics. So it's partly reflective of that, but it's also very much linked, as Mark has already said, to the context of the American War. So George Gordon sees in the Relief Act what he sees as a diabolical purpose, which is to arm Catholics against American Protestants. And actually, that is one of the incentives. It turns out that they are looking to recruit, more manpower into the British army and they're looking to Catholics

particularly Catholics in Scotland for that injection of manpower. At the same time there was an underground culture of Catholicism still going in England. There were private chapels people getting round it, the great landowners and also in some of the foreign embassies

and so on so. So it was there. Absolutely. So there is a small, I mean the numbers we're talking about a very small, Catholics only make up. about 1% of the population of England at this time. So there are a small community, but there are still, you know, there's some wealthy Catholic landowners still.

Because it was only in 1745, which wasn't very long before when Pony Prince Charlie had come down and there was a Catholic-led army which went to Derby, could have gone on to London, for some reason turned back at Derby. So it must have been in people's minds that these Catholics were not to be trusted.

Absolutely. A lot of people's minds, as we're going to find out. Yes, so since the Reformation, of course, Catholicism has been held accountable for the persecution of Protestants, for plots against the British state from the gunpowder plot onwards, and then into the 18th century, those fears are kept alive by the Jacobite rebellions in 1715, 1745. That's becoming less of a threat into the 1770s, really. Jacobism is in terminal decline. In 1766, James III, the old pretender, dies.

And at that point, the Pope withdraws his support for the Stuart dynasty's claim to the British throne. And recognises George III as the rightful heir to the British throne. Nevertheless, memories are long and can be heated up. Ian Hayward, tell us about George Gordon, Lord Gordon. I'm glad you've asked the question because I think it's important to separate the kind of myth about Gordon that grew up in the wake of the riots

from the biographical mind. I think in current parlance we'd probably call him a charismatic politician if we've been quite flattering. He became known as a kind of demagogue or a fanatical, a kind of religious bigot who was prepared to see central London burnt to the ground

before he'd give an inch of civil liberties to Catholics. In fact, you know, he was a skilled politician. He's from a Scottish noble background. You know, he's highly educated. He went to Eton. He saw service in the Navy. He was a midshipman.

And we think that it's while he was serving in America, he was stationed in America, that he first kind of absorbed, you know, as kind of zeal as support for the American cause, which at that time the British government, of course, was trying to crush, as we've just heard. He was inspired by John Wilkes, who was a similar kind of figure in the 1760s, who stood up against Parliament for Press Freedom,

which were now benefiting from as we sit here. And it's worth saying that some of the riots associated with John Wilkes, particularly when he was released from prison, were only 12 years earlier in 1768. So the memory of those riots, you know, was fresh in people's minds. When the war broke out between Britain and the colonies, the American colonies, like many liberals who were serving officers, he resigned his commission. He would not fight against the colonies.

And he decided to become a politician so he could pursue his campaign against the government in Parliament. And indeed, you know, he was very active for Protestantism. He thought it was the greatest aspect of religion and had benefited what he thought of his country very well indeed. I think so, and I think he absorbed a lot of that from the Scottish background. Because of course, Scotland had a very strongly Protestant. and indeed you could argue maybe extreme Protestant Presbyterian religious culture. So his first speech in Parliament, he asked the British government to call off its butchers against the Americans.

This was a kind of vivid oratory that was acceptable in those days in Parliament. But his real moment came the following year in 1779 when the government tried to impose a similar act on Scotland. And he saw this as his moment. This was his moment in history. So he went to Scotland. and basically very quickly rose through the ranks of the Protestant Association and became the president. And the point being that the campaign to prevent the act being introduced in Scotland was a success.

Now there was violence, you know, it was a very militant campaign that there was violence, but it did in fact stop the introduction of the act in Scotland. And I think, you know, flush with the success of that, he was then the natural successor, you know, for the English Protestant Association, which Mount started to up its campaign in the early months of 1780. So, you know, his elected president in January 1780, and it's in the ensuing months that we head towards the, you could say, fatal events of 2nd of June.

So it came down to England, and he got this enormous petition together, by the per capita, 44,000 people for it to sign a petition, given how many people couldn't write, an enormous feat of organisation to get that. And people said, their names were faked as they always say about these things, but it's been proved they were not faked.

And how did he do that? I think I would probably defer to Mark for these specifics, but just on the size of the petition, there is an engraving if people are interested about this showing the petition being carried to Parliament. You know, and it almost looks like it's a kind of, you know, religious procession with this huge portion being carried on this man's shoulders like a burden.

So what happened on this? day second of June mark so Gordon announced that he wanted to be followed with the petition by a large number of supporters to prove that they were all genuine signatures and he wanted 40,000 people to join him so he organised a very large meeting in st george's fields in suburb where waterloo station now is and divided his followers there into four camps for Westminster's London Southwark and there was a Scots brigade there. He then zoomed off in a carriage to Parliament and the petitioners then marched towards Parliament.

As they did so, they gathered more people and perhaps some less salubrious characters joined the group at that point and they arrived at Parliament and occupied the lobby of the House of Commons. It's a very, very dramatic moment as well because this huge role of a petition was on the floor of the House of Commons

and MPs were being asked essentially whether they would debate this petition. And what was the answer? And the answer, well, there is a debate amongst MPs about whether to do this but in the end they decide against, they decide to defer essentially the debate. But Gordon is taking advantage of that.

He's nipping out during the debate into the balcony, overlooking the lobby, and giving his supporters a sort of running commentary on who's opposing the petition, including characters like Edmund Burke, who he specifically name-checks as somebody who's not a friend to the petition. And at the end of that day, afternoon, they decided they would defer it. And as I understand it, if we take this, I'll be in, as I understand it, Gordon said to his supporters, go home quietly and we'll come back again when they've thought it through. Yes, and they were given until the 6th of June, so they're going until the following Tuesday.

But what's normally said is that at this point he lost control over the crowd, because that night the first attacks began on Catholic targets. Which were? The first targets were Catholic chapels. They were in embassies. One was in Lincoln's in Fields, the Sardinian Embassy, and the other was in what's now Golden Square, and so how actually that building is still standing.

You can go and see it. And so the Bavarian Embassy. And these chapels were attacked, and a very specific kind of violence took place, which again is a very distinctive feature of the Gordon riots. It wasn't this kind of mindless violence, as you suggested in your introductory comments. I suggested that it wasn't.

I think you suggested it wasn't. I did, yes. I just thought the construction of the centres might have suggested. There was a kind of discipline. There was a kind of discipline. The writer Horace Walpo, you know, the son of the first prime minister, Sir Robert Walpole, was very impressed by what he called a mixture of rage and consideration.

That's what he actually said. So what normally happened is the possessions, you know, the interiors of these buildings, treasures, you know, specific symbolic objects, were brought out like plunder and then turned into a bonfire, into a spectacle, you know, to make a statement. The buildings were also sometimes set on fire, but the surrounding buildings were protected.

It was very targeted activity. Katrina, can you come in on this? It seems that for all the rioting and rampaging, as we're told, and later we can talk about how that turned into the idea of the mob to get rid of it as a word. They don't matter because they're just the mob, but that's another question.

Nobody was killed. Yes, no, that is true, except the rioters themselves, yes, but there doesn't seem to be... The writers themselves falling into fire and that sort of stuff. Yeah, but they didn't kill anybody. Yes, I mean, there are threats of violence. Obviously, there's the risk that...

Yeah, but nobody's killed. But nobody's killed. Yeah, so it is, as Ian was saying, it's quite systematic, it's quite targeted. You know, when they're taking the valuables and furniture out of those houses to burn it in the streets, of course they're protecting the houses on either side

from being consumed by the flames. They're not just burning things inside the houses. And they're also quite systematic in terms of their selection of targets that they are going, making sure that the houses, that they are pulling down, as it were, so that means tearing up the floorboards, breaking the windows, that they are Catholic houses. So they will go in and search the house.

and if there's a Protestant prayer book or a Protestant Bible, then they will spare that house. So there's a sense of some kind of system there as well and a focus on perhaps symbolic action rather than just senseless violence. And this is where we come, I think, to the crucial point. You'll tell me if I'm wrong obviously, I hope you do. These have been well-behaved,

and according to your research, Mark, educated enough, perhaps very well-educated people, using riots, bad luck for buildings, but so far not so bad for individuals, and so on. Let's leave it at that, there's a general enough generalisation, I hope. It started to spread more widely. Now it's at this stage that the idea of the mob, the heedless drunken mob,

began to take hold of those in authority over them. They set fire to a great Catholic distillery, in a home and gin run in the gutters, people, the mob were supposed to lick the gin out of the gutters, and sedated lights or the burning in the sky like the Great Fire of London and so on. And the idea of the mob on the rampage as a force took place. Yes. Historians are very divided about how to interpret this,

and some historians have stressed that the religious imperative remained very strong throughout this process. I mean, even at the height of the riots, a week on on the 7th and 8th, they're still attacking Catholic targets. But you're right that in the second phase,

if you like, of the rioting. Towards the 6th of June. Towards the 6th and the 7th and the 8th of June, the targets seem to become wider. And principle amongst the targets then are symbols of law and order.

But they are in some ways related back to the original rites. prisons, for instance. A newly built massive prison 100 metres along the wall, yeah. We're talking about Newgate prison, the great prison, newly built, they attacked that. Yes, this is one of the most dramatic episodes of the riots. Newgate prison went up in flames. It seems to have been a target because some of the initial rioters were sent to Newgate and the mob in a sense was trying to free their colleagues. But it quickly proliferated to attacks on other prisons as well.

So the King's Bench Prison, the Fleet Prison, Clark &well, they were all attacked. And so were some of the magistrates who had been in charge of trying to bring the rioters to book. So the blind justice, Sir John Fielding, for example, is threatened, his house is threatened. Lord Mansfield, who's the Lord Chief Justice at the time, very, very closely identified with the Quebec Act of 1774. He's also suspected of converting the king to popery amongst the circles of the rioters. He's a frequent target of attack right from the very start. His house is looted.

His wonderful library is unceremoniously dragged out of his house with his furniture and his paintings and burnt. Can I just go to Katrina? I'll come to you. Trina, I'm interested, and I was from the accounts of all of you and from its eyebra, about the way that he turned into a mob. Now, Dickens writes a bit later in Barnaby. And he talks about the mob with one of his metaphors. The mob is like this and mob is like that.

It's mob, mob, and the idea of it being intelligent artisans coming to a cause in which they had faith and conviction and reason as they saw it is lost in the idea of this heedless, headless, drunken mob, just breaking things up. And that's before the terrible thing happens. Is that right? Yes, I mean, in terms of the later representation, and definitely Dickens in his historical novel about the riots, Barnaby Rudge,

that is the image that he deploys the idea of the rioters as this almost elemental force like the sea. Riot as a kind of contagion that's spreading through the city. And, you know, one of the big set pieces of Dickens' novel is the attack, as you already mentioned, Thomas Langdale, the Catholic gin distillers, distillery. And he depicts that as a scene almost out of hell. So the combination of the rioters who have broken into the cellar of the distillery

and have started breaking into the casks. Reportedly, they even commandeered a fire engine to pump gin out of the stills. And then of course when that catches fire there is a spectacular blaze and there's rivers aflame running through the gin-soaked streets. There's drunken men, women and

children in Dickens' account, but he's also drawing on contemporary accounts for that. So that image definitely as it lodges in the popular imagination is one that seems to confirm that the kind of the drunkenness, the disorderliness, the

unreason of of the mob, yeah. The mob, the word the mob could be used in a very positive way. I mean, Charles James Fox, for example, said that it's better to be ruled by a mob than a standing army. You know, and he put it another way, wouldn't he said, I'd sooner be ruled by an ill-dress mob than a well-dressed mob. So this idea that what E.P. Thompson called the moral economy of the crowd existed,

this kind of unwritten contract between the rulers and the people, that at various times these kinds of violent outbursts would, happen for very good reasons usually if you know there were social economic grievances and it was a kind of venting of this and then in the wake of that usually the authorities would give a you know would give a kind of response would give something back were at a transitional point even thomas pain in the rights of man you know that great revolutionary text that you know for publishing that you could be thrown in jail and people were he still referred back to the gordon rights in terms of a mob and he was distinguishing there between that older form of action which he saw as you know

as quickly becoming lawless, and the more disciplined form of protest, which is, of course, looking forward to the Chartists, you know, of the 1830s, who also presented monster petitions to Parliament. The term mob distills into one word a very, very diverse crowd, and of course there are lots of different interests within that crowd. So you've got your religious fanatics, if we want to call them that, who are pursuing their religious agenda, but we've also got pickpockets who are routinely being reported as pilfering.

And then we've got this strain, I suppose, of people who are actually out on the loot. And then there's this extraordinary attack on the Bank of England as perhaps the culmination of the threat to the established order, which ratchets up the mob to yet another threatening level. It might be the attack on the Bank of England, which stiffens the sinews of the city of London. they had held back, feared retaliation, they in charge of the city, as it were, police, conservative, at the time.

But they introduced martial law, which said that if the crowds did not disperse within an hour, they could be shot. Yes. They brought in 10,000 troops. Now, can you give me a bit more flesh on that? Yes, so this is, I mean, the response of the city authorities in London is seen as being incredibly tardy. So huge destruction has already accomplished. occurred before the Riot Act is even read.

And that's partly seen as resulting from perhaps some sense of sympathy with the objectives of the Protestant Association and of the rioters. Partly out of fear, the Lord Mayor at the time, there's a suggestion that he fears reading the riot act or enforcing or bringing in military force. case he becomes a target for the rioters. But eventually the London authorities are overridden and it is decided that the army will be able to... Who by who?

Well, by the government at the time. So, and with the king's blessing, that without a magistrate reading the riot act, that troops will be able to fire on the rioters. So that actually is a very controversial episode. Why did they get 10,000 troops at that short notice? Well, Britain's at war. There's a threat of French invasion, so a lot of them are positioned along the southeast coast.

So it does take some time for them to arrive into London, but they're marching from those encampments around the southeast coast. coast camping in Hyde Park that's where they're sending them. So they turn up, they've got an hour and a lot of them don't disperse an hour, perhaps don't here. Anyway, they don't. For one reason or another. And then they let, and then they fire. And according to different reports from three of you, differing, and different reports

from more people, between 300 and 700 and 700 were killed and many more died after as a result of injuries. And something like 400 were tried. under a sentence to death, only 65 were executed and on and on it went. Would you like to comment on that? Yes. I mean, the the quelling of the riots and the judicial process, the aftermath,

is actually very interesting. It's not quite what you expect. I think the numbers executed were actually 25, as far as I know. So, as usual, in the British penal system, which of course was very harsh. listeners might need to know, I'll be reminded of the fact, that at this time, offences against property, and this could involve just really casual theft, potentially carried a capital, you know, was a capital offence. So you could be hanged for, you know, stealing a watch or stealing

a handkerchief, stealing a loaf of bread. So it was a very harsh system. So you would expect the full might of the law to have come down on these writers. Now, this was controversial, wasn't it? Edmund Burke, for example, tried to persuade the government to only execute what he called the ringleaders. So he thought about six was about the right number.

Well, it was considerably more than that. It was 25. And we do know about these people, obviously, from the trials, and we do have their identities. And, you know, this shows quite convincingly, for a start, that the rioters were not this kind of, you know, riffraff

of, you know, of the kind of lump and proletariat. You know, the majority. The majority were skilled artisans, tradespeople. One of the ringleaders, a man called Thomas Tapplin, for instance, who Dickens drew on in Barnaby Rouge, was a master coachman. And he was a man who went round on horseback, you know, kind of extorting money and insisting that people illuminated their houses and led the attack on the Bank of England.

What the government decided to do was actually very interesting. Instead of using Tyburn, which was, you know, now Marble Arch, which was the usual place of execution, which was something of a carnival atmosphere, they actually decided to execute people in the vicinity of where the offences were committed. Mark, I exaggerated from my notes, perhaps I couldn't read my handwriting well enough,

about how many people were executed, but still were fewer than I said executed, partly because people were chastened by how many had been already killed. I think the government was very nervous about the repressive policy that could be... It was criticised, wrong. The policy was criticised at the time. Exactly. I think it's also worth remembering that it wasn't just the troops that had been brought out to quelless. The government had also had to rely on citizen militias.

And famously, John Wilkes, who was mentioned earlier as having led protests in the previous decade, joined one of those, in fact, headed one of those militias and fired on the protesters. How did you do that for? We have this really interesting paradox where one of the leaders of popular protest, only a decade before, is now firing on the protesters. How did that come about to phrase my question more elegantly? So, even more ironically, Wilkes was defending the Bank of England. And he decided that it had become a mob that was threatening. And the city authorities, although he had a lot of sympathy with the state.

city authorities needed to act. And that meant killing people. And he records in his diary that he shot several people dead. So the government in its decisions about how to quell this is also having to think about how do we incorporate the population to make this an acceptable process. The numbers are still huge, Katrina Kennedy. The numbers killed in the streets. The numbers executed. the numbers injured and died afterwards, the numbers transported, and so on and so. This is huge. This is London. This is an imperial capital city

where there's supposed to be law and order, civil rights, one thing and another. What did the writers achieve? Well, in terms of their objective, their primary objective, which is supposed to be repeal of the Catholic Relief Act, they failed. So the Relief Act is enacted,

it's not repealed. and in fact, you know, over the next decade, there's further relief for Catholics. So in 1791, Catholics are granted full freedom of worship. Now, you might say that arguably the protest, the revealing of the depth of anti-Catholic feeling, does stall further Catholic emancipation. So, for instance, in 1800 when the Act of Union between Britain and Ireland is passed, which incorporates into the United Kingdom many more Catholics, millions, that is enacted. William Pitt makes a sort of promise to Irish Catholics that it will be accompanied by full emancipation. Irish Catholics, or Catholics will be able to sit in Parliament.

But that's vetoed by George III because he says it would have been a violation of his coronation oath. And you can perhaps see how the memory of the riots, the memory of the fact that he was claimed to be a popish king at the time that a lot of the anger was directed at George III might be influencing some of those decisions. And what was the reaction at the time in the press? The press was pounding away then.

The press reports in a way reflected quite vividly the kinds of points we've been making. I mean, the failure of the authorities to intervene, for example, was quickly interpreted in a number of ways. As, for example, an expression of the city's desire to embarrass the government, for example. You know, that was one. There were rumours about plots. There was rumours that the French were behind this, or rumors that the Americans were behind this.

There was, you know, apparently evidence for this kind of lawless mob but you've mentioned earlier. So there was a whole range of opinion. But on the whole, I think what comes out to me, mainly as a kind of literary scholar, is just how extraordinary, vivid and spectacular this narrative is, of this week-long, you know, quite week-long, extraordinary riot where you have all these buildings

burning through the night. And this, it was a kind of spectacle, I think, to me, that impressed itself on the public and that left such vivid descriptions, you know, on the parts of commentators, that made the Gordon rights what it was. It wasn't so much the kind of political niceties of it. It was as a kind of spectacular event.

That to me is a legacy because that then haunts the popular imagination whenever you have social unrest subsequently. Mark. There's also some really interesting visual satires produced and disseminated about this incident. Katrina just mentioned the perception of George III as a Catholic. There's an extraordinary biting satire of the king as a tonsured monk

kneeling in front of an altar with the Protestant petition in his privy behind him. And there's an extraordinary cartoon by Gilray of one of the Protestant reformers, the Newgate reformers as it calls it, implying

that religion was just being used as a veneer for mob activity and there's Newgate burning in the background. So this visual aspect, I think, is very very clearly brought home. First riots that really have that very strong visual presence. Katrina, did this

the news of this rise to Gordon rights spread throughout England and up into Scotland across into Ireland? Yes, well there are riots and imitation you know during and after that week so in there's some upheaval

in Bath and in I'm trying to think of where else Birmingham. Yeah, you know so there are echoes elsewhere. And yes, I mean, clearly as interconnected nations,

the news is spreading. It is kind of raising concern, again, about the depth of anti-Catholic feeling. It's also in Newcastle. There's a really big petition. It's got almost 8,000 signatures, which again is in the National Archives, promoted in Newcastle.

So this isn't just a metropolitan phenomenon, although it's primarily located in London. It does have ripples out both in the north and in the south. Did this send an undercurrent of emphasis and effect on the beginnings of reform about 40 years later? I just say it's quite ironic really, but apparently I'll be corrected on this, but on the same day the 2nd of June

that the riots began there was a motion in Parliament for universal suffrage. Probably universal suffrage. Men and women. Yeah. Oh, no, no, sorry. Sorry. That's your question. I'm afraid the word universal does not include women for a long time. There were women involved in the riots. There were certainly women involved. And I'm going to be right through the 18th century. So the basic, if you like, manifesto for universal suffrage, which means male, you know, manhood, suffrage. You've been in existence since the 1760s. So it really arises in the Wilkes period. So if you like, the question of the Gordon-Rightswood, does it have, how? or does it hinder that cause?

And I would say probably hindered it because the idea that in order to get popular support, you mobilise the people in the streets, excuse me, could always be used then against popular reform. And indeed it was used, you know, whenever, you know, the Luddites, the swing riots,

you know, the Chartists, this was always potentially waiting as ammunition against them, wasn't it? Katrina. Yes, and just going back, certainly in the 1790s, when, after the French Revolution, when the campaign for radical reform takes off. There is real anxiety amongst groups

like the London corresponding society, which is founded in 1792, to campaign for political reform about being perceived as a mob. And there's, although they do have mass meetings, some involving hundreds of thousands. Hundreds of thousands. Yeah.

Copenhagen field. Yes. Again, they're very anxious. that it must be orderly, it must be peaceful, there can be no sense of the energies, the exuberance of the crowds. Interestingly, though, it doesn't destroy petitioning as a popular vehicle.

Petitioning remains a fundamentally important way for popular protests to be expressed. This is the people against the Parliament, isn't it? It is, indeed. Vox popular against it? Absolutely. So the first decades of the 19th century, again, you see petitioning as the sort of fundamentally key instrument. I would say, I mean, in a way, I'm going to go back on something I said a moment ago,

if you look at the Reform Bill crisis of 1830 to 1832, there were some absolutely spectacular riots in the autumn of 1831, particularly in Bristol, also in Nottingham. And you could argue that's when the House of Lords refused to put the Bill for Reform through, despite the fact they had gone through in the House of Commons. You could argue that at that point, and indeed historians have said this, there was an awakening, possibly the last awakening, of the spirit of the Gordon riots.

Certainly E.P. Thompson has made that analogy. Yeah, absolutely. That fear of revolution pushing into reform finally. You either reform or you have revolution. That often was the motto, wasn't it, reform or you will have a revolution. Nice word, Katrina. Oh, thank you. Well, I mean, I think, I mean, going back to the great historical novel of the Gordon riots, Charles Dickens, Barnaby Rudge, that is, you know, it's published in 1841, and it's very much shaped by. my sort of sense of the Chartist movement as being perhaps a possible parallel

to the Gordon riots and the risks of that kind of mass platform, that mass upswelling of the populace trying to transform or change the political and social order. So he sees the parallels. It's slightly surprising that the great democratic novelist didn't see inside the mob the artisans that we've been talking about. Absolutely.

I mean, that's often. There's some sympathy for the moment. It's not an entirely unsympathetic account, but it is, as we've already said, it's an inability to see the individuals behind the crowd. And finally, what happened to Gordon, Ian? Very ironically, he ends up himself a prisoner in Newgate.

This is because he maligned the French Queen. Marie Antoinette. He maligned the French Queen. And by this point, lost all this kind of elite support, so he can't even be kind of bailed. So he ends his days in the prison that was the kind of highlight of the power of the crowd during the Gordon riots. He also converted to Judaism. Well, I was going to say. Which we have managed to not touch on his private life, which impugned quite a deal on his reputation.

But let's leave that for another time. Thank you very much. Katrina Kennedy, Mark Knight, and Ian Hayward. Next week, it's the French philosopher Henry Bergson, whose ideas on time and space and duration influenced Proust, Wolf and Cubism. Thank you for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests.

I think we missed out a little bit talking about the sort of parallel process of the parliamentary reform process, which is called the association movement. Yeah. Because the two run in parallel. Yeah. And its primary focus is in Yorkshire. And it adopts very, very similar tactics to Gordon.

It creates an association. It uses petitioning. It uses public meetings. And yet it's entirely peaceful. And it looks as though at one point the two processes might combine because they've got similar aims. They both want reform. They want different types of reform.

And ultimately, they don't join. And in fact, there's some antagonism between the two processes because the parliamentary reformers, the Yorkshire reformers, the economical reformers as they are sometimes called, don't want to be associated with the mob violence that's unleashed in the Gordon riots. Or with the religious kind of zealotry, I suppose. Absolutely. So Sir George Saville, who's very instrumental in the reform movement in Yorkshire, is one of the people who the mob targets in his house. in London.

And I was going to say in my review of Gordon's career, the decision to bring the thousands of supporters onto the streets, which was hotly contested, wasn't it, within the Protestant Association, was only done when these other mechanisms failed. So he did actually try to operate in the corridors of power. He tried to make an alliance, didn't he, with Wyvel's Yorkshire Association. He went to see the Prime Minister, Lord North.

He even had an audience with the... king, which you could do in those days if you were a member of parliament and he actually took the kind of manifesto, didn't he, the Protestant Association. The king was singular unimpressed by this. So it was kind of when those, if you like,

you know, kind of mover and shaker options failed, wasn't it? They then said, right, I'm going to do what Wilkes and other politicians before me have done. I'm going to mobilize the people, didn't he? It was a bit of a last resort to that extent. Although of course it had been a successful tactic

north of the border. So there is a real logic there. Well, I mean, I suppose I was just going to go back to this point about the connections between other political reform movements. And I suppose the difficult thing to kind of, maybe for later historians, thinking about the rights, is trying to fit them within a narrative of political reform or more radical movements that are aimed at changing the social and political order.

But of course, Gordon himself has those connections, you know, especially later in the 1780s, very 1790s, he is connected to international radicals. He, especially those who are involved with the French Revolution. So although in some ways he seems to represent a kind of religious bigotry, there is this, you know, more progressive, Radical sight. The story here McCallman

certainly sees him as a kind of radical as a radical Republican you know, harking back indeed to the 17th century because he modelled himself on the Scottish covenanters you know of the late 17th century and in fact Thomas Holcroft

who wrote one of the main pamphlets about the Gordon Wrights soon after the event said he resembles a modern Puritan and apparently he dressed a bit like you know this rather old-fashioned, and he spoke in this very kind of antiquated way. Of course, the downside of that is all these accusations against the horrors of popery,

isn't it, to us now? But on the other side, there's lots of rhetoric of freedom and liberty and the freeborn Englishmen, you know, and those enshrined rights you mentioned earlier in the programme. So that can be seen as radical, but it's got to be weighed against. He's also a critic of capital punishment. Yep. So he's this curious mixture, isn't he, of enlightenment ideas? and counter-enlightment ideas.

Assuming we see anti-Catholicism as counter-enlightment, of course, which I guess we should. But I mean, some historians say that really Catholicism was kind of short-hand for tyranny, wasn't it? So the real... Absolutely, yes. The real target was political tyranny,

not in fact religion. Yes, I mean, if Catholicism is associated with dogma and tradition, that's opposed to everything that the Enlightenment stands for. So I think that's the tricky thing, kind of seeing how closely intertwined ideas about politics and liberty

are with these, what we might see as more atavistic attitudes towards Catholics, that you can be kind of progressive in some ways, but also quite bigoted in others. I mean, in the curious way, dissenters had more in common... I mean, this is always, what I see is ironic, dissenters had more in common with Catholics and they had against them in many ways. They may have been

Protestant Catholic, but they were both discriminated against. So of this was called the Test Act. You know, the Test Act was the one that discriminated against Protestant dissenters. And indeed, when there were moves to repeal the Test Act, this imagery of the mob again, you know, the mindless mob, if you give, you know, if you give the dissenters their freedom, you know, they're going to destroy the whole of the Constitution and move towards some kind of, you know, anarchy. All this imagery recurs in the 1790s, doesn't it?

Where it's kind of fueled by the French Revolution as well, isn't it? Can I, go to the French Revolution? in the note there's some suggestion that this was the Gordon writers an inspiration to or precursor of or there was a connection with the French Revolution. Yes, so I think thinking about a figure like Edmund Burke, of course, who's the great polemicist against the French Revolution, but also has direct experience of the Gordon riots.

He's targeted during those rights as a proponent of the Relief Act. and you can see ways in which the reflections is haunted maybe by the memory, the experience of the riots. So when he writes it, at 1790, the French Revolution is still in quite a moderate phase, and yet he already sees the potential for uncontrolled violence and terror. Based on his experience of the Gordon riots? Arguably, yes, I think that's one way of looking at it. On the other hand, Charles James Fox, you know, when he's celebrated,

that early stage of the French Revolution does make a very direct comparison to the storming of Newgate, which was called the Bastille. And I think, you know, Newgate to me is the kind of pinnacle of the riots. And this is reflected in the engravings because it's an example of crowd power, isn't it, of the power of the people. And they're shown, you know, in this spirit of liberation and they're waving their shackles. You know, the freed prisoners are waving their shackles, aren't they? And they're kind of dancing, you know, rather like words were celebrated the French Ruffalo. Revolution has one great dance, you know, and the fact de la Fé d'Auxion. And it has been said that there was six times more property damaged

in the London rights, in the Gordon rights, than in the course of the French Revolution in Paris. So that puts it into some sort of perspective. Well, I think the producers waiting to come in. Yes, here he is. Just offering tea or coffee. Oh.

Yeah, please. Coffee for me, please. Tea, please. Tea, please. Tea, please. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson. Oi, you. While you're here, have a listen to this, Richard.

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