In the year 1780 London experienced a notoriously ugly outbreak of mob violence prompted by religious bigotry which historians have dubbed the ‘Gordon’ or ‘No-Popery’ Riots. Fortunately, perhaps, the revolutions taking place at this time both in France and America have eclipsed this unsavoury event and it is rarely remembered. But anyone well read in the works of Charles Dickens will know that Barnaby Rudge, one of the author’s two historical novels, is built around the Gordon Riots.
The threat of Roman Catholic interference in the affairs of England seemed to any logical person quite dead by the latter half of the eighteenth century. Thus in 1778 Parliament passed a Catholic Relief Act to do away with the old laws suppressing the Catholics. But, as the common people were generally unrepresented in Parliament at his time, a wave of popular resistance to this new act swept the country and Protestant Associations sprang up everywhere. The leader of this agitation was an enthusiastic but mentally unsound Scottish nobleman named Lord George Gordon.
His rallying slogan was, ‘No popery! Gordon prepared an appeal to do away with the Catholic Relief Act and called for 20,000 Protestants to join him on 2 June 1780, to present the appeal to Parliament. Sixty thousand showed up, and the affair quickly escalated from a demonstration to a riot. The Parliament House was stormed and the members mobbed, Roman Catholic chapels in London were sacked and burned, houses and businesses of Roman Catholics and anyone known to be sympathetic to them were destroyed. For six days the mob raged out of control. Newgate Prison was attacked and burned, the mob was swollen by hardened criminals, and in the end some 300 people were killed. Finally King George III personally sent troops to restore order, which was done rigorously with much loss of life. Twenty-five of the leaders were hanged, though Gordon himself was acquitted.