King Mob
by Andy Worthington
[ bookreviews ]
Forty-six years after it was first published, Sutton Publishing has seen fit to reissue Christopher Hibbert's masterly study of eccentric aristocrat Lord George Gordon and the combination of personal hubris, anti-Catholic sentiment, inadequate policing and mob opportunism that led to one of the largest popular uprisings in British history, the "Gordon Riots" of June 1780, when, over five days, an insurgent mob destroyed numerous Catholic chapels and houses belonging to Catholics or Catholic sympathisers, attacked the Bank of England, and set fire to several prisons, including the notorious examples of Newgate, Fleet and King's Bench, before finally being routed by the army.
In erudite yet elegant prose that seems closer in spirit to the 18th century than the 21st, Hibbert introduces Gordon as an example of a family that had "for generations shown occasional signs of something more than eccentricity", runs through his disastrous early career as a midshipman, where his instinctive sympathy for the underdog - in this case the sailors - alienated his superior officers and convinced the Admiralty Board that he was "a damned nuisance wholly unsuitable for promotion", and details his subsequent - and equally confounding - career as a politician. Despite his vehement criticism of the Tory government, Gordon proved to be a notoriously unreliable supporter of the Opposition, a maverick figure with a "whole-hearted and uncritical" admiration for the American people, which he had conceived while serving in the Navy, and an insistence that his own purpose in Parliament was to serve "the people", something that neither political party could apparently be trusted to do.
Hibbert explains how these particular passions, rather than a virulent personal crusade against Catholicism, led the iconoclastic MP to oppose the Catholic Relief Act of 1778, which in itself was a largely cynical gesture on the part of the government, intended primarily to make it easier to recruit Catholic soldiers to serve in the American War. In the process, Gordon assumed the leadership of the Protestant Association and came to the fateful conclusion that the best way to influence Parliament in the matter was to deliver a petition at the head of a crowd of 50,000 men. This was the protest - of devout Protestants "with hymn-books in their pockets and a look of martyrdom, determined, noble and self-righteous, in their eyes" - that was hijacked by another beast entirely, the notorious London "mob", who proceeded to terrorize the capital for the next five days.
While Gordon himself had little or no influence over these events, Hibbert makes it clear that, in the period leading up to the riots, the wayward Lord was not motivated solely by political ideals. After years of neglect and ridicule, he was finally representing his beloved "people". As the author declares, it was "a vision which sparkled with the glittering dust of megalomania", and "when he had gained that power, so much desired and so long denied him, his supporters with their delicious, intoxicating flattery urged him on to excess; while he, sharing their reckless enthusiasm, did not notice where it was leading him until it was too late to turn back".
While the publishers are right to claim, as the back cover blurb states, that King Mob "will appeal to all those interested in popular protests and political movements, or in eighteenth century social history", I must take exception to the additional claim that "this astonishing episode... has many parallels today". Except in the very broadest sense that "visionary" leaders and crowds of dour, reactionary Puritans should not be trusted, Hibbert's meticulously reconstructed history makes clear that this was an uprising that was very specific to its time and place.
In the first instance, the London of 1780 had no efficient police force, a situation that is clearly inconceivable today. Confronted by the rioters, the majority of the city's supposed defenders - the Justices of the Peace, magistrates, aldermen and even the Lord Mayor - shrank from their duties, and it was not until Parliament finally conceded that martial law would have to prevail over what Hibbert describes as "the old familiar cry for the freedom of the individual; the belief for so long cherished that even lawlessness was better than oppression" that the army was mobilized to bring the riots to a bloody end.
Secondly, the mob of 1780 differs from any conceivable parallel today in its almost complete anonymity. Few individuals can be picked out from the groups of "resolute, half-drunk, venomous-looking" men described in a contemporary report, or the "hundreds of street boys and prostitutes, drunks, pickpockets and rowdies" - or permutations thereof - that Hibbert frequently resorts to in his descriptions. There are a few memorable characters - James Johnson, "a giant of a man", seated on a cart-horse, whose voice "boomed like the crack of doom", Thomas Taplin, one of 25 rioters who were subsequently executed, who "led on horseback a gang of about fifty ragamuffins", and a certain "brewery drayman, who rode a cart-horse decorated with chain and fetter stolen from Newgate" - but neither these men, nor any of the rioters, has left any kind of statement that explains their motives or beliefs. This one-sided source material undoubtedly contributes to the antique splendour of much of Hibbert's prose, in that he is forced to quote at length from a steady procession of well-educated eye-witnesses, although, to his credit, he compensates for these omissions and attempts to humanize the rioters by including an occasional - and well aimed - barb at those responsible for the desperate plight of London's poorest inhabitants:
"The poor were in revolt against authority. For as long as any of them could remember they had been insulted, frustrated and ignored; the victims of laws specifically directed against them; the lower orders in a society which shamefully abused them. They rose up incoherently in protest, unprepared and inarticulate, unsure even themselves of what they wanted or hoped to attain. Encouraged by fanatics and criminals, reckless and drunken, they themselves became criminals, and died to no purpose which they could name, rebels without a cause and without a leader".
This may be Hibbert's most poignant conclusion about the "Gordon Riots", but his story ends, as it began, with Lord George Gordon himself, the erstwhile leader of the leaderless mob. Tried for high treason but acquitted in the wake of the riots, Gordon finally vexed the authorities to breaking point by launching a libellous personal attack on the French Queen in the Public Inquirer, and publishing an equally libellous assault on the British judiciary - in a pamphlet designed to prevent prisoners at Newgate from being exiled to Botany Bay - in which he declared that "the true record of the Almighty is falsified and erased by the Lawyers and Judges (who sit with their backs to the words of the living God and the fear of men before their faces) till the streets of our city have run down with a stream of blood".
There followed a ludicrous trial during which Gordon spectacularly failed to defend himself from the charges. He began, as Hibbert notes, "with an enormously long and muddled speech which included a by no means brief summary of English Criminal Law from the time of Athelstan", and proceeded swiftly downhill thereafter. After absconding before he could be sentenced, he was finally apprehended in Birmingham the following year, re-emerging as a convert to Judaism now known as Israel bar Abraham George Gordon. He spent the last years of his life behind the bars of Newgate prison, where, as befitted the idiosyncratic tenor of his life, he became something of a celebrity, receiving anyone who wanted to see him, and ensuring that his cell was "often so crowded in the early afternoons that there was no room to sit down even on the floor", before succumbing to typhoid in 1793, "murmuring scraps of long forgotten speeches, the names of his brothers and favourite sister and of women he had loved".
