‘Have a Care What You Do’
Lord George Gordon marched at the head of 50,000 protestors to the House of Commons, to demand that George III’s England did not become like Louis XVI’s France.
set in 1780
Lord George Gordon marched at the head of 50,000 protestors to the House of Commons, to demand that George III’s England did not become like Louis XVI’s France.
set in 1780
This post is number 1 in the series Barnaby Rudge (Novel)
The ‘Gordon Riots’ of 1780 were a protest against the Papists Act (1778), which eased the ban on Roman Catholics in Government. Fearing the Pope would meddle in English politics as he apparently meddled all over Europe, Lord George Gordon MP led an unruly mob to the Commons with a petition for repeal. In Barnaby Rudge, Charles Dickens dramatised what unfolded on the stairs up to the Visitor’s Gallery.
‘I AM afraid,’ he [Lord George Gordon] said, this time, ‘that we have little reason, gentlemen, to hope for any redress from the proceedings of Parliament. But we must redress our own grievances, we must meet again, we must put our trust in Providence, and it will bless our endeavours.’*
This speech being a little more temperate than the last, was not so favourably received. When the noise and exasperation were at their height, he came back once more, and told them that the alarm had gone forth for many miles round; that when the King heard of their assembling together in that great body, he had no doubt, His Majesty would send down private orders to have their wishes complied with; and — with the manner of his speech as childish, irresolute, and uncertain as his matter — was proceeding in this strain, when two gentlemen suddenly appeared at the door where he stood, and pressing past him and coming a step or two lower down upon the stairs, confronted the people.
The boldness of this action quite took them by surprise.
* Lord George Gordon (1751-1793), third and youngest son of Cosmo George Gordon, 3rd Duke of Gordon. He entered Parliament in 1774 as MP for Ludgershall, and five years later founded the Protestant Association with the aim of repealing the Papists Act of 1778. For his part in the events of June 2nd, 1780, and the destruction of the ‘Gordon Riots’ that followed, Gordon himself was acquitted of treasonous intent. However, he remained a political loose cannon and in 1787 was charged with defamation for his salacious revelations about Louis’s queen, Marie Antoinette. Gordon was committed to Newgate Gaol, where he died, a model prisoner who was much-loved among the inmates for his generosity and his welcome to all, in 1793.