Georgian London: Into the Streets (15 page)

America’s Declaration of Independence in 1776, so soon after Britain had ceded substantial foreign territories to end the Seven Years War, was a huge blow to the natural optimism of London, many of whose citizens earned a living by trading with American
friends and family. Amongst societies, the press and in many ordinary homes there was constant debate on the subject: ‘Would it not be advisable for the legislature of Great-Britain to treat with the American Congress on terms of reconciliation?’ asked
The Gazetteer
on 18 January 1776. The declaration echoed John Locke’s ideas and even quoted directly from his
Second Treatise of Government
. America was annexed to Britain yet seen as a land apart, one of unlimited opportunity and conflicting, often flexible values. As Samuel Johnson wrote, ‘
How is it that we hear
the loudest yelps for liberty among the drivers of negroes?’

The middle-class Westminster debating societies went into overdrive in the taverns surrounding Parliament. The Declaration of Independence was seen not so much as a definitive break but a step along a long road. Interest in matters American continued unabated amongst the middle classes. Many felt let down, believing that agreement could have been reached with America were it not for the stubbornness of George III.

Recourse to government by the educated citizen was seen increasingly as a right. But in the latter part of the eighteenth century, the vulnerability of the shabby old Parliament buildings became alarmingly apparent. For almost a week during the summer of 1780, London was gripped by a violent and drunken mob, raging against the Papists Act of 1778 which aimed at returning Catholics to public life. After the passing of the Act, rumours began to circulate that there were 20,000 Jesuit priests hiding in Bankside, waiting for the word from Rome, upon which they would blow up the banks of the Thames and flood the city. Another rumour was that a team of Benedictine monks had disguised themselves as chairmen in order to poison all the flour in the borough. No one bought any bread for days, until it was tested publicly upon a dog.

Lord George Gordon was a London-born nobleman of Scottish extraction. He was charming, articulate and intense, but the Gordons ‘
were, and are, all mad’. This included their choice of wives, and Gordon’s mother was famous in Edinburgh for ‘galloping madly down High Street on the back of a capering pig
’. Gordon got into Parliament by having the pocket borough of Ludgershall bought for him at the age
of twenty-two. He emerged as a great speaker, but he criticized all the parties and was unpopular in the House of Commons.

Inflamed by the Protestant cause, Gordon proposed that London’s Protestants meet him in St George’s Fields on Friday 2 June, at ten o’clock in the morning. Then they would proceed to the Houses of Parliament, to deliver a petition against the Act. The day dawned hot, and the numbers were massive: in excess of 50,000. They arrived early to sign the petition, which was made of strips of parchment; as each one was filled, a tailor began to sew them together. Gordon arrived almost an hour late, having struggled through the crowd. It was sweltering, and Gordon couldn’t make himself heard above the masses. He soon gave up, pushed back through the crowd and was rescued by a friend who drove him off towards the House of Commons. The crowd followed, with the rolled-up petition carried like a carpet.

Fifteen-year-old Frederic Reynolds and his best friend, the young Duke of Bedford, were pupils at Westminster School. They bolted their lunch and came out to get a look at the protest. They saw protestors ‘
occupying every avenue
to the Houses of Parliament, the whole of Westminster Bridge and extending to the northern end of Parliament Street’.

Coaches arrived carrying members to the House of Lords. The crowd took leave of its senses. Lord Bathurst was an old man and Lord President of the Council, but this did not prevent him being pulled from his coach, punched and smeared with filth from the road. Lord Stormont’s coach was destroyed in the road, and he took a sustained beating. Lord Mansfield had the windows of his carriage smashed in, and the protestors tried to pull him out by his hair; his wig came off in their hands. It was only by the bravery and cunning of his coachman that he got into the House unscathed. Old Lord Ashburnham was so badly beaten that those in the crowd with a remaining sense of decency lifted him over their heads and passed him into the House.

MPs heading for the Commons were treated somewhat better, but a few were unlucky. Welbore Ellis, who had ‘saved’ Casanova some years before, was struck viciously across the face with a horsewhip, leaving him pouring blood as he pelted into the Westminster
Guildhall pursued by more than thirty men before skittering over the roof to the next-door building.

Not enough magistrates could be found to control the mob. In the House of Commons, a disgruntled group of men were waiting to hear Gordon speak. The parchment petition was brought in and put on the floor. For the next six hours, the House debated; and then, at eight in the evening, they voted. One hundred and ninety-eight MPs had fought their way into the House of Commons on that day. Only six voted with Gordon.

The violence outside escalated as this news reached the mob. Just after nine o’clock, the Foot and Horse Guards arrived to ‘release’ the captive MPs. Rather than having an intimidating effect, the soldiers were pelted with stones and filth.

As darkness fell, a mob including many street children and prostitutes converged in Lincoln’s Inn, then headed to the nearby chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador. Minutes later, the interior of the chapel was ripped out and burned in the street. In the following days, the uproar swept through Soho, Moorfields and Holborn. Irish Catholics were targeted, including one silk weaver whose house was torn down, a bonfire made in the fields and his collection of caged canaries placed on the top. One distressed bystander offered money for the canaries but was knocked back and told that they were ‘
Popish birds
and should burn with the rest of the Popish goods’.

Newgate and The Fleet prisons were liberated, setting free in excess of 1,600 convicts. Gangs roamed the streets, requesting money with menaces. The poet William Cowper saw the fires across the city and wrote, ‘
London seemed a second Troy
.’

At dawn on Wednesday morning, 7,000 soldiers of the Home Counties militia marched into London. With the arrival of the army, the violence petered out. ‘
Such a time of terror
you have been fortunate in not seeing,’ Samuel Johnson would write to Mrs Thrale. The official death toll was low – some 210 deaths – but those who had been piled on to a barge beneath Blackfriars Bridge and cast off into the fast waters of the Thames remained uncounted. Gordon was arrested for treason. His luck held long enough for Lloyd Kenyon and Thomas Erskine to be appointed to defend him, and he was
acquitted. He disappeared into a Birmingham slum, where he was found some months later living as an Orthodox Jew, having been circumcised and taken the name Yisrael bar Avraham Gordon. Eventually, he was committed to Newgate on other charges. There he kept strict observance of Jewish religious law and was allowed to turn his room into a synagogue on the Jewish Sabbath. He seems to have suffered from a form of holy anorexia, becoming ever more devout and thin until he was carried off by gaol fever aged forty-two. A sad end for a deeply engaging, deeply eccentric man.

The Gordon Riots left their mark upon London. As people began to write up their memories of those terrible days, they wondered if such an event were not the product of a conspiracy, ‘
the effect of Accident
or Design?’ But by whom, and to what end, none could say. The mini-militias which had sprung up across neighbourhoods were at once admired and distrusted. Whilst such vigilante groups had worked well in the ill-lit and cramped quarters of London half a century earlier, they were not so welcome in Enlightenment London. The endless wrangling over the need for a properly funded police force, such as the French had, was brought up by the House of Lords, and eventually resulted in the introduction of the Metropolitan Police in 1829.

The historian Edward Gibbon called the rioters the ‘scum’ who had ‘boiled up to the surface in the huge cauldron’. But they had achieved what Westminster’s many active pub and coffee house debating societies full of concerned citizens could not. The riots led to a widespread questioning of how urban communities functioned and how they should be administrated or controlled. As importantly, they raised questions about the identity of Londoners: who they were, what they believed and what they would do when the rules were suspended, even temporarily.

The Gordon Riots made it relatively easy for George III to get rid of Lord North and Charles James Fox. The King appointed the 24-year-old Tory, William Pitt, as Prime Minister. Fox, however, was determined not to give up. Shambolic and charismatic, he wore blue coats and buff trousers like George Washington’s troops. He also gambled and drank, and had widespread support in all the social
classes. The King loathed him and thought him responsible for leading his son the Prince of Wales, later the Prince Regent, astray.

The general election was fiercely contested, but no more so than in Westminster. Fox and Pitt spent thousands, exchanged personal insults and engaged their friends to canvass for them. Fox’s canvassers included the Prince of Wales and Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire. ‘
She gets out of her carriage
and walks into alleys—many feathers and fox tails in her hat,’ wrote a disdainful Lady Boscawen. It was even reported that she was exchanging a kiss for the promise of a vote. Fox was returned for Westminster by a slender margin, but the result was delayed for over a year by legal challenges. William Pitt became Prime Minister and immediately put forward a Bill to reform the electoral system, but it was rejected. Finally, in 1832, the ‘Act to amend the representation of the people in England and Wales’, otherwise known as The Great Reform Act, began to improve the fairness of the electoral system.

As the Georgian period came to a close, politics remained an enduringly mysterious art. In the best parliamentary tradition, a Londoner attending the House of Commons debate one evening noted that, having inquired as to which was the politician he had come to hear speak, he was directed to a man ‘
sitting cross-legged
and cross-armed; his hat on a head resting on a sunk doubled-in chest’. For many others, politicians had emerged as a separate breed, as the
Morning Herald
asked, ‘
Have the people
more reason to believe that the present opposition to Government proceeds from a sincere regard for the interest of the nation, or a desire only to get into power?’

The Parliament buildings became even more run-down, and Sir John Soane was brought in to modernize them. However, a fire in an unattended stove, on 16 October 1834, set light to the flues beneath Black Rod’s dais and resulted in an almost comprehensive destruction of both Soane’s new buildings and the old Palace. Westminster Abbey and St Margaret’s church were untouched, but only a lucky change in wind direction, along with a colossal effort by spectators and the London Fire Brigade, saved Westminster Hall. That night, an army captain, George Manby, was injured in an accident with a fire engine, but what he saw inspired him to invent the first modern fire extinguisher. The London Fire Brigade’s famous ‘firedog’, Chance,
was also there and rode in on the engine before running up and down the lines, barking at the flames.

J. M. W. Turner stood on the banks of the Thames, filling a sketchbook. It was a memorable night and one deeply symbolic to the onlookers: the capital of a nation in the grip of parliamentary reform watched as the old Houses of Parliament were destroyed.

The development of St James’s Square and the surrounding area was under way soon after the Restoration. Charles II had chosen to live in St James’s Palace, close to the fresh air and countryside of which he was so fond. Henry Jermyn, Duke of St Albans, was the man who began to build on St James’s Fields, south of Piccadilly. He was ‘
a man of pleasure
 … and entertains no other thoughts than to live at ease’, perhaps the ideal qualifications for a man who was to design a miniature village for London’s wealthiest families. The first residents included the King’s ex-mistress Mary ‘Moll’ Davis. Elizabeth Pepys called her ‘
the most impertinent slut
in the world’, which is no doubt how she came by the £1,800 she paid for the property, aged twenty-nine. Jermyn had Christopher Wren design a local church, St James’s Piccadilly, and a market for the residents, located just to the west of the Haymarket.

St James’s proximity to the palaces and to Westminster meant it was much in favour with those who played a part in court and political life:

Those who have offices
, places or pensions from the court, or any expectations from thence, constantly attend the levees of the prince and his ministers, which takes up the greatest part of the little morning they have. At noon most of the nobility, and such gentlemen as are members of the house of commons, go down to Westminster, and when the houses do not sit late, return home to dinner or visit their clubs. Others that are not members of either house, and have no particular business to attend, are found in the chocolate-houses near the court, or in the park.