1715 England riots

King George I by Sir Godfrey Kneller, c. 1714.

In the spring and summer of 1715 a series of riots occurred in England in which High Church mobs attacked over forty Dissenting meeting-houses.[1][2] The rioters also protested against the first Hanoverian king of Britain, George I and his new Whig government (the Whigs were associated with the Dissenters).[3] The riots occurred on symbolic days: 28 May was George I's birthday, 29 May was the anniversary of Charles II's Restoration and 10 June was the birthday of the Jacobite Pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart.

  1. ^ Nicholas Rogers, ‘Riot and Popular Jacobitism in Early Hanoverian England’, in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), p. 70.
  2. ^ Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 191.
  3. ^ Rogers, p. 78, p. 81.