| Gordon Riots | |||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
 The Gordon Riots by Charles Green | |||||||||
| Date | 2–9 June 1780 | ||||||||
| Location | |||||||||
| Caused by | Papists Act 1778, anti-Catholicism in the United Kingdom | ||||||||
| Parties | |||||||||
| |||||||||
| Casualties | |||||||||
| Death(s) | 300–700 | ||||||||
The Gordon Riots of 1780 were several days of rioting in London motivated by anti-Catholic sentiment. They began with a large and orderly protest against the Papists Act 1778, which was intended to reduce official discrimination against British Catholics enacted by the Popery Act 1698. Lord George Gordon, head of the Protestant Association, argued that the law would enable Catholics to join the British Army and plot treason. The protest led to widespread rioting and looting, including attacks on Newgate Prison and the Bank of England[1][2][3] and was the most destructive in the history of London.[4]
Violence started on 2 June 1780, with the looting and burning of Catholic chapels in foreign embassies. Local magistrates, afraid of drawing the mob's anger, did not invoke the Riot Act. There was no repression until the government finally sent in the army, resulting in an estimated 300–700 deaths. The main violence lasted until 9 June 1780.
The riots occurred near the height of the American War of Independence, when Britain, with no major allies, was fighting American rebels, France, and Spain. Public opinion, especially in middle-class and elite circles, repudiated anti-Catholicism and lower-class violence, and rallied behind Lord North's government. Demands were made for a London police force.[5] There appeared painted on the wall of Newgate Prison a proclamation that the inmates had been freed by the authority of "His Majesty, King Mob". The term "King Mob" afterwards denoted an unruly and fearsome proletariat.
Edmund Burke later recalled the riots as a dangerous foretaste of the 1789 French Revolution:
Wild and savage insurrection quitted the woods, and prowled about our streets in the name of reform.... A sort of national convention ... nosed parliament in the very seat of its authority; sat with a sort of superintendence over it; and little less than dictated to it, not only laws, but the very form and essence of legislature itself.[6]
- ^ Brayley, Edward Wedlake; James Norris Brewer; Joseph Nightingale (1810). London and Middlesex. Printed by W. Wilson, for Vernor, Hood, and Sharpe.
- ^ "Lord George Gordon". Archived from the original on 1 June 2009. Retrieved 25 July 2009.
- ^ Horn, David Bayne; Mary Ransome (1996). English Historical Documents 1714–1783. Routledge. ISBN 978-0-415-14372-1.
- ^ Ian Haywood (11 March 2013). "The Gordon Riots of 1780: London in Flames, a Nation in Ruins". Gresham College. Retrieved 20 September 2021.
- ^ Dorothy Marshall, Eighteenth Century England (1974) pp. 469–472.
- ^ Burke, Edmund (1796). A Letter to a Noble Lord. The Harvard Classics.