Books: Zion’s Bagpiper

KING MOB (249 pp.)—Christopher Hibbert—World ($4.95).

“They were, and are, all mad.” said Horace Walpole of the noble Gordon family. Perhaps the maddest of the lot was Lord George Gordon,* hero of this excellent study of a neglected piece of British history. He attained notoriety in childhood, dressed up as Cupid at a soiree, by shooting visiting King Stanislaus of Poland in the face with a silver arrow. Unfortunately, destiny cast George Gordon for the leading part in a far more horrendous 18th century shooting match.

After a stretch in the navy and in Parliament (he cozened the Scottish voters by dancing Highland reels and, on one occasion, importing 15 beautiful maidens of the Clan Macleod for a party), truculent Lord George Gordon became president of the Protestant Association. Gordon was a furious enemy of the Catholic Relief Act, passed in 1778 to ease the lot of English Catholics. One June day in 1780 the association met in St. George’s Fields, 50,000 strong. After a speech by Gordon, they marched eight abreast to Parliament to demand repeal of the Relief Act, and an onlooker noted that they “had long lank heads of hair, meagre countenances . . . and they uttered deep ejaculations; in short, displaying all the outward and visible signs of hypocrisy and starvation.”

Sacked City. Outside Parliament the demonstrators were joined by “ruffians and street boys, pickpockets and prostitutes.” As the carriages carrying peers and M.P.s began to arrive, this mixed mob went berserk. The great Edmund Burke received no worse than shrieks of “obscene invective,” but the Duke of Northumberland was beaten up, the Lord Chief Justice stripped of his wig. The Bishops of Lincoln and Lichfield were “plastered with mud and excrement”; the Archbishop of York was shoved about until he agreed to cry out “No Popery!”

During succeeding days and nights, marching in crazed, drunken columns, the mob smashed, looted and burned the Catholic chapels of continental ambassadors. The rioters wrecked breweries and distilleries, pumping raw gin onto the flames through the hoses of fire engines, rolling barrels of fat into the bonfires until the London sky blazed with a red glare not seen again until World War II. Methodically, the mob went to work on London’s storied prisons—Newgate, Bridewell, Fleet —turning a stream of criminals loose. “London offered on every side,” said an eyewitness, “the picture of a city sacked and abandoned to a ferocious enemy.”

It was several days before the government of Prime Minister Lord North ordered soldiers to fire on the mob. The “Gordon Riots” were a part of the process that destroyed the political system of George III and opened the way to 19th century democracy—although Author Hibbert himself admits that to this day nobody has completely explained the why and wherefore of “the most savage riots in English history.”

Prison Salon. And what of their instigator, Lord George Gordon? Thunderstruck by an orgy of destruction that had got out of his control almost as soon as it had begun, he was hustled off to the Tower of London. Brought to trial for high treason the following year, when tempers had cooled, he was acquitted, and retired quietly to private life. But not for long. Within a few years, he reappeared in the public eye by getting himself into more political scrapes. During one of them, he fled the country and then, to everyone’s astonishment, returned wearing “a straggling black beard . . . and … a large wide-brimmed black hat such as those worn by Polish merchants.” He gave his name as Israel bar Abraham George Gordon. Presumably disillusioned with both Protestants and Catholics, he had become an Orthodox Jew.

Some said that the convert—having changed his faith but not his spots—would soon set to work “leading back the Israelites to their father’s land.” The Jewish lord was prevented from becoming the first Zionist by being sentenced to five years in rebuilt Newgate for his latest political escapades. There his large, comfortable cell, decorated like a synagogue every Sabbath, became one of the most popular salons in London. “Everyone who believed in democracy was welcome”—except Jews whose beards were too short by Orthodox standards. There were big parties, at which the host played the bagpipe, the Duke of York “very obligingly” helped roast the turkey, and “ladies of fashion would dance with Jewish shopkeepers.” Though they had suffered greatly at his hands, Londoners mourned when, in 1793, death silenced the bagpipe of Lieutenant Lord Israel bar Abraham George Gordon.

* Distant kin of George Gordon Lord Byron.