“On Wednesday I walked with Dr. Scott, to look at Newgate, and found it in ruins, with the fire yet glowing. As I went by, the Protestants were plundering the Sessions House at the Old Bailey. There was not, I believe, a hundred; but they did their work at leisure, in full security, without sentinels, and without trepidation, as men lawfully employed in full day. Such is the cowardice of a commercial place!
“On Wednesday they broke open the Fleet Prison, the King’s Bench and Marshalsea Prisons, Wood-street Compter, and Clerkenwell Bridewell. At night they set fire to the Fleet and the King’s Bench, and I know not how many other places; and one might see the glare of conflagration fill the sky from many parts.—The sight was dreadful. Some people were threatened: Mr. Strahan advised me to take care of myself. Such a time of terror you would have been happy in not seeing.
“The king said in council ‘That the magistrates had not done their duty, but that he would do his own;’ and a proclamation was published, directing us to keep our servants within doors, as the peace was now to be preserved by force.
“The soldiers were sent out to different parts, and the town is now quiet. They are stationed so as to be everywhere within call; there is no longer any body of rioters, and the individuals are hunted to their holes, and led to prison: Lord George Gordon was last night sent to the Tower.
“Mr. John Wilkes was this day in my neighbourhood, to seize the publishers of a seditious pamphlet.
“Several chapels have been destroyed, and several inoffensive Papists have been plundered: but the high sport was to burn the gaols. This was a good rabble trick. The debtors and the criminals were set at liberty; but of the criminals, as has always happened, many are already retaken; and two pirates have surrendered themselves, and it is expected they will be pardoned.
“Government now acts with its proper force; and we are all now again under the protection of the king and the law. I thought it would be agreeable to you to have my testimony to the public security; and that you would sleep more quietly when I told you that you were safe.
“There has been, indeed, an universal panic, from which the king was the first that recovered. Without the concurrence or assistance of his ministers, or even the assistance of the civil magistrates, he put the soldiers in motion, and saved the town from calamities such as a rabble’s government must naturally produce.
“The public has escaped a very heavy calamity. The rioters attempted the Bank on Wednesday night, but in no great numbers; Jack Wilkes headed the party that drove them away. It is agreed, that if they had seized the Bank, on Tuesday, at the height of the pause, when no resistance had been prepared, they might have carried away whatever they had found.”
The number of persons killed in this dreadful riot is variously stated. Many persons, strangers to the attempt, were destroyed by the necessarily indiscriminate fire of the soldiers and militia; and although it is impossible to calculate the precise number who lost their lives, from the circumstance of many being carried off by their friends, it is believed to be about 500.