“Pipes and tobacco, pipes and tobacco, for Biddy Simpson!”
The pipes were got, and Biddy stuck one in her mouth and lit it amid frantic yells, and the crowd began to indulge in all kinds of antics. Snatches of songs and speeches, interlarded with oaths, were only half heard in the din. It was a motley crowd. Peers, members of the House of Commons, University students, and half the men and women from the Liberties, and some ladies who had come down to see Lord Farnham take the oath, were all mixed up in the wildest disorder.
How long this was likely to go on no one could surmise, when suddenly one of the ringleaders cried out:
“Let’s burn the records! Let’s burn the records! To the House of Commons!—To the House of Commons!”
The cry was taken up and the crowd began to force its way out and make for the House of Commons.
“Are ye goin’ to desert me, ye thieves, afther ye made a lord o’ me?” shouted Biddy, but the crowd had found a new purpose, and emptied out of the House of Lords as quickly as it had poured into it.
But for nearly an hour after, Jack and I and old Jacob and Dorothy remained where we were, and then, when the military, acting on the orders of the Lord Lieutenant, had partially cleared the streets—for the Lord Mayor had refused to interfere with the people—we made our way, not without some difficulty, to the “Robin Hood.”
Dorothy, for all her mild manners, was a brave little woman, and appeared little the worse of the ordeal through which she had passed.