Sir George Savile's measure did away with certain restrictions, certain barbarous restrictions, as they now seem, upon English subjects professing the Catholic faith. The famous Act of the eleventh and twelfth years of King William the Third, the Act known as the Act for the Further Preventing the Growth of Popery, had instituted certain very harsh penal enactments against Catholics. {192} That Act Sir George Savile proposed largely to repeal. This was a measure of relief of no great magnitude, but it did at least recognize the common humanity of Catholic Englishmen with Protestant Englishmen; it did at least allow to Catholic Englishmen some of the dearest and most obvious rights of citizenship. The savage penal laws which for so long afflicted the sister island of Ireland were tempered and abrogated in this measure as far as England was concerned, and rumor spread it abroad that a similar relief was soon to be extended to the Catholics of Scotland. Straightway a Bill which had passed both Houses without a single negative aroused the fiercest opposition beyond the Border. The announcement of the recall of the Stuarts could not have spread a greater panic through the ranks of the Scottish Protestants. A violent agitation was set on foot, an agitation which could not have been more violent if the Highlanders had once again been at the gates of Edinburgh. An alarmist spirit spread abroad. All manner of associations and societies were called into being for the defence of a faith which was not menaced. Committees were appointed to inflame faction and serve as the rallying points of bigotry. Sectarian books and pamphlets of the most exaggerated and alarming kind were sown broadcast all over the country. The result of this kind of agitation showed itself in a religious persecution, which gradually developed into a religious war. The unfortunate Catholic residents in Edinburgh, in Glasgow, and in other great Scottish towns found themselves suddenly the victims of savage violence at the hands of mobs incited by the inflammatory utterances and the inflammatory propaganda of the Protestant committees. In the face of the disorder which a suggestion of mercy aroused in Scotland, the Government seemed to take fright, and to abandon all thought of extending the clemency of the Relief Bill to Scotland.
But the Scottish agitation against the Catholics soon spread across the Border, soon directed itself, not against the imaginary Bill which it might be the intention of the Government to pass, but against the actual Bill which the {192} Government had passed for the benefit of English Catholics. The bigoted bodies, societies, and committees in Scotland soon found their parallels in England. The English Protestant Association rose into being like some sudden evocation of a wizard, and chose for its head and leader the man who had made himself conspicuous as the head and leader of the movement in Scotland—Lord George Gordon.
[Sidenote: 1750-80—Lord George Gordon]
Lord George Gordon lives forever, a familiar figure in the minds of the English-speaking race, thanks to the picture drawn by Charles Dickens. Englishmen know, as they know the face of a friend, the ominous figure "about the middle height, of a slender make and sallow complexion, with an aquiline nose, and long hair of a reddish brown, combed perfectly straight and smooth about his ears and slightly powdered, but without the faintest vestige of a curl." It is a living portrait of that solemn gentleman in the suit of soberest black, with those bright large eyes in which insanity burned, "eyes which betrayed a restlessness of thought and purpose, singularly at variance with the studied composure and sobriety of his mien, and with his quaint and sad apparel." It fits well with all that we know of Lord George Gordon, to learn that there was nothing fierce or cruel in his face, whose mildness and whose melancholy were chiefly varied by a haunting air of "indefinable uneasiness, which infected those who looked upon him and filled them with a kind of pity for the man: though why it did so they would have had some trouble to explain." Such was the strange fanatic whose name was destined to be blown for a season throughout England, who was fated to stand for a moment visible in the eyes of all men, the idol of intolerance, the apostle of violence, of murder, and of fire, and then to fall most pitiably, most pitifully into the dust.
Lord George Gordon was still a young man when he became leader of the anti-Catholic agitation. He would seem in our days a very young man, for, as he was born in 1750, he was only thirty when the agitation reached its height. But a man of thirty was counted older than he {193} would not be reckoned, in an epoch when it was possible for a young man just come of age to lead the House of Commons. Lord George Gordon had led a somewhat varied life. He had been in the navy, and had left the service from pique, while the American war was still in its earliest stages, in consequence of a quarrel with Lord Sandwich concerning promotion. The restless energy which he could no longer dedicate to active service he resolved most unhappily to devote to political life. He entered Parliament as the representative of the borough of Ludgershall, and soon earned for himself a considerable notoriety in Westminster. He had very fierce opinions; he attacked everybody and everything; his vehemence and vituperation were seasoned with a kind of wit, and he made himself, if not a power, at least an important factor in the House of Commons. Indeed, it passed into a kind of proverb at St. Stephen's that there were three parties in the State—the Ministry, the Opposition, and Lord George Gordon. Parliament had seen before, and has seen since, many a politician fighting thus like Hal o' the Wynd for his own hand, but no one so influential for a season or so pernicious in his influence as Lord George Gordon.
It seems quite clear to those who review so strange a career at this distance of time that Lord George Gordon was of deranged intellect. It does not need the alleged contrast between his professions and his practice to enforce this conclusion. Many men have affected the religious habit and the religious bearing while their lives were privately profligate without deserving to be called insane except in the sense in which any criminal excess may be regarded pathologically as a proof of madness. Even if it were true that the long-haired and black-habited George Gordon were the debauched profligate that Hannah More and Horace Walpole maintained him to be, he might find fellow-sinners of unquestioned sanity. But the conduct of his public life goes to prove that his wits were diseased. His behavior in the House, when it was not intolerably tedious, was characterized by a grotesque buffoonery which men looked upon as laughable {194} or pitiable according to their tempers, but which they had not yet learned to look upon as dangerous. When he denounced the King as a Papist, when he declared that the time would come when George Gordon would be able to dictate to the Crown and Parliament, when he occasionally interrupted his wild utterances to break into floods of tears, men sneered or yawned or laughed. They were soon to learn that the man was something more than divertingly contemptible.
In the excitement that followed on the passing of the relief measure Lord George Gordon found his opportunity for being actively noxious. A gloomy fanaticism in Scotland took fire at the fear lest kindred relief should be extended to the North Briton, and, as we have said, displayed itself in savage speech and savage deed. In the press and from the pulpit denunciations of the Catholics streamed. The Synod of Glasgow solemnly resolved that it would oppose any Bill brought into Parliament in favor of Scottish Catholics. In Edinburgh and in Glasgow houses were wrecked and lives menaced. In Glasgow a worthy potter, Mr. Bagnal, who had brought from Staffordshire its famous art, had his property wholly destroyed. In Edinburgh the house of a Catholic priest was wrecked in obedience to a brutal handbill which called upon its readers to "take it as a warning to meet at Leith Wynd, on Wednesday next, in the evening, to pull down that pillar of popery lately erected there." The "pillar of popery" was the dwelling occupied by the priest, which was duly wrecked in obedience to the bidding of the nameless "Protestant" who signed the manifesto. It is curious to note a postscriptum to the handbill, which ran thus: "Please to read this carefully, keep it clean, and drop it somewhere else. For King and country.—UNITY." The means which were adopted to spread fanaticism in Scotland were carefully followed when the time came for carrying the agitation into England.
[Sidenote: 1778-80—The English "Protestant Association">[
It was indeed not necessary to be a Catholic to call down the fury of fanatical persecution. To have expressed any sympathy for Catholicism, to have taken part in any way, {195} no matter how indirect, in the advocacy of the relief measure, was enough to mark men out for vengeance. Dr. Robertson, the historian, was threatened because he advocated tolerance in religious matters. A lawyer named Crosbie was denounced merely because he had in the way of his regular business drawn up the Bill intended for Parliament. It was inevitable that the action of intolerance in Scotland should come before the notice of Parliament. Wilkes, always ostentatious in the cause of liberty, called upon Dundas to bring in his relief measure for Scotland. When Dundas declared that it was better to delay the measure until cooler judgment might prevail, Wilkes denounced him for allowing Parliament to truckle to riot, and the denunciation found support in the actions of Burke and of Fox. Lord George Gordon had found his opportunity. He assailed Fox; he assailed Burke. He declared that every non-Catholic in Scotland was ready to rise in arms against Catholic relief, and that the rebels had chosen him for their leader. He raged and vapored and threatened on the floor of the House. But he did more than rage and vapor and threaten. Whether of his own motion, or prompted by others, he formed a "Protestant Association" in England. Of this, as of the similar Scottish Association, he was declared the head, and this accumulation of honors wholly overthrew his intelligence. An amiable writer has declared that "it would be much beneath the dignity of history to record the excesses of so coarse a fanatic but for the fatal consequences with which they were attended." The amiable defender of a detestable phrase does not understand that it was the excesses of the fanatic that led to the fatal consequences, and that Lord George Gordon, as the ostensible head and conspicuous cause of one of the gravest events of the history of England in the eighteenth century, is in no sense beneath the "dignity of history." The business of history is with him and with such as he, as well as with the statelier, austerer figures who sanely shape the destinies of the State. There was plenty of fanaticism abroad in England; it was reserved for Lord George Gordon to bring it together into {196} a single body, to organize it, and to employ its force with a terrible if temporary success. He issued an insane proclamation calling upon men to unite against Catholicism; he held a great meeting of the Protestant Association at Coachmakers' Hall, at which with a kind of Bedlamite-brilliancy he raved against Catholicism and lashed the passions of his hearers to delirium. It was resolved to hold a huge meeting of the Protestant Association in St. George's Fields on June 2. At its head Lord George Gordon was to proceed to the House of Commons and deliver the petition against Catholic relief. All stanch Protestants were to wear blue cockades in their hats to mark out the faithful from the unfaithful.
[Sidenote: 1780—The Lord George Gordon riots]