This piece originally appeared as an addendum to this post. I’m reprinting it now, with slight amendment.
What follows is an account of Edmund Burke’s position on the use of the army against the Gordon Rioters, who had laid London to waste in the cause of anti-Catholic fanaticism.It is important to realise the level of the destruction. Newgate Prison had been burned down and murderers were roaming the streets. A mob was besieging Parliament and beating MPs and Peers. Embassies of Catholic countries had been sacked. The house of a prominent judge was sacked, and his books and furnishings turned into a huge bonfire.
Burke was in favour of Catholic emancipation. He was utterly opposed to the rioters and all they stood for. Indeed, he was a victim of anti-Catholic prejudice, and the Riots themselves.
For Edmund Burke this time proved turbulent. He vividly remembered his house being guarded in case rioters targeted him because of his Catholic family background and because he was still suspected of being a latent Catholic. He lost his seat in Bristol later that year because of the anti-Catholic movement. Certainly he had during this period looked at evil straight in the eyes.
However, when the soldiers fired on civilians, he was horrified:
Mr Burke condemned the riots in very strong terms; but said Ministers were much to blame for neglecting to take proper precautions in time to prevent it, and doubly so now, by drawing out the army, and thereby establishing a military on the ruins of civil government. The avenues near the House, and the streets leading to it, bore the appearance more of Paris, Berlin or Petersburgh, that of the capital of a government limited by law. The streets were all lined as he came along with the horse and foot guards, and the Park looked more like a camp or a garrison than the Park belonging to the palace of a free monarch. He was of the opinion that such an appearance of military preparation served only to create, and not suppress it. Government had lost all dignity and respect, and it was a mistaken idea to imagine the people of this country would be bullied by legions of armed men, or jannisaries clothed in scarlet.
As a footnote, Lord George Gordon, who inspired the riots which bear his name, ended his life a convict. He had been convicted of the criminal libel of Marie Antoinette, and was detained in Newgate Prison, which had been rebuilt. Having spent a few months on the run, Lord George Gordon was discovered in the house of a Jewish washerwoman in Lincoln, where he had converted to Judaism.
Edmund Burke mocked him as “our protestant Rabbin”, in a passage of his Reflections on the Revolution in France, only slightly marred by an unfortunate reference to the “compound interest on the thirty pieces of silver”.