The Gordon Riots: a Study of the Rioters and their Victims

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Abstract
THE Gordon Riots made a profound impression on contemporaries. They took place at a time of acute political crisis, at the most dangerous moment of the American war, when the country, after numerous defeats and counteralliances, found itself virtually isolated. At their height, on the night of 7 June 1780, London appeared to onlookers to be a sea of flames. ‘I remember’, wrote Horace Walpole on the 8th, ‘the Excise and the Gin Act and the rebels at Derby and Wilkes’ interlude and the French at Plymouth, or I should have a very bad memory; but I never till last night saw London and Southwark in flames!' Sébastien Mercier, in his Tableau de Paris, wrote nine years before the attack on the Bastille that such ‘terrors and alarms’ as were spread by Lord George Gordon in London would be inconceivable in a city as well-policed as Paris.

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