Defenders of the Faith
IN spite of all the kindness shown by the English to less fortunate peoples and to animals, intelligent foreigners still remark as they have remarked for two centuries that deep down the English are sadists. Bottled down by convention for ninety- nine days out of a hundred, English brutality when it explodes has a fearful, indiscriminate quality
which may choose any target to bait and torment in a kind of revenge for the cruel hopelessness of English city life. Frenchmen and Italians go riot- ing to get things done : Russians and Scots and Englishmen go rioting to hurt other human beings.
The Gordon Riots of 1780 stand in line of ancestry to Notting Hill. At first there was only a silly but genuine political agitation against the lifting of a few disabilities for Catholics who took the Oath of Allegiance. Lord George Gordon, a recognisably twentieth-century combination of insane conceit and messianic concern for the underdog, decided that he would best preserve the liberties of the English people by leading the Protestant Associations into a popular campaign against the Catholic Relief Bill. He was warned of the dangers of using 'No Popery' as a political slogan at large in London : he rejected the warn- ings and practically called those who brought them traitors.
It was a hot summer. The first public meeting drew a terrifying horde of over 50,000; and the attempts to march with a petition to Parliament nearly ended in its storm. That night the burnings of Catholic houses and chapels began and by morning London was adrift on an appalling pogrom of blazing houses, drunkenness and tor- ture. No organised police existed, and the military did not receive orders to fire until four days later : by the time they did fire, the prisons had been broken open and destroyed, and thousands of sightseers had poured in from the suburbs to gloat over the puddles of blood, the gutters running with gin, the terrified Irish labourers being chased through Moorfields with knives and sticks. Economic misery had bred, as in Notting Hill, a violence which does not try to change conditions, but only wants to pass on suffering to others.
Mr. Hibbert writes dramatically and learnedly of the great riots themselves, Only Lord George himself, who died thirteen years later in prison as Israel bar Abraham Gordon and singing the 'Ca Ira,' remains a personality unexplained, and
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