Some were carried out exhausted and bleeding; some came out shuffling in chains and were immediately taken in triumph to a local blacksmith to the shrieks of “A clear way! A clear way!” from the multitude who surrounded with joy those who had been released. More than three hundred prisoners were liberated. Some had escaped from imminent execution, and were like men resurrected; others were hurried away by friends; others, habituated to the prison, wandered in astonishment and bewilderment through the wreckage of Newgate. Other prisons were fired and opened that night, and it was- for that night, at least-as if the whole world of law and punishment had been utterly demolished. In subsequent years the Londoners of the area recalled the unearthly light which seemed to shine from the very stones and streets of the city. The city was momentarily transformed.
It was appropriate, therefore, that the crowd should then make its way from the burning ruins of the prison to the home of the Lord Chief Justice, Lord Mansfield, in Bloomsbury Square. It is one of the aspects of eighteenth-century London that the house of every notable or notorious citizen was well known. The serried spearpoint railings were torn down and hurled within; the windows were broken; the mob entered the house, went through all of its rooms, broke or set fire to its furniture. Mansfield’s paintings and manuscripts were consigned to the fire, together with the contents of his law library; this, in vivid form, was the burning of the Law. A curious episode might be mentioned here, as all the power and oppression of the city are despatched to the flames. From the window of the burning house one demonstrator exhibited to the roaring mob “a child’s doll-a poor toy … as the image of some unholy saint.” On reading this account Dickens immediately assumed that it was a token of that which the late occupants had worshipped but in fact this strangely anonymous, almost barbaric, object can be seen as the deity of the crowd.
On the following morning Samuel Johnson toured the scene of that night’s riots. “On Wednesday I walked with Dr. Scot to look at Newgate, and found it in ruins with the fire yet glowing. As I went by the Protestants were plundering the Sessions-house at the Old Bailey. There were not, I believe, a hundred; but they did their work at leisure, in full security, without sentinels, without trepidation, as men lawfully employed, in full day.” He added a curious statement: “Such is the cowardice of a commercial place.” By this he meant, no doubt, that there was no communal spirit or civic pride abroad to avert or prohibit these outrages; London, as a commercial city, had no defences except those of fear and oppression. When those twin guarantors of security were lifted, then theft and violence naturally and inevitably emerged in their stead. A “commercial place” is an arena of rapine and anxiety under another name. Samuel Johnson, who understood the pleasures and virtues of the city, also understood its debilitating faults better than any of his contemporaries.
But that day witnessed more than the smoking ruins of the Law. Horace Walpole termed it, in a phrase that was not then a cliché, “Black Wednesday.” It might almost have been termed Red Wednesday. That morning the “cowardice” of London was manifest in the closed shops and shuttered windows. Many of the citizens were so dismayed and astounded by the destruction of Newgate, and the complete failure of the city authorities to punish or apprehend those who were responsible, that it seemed to them that the whole fabric of reality was being torn apart before their eyes. And “round the smoking ruins people stood apart from one another and in silence, not venturing to condemn the rioters, or to be supposed to do so, even in whispers.” There was another curious aspect of this lawlessness. Some prisoners lately released sought out their gaolers, “preferring imprisonment and punishment to the horrors of such another night as the last,” while others actually returned to Newgate in order to wander among the smoking ruins of their erstwhile place of confinement. They were brought there by some “indescribable attraction,” according to Dickens, and they were found talking, eating and even sleeping in the places where their cells had once stood. It is a curious story but somehow all of a piece with the greater story of London, where many will dwell upon the same stones for the whole of their lives.
Troops had been stationed throughout the city, but the energy and purpose of the rioters were not significantly diminished; in fact the burning of the night before seemed only to have increased their rage and resentment. Threatening letters were posted up outside those prisons which had remained secure, including the Fleet and the King’s Bench, assuring their keepers and gaolers that they would be fired that night; the houses of prominent legislators were similarly picked out. The leaders of the riot declared that they would take and fire the Bank, the Mint and the Royal Arsenal-and that they would occupy the royal palaces. A rumour spread that the demonstrators would also throw open the gates of Bedlam, thus contributing a curious terror to the general fear of the citizens. Truly then the city would become a hell with the desperate, the doomed and the distracted wandering its streets against buildings collapsing and houses on fire.
That night it seemed that the fire of 1666 had come again. The rioters emerged upon the streets “like a great sea,” and it seemed their purpose “to wrap the city in a circle of flame.” Thirty-six major fires were started-the prisons of the Fleet, the King’s Bench and the Clink were all alight-while the soldiers fired upon the crowds with sometimes fatal effect. Some of the greatest conflagrations were in the vicinity of Newgate itself, beside Holborn Bridge and Holborn Hill, as if the destruction of the previous night had somehow magnetised the area so that it drew more vengeance upon itself. The image of the blank-faced doll, as some anonymous and infernal deity of the riotous city, seems appropriate.
Samuel Johnson wrote to Mrs. Thrale that “one might see the glare of conflagration fill the sky from many parts. The sight was dreadful.” And, from Horace Walpole: “I never till last night saw London and Southwark in flames.” This spectacle of the burning city, again according to Johnson, created a “universal panick.” There were sporadic riots on the next day, Thursday, but the incandescent scenes of the day before seem to have exhausted that lust for violence which had so suddenly visited the streets of London. The military had been posted at all the appropriate sites, while bands of soldiers were actively seeking out and arresting rioters, so that by Friday the city was quiet. Many of those who had left London in fear of their lives still remained apart, and the majority of shops were closed, but the insurrection had passed as quickly and as generally as it had gathered just a week before. Two hundred were dead, more lying badly and often fatally injured, while no one was able to compute the numbers of those who had burned to death in cellars or hiding-places. Lord George Gordon was arrested and taken to the Tower of London, and hundreds of rioters were confined in the prisons that had not already been destroyed by fire. Twenty-five were hanged on the spots where their crimes had been committed; two or three boys were suspended before Lord Mansfield’s house in Bloomsbury Square.
So ended the most violent internecine episode in the city’s history. Like all London violence it burned brightly but quickly, the stability and reality of the city being distorted by the heat of its flames before once more settling down.