Posted on 07/11/2021 8:20:27 AM PDT by CheshireTheCat
This date in 1780 saw three men and two women hanged at various spots around London for the previous month’s Gordon Riots. They were the first five souls among 19 who would suffer the last extremity of the law for that disturbance.
The eponymous Protestant Lord George Gordon, had inflamed a mob against the 1778 Papists Act, which disencumbered British Catholics of some of their legal disabilities. (In part to pad out the redcoat ranks as the army found itself stretched thin by the American Revolution.)
The Gordon Riots started from Lord Gordon’s march on Parliament to serve it an anti-Catholic petition, and turned into five days of anti-Catholic mayhem before the troops were finally called out to quell it. (The want of a standing professional police force was among the deficiencies London encountered.)
But the matter metastasized well beyond a merely sectarian event: a mass rally originating in the working-class Moorfields took an unmistakable class dynamic — assailing Newgate Prison and The Clink, liberating convicts in the process. The latter dungeon would never resume operations. “Crimping houses” for impressed sailors and “sponging houses” imprisoning debtors were also liberated.
Alongside white sailors and day laborers, London’s emerging black population would feature prominently in this affair. A “copper coloured person,” a former slave named John Glover, was observed at the front rank of those torching Newgate. Peter Linebaugh attributes to Glover the incendiary (and, as it turned out, credible) threat, “Damn you, Open the Gate or we will Burn you down and have Everybody out.” (Glover was condemned to death, but reprieved for likely-fatal servitude on the African coast.)...
(Excerpt) Read more at executedtoday.com ...
There was a London prison named “The Clink”? How do you like that? That obviously explains the old aphorism “throw ‘em in the clink” (which I haven’t heard in a coon’s age).
They deserved it. Upset because the British government wanted to make life easier for Catholics? Sectarian bigots.
Its a long hard historical story over there.
Up until recently, there was neighborhoods at Glasgow Scotland that were off limits to other denominations.
Of course then, there is Northern Ireland you know. Walls and all that.
Yeah I know. My Dad’s family are from Colyton in Devon, as recently as the 19th century the hatred for Catholicism would have made Rev Ian Paisley blush. It produced a large proportion of the rebels that took part in the failed Monmouth rebellion against James II, and during the 19th Century a parish vicar was driven out by angry locals who objected to his High Church practices of using incense and communion wine.
You can also see a memorial commemorating the marriage of Prince Albert (later Edward VII) and emphasising, in block capitals, their celebration of their PROTESTANT prince. It all seems very ridiculous and over the top.
Sectarianism seemed to disappear pretty quickly in England though. Anti-Catholic bigotry hasn’t been a major force in England for a very long time. There is no contradiction now between being English and being Catholic, they don’t get more English than Jacob Reese Mogg and he is an extremely devout Catholic.
I think the reason it has persisted in Northern Ireland is because being protestant or catholic is still bounded up with being an Irish nationalist/republican or being an Ulster Unionist and identifying with Britain. The reason it has still persisted in Glasgow is because there are extremely close familial ties from both sides of the divide with Northern Ireland so the politics there spills over into Glasgow, aggravated by the intense rivalry between Rangers and Celtic which encourages this ridiculous sectarianism.
I got two ancestors who signed the death warrant for Charles the 1st.
Temple.
Did not go to well for them after the monarchy was re-established. Although they did manage to avoid the ultimate capital punishment. The only reason for that is the family was one, if not the most powerful families in England. Somehow they managed to hold onto power through the other members of the family.
Nothing as grandiose in my family tree as that, but one of my ancestors was hanged by Judge Jeffries the hanging judge for taking part in the Monmouth rebellion and others were enslaved and shipped to the carribean to work on the sugar plantations.
Maybe I should ask for “reparashuns” for the legacy of slavery my ancestor’s suffered?
Wasnt that the judge who insulted a potential navy officer who went on to kill him?
I cant remember what that was called ..the Bloody...
Judge Jeffries the eponymous ‘hanging judge’ who presided over the Bloody Assizes.
He died in the Tower of London after being arrested and confined there following the Fall of James II during the ‘Glorious Revolution’. It was the only place secure enough to protect him from a mob who wanted to do to him what he had done to others by stringing him up.
Thats it!
BTW the one who I was thinking of is George Villiers Duke of Buckingham.
Good thing I got these books of royal monarchy history hey?
I know! And this must also mean somewhere, at some point, there was also a REALLY freakin' old raccoon!
We have to remember that today's Catholic Church is nothing like the medieval Catholic Church. Then the Catholic Church was the center of European government and politics and controlled the diplomacy and coordination between European states. The English protestants were afraid of the Catholic Church regaining control of England and being put to the flames of heresy.
1780 is a long way from the Middle Ages. Jacobitism had also been a spent force for decades. Most of the rioters would not have been born during the last Jacobite uprising and the Papacy has already recognised the Hanoverians as the rightful Kings of Britain and Ireland by this point so there was no practical reason for this hostility any more.
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