Two Parliaments Escape Reform 225
Whigs everywhere disputed with radicals, as the Whigs everywhere fled from
the association idea, and even refused to submit to electoral tests. Most meetings
would go no further than to ask for economical reform. Parliamentary reformers
divided. Wyvil and his followers concluded that parliamentary reform could come
only with the support of the landed class, and advocated only a more uniform and
effective representation of property owners. The popular reformers became more
self- conscious in identifying their opponents and in formulating their own aims.
One of them burst out in the Essex meeting: “I have never yet heard of an aristoc-
racy [and he meant the Rockingham Whigs and the Parliament] from ancient
Rome to modern Venice that was not the universal tyrant and inquisitor of the
species.”^9 It was at this time, in May 1780, that the Westminster meeting, as al-
ready noted in connection with the American Revolution, drafted its far- reaching
proposals for parliamentary reform, which went beyond the American constitu-
tions in their theory of representation, and anticipated the six points of the Peo-
ple’s Charter, including universal suffrage for all adult males.^10
Then in June 1780 came the Gordon riots, an irrelevant episode, unconnected
with projects of association or of reform, but which crippled and discredited the
democratic movement by exposing the violence endemic at the bottom of society.
A mild act of Catholic relief, passed by Parliament in 1778, had aroused ancestral
terrors of popery, particularly among the lower classes, which, in Britain as in Ire-
land, did not yet share that religious magnanimity that educated persons had come
to feel. Lord George Gordon, a Scotsman, and an eccentric of the kind admired by
the British when harmless (he died a converted Jew), became the leader of the no-
popery forces in London. The misery of the poor, and the absence of effective po-
lice, made mobs a chronic danger in all great cities. On June 2 Lord George en-
tered the House of Commons (of which he was a member, being the son of a
duke), to present a petition against legislation in favor of Catholics. Large crowds
accompanied him, wearing the blue cockade originated by Wilkes, who, however,
opposed the present demonstration. They “overawed” Parliament in an actual
sense, pulling the wigs off two lords, and chasing a bishop across the adjoining
roofs. The next day a full- grown riot took possession of London, and held it for a
week. Whole Catholic neighborhoods were burned, as were the houses of judges
and lawyers. The Fleet, Newgate, and King’s Bench prisons went up in flames, and
two thousand prisoners wandered free. On one night thirty- six separate fires were
visible. Probably there was less physical destruction in Paris during the whole
French Revolution, if we except the demolition of the Bastille.
The mob was put down mainly by John Wilkes, who headed a body of volun-
teers before the arrival of military reinforcements. Several were killed, hundreds
wounded. Wilkes, long known to some as an agitator, was now a traitor in the eyes
of the populace. The democratic branch of the reformers was silenced. Henceforth
any notion of giving a vote to all adult males had a great resistance to overcome.
No General Association ever met. There was no second Runnymede. No Na-
tional Assembly ever convened in England. The difficulty of holding any such as-
9 Butterfield, op.cit., 295.
10 See above, p. 157, and Maccoby, op.cit., 320.