Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty
intelligence as he had picked up, of their designs.’
--‘On one condition, please, sir,’ said John, touching his hat. No
evidence against my lord--a misled man--a kind-hearted man, sir. My lord
never intended this.’
‘The condition will be observed, of course,’ rejoined the old distiller.
‘It’s a point of honour. But come with us, sir; pray come with us.’
John Grueby added no entreaties, but he adopted a different kind of
persuasion, by putting his arm through one of Mr Haredale’s, while his
master took the other, and leading him away with all speed.
Sensible, from a strange lightness in his head, and a difficulty in
fixing his thoughts on anything, even to the extent of bearing his
companions in his mind for a minute together without looking at them,
that his brain was affected by the agitation and suffering through which
he had passed, and to which he was still a prey, Mr Haredale let them
lead him where they would. As they went along, he was conscious of
having no command over what he said or thought, and that he had a fear
of going mad.
The distiller lived, as he had told him when they first met, on Holborn
Hill, where he had great storehouses and drove a large trade. They
approached his house by a back entrance, lest they should attract the
notice of the crowd, and went into an upper room which faced towards the
street; the windows, however, in common with those of every other room
in the house, were boarded up inside, in order that, out of doors, all
might appear quite dark.
They laid him on a sofa in this chamber, perfectly insensible; but John
immediately fetching a surgeon, who took from him a large quantity of
blood, he gradually came to himself. As he was, for the time, too weak
to walk, they had no difficulty in persuading him to remain there all
night, and got him to bed without loss of a minute. That done, they
gave him cordial and some toast, and presently a pretty strong
composing-draught, under the influence of which he soon fell into a
lethargy, and, for a time, forgot his troubles.
The vintner, who was a very hearty old fellow and a worthy man, had
no thoughts of going to bed himself, for he had received several
threatening warnings from the rioters, and had indeed gone out that
evening to try and gather from the conversation of the mob whether his
house was to be the next attacked. He sat all night in an easy-chair in
the same room--dozing a little now and then--and received from time
to time the reports of John Grueby and two or three other trustworthy
persons in his employ, who went out into the streets as scouts; and
for whose entertainment an ample allowance of good cheer (which the old
vintner, despite his anxiety, now and then attacked himself) was set
forth in an adjoining chamber.
These accounts were of a sufficiently alarming nature from the first;
but as the night wore on, they grew so much worse, and involved such a
fearful amount of riot and destruction, that in comparison with these
new tidings all the previous disturbances sunk to nothing.
The first intelligence that came, was of the taking of Newgate, and the
escape of all the prisoners, whose track, as they made up Holborn and
into the adjacent streets, was proclaimed to those citizens who were
shut up in their houses, by the rattling of their chains, which formed
a dismal concert, and was heard in every direction, as though so many
forges were at work. The flames too, shone so brightly through the
vintner’s skylights, that the rooms and staircases below were nearly as
light as in broad day; while the distant shouting of the mob seemed to
shake the very walls and ceilings.
At length they were heard approaching the house, and some minutes of
terrible anxiety ensued. They came close up, and stopped before it;
but after giving three loud yells, went on. And although they returned
several times that night, creating new alarms each time, they did
nothing there; having their hands full. Shortly after they had gone away
for the first time, one of the scouts came running in with the news that
they had stopped before Lord Mansfield’s house in Bloomsbury Square.
Soon afterwards there came another, and another, and then the first
returned again, and so, by little and little, their tale was this:--That
the mob gathering round Lord Mansfield’s house, had called on those
within to open the door, and receiving no reply (for Lord and Lady
Mansfield were at that moment escaping by the backway), forced an
entrance according to their usual custom. That they then began to
demolish the house with great fury, and setting fire to it in several
parts, involved in a common ruin the whole of the costly furniture, the
plate and jewels, a beautiful gallery of pictures, the rarest collection
of manuscripts ever possessed by any one private person in the world,
and worse than all, because nothing could replace this loss, the great
Law Library, on almost every page of which were notes in the Judge’s
own hand, of inestimable value,--being the results of the study and
experience of his whole life. That while they were howling and exulting
round the fire, a troop of soldiers, with a magistrate among them, came
up, and being too late (for the mischief was by that time done), began
to disperse the crowd. That the Riot Act being read, and the crowd still
resisting, the soldiers received orders to fire, and levelling their
muskets shot dead at the first discharge six men and a woman, and
wounded many persons; and loading again directly, fired another volley,
but over the people’s heads it was supposed, as none were seen to fall.
That thereupon, and daunted by the shrieks and tumult, the crowd began
to disperse, and the soldiers went away, leaving the killed and wounded
on the ground: which they had no sooner done than the rioters came back
again, and taking up the dead bodies, and the wounded people, formed
into a rude procession, having the bodies in the front. That in this
order they paraded off with a horrible merriment; fixing weapons in the
dead men’s hands to make them look as if alive; and preceded by a fellow
ringing Lord Mansfield’s dinner-bell with all his might.
The scouts reported further, that this party meeting with some others
who had been at similar work elsewhere, they all united into one, and
drafting off a few men with the killed and wounded, marched away to Lord
Mansfield’s country seat at Caen Wood, between Hampstead and Highgate;
bent upon destroying that house likewise, and lighting up a great fire
there, which from that height should be seen all over London. But in
this, they were disappointed, for a party of horse having arrived before
them, they retreated faster than they went, and came straight back to
town.
There being now a great many parties in the streets, each went to
work according to its humour, and a dozen houses were quickly blazing,
including those of Sir John Fielding and two other justices, and four
in Holborn--one of the greatest thoroughfares in London--which were all
burning at the same time, and burned until they went out of themselves,
for the people cut the engine hose, and would not suffer the firemen to
play upon the flames. At one house near Moorfields, they found in one of
the rooms some canary birds in cages, and these they cast into the fire
alive. The poor little creatures screamed, it was said, like infants,
when they were flung upon the blaze; and one man was so touched that he
tried in vain to save them, which roused the indignation of the crowd,
and nearly cost him his life.
At this same house, one of the fellows who went through the rooms,
breaking the furniture and helping to destroy the building, found a
child’s doll--a poor toy--which he exhibited at the window to the mob
below, as the image of some unholy saint which the late occupants had
worshipped. While he was doing this, another man with an equally tender
conscience (they had both been foremost in throwing down the canary
birds for roasting alive), took his seat on the parapet of the house,
and harangued the crowd from a pamphlet circulated by the Association,
relative to the true principles of Christianity! Meanwhile the Lord
Mayor, with his hands in his pockets, looked on as an idle man might
look at any other show, and seemed mightily satisfied to have got a good
place.
Such were the accounts brought to the old vintner by his servants as he
sat at the side of Mr Haredale’s bed, having been unable even to doze,
after the first part of the night; too much disturbed by his own fears;
by the cries of the mob, the light of the fires, and the firing of the
soldiers. Such, with the addition of the release of all the prisoners in
the New Jail at Clerkenwell, and as many robberies of passengers in
the streets, as the crowd had leisure to indulge in, were the scenes of
which Mr Haredale was happily unconscious, and which were all enacted
before midnight.
Chapter 67
When darkness broke away and morning began to dawn, the town wore a
strange aspect indeed.
Sleep had hardly been thought of all night. The general alarm was so
apparent in the faces of the inhabitants, and its expression was so
aggravated by want of rest (few persons, with any property to lose,
having dared go to bed since Monday), that a stranger coming into the
streets would have supposed some mortal pest or plague to have been
raging. In place of the usual cheerfulness and animation of morning,
everything was dead and silent. The shops remained closed, offices and
warehouses were shut, the coach and chair stands were deserted, no carts
or waggons rumbled through the slowly waking streets, the early cries
were all hushed; a universal gloom prevailed. Great numbers of people
were out, even at daybreak, but they flitted to and fro as though they
shrank from the sound of their own footsteps; the public ways were
haunted rather than frequented; 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.
At the Lord President’s in Piccadilly, at Lambeth Palace, at the Lord
Chancellor’s in Great Ormond Street, in the Royal Exchange, the Bank,
the Guildhall, the Inns of Court, the Courts of Law, and every chamber
fronting the streets near Westminster Hall and the Houses of Parliament,
parties of soldiers were posted before daylight. A body of Horse Guards
paraded Palace Yard; an encampment was formed in the Park, where fifteen
hundred men and five battalions of Militia were under arms; the Tower
was fortified, the drawbridges were raised, the cannon loaded and
pointed, and two regiments of artillery busied in strengthening the
fortress and preparing it for defence. A numerous detachment of soldiers
were stationed to keep guard at the New River Head, which the people had
threatened to attack, and where, it was said, they meant to cut off the
main-pipes, so that there might be no water for the extinction of the
flames. In the Poultry, and on Cornhill, and at several other leading
points, iron chains were drawn across the street; parties of soldiers
were distributed in some of the old city churches while it was yet
dark; and in several private houses (among them, Lord Rockingham’s in
Grosvenor Square); which were blockaded as though to sustain a siege,
and had guns pointed from the windows. When the sun rose, it shone into
handsome apartments filled with armed men; the furniture hastily heaped
away in corners, and made of little or no account, in the terror of the
time--on arms glittering in city chambers, among desks and stools, and
dusty books--into little smoky churchyards in odd lanes and by-ways,
with soldiers lying down among the tombs, or lounging under the shade of
the one old tree, and their pile of muskets sparkling in the light--on