Gin: The Much Lamented Death of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze

by Dillon, Patrick

  CHAPTER NINE

  SUMMER RIOTS

  It wasn’t much of a bomb. There was a loud bang and some smoke, and then Westminster Hall was filled with fluttering sheets of paper. It happened between one and two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, and the hall was crowded. In 1736, the Courts of Chancery and King’s Bench and the Court of Common Pleas all sat there, in open-plan wooden booths. Uffenbach, who visited in 1710, commented on the general chaos of people walking up and down, and the ‘stalls on both sides, where books and all kinds of wares are sold.’1 The bomb had been hidden under the Counsels’ bench in the Court of Chancery.

  As with the Gin Craze, the resulting panic caused as much damage as the explosion itself. The Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State with ultimate responsibility for the affairs of Middlesex, reported that ‘the noise … and smoke created a great consternation in the hall.’2 In his memoirs, Lord Hervey described ‘such a loud report from a discharge of gunpowder, that the whole Hall was in a moment in the utmost confusion; and everybody concluding it was a plot to blow up the Hall, the judges started from the benches, the lawyers were all running over one another’s backs to make their escape, some losing part of their gowns, others their periwigs, in the scuffle.’3

  The date was 14 July, not that there was any significance in that. It would be another fifty-three years before the Bastille went up in smoke. When the initial panic had subsided, someone picked up one of the sheets of paper and took it to Lord Chancellor Hardwicke, sitting in the Court of King’s Bench. Blurrily printed on cheap paper, the bomber’s calling card read as a kind of proclamation:

  By a general consent of the citizens and tradesmen of London, Westminster, and the Borough of Southwark, this being the last day of term, were publickly burnt, between the hours of twelve and two, at the Royal Exchange, Cornhill, at Westminster Hall … and at Margaret’s Hill, Southwark, as destructive of the product, trade and manufacture of this kingdom and the plantations thereunto belonging, and tending to the utter subversion of the liberties and properties thereof, the five following printed books, or libels, called Acts of Parliament.

  The Gin Act came top of the list. Parliament’s other ‘libels’ were the Mortmain Act, which had outraged church leaders by limiting charitable bequests, the Act for Westminster Bridge, bitterly opposed by Thames watermen, the Smuggler’s Act which had further restricted the right to carry arms, and Walpole’s £600,000 raid on the sinking fund on behalf of George II, derided in the paper as a ‘foreign prince’. When the bomber signed off ‘God Save the King!’ he left no one in doubt that he was referring to the king across the water.

  Somehow, the Jacobites had managed to strike a blow at the Hanoverian establishment in the very heart of Westminster Hall. It was only smoke and paper, but as a publicity stunt it could hardly have had more effect. Lord Hervey afterwards commented that the affair was ‘as much talked of for a time as any I have mentioned.’ For Newcastle, it was ‘a very extraordinary insult … a wicked and traitorous design,’ for the London Daily Post, ‘the most impudent and daring insult.’4

  For Samuel Killingbeck, waiting in an alehouse nearby, it was a triumph, but he still couldn’t stop his hands from shaking. A few years before, Samuel Killingbeck had been introduced to a clergyman called Robert Nixon. Nixon was a ‘non-juror’, one of the hardliners who refused to take the oath of allegiance to the Hanoverian régime. Like Killingbeck, he was a Jacobite. They used to meet quite often to talk about the Pretender, across the water in Paris, and discuss the chances of a restoration.

  But a fortnight before, that idle talk had suddenly turned serious. Robert Nixon had asked Samuel Killingbeck to come for a walk out on St George’s Fields. Usually they met at one of the pubs in the Borough. Killingbeck had thought Nixon wanted to be out of doors just because it was a hot day. It was only when they were out in the Fields that he realised there was another reason. What Nixon had to say could see both of them hanged.

  Robert Nixon had had enough of idle talk. He announced that he had a plan to blow up a parcel bomb in Westminster Hall. To start with, Samuel Killingbeck simply didn’t believe it was possible. Much later, when he’d been caught, and questioned, and had broken down, he described the conversation to his examiner. They had had a friend with them, another Jacobite called William Spittell. Spittell and Nixon explained how it could be done. The clergyman had been carrying out some experiments. ‘Nixon … knew how to make papers burn of themselves without being visibly set fire to … [and Spittell] himself had seen the experiment made.’5 Killingbeck was still unsure. It wasn’t just the danger. He replied that ‘he was an unbelieving Thomas and must see the experiment himself before he would believe it.’

  A few days later he found himself standing on the Falcon Stairs, waiting with William Spittell for a boat to take them across the Thames to Fleet market. To Samuel Killingbeck, the whole plot had suddenly become frighteningly real. He had even seen a proof of the paper Nixon was planning to put in his parcel. The printer who had typeset it was waiting with them now, carrying two rollers and a portable chase. A boatman pulled up to the steps. In silence they crossed the river to Blackfriars. In silence they walked through the streets to Nixon’s house near Hatton Gardens.

  Samuel Killingbeck was nervous. Once inside he ‘desired the experiment … might be made, because he was desirous to be gone.’ Robert Nixon put a sheet of paper on his hand, ‘[and] poured out of a small vial a few [grains] of a powder.’ There was a sudden fizz, and the paper burst into flame. Shocked, Killingbeck ‘threw it out of his hand.’ But the clergyman hadn’t finished. Nixon ‘made a second experiment, namely he laid upon the hearth a piece of the said prepared paper, and upon a part of that paper laid a little gunpowder, and upon these he laid some papers, then putting a little of his powder out of the vial upon the said prepared paper, it took fire and spread, and when the fire reached the gunpowder, it blew up and scattered the papers laid over it.’

  The little parlour in Nixon’s house was full of smoke and the reek of chemicals. The powder in the vial was phosphorus.

  After that demonstration Killingbeck needed no more persuasion. The three men worked fast. They made up three parcels, each packed with copies of the five Acts and the paper denouncing them. The plan was to detonate all three at different times in different places around London. Westminster Hall would be the first target.

  They agreed final arrangements as they walked towards Westminster. Killingbeck would stand in front of Nixon to cover him while he fumbled with the phosphorus. ‘Nixon would signal to Killingbeck when to move off, ‘touching him on the back or side and saying let us be going or words to that effect.’ Spittell, meanwhile, would ‘stay at Westminster Hall Gate until the explosion should be over, and then they were all three to meet at a certain alehouse not far from Westminster Hall.’

  The Courts of Chancery and King’s Bench were at the far end of the hall, separated by a flight of steps. Nixon and Killingbeck ‘placed themselves behind the Counsel attending the Court of Chancery, [Killingbeck] standing before Nixon.’ Nixon had ‘his hat under his arm, and the packet … in the crown of it, and a vial (with the powder in it) in his other hand.’ After a few moments, ‘Nixon gave the sign to [Killingbeck] to move off.’ Everything seemed to be going smoothly.

  Samuel Killingbeck needed no encouragement to make himself scarce. He ‘made off directly to the alehouse and called for a pint of beer, drank once of it and paid for it.’ Then he settled down to wait for the others. But when Spittell and Nixon didn’t appear quickly, he started to worry. What if the bomb hadn’t gone off? He had heard no explosion. Maybe he had mistaken the signal. Maybe Nixon had lost his nerve. He had seen how quickly the gunpowder exploded the evening before. Something must have gone wrong. Abandoning his drink, Killingbeck hurried out into the street. But there, to his relief, he saw Spittell coming towards him. Back in the pub, Spittell told him ‘that Westminster Hall was all in an uproar, people tumbling over one another and the Constables bu
sy with their staves; [and] while he was saying this came in Nixon, who said that when he … got to the place where the Grand Jury usually sit he heard it (the packet) give a great bounce.’ The only disappointment was that the plan for two other explosions had to be abandoned. ‘In the disorder and confusion [Spittell] saw in the Hall he took the two packets out of his pocket and dropt them in the crowd.’

  Back in Westminster Hall, business was slowly getting back to normal. The smoke soon cleared; gradually everyone realised this wasn’t a second Gunpowder Plot. ‘At first,’ the Duke of Newcastle reported, ‘the business a little stopped in the respective courts; but they soon proceeded, till the … seditious and treasonable paper was brought into the King’s Bench by some of the officers of the court, who had picked up several of them in Westminster Hall.’ Hardwicke, the Lord Chancellor, immediately sent a message to Middlesex Quarter Sessions, which was then sitting, to issue a warrant against the libellous paper and its author. A Jacobite demonstration so close to the heart of government was a serious matter, even if it was more coup de théâtre than coup d’état. Newcastle, Hardwicke and Walpole moved fast. The King was away in Hanover, but the Queen and Council issued a proclamation and reward the same weekend.

  Sir Robert Walpole, for one, had no doubt who was to blame for the outrage. Nor did he doubt that sooner or later he would track them down. ‘Since my coming to town,’ he wrote to his brother a fortnight later, ‘I have been endeavouring to trace out the authors and managers of that vile transaction, and there is no reason to doubt that the whole was projected and executed by a set of low Jacobites … Of this I have had an account from the same fellow that brought me these and many such sort of intelligencies.’6 Walpole’s spy network was in good shape. In the end it didn’t take long to pick up Nixon, Spittell and Killingbeck. Fringe members of the gang – printers and associates – soon cracked. It wasn’t long before Samuel Killingbeck was giving the authorities chapter and verse.

  Robert Nixon, arrested after a tip-off on 14 August, was the only one who put up anything of a fight. The Duke of Newcastle interviewed him personally, but Nixon denied knowing anything about either the libel or the bomb. Then the Duke tried another tack. The clergyman had been arrested on his way back from church. ‘Being asked whether they prayed for the King in that congregation, [Nixon] said, “Yes, always.”’ The question was which King? ‘Being asked whether they pray’d for King George, he said, they never named names.’7 It was forty-seven years since James Stuart fled his throne, and twenty-one since the 1715 rebellion, but the Jacobites still hadn’t given up.

  Jacobitism was the fly in the ointment of Hanoverian stability; it was Britain’s loose cannon, its unfinished business. Nearly half a century after the Glorious Revolution, the Old Pretender still waited in Paris with his ridiculous court and his bogus ceremonial; whenever a French king wanted to annoy the English, he still had only to start talking about invasions and restorations. Back in England, the wounds of the Glorious Revolution had still not healed over.

  All the same, Jacobitism had changed in the past few decades. The passage of half a century was bound to change something. Even in 1715, restoration had been a real possibility. There had been a real Stuart army in Britain, with real support from Jacobite aristocrats, and from at least part of the people. The replacement of the unknown fifty-five-year-old German who sat on the throne with the late Queen’s half-brother seemed perfectly plausible.

  By 1736, it didn’t seem so any more, or only to people like Robert Nixon and Samuel Killingbeck. After twenty years of Hanoverian stability, the Stuarts had receded several steps into the realm of myth. A French-speaking king didn’t seem any more desirable than a German-speaking one. And although he had ditched much of the baggage of absolutism, James Stuart had stubbornly refused to turn away from Rome. The world had moved on. The opposition had found other ground on which to fight its battles.

  Jacobitism had become something more diffuse; the king across the water was wreathed in mist. The mist was partly made up of romantic memories and partly of dreams for a better future. Nine years later, in 1745, when the mist briefly evaporated and a real Jacobite army was marching through England behind a real Stuart prince, the main emotion among English Jacobites was one of alarm. The Pretender didn’t realise it himself, but after twenty-one years Jacobitism in England had turned into something quite different from a campaign to restore him.

  Instead, it had become a general form of protest against those in power. As long as there was Jacobitism, there was an alternative to the Hanoverians. Jacobitism became a way of withholding support. That way, the King of England and his ministers, like everyone else, had to live with uncertainty. It had metamorphosed into a general spirit of subversion. Disgruntled Tory squires toasted the ‘King over the Water’ to express their disenchantment with London, the times and Walpole’s ministry. Jacobite songs like ‘The King Shall Enjoy His Own Again’ became a way to cheek anyone in authority.8 Smugglers adopted Jacobite oaths and slogans. Wesley, attending an execution at Tyburn, saw that two of the condemned men had white cockades in their hats. In the great age of popular satire, it was easy to find ways of annoying the establishment without going so far as to overthrow it. The accession of James II on 11 June could be marked by a sprig of rue and thyme; the Pretender’s birthday, four days later, by a white cockade.

  And if the aim was to give those in authority sleepless nights, Jacobitism certainly had its effect. Sir Robert Walpole, for one, could never convince himself that his position was secure. ‘I am not ashamed,’ he told the House of Commons in 1738, ‘to say I am in fear of the Pretender.’ And there was still enough of real substance in Jacobitism to keep the fear alive. In 1734 there were disturbances in Suffolk Street on the anniversary of Charles I’s execution. The divisions of the Civil War and the Glorious Revolution were still there, and so were French armies, Jacobite cells, and Jacobite plots.

  It wasn’t just Robert Nixon’s packet of phosphorus that alarmed Walpole, or his blurry paper attacking government legislation. It was what lay ahead. The Gin Act was due to come in on Michaelmas Day – 29 September – and already that looked like a flashpoint. ‘There are great endeavours,’ he wrote to his brother, ‘to inflame the people, and to raise great tumults upon Michaelmas Day, when the Gin Act takes place … These lower sorts of Jacobites appear at this time more busy than they have for a great while. They are very industrious, and taking advantage of everything that offers, to raise tumult and disorder among the people.’

  Tumult and disorder followed the Westminster bomb by no more than a fortnight. In the event, the alarm was given by the Deputy Lieutenants of Tower Hamlets. They were barricaded inside the Angel and Crown tavern in Spitalfields, on Tuesday 27 July, and calling desperately for reinforcements. Outside, the East End had erupted in violence.9

  It was feeling against the Irish that triggered it. London was full of Irish workers. They flooded into the capital in search of jobs on building sites or out in the fields and, like all immigrants before and after them, they were accused of stealing English jobs. Within hours of the trouble starting, Walpole had informers mingling with the crowd, and sending back regular reports from public houses. ‘Some of [the crowd] told me,’ Joseph Bell scribbled hastily to his master, ‘there was such numbers of Irish who under-work them, they could not live and that there was an Irish man in the neighbourhood who employed numbers of them & they was determined to demolish him and drive the rest away.’ It turned out that the contractor for Shoreditch Church ‘had paid off his English labourers and imployed Irish because they worked cheaper.’10 The same thing was happening in the weaving industry. Out in the countryside, there were disturbances against low-waged Irish harvest-workers.

  But if the Irish problem had started it, there was plenty more discontent simmering under the surface. As he mingled with the crowd, Joseph Bell heard hints which would realise all Sir Robert Walpole’s worst fears. ‘In other parts of the crowd,’ he wrote to the Prime Mi
nister, ‘they told me their meeting was to prevent the putting down Ginn.’

  On the first night of the riots, Irish public houses were attacked. A squad of fifty soldiers under Major White, officer on duty at the Tower, found itself up against a crowd he estimated at 4,000. On Thursday, a boy called Thomas Larkin was shot dead in Brick Lane. The next night was even worse. Richard Burton, a brewer’s assistant, ‘saw the mob coming down Bell Yard, with sticks and lighted links. One of them made a sort of speech directing the rest to go to Church Lane, to the Gentleman and Porter.’ The crowd was organised by now. These were no longer spontaneous demonstrations. Quite a few of the leaders had papers with lists of Irish pubs on them. ‘One of them was called Captain Tom the Barber, and was in a striped banjan. I would have taken notice of him,’ Richard Burton told the Old Bailey later, ‘but he turned away and would not let me see his face.’ The authorities were having to take ever stronger measures to deal with the situation. Clifford William Phillips, a Tower Hamlets magistrate, was woken by neighbours about ten o’clock, despatched a message to the Tower for help, and then set off towards the riot. ‘The street was very light,’ he recalled afterwards, ‘and I could see (at a distance) the mob beating against the shutters with their clubs and hear the glass fly … I heard the hollowing at my house, and the cry in the street was Down with the Irish, Down with the Irish.’ As Richard Burton remembered, it was only the appearance of magistrate and soldiers that prevented worse violence. ‘Justice Phillips coming down, and the captain with his soldiers, they took some of [the crowd], and the rest made off immediately, and were gone as suddenly, as if a hole had been ready dug in the bottom of the street, and they had all dropped into it at once.’11

  In the end that was the worst night of violence. By the weekend the authorities had flexed their muscles. Irish workmen had been laid off and the trouble was over. But the July riots showed what a powder-keg London had become. Some of Walpole’s informers insisted the trouble was all to do with Irish labour, but others couldn’t get deeper fears out of their minds. ‘It is very difficult to judge whence this riot arose,’ reported the Tower Hamlets magistrates. ‘Some say the Irish … were the causes, but I am afraid there must be something else at the bottom, either Mother Gin or something worse. Captain Littler of the Guards said he heard the words High Church among them.’ ‘High Church’ had been one of the slogans of the Sacheverell riots which broke out against the Whig ministry in 1710. For Walpole, it was a sure sign of Jacobite involvement. Meanwhile, a witness at the rioters’ trial, Peter Cappe, told how he had seen a group of watermen on the Thursday night swearing ‘they would lose their lives before they would suffer one stone to be laid on [Westminster] Bridge.’ Another of Walpole’s correspondents reported ‘great discontents and murmurings all through this mobbish part of town. The Ginn Act and the Smuggling Act sticks hard in the stomachs of the meaner sort of people and the Bridge Act greatly exasperates the watermen insomuch that they make no scruple of declaring publiquely that they will joyn in any mischief that can be set on foot.’12