The Masters of Bow Street (51 page)

He broke off, aware of the relief on the faces of the other two men, who saw in him the one possible means of averting grievous disaster. They could not see into his mind, however; they could not begin to understand the immensity of the task. With help from Sir John Fielding or Welch he might have a chance of success. Without it, what magistrate had the strength and courage to call out the troops and risk disaster?

‘Do you know when this is to begin?’ he asked.

‘Very soon,’ replied Simon Rattray. ‘Messengers will take the word around and trouble will begin in a dozen places at the same time.’

‘So as to prevent a concentration of forces against the rioters,’ James reasoned. ‘Mr. Rattray, will you and Mr. Bowyer obtain as much information as possible about the timing of the raids and the places where trouble is to begin and leave it as a message for me at the offices of The Daily Clarion?’ It did not occur to James to doubt that Benedict Sly would help. ‘I’ will acquaint the senior justices of the danger. I will also inform the Bow Street men, who, once they have authority from their acting chief magistrate, will be of much value, especially if the riot is quickly controlled.’

‘Be sure we will ferret out everything we can,’ Simon Rattray promised, rising to his feet. ‘I trust it will be possible to avoid calling on the military, sir. For when the Army is called to stop civil troubles many who are on the side of law and order are deeply resentful.’

Silently James nodded.

Ten minutes later he was riding along Fleet Street, which had never seemed more crowded. As he tied the reins about a hitching post outside the new Fleet Street offices of The Daily Clarion, a thought flashed into James’s mind.

It had not once occurred to him that Simon Rattray might be wrong. And it had not once occurred to him to go first to the Minister of State responsible, so sure was he that no action would be taken.

Benedict Sly, grey showing clearly in the darkness of his beard, took only a few seconds to answer.

‘Yes, James. I shall put a reliable man at a desk to take messages and keep a close record of them. Whenever news of significance is brought in I will send a messenger to you. Will you be at the House of Commons?’

‘As soon as I have seen the magistrates,’ James answered. ‘Ben, will you find out for me whether Johnny is in London at the moment, or abroad?’

‘I will,’ Benedict promised.

The two men who shared the bench at Bow Street listened, one attentively, the other with impatience. The attentive one replied, ‘When there is clear cause for action we shall take it, Mr. Marshall.’

‘If the parish constables are not alerted—’

‘Allow us, sir, to know how to handle our own affairs.’

The three men who sat on the benches in the County of Middlesex listened with haughty patience.

‘We are grateful for your information, Mr. Marshall. At this juncture we see no cause for alarm.

The two magistrates at Westminster said, as with one voice, ‘We have heard such rumours countless times, Mr. Marshall. Nothing would cause more harm than to organise our constables before need, for that would antagonise the greatest number of people, peace-loving citizens who respect freedom of religion.’

The most helpful of James’s fellow Members at the House of Commons were concerned but far from persuaded that danger was imminent. They had, they said, no doubt that if a wave of rioting did begin, it would be taken care of quickly. The magistrates were well aware of what they were doing. All this could so easily prove a false alarm.

The Secretary of State for Home Affairs, Lord Stormont, could not or would not see him.

Word came from The Daily Clarion while James was at the House of Commons listening to a fruitless debate on keeping open all sea lanes to the various parts of the Empire:
The time is tonight, at eight o’clock.

And with this was a note in Benedict Sly’s own handwriting, saying:
Your half brother is in London. He spends little time at Furnival Tower House and even less at Great Furnival Square.

On that sharp, sunny day in early June, Parliament rejected Lord George Gordon’s petition with almost cynical indifference and James felt there was no hope at all of avoiding trouble.

Reports began to come in of isolated outbreaks of violence at brothels, theatres, alehouses and crowded thoroughfares. None of the incidents seemed connected, but each demanded the time and urgent attention of Bow Street men and local justices and constables. Details came in quickly one upon another, convincing James of the complete truth of Simon Rattray’s story. The riots were beginning. And it seemed to him that the one remaining hope was to go again to the Secretary of State and implore that troops be stationed at vantage points about the whole area of the metropolis.

‘Mr. Marshall, no one respects your integrity or your good will more than I,’ said Lord Stormont pompously. ‘And few disagree more vehemently with your beliefs and your support for Sir John Fielding. There is overwhelming evidence that the present method of keeping the peace and fighting crime is most effective. I see not the slightest cause for alarm and am horrified at the thought of summoning troops, whose presence invariably inflames the mood of both the middle classes and the mob. Good day to you, sir.’

When James rode from Whitehall and the Palace of Westminster, crowds were gathering at the Charing Cross approach to the Strand, always a trouble spot. On a platform on a corner near Hennessy’s, the butcher’s, a man was standing and roaring so that his voice travelled with frightful clarity.

‘We’ll burn them out of their homes. . . We’ll drive them into the sea. . . To the devil with the papists! What do we say?’

‘No popery!’ the crowd roared. ‘Let’s get the papists on the run!’

There was a bellow of approval from dozens of men in the crowd, a waving of staves and muskets, a vivid lighting of flares, a terrifying sense of purpose - to pillage and to burn - as the cry reached the rooftops and the skies.

‘No popery ! No popery !’ they roared. ‘No popery !’

A vast crowd of sixty or seventy thousand men, with Lord George Gordon at their head, set out to march from St. George’s Fields, in Southwark, to the Houses of Parliament, and there was none to stop them. Soon they were a rabble pouring over Westminster Bridge, smashing carriages and setting on peers and Members of Parliament. Far too late Stormont sent for Army help.

Day after day the riots went on, the June weather nearly as cold as winter, constables and watchmen helpless, the magistrates impotent. Yet still the government vacillated.

If James had any comfort it was that Mary and the children were safe at Chelsea. He stayed between Westminster and ‘Mr. Londoner’ whilst reports grew more and more alarming.

In Lincoln’s Inn Fields, close to the Unitarian church of Simon Rattray’s father, a mob descended without warning on the Sardinian Embassy in which was a Roman Catholic church, smashing down doors and windows, pitching furniture into the street, using flares to start huge fires. As the mob danced and sang in gin-sodden revelry, the scream ‘No popery!’ seemed to drown all other sound.

At the same time a vast crowd stormed and set fire to the Bavarian Embassy in St. James’s, until the conflagration showed in the sky all over London, whilst in a dozen other places the homes of wealthy Catholics were sacked, their inmates escaping narrowly with their lives.

Uneasy quiet came with the night, when Simon Rattray arrived at the Clarion offices while the story was being set in type. He was wild-eyed, his face bruised his hair scorched.

‘I hoped I’d find you here,’ he said to James. ‘Tomorrow night there’s to be a mass attack on the weavers of Moorfields, sir. They are mostly Romans who live there. If there could be a company of dragoons it might still prevent the situation from getting out of hand.’

‘Can we get the justices to act?’ asked James.

‘I can’t, sir, and the Lord Mayor won’t try. He’s nought but a brothel keeper. And it’s a waste of time relying on the parish constables; you only have to mix with the crowds to see how many wear the cockade of the Protestant Association. I sometimes come to hate that blue,’ Rattray said in a grating voice. ‘If ever troops in large numbers were needed this is the occasion, sir.’

‘Jamey, this has all the smell of revolution,’ Benedict Sly groaned when Rattray had gone. ‘Is there no hope from Parliament? Can you not see Stormont again?’

‘I try each day,’ James said grimly.

And once again it was his first act when he reached Westminster the next morning. Being on foot, ignoring the thinning crowd, he was not molested, but his heart beat fast nevertheless. He did not have to wait long for word from Lord Stormont this time.

‘I have sent for troops in strength,’ he said.

About that time, two Irish servant girls, cowering behind a staircase while rioters wrecked and burned a house in Leicester Square, were driven out of their hiding place by smoke and fire. As they appeared in the hall leading to the street a man leaped at them, dragged them into one of the rooms, stripped himself and them naked and raped first one and then the other. Done, he struck their heads together and dropped them, unconscious, into a corner where flames were already creeping. Still naked, but for one girl’s dress over his shoulders, he strutted out among the mob, which roared its approval as he paraded himself in stolen finery.

Fire after fire was started, in shops, in houses, in churches. No one was safe as the cry raged everywhere: ‘No popery! No popery!’ ‘

When at last the mob seemed to tire of its own violence, men moved among the people, thrusting gin into their hands, spurring them on to further destruction, or went off to start still more trouble wherever the crowd was not yet sated.

All over London the rioting continued. One great mass of rioters assembled close to the House, another debouched into the side streets, the grogshops and the taverns. Great piles were made of the wreckage and the fields were dotted with fiercely growing fires.

James Marshall, denied entrance to the Palace of Westminster by the mob, stayed on the fringe of the crowd. His clothes were torn and blackened, his face was unshaven, and he looked as villainous as any of the rioters. Utterly helpless, all he could think of was how to prevent the riot spreading. If there were a way, it was to catch the ring-leaders. Without the Bow Street men and with hardly a constable who might serve, the only source of help was Rattray’s men.

Rattray might be at The Daily Clarion’s office.

James pushed his way, on foot, towards Fleet Street, when he heard a cry: ‘Bow Street! On to Bow Street!’ A great fear choked him as the cry was taken up and a man standing in a cart raised his huge voice: ‘Bow Street ahoy!’ One moment James was ahead of the crowd; the next he was helpless in its midst. Men carrying lighted torches raced ahead, and what he had thought to be impossible happened. The hordes streamed into Bow Street, smashing the windows of the house he knew so well and tossing their torches through the broken glass.

James saw three or four Bow Street men beating out the flames inside the court. Could they save it? he wondered distractedly.

Suddenly another huge roar came from the man in the cart as it came crunching along the street.

‘Newgate!’ the man roared. ‘They’ve got some of our men in Newgate. Newgate ahoy!’

‘It isn’t possible,’ James breathed in a strange despair.

Now the rioters, maddened by success, surged in a solid mass towards Holborn until they came within sight of Newgate Prison. At their head was the man in the cart, and now his voice reached a volume it was hard to believe could come from human throat.

‘Newgate! Open the gates and let the prisoners out. Break down the doors!’

As he roared the words, the Keeper appeared with six or seven of his men, all armed and ready for defiance; but suddenly a new sound came: the thud of running feet. Could this be the troops? James wondered. Then he saw a dozen men appear, not troops but constables and their deputies, lashing out with staves. At last all the justices had stirred.

‘At them, men!’ roared the man in the cart. ‘Cut them down!’

The rioters, armed with swords and knives, hammers and axes, pitchforks and iron bars, went forward like a solid phalanx. But James hardly noticed the horror that ensued.

He hardly noticed the way the constables were battered, their staves smashed and set alight; how the Keeper and his bodyguard were swept aside while the mob hacked at the bars of the huge prison, climbed the roof and beat great holes in it, set fire to the massive doors and finally broke in, met by a horde of prisoners bent only on escape.

He did not see the beginning of the fires which took hold of Newgate Prison and began its burning.

In his ears rang a single cry, uttered in the stentorian voice, yet with a cadence he could never forget.

‘At them, men! Cut them down!’

‘Cut them down!’

Cut - him - down!

The man in the cart was Johnny; his half brother Johnny, disguised with filthy wig and clothes that no one who knew him would recognise. But that one phrase had brought the truth home. James Marshall had no doubt at all.

The leaders of the rioters was Johnny.

All over London fires raged. Everywhere, rioters surged and raped and pillaged. Prison after prison, great house after great house, were wrecked and set on fire. Two thousand more prisoners escaped from fetid jails and mixed with the mob, only a few trying to make their escape into the country. There was smallpox and cholera. There was jail fever. There was rioting and looting such as had not been seen in London since the Great Fire.

But at long last sufficient troops were summoned, it was said, by the King’s command. Gradually they forced the rioters back and thinned their ranks; gradually the noise and fury abated.

While James, back in the House of Commons, was haunted day and night by one man’s voice: the voice of his half brother.