GORDON, LORD GEORGE (1751-1793)

This article appears in Volume V12, Page 253 of the Encyclopedia Britannica.

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GORDON, LORD GEORGE (1751-1793) , third and youngest son of Cosmo George, duke of Gordon, was born in London on the 26th of December 1751. After completing his education at Eton, he entered the navy, where he rose to the rank of lieutenant in 1772, but Lord Sandwich, then at the head of the admiralty, would not promise him the command of a ship, and he resigned his commission shortly before the beginning of the American War. In 1774 the pocket borough of Ludgershall was bought for him by General Fraser, whom he was opposing in Inverness-shire, in order to bribe him not to contest the county. He was considered flighty, and was not looked upon as being of any importance. In 1779 he organized, and made himself head of the Protestant associations, formed to secure the repeal of the Catholic Relief Act of 1778. On the 2nd of June 178o he headed the mob which marched in procession from St George's Fields to the Houses of Parliament in order to present the

monster

petition against the acts. After the mob reached Westminster a terrific riot ensued, which continued several days, during which the city was virtually at their mercy. At first indeed they dispersed after threatening to make a forcible entry into the

House

of Commons, but reassembled soon afterwards and destroyed several Roman Catholic chapels, pillaged the private dwellings of many Roman Catholics, set fire to Newgate and broke open all the other prisons, attacked the Bank of England and several other public buildings, and continued the work of violence and conflagration until the interference of the military, by whom no fewer than 450 persons were killed and wounded before the riots were quelled. For his share in instigating the riots Lord Gordon was apprehended on a charge of high treason; but, mainly through the skilful and eloquent defence of Erskine, he was acquitted on the ground that he had no treasonable intentions. His life was henceforth full of crack-brained schemes, political and

financial

FINANCIAL

. In 1786 he was excommunicated by the archbishop of Canterbury for refusing to

bear

witness in an ecclesiastical.suit; and in 1787 he was convicted of libelling the queen of France, the French

ambassador

AMBASSADOR (also EMBASSADOR, the form sometimes still used in America; from the Fr. ambassadeur, with which compare Ital. ambasciatore and Span. embajador, all variants of the Med. Lat. ambassiator, ambassiator, ambasator, &c., derived from Med. Lat. amba

and the administration of justice in England. He was, however, permitted to withdraw from the court without bail, and made his escape to Holland; but on account of representations from the court of Versailles he was commanded to quit that country, and, returning to England, was apprehended, and in January 1788 was sentenced
inference from carefully surveyed fact; with many variations of mood he mixed, as we often see in people less famous, an invincible faith in his own rapid prepossessions while they lasted. Everybody now discerns that to despatch a soldier of this temperament on a piece of business [the mission to the Sudan in 1884] that was not only difficult and dangerous, as Sir E. Baring said, but profoundly obscure, and needing vigilant sanity and self-

control

CONTROL (Fr. contrdle, older form contre rolle, from Med. Lat. contra-rotulus, a counter roll or copy of a document used to check the original; there is no instance in English of the use of " control " in this, its literal, meaning)

, was little better than to

call

CALL (from Anglo-Saxon ceallian, a common Teutonic word, cf. Dutch kallen, to talk or chatter)

in a wizard with his magic. Mr Gladstone always professed perplexity in understanding why the violent end of the gallant Cavagnari in Afghanistan stirred the world so little in comparison with the fate of Gordon. The answer is that Gordon seized the imagination of England, and seized it on its higher side. His religion was eccentric, but it was religion; the Bible was the rock on which he founded himself, both old dispensation and new; he was known to hate forms, ceremonies and all the ' solemn plausibilities'; his speech was

sharp

, pithy, rapid and ironic; above all, he knew the ways of war and would not

bear

the sword for nought."
to five years' imprisonment in Newgate, where he lived at his ease, giving dinners and dances. As he could not obtain securities for his good behaviour on the termination of his term of imprisonment, he was not allowed to leave Newgate, and there he died of delirious fever on the 1st of November 1793.. Some time before his apprehension he had become a convert to Judaism, and had undergone the initiatory rite.
A serious defence of most of his eccentricities is undertaken in
The Life of Lord George Gordon, with a Philosophical Review of his
Political Conduct, by Robert Watson, M.D. (London, 1795). The best accounts of Lord George Gordon are to be found in the Annual Registers from 178o to the year of his death.

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