In the spring and summer of 1715 a series of riots occurred in England in which High Church mobs attacked over forty Dissenting meeting-houses.[1][2] The rioters also protested against the first Hanoverian king of Britain, George I and his new Whig government (the Whigs were associated with the Dissenters).[3] The riots occurred on symbolic days: 28 May was George I's birthday, 29 May was the anniversary of Charles II's Restoration and 10 June was the birthday of the Jacobite Pretender, James Francis Edward Stuart.
Upon the death in August 1714 of the last Stuart monarch, Queen Anne, Georg Ludwig, Elector of Hanover, ascended the throne in accordance with the terms of the Act of Settlement 1701 that excluded Anne's half-brother James Francis Edward Stuart. After his arrival in Britain in September, George promptly dismissed the Tories from office and appointed a Whig-dominated government. His coronation in October led to rioting in over twenty towns in England.[4] The 1715 general election was also accompanied by riots and resulted in a Whig majority in the House of Commons and the proscription of the Tories from office, with some former Tory ministers being impeached by the new government.
According to Nicholas Rogers, the High Church clergy of the Church of England played a role in fomenting discontent: they were "by reputation the progenitors of mob violence" and after George's accession the "high-flying clergy strove desperately to revive the flagging fortunes of their party, mobilising their congregations in defence of the Anglican inheritance and warning them of the dangers of Whig rule".[5] The Whig writer Daniel Defoe complained that the pulpit had become "a Trumpet of Sedition".[6]
Riots
The anniversary of Queen Anne's accession day and William III's death, 8 March, was met in London with bell-ringing, flag-waving and closed shops. On 23 April, the anniversary of Anne's coronation, a mob met at Snow Hill and made a bonfire under a banner depicting Anne and emblazoned with the words: “Imitate her who was so Just and Good, / Both in her Actions and her Royal Word” (the latter may have hinted at her supposed promise to restore James Stuart to the throne). Near St Andrew's, Holborn, the mob burned a picture of William III and broke windows which were not illuminated in celebration. Referring to the 1710 Sacheverell riots, they also proposed "to sing the Second Part of the Sacheverell-Tune by pulling down [Dissenting] Meeting Houses" but they were persuaded not to do so.[7]
The first riots happened in London during the impeachment trials of Tory politicians. On 29 April the birthday of the Tory peer the Duke of Ormonde was riotously celebrated in Drury Lane and west London.[8]
On George I's birthday, 28 May, there occurred large demonstrations in Smithfield, Cheapside and Highgate, where the Dissenting chapel was attacked.[8] In Smithfield, according to Abel Boyer, "a large mob burnt Cromwell (some say Hoadly) in effigy".[9] In Cheapside the rioters shouted “No Hanoverian, No Presbiterian government”.[9] The next day was Restoration Day and the mob shouted: “A Restoration, a Stewart, High Church and Ormonde”, “A Stewart, a second Restoration” and “No King George, King James the third”. When a coachman called for King James he "was hollowed through the Mob" and supporters of the Whigs had their windows broken.[9] In Queen Street a battle occurred between the rioters and the trained bands. At the London Stock Exchange the crowd shouted “High Church and the Duke of Ormonde”. Stock jobbing was seen as the parasitical and immoral growth from Whig principles.[9] When one passer-by shouted “Long live King George” he was beaten up by the mob.[9]
In Oxford on 28 May a rumour spread that Queen Anne, Lord Bolingbroke, Ormonde and Henry Sacheverell were to be burned in effigy. In response, undergraduates and townsfolk attacked those celebrating George's birthday and broke into the Presbyterian meeting-house and made a bonfire of its pulpit, pews and window, with an effigy of its minister. The mob chanted “An Ormond, an Ormond, a Bolingbroke, down with the Roundheads, no Constitutioners [members of the Whig Constitutional Club], no Hanover; a new Restoration”. The next day a Quaker and Baptist meeting place was also attacked.[10][11]
On 10 June Anglican churches in Clerkenwell and St Dunstan-in-the-West rang their bells to celebrate James Stuart's birthday, a Dissenting meeting place in Blackfriars was gutted by the mob, and James's declaration was nailed to the door of the former Dissenting chapel in Lincoln's Inn Fields (which had been destroyed five years previously during the Sacheverell riots).[8] Similar disturbances on James's birthday occurred at Cambridge, Leeds and several Somersetshire villages; in Norton St Philip near Bath James was proclaimed king.[11] At Frome the mob was reluctantly persuaded not to destroy the local Dissenting chapel.[12] At Marlborough, Wiltshire the mob broke into the church and rang the bells, despite objections from the parson.[12]
In the Midlands in late June and early August, similar riots against Dissenters took place, starting in Wolverhampton during St. Peter's fair and ending at Kingswinford in Worcestershire on 1 August.[13] In Wolverhampton a buckle maker was heard shouting “God damn King George, and the Duke of Marlborough” and a suspected spy was forced by the mob to get on his knees and bless King James III.[14] Robert Holland of Bilston urged the mob: “Now boys goe on we will have no King but James the third & he will be here in a month and wee will drive the old Rogue into his Country again to sow Turnipps”.[15] Similar expressions of loyalty to James were heard in Walsall and Leek.[16]
In Warrington on 10 June bells were rung and the mob shouted “Down with the Rump”. However they were prevented from attacking a Dissenting meeting house.[17] In Leeds a bonfire was made and a man was later indicted for threatening a Dissenting meeting place.[18]
In Manchester in early May James Stuart had been proclaimed James III.[12] Between 28 May and 23 June there was a spate of rioting, with the Dissenting chapel in Cross Street ransacked and destroyed between 1 June and 30 July. The historian Paul Monod said "[t]his methodical destruction must have passed on to Dissenters the chilling message that the Manchester Jacobite crowd wanted their presence totally extinguished. ... It was a violent call for a return to the [religious] uniformity of Charles II's reign".[18]Lord Cobham's dragoons eventually restored order but the rioting had by then spread to Monton and Houghton, where Dissenting chapels were attacked on 13 June. A week later the Dissenting chapels in Blackley, Greenacres, Failsworth and Standing were attacked and by 25 June the Dissenting chapels in Pilkington and Wigan had been attacked.[13]
In the West Midlands and Lancashire over thirty Dissenting chapels were attacked.[18] In Shrewsbury during the riots a paper was posted:
We Gentlemen of the Loyal Mob of Shrewsbury, do issue out this Proclamation to all Dissenters from the Church of England, of what Kind or Denomination soever, whether Independent, Baptists or Quakers: If you, or any of you, do encourage or suffer any of that damnable Faction called Presbyterians, to assemble themselves amongst you, in any of your Conventicles, at the time of Divine Worship, you may expect to meet with the same that they have been treated with. Given under our Hands and Seals the 11th Day of July 1715. God save the King.[14]
Paul Monod has said that the hostility shown towards the Dissenters, especially Presbyterians, was astonishing and that "[p]opular Tory rage...centred on religious rather than secular objects – in particular, on the hated meeting-houses".[19] He argues that plebeian English people were attached to the Church of England because it embodied a myth of unity and they feared Hanoverian–Whig rule would return England to the rule of Puritans between 1649–1660, when the Church of England had been abolished.[20]
Aftermath
Around 500 people were arrested for rioting in Shropshire, Staffordshire and Worcestershire with around 2,000 people taking part in the riots in these counties with several hundred more in Birmingham.[21]
In response to these riots, the new Whig majority passed the Riot Act to put down disturbances. This law strengthened magistrates powers and allowed Justices of the Peace to disperse demonstrations without fear of prosecution.[22]
In September and early October the government arrested the leading Tories in fear of a Jacobite rising.[16] The Jacobite rising of 1715 resulted in failure.
↑ Nicholas Rogers, ‘Riot and Popular Jacobitism in Early Hanoverian England’, in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), p. 70.
↑ Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688–1788 (Cambridge University Press, 1993), p. 191.
Jacobitism was a political movement that supported the restoration of the senior line of the House of Stuart to the British throne. The name derives from the first name of James II and VII, which is rendered in Latin as Jacobus. When James went into exile after the November 1688 Glorious Revolution, the Parliament of England argued that he had abandoned the English throne, which they offered to his Protestant daughter Mary II, and her husband William III. In April, the Scottish Convention held that he "forfeited" the throne of Scotland by his actions, listed in the Articles of Grievances.
Francis Atterbury was an English man of letters, politician and bishop. A High Church Tory and Jacobite, he gained patronage under Queen Anne, but was mistrusted by the Hanoverian Whig ministries, and banished for communicating with the Old Pretender in the Atterbury Plot. He was a noted wit and a gifted preacher.
Henry Sacheverell was an English high church Anglican clergyman who achieved nationwide fame in 1709 after preaching an incendiary 5 November sermon. He was subsequently impeached by the House of Commons and though he was found guilty, his light punishment was seen as a vindication and he became a popular figure in the country, contributing to the Tories' landslide victory at the general election of 1710.
The Priestley Riots took place from 14 July to 17 July 1791 in Birmingham, England; the rioters' main targets were religious dissenters, most notably the politically and theologically controversial Joseph Priestley. Both local and national issues stirred the passions of the rioters, from disagreements over public library book purchases, to controversies over Dissenters' attempts to gain full civil rights and their support of the French Revolution.
The Tories were a loosely organised political faction and later a political party, in the Parliaments of England, Scotland, Ireland, Great Britain and the United Kingdom. They first emerged during the 1679 Exclusion Crisis, when they opposed Whig efforts to exclude James, Duke of York from the succession on the grounds of his Catholicism. Despite their fervent opposition to state-sponsored Catholicism, Tories opposed exclusion in the belief inheritance based on birth was the foundation of a stable society.
Charles Leslie was a former Church of Ireland priest who became a leading Jacobite propagandist after the 1688 Glorious Revolution. One of a small number of Irish Protestants to actively support the Stuarts after 1688, he is best remembered today for his role in publicising the 1692 Massacre of Glencoe.
Whiggism is a political philosophy that grew out of the Parliamentarian faction in the Wars of the Three Kingdoms (1639–1651). The Whigs' key policy positions were the supremacy of Parliament, tolerance of Protestant dissenters, and opposition to a "Papist" on the throne, especially James II or one of his descendants. It is associated with early conservative liberalism.
The Nonjuring schism refers to a split in the established churches of England, Scotland and Ireland, following the deposition and exile of James II and VII in the 1688 Glorious Revolution. As a condition of office, clergy were required to swear allegiance to the ruling monarch; for various reasons, some refused to take the oath to his successors William III and II and Mary II. These individuals were referred to as Non-juring, from the Latin verb iūrō, or jūrō, meaning "to swear an oath".
Sir Watkin Williams-Wynn, 3rd Baronet was a Welsh politician and landowner who sat in the British House of Commons from 1716 to 1749, when he died in office. A member of the Tory party, he was also a prominent Jacobite sympathiser. He helped engineer the downfall of Prime Minister Robert Walpole in 1742 and engaged in negotiations with the exiled Stuarts prior to the Jacobite rising of 1745 but did not participate in the rebellion himself. Watkin died in a hunting accident in 1749.
The 1710 British general election produced a landslide victory for the Tories. The election came in the wake of the prosecution of Henry Sacheverell, which had led to the collapse of the previous government led by Godolphin and the Whig Junto.
Events from the year 1715 in Great Britain.
The Jacobite uprising in Cornwall of 1715 was the last uprising against the British Crown to take place in the county of Cornwall.
The Sacheverell riots were a series of outbreaks of public disorder, which spread across England during the spring, summer and autumn of 1710 in which supporters of the Tories attacked the homes and meeting-houses of Dissenters, particularly those of Presbyterians, whose congregations tended to support the Whigs. The Sacheverell and Rebellion riots are regarded as the most serious instances of public disorder of the eighteenth century, until, perhaps, the anti-Catholic protests of 1780.
The Jacobite rising of 1715 was the attempt by James Edward Stuart to regain the thrones of England, Ireland and Scotland for the exiled Stuarts.
The Atterbury Plot was a conspiracy led by Francis Atterbury, Bishop of Rochester and Dean of Westminster, aimed at the restoration of the House of Stuart to the throne of Great Britain. It came some years after the unsuccessful Jacobite rising of 1715 and Jacobite rising of 1719, at a time when the Whig government of the new Hanoverian king was deeply unpopular.
The coronation riots of October 1714 were a series of riots in southern and western England in protest against the coronation of the first Hanoverian king of Great Britain, George I.
When the king enjoys his own again is a Cavalier ballad written by Martin Parker during the English Civil War. It was later adopted by Jacobites. According to the historian Dr. Bernard Capp, this song was perhaps the most popular song in mid-seventeenth century England. The eighteenth century critic Joseph Ritson called it "the most famous and popular air ever heard in this country".
"Nero the Second" or "Nero II" is a traditional ballad that was popular amongst Jacobites in Great Britain and Ireland during the first half of the eighteenth century.
Ralph Sneyd was an English politician who sat in the House of Commons from 1713 to 1715.
Hanoverian Tories were Tory supporters of the Hanoverian Succession of 1714. At the time many Tories favoured the exiled Jacobite James Francis Edward Stuart to take the British and Irish thrones, while their arch rivals the Whigs supported the candidacy of George, Elector of Hanover.
References
Paul Kleber Monod, Jacobitism and the English People, 1688-1788 (Cambridge University Press, 1993).
Nicholas Rogers, ‘Riot and Popular Jacobitism in Early Hanoverian England’, in Eveline Cruickshanks (ed.), Ideology and Conspiracy: Aspects of Jacobitism, 1689-1759 (Edinburgh: John Donald, 1982), pp. 70–88.
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