If Lord George Gordon is remembered at all, it is as the half-mad aristocrat who gave his name to the anti-Catholic Gordon Riots of June 1780. The image survives in popular imagination largely through Dickens: London in flames, prisons burnt down, Catholic chapels ransacked, Irish distilleries trashed and cries of “No Popery”.
Yet Lord George Gordon also has another, stranger claim to historical distinction. Technically speaking, he was Britain’s first Jewish MP.
There are two more familiar candidates for the parliamentarian with that distinction. Lionel de Rothschild became the first practising Jewish MP to take his seat in Parliament in 1858, after the long struggle to remove the Christian oath requirement. Most of us would also count Benjamin Disraeli, notwithstanding that he was baptised into the Church of England as a child.
Gordon fits neither category comfortably. He was not a Jew while serving as MP for Ludgershall in the 1770s. His conversion came in the aftermath of political and personal collapse. Yet by the end of his life he was living observantly as a Jew, keeping kosher, studying Torah and refusing to moderate either his conduct or his faith even when compromise might have secured his release from prison.
The transformation from Scottish Lord to observant Jew seems bizarre. In fact, it reveals something important about the religious and political imagination of 18th-century Britain and also about antisemitism in the 21st century.
Gordon emerged from the turbulent world of late Georgian opposition politics. The younger son of the Duke of Gordon, he entered Parliament in 1774 and attached himself loosely to sections of the parliamentary opposition sympathetic to the American colonists. He did not see his anti-Catholicism as reactionary. Like many Protestant critics of Lord North’s government, he regarded himself as defending English liberty against corruption, arbitrary power and creeping tyranny.
From our 21th century perspective it seems odd that a man sympathetic to the American Revolution should also become the figurehead of militant anti-Catholicism. In the 18th century, however, these positions arose from the same Protestant constitutional worldview.
The political culture of the English-speaking world after 1688 defined itself against what was commonly termed “Popery”. Catholicism – or rather the English Protestant idea of Catholicism – functioned as the symbolic opposite of liberty. It was associated with arbitrary monarchy, superstition and “bigotry”, foreign allegiance and emotional excess. By contrast Protestant Britain imagined itself as sober, rational, constitutional and therefore free. Catholic Europe, particularly Bourbon France, represented the mirror image: absolutism, hierarchy and submission.
This caricature bore only a passing relationship to the reality of eighteenth-century Catholic life. What mattered was the symbolic role Catholicism occupied within English political thought. Anti-Catholicism went beyond a dispute about theology. It was woven deeply into the fabric of Britain’s self-understanding.
These attitudes coloured British political responses to the American War of Independence. By the late 1770s Britain had significant difficulties recruiting sufficient soldiers to put down the insurgency across the Atlantic and was relying on Hessian mercenaries. The Catholic Relief Act of 1778 was intended in part to make it possible to recruit Catholics from significantly unreformed counties, such as Lancashire, to the armed forces.
To Gordon and his supporters, however, the Act represented the erosion of the Protestant constitution itself.
By 1780, Gordon had become president of the Protestant Association, which organised a huge petition demanding repeal of the Act. Tens of thousands marched on Parliament. What followed was one of the most destructive episodes of civil disorder in British history. The demonstrations disintegrated into several days of rioting. The level of destruction was spectacular and, in the absence of a police force, order could not be restored. Eventually, to the horror of Edmund Burke, the riot was quelled by military action.
Gordon was arrested and tried for high treason. His defence was that he had merely organised a political demonstration that had spun out of control. His defence team, led by Thomas Erskine, argued brilliantly that political agitation, however reckless, was not treason. The jury agreed, and Gordon walked free.
Over the following years Gordon became increasingly eccentric. He launched a series of political attacks, including libels against Marie Antoinette and the French ambassador. For that action, he was prosecuted for criminal libel. However, during this trial, he was unable to secure the services of Erskine, who had been instructed by the government on another matter. Foolishly, Gordon represented himself. As his defence foundered, Gordon fled from justice and was missing for many months before being discovered living among poor Jews in Birmingham.
It was during this period that Gordon converted formally to Judaism.
The conversion has often been dismissed as insanity. Yet the evidence suggests something more sincere and complicated. Gordon immersed himself in Jewish religious practice with complete sincerity. He adopted traditional dress, observed dietary laws, and appears genuinely to have embraced Judaism rather than merely toyed with it as an eccentric affectation.
Perhaps there was also a deeper logic at work. Gordon had spent his political life attacking what he regarded as the coercive religious and political machinery of the state. Judaism, in 18th-century England, occupied an unusual position. Jews were outsiders: but tolerated. They possessed no threatening institutional power. Unlike Catholics, they were not associated in the Protestant imagination with foreign armies, absolutist monarchies or conspiratorial political influence. Gordon’s conversion may therefore have represented an act of dissident rejection of established political society.
Gordon spent his final years imprisoned in Newgate after refusing to compromise with the authorities. His cell became a fashionable salon, where visitors came to pay court to the aristocratic Jewish prisoner. He died there in 1793, aged only 42.
The world that produced Gordon has largely vanished from England. Anti-Catholicism, once one of the organising passions of British public life, has faded dramatically. Yet traces remain. Sectarian politics survived in parts of Liverpool and especially Glasgow far into the modern era. The old Protestant-Catholic divide shaped voting patterns, identities and public culture long after most assumed it obsolete.
In various ways, the structure of that prejudice survives even when the target changes.
Many accusations once made to Catholics are now directed, in altered form, at Muslims: loyalty to foreign authorities, resistance to integration, excessive religiosity, hostility to liberal values, assertive public piety and fears of parallel legal or political systems. The resemblance is not exact, but it is recognisable.
The legacy of anti-Catholicism also helps explain why Britain historically produced lower levels of antisemitism than much of continental Europe. The deepest sectarian anxieties of British society were focused elsewhere. For centuries, the principal religious opponent was not the Jew, but the Catholic. Lord George Gordon’s improbable life is a reminder of just how deeply that older sectarian world once shaped British politics, and how far its shadow still stretches.
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