Sir Francis Burdett, MP and fifth baronet, was arrested on this date for arguing that parliament should not imprison without trial journalists who criticised it. It took 50,000 troops to get him into the Tower of London.
It is said that in the riots that followed, former Secretary of State for War, Lord Castlereagh, was forced to join protestors throwing stones through the windows of his own house so that they would not recognise him. If true, that surely puts this into the top five most amusing riots of all time.
(Castlereagh – who was briefly out of the Cabinet just then, due to having fought a duel with the Foreign Secretary – has, of course, another claim to immortality, though this too is not one he would have chosen: Byron’s famous epitaph, following Castlereagh’s suicide, “Posterity will ne’er survey/ A nobler grave than this:/ Here lie the bones of Castlereagh:/ Stop, traveller, and piss.”)
Francis Burdett (1770-1844) held political opinions which would be difficult to summarise in modern terms. For our immediate purposes it’s sufficient to say that he supported electoral reform and freedom of the press, fair trials for political prisoners and an end to pointless wars, which was enough for him to be classed by the government as an extremist and an enemy of the state.
From his youth onwards, this privileged boy seems to have had strong views on the (supposed) ancient liberties of the freeborn Briton which had been stolen by corrupt politicians. Oppression and injustice were the dragons that fired him up, and in 1796 he was finally in a position to do something about them. Francis had married into the Coutts banking family, and to keep the eccentric young man out of trouble his father-in-law bought him a nice, quiet seat in parliament. Which brings us to 1810 and the Tower of London.
An all-night sitting of the Commons voted at breakfast time on the 6th April that Burdett’s criticism of the House, contained in a letter to the press, was sufficiently insulting that he should be jailed for a breach of parliamentary privilege.
Burdett refused to surrender to what he saw as an illegal and unconstitutional warrant, insisting that he would only be taken by force. The subsequent stand-off gave time for all of London to hear the news that one of the favourites of the common people was being silenced by a discredited regime, and three glorious days of rioting ensued.
The Tower itself was picketed by thousands to prevent Burdett being taken there. The parliamentary authorities were forced to call out infantry, and surround the Tower with cannons. The Thames was patrolled by great mobs so that Burdett couldn’t be transported by river. In the well-to-do districts around his house, demonstrators chanting “Burdett and Liberty” smashed the windows of government members, and after dark enforced a traditional “illumination” – any house which failed to show a light in its window, in support of Sir Francis, would be attacked.
The West End burned, and running battles were fought between the people and the state - the latter represented by an astonishingly huge mobilisation of cavalry, infantry, guards and artillery. By Sunday evening, Burdett’s house was ringed with howitzers.
Sir Francis himself attended the opera.
It was on the Monday that a combination of police and soldiers finally managed to enter the Burdett residence. Over the weekend some of Sir Francis’s most prominent supporters had arrived with a barrel of gunpowder, with which they proposed booby-trapping the house. But Francis Burdett was not really a revolutionary, or keen for martyrdom, or eager to see his family home exploded, so he’d talked them out of that.
Tens of thousands of armed men had finally succeeded in getting one member of parliament into jail, where he remained until – rather anticlimactically – the parliamentary session ended on June 21st and with it the Commons’ right to hold him. The government didn’t dare to expel him from the House altogether, because they feared it would trigger a revolution.
A triumphal procession was organised to mark his release from the Tower, but Burdett didn’t attend it as he worried that it would lead to fresh violence. He remained an MP for the rest of his life, but his popularity on the streets never recovered from what many of his supporters saw as a snub.
*
Sources:
The laughter of triumph by Ben Wilson (Faber, 2005)
The Canadian Bar Review June 1933
www.historyofparliamentonline.org/volume/1820-1832/member/burdett-sir-francis-1770-1844