352

HISTORY OF ENGLAND,

CHAP.

X.

168 S.

Riots inLondon.

and ministers of religion, barbarous in the midst of civilisa-tion, heathen in the midst of Christianity, burrows among allphysical and all moral pollution, in the cellars and garretsof great cities, will at once rise into a terrible importance. Soit was now in London. When the night, the longest night,as it chanced, of the year, approached, forth came fromevery den of vice, from the bear garden at Hockley, andfrom the labyrinth of tippling houses and brothels in theFriars, thousands of housebreakers and highwaymen, cut-purses and ring-droppers. With these were mingled thousandsof idle apprentices, who wished merely for the excitementof a riot. Even men of peaceable and honest habits wereimpelled by religious animosity to join the lawless part of thepopulation. For the cry of No Popery, a cry which has morethan once endangered the existence of London, was thesignal for outrage and rapine. First the rabble fell on theRoman Catholic places of worship. The buildings were demo-lished. Benches, pulpits, confessionals, breviaries wereheaped up and set on fire. A great mountain of books andfurniture blazed on the site of the convent at Clerkenwell.Another pile was kindled before the ruins of the Franciscanhouse in Lincoln’s InnFields. The chapel in Lime Street, thechapel in Bucklersbury, were pulled down. The pictures,images and crucifixes were carried along the streets intriumph, amidst lighted tapers torn from the altars. Theprocession bristled thick with swords and staves, and on thepoint of every sword and of every staff was an orange. TheKing’s printing house, whence had issued, during the pre-ceding three years, innumerable tracts in defence of Papalsupremacy, image worship, and monastic vows, was, to usea coarse metaphor which then, for the first time, came intouse, completely gutted. The vast stock of paper, much ofwhich was still unpolluted by types, furnished an immensebonfire. From monasteries, temples, and public o'ffices,the fury of the multitude turned to private dwellings. Severalhouses were pillaged and destroyed: but the smallness of thebooty disappointed the plunderers; and soon a rumour wasspread that the most valuable effects of the Papists had been