Barnaby Rudge | Page 4

years he too was taken ill, and died before the kitchen fire. He
kept his eye to the last upon the meat as it roasted, and suddenly. turned
over on his back with a sepulchral cry of 'Cuckoo!' Since then I have
been ravenless.
No account of the Gordon Riots having been to my knowledge
introduced into any Work of Fiction, and the subject presenting very
extraordinary and remarkable features, I was led to project this Tale.
It is unnecessary to say, that those shameful tumults, while they reflect
indelible disgrace upon the time in which they occurred, and all who
had act or part in them, teach a good lesson. That what we falsely call a
religious cry is easily raised by men who have no religion, and who in

their daily practice set at nought the commonest principles of right and
wrong; that it is begotten of intolerance and persecution; that it is
senseless, besotted, inveterate and unmerciful; all History teaches us.
But perhaps we do not know it in our hearts too well, to profit by even
so humble an example as the 'No Popery' riots of Seventeen Hundred
and Eighty.
However imperfectly those disturbances are set forth in the following
pages, they are impartially painted by one who has no sympathy with
the Romish Church, though he acknowledges, as most men do, some
esteemed friends among the followers of its creed.
In the description of the principal outrages, reference has been had to
the best authorities of that time, such as they are; the account given in
this Tale, of all the main features of the Riots, is substantially correct.
Mr Dennis's allusions to the flourishing condition of his trade in those
days, have their foundation in Truth, and not in the Author's fancy. Any
file of old Newspapers, or odd volume of the Annual Register, will
prove this with terrible ease.
Even the case of Mary Jones, dwelt upon with so much pleasure by the
same character, is no effort of invention. The facts were stated, exactly
as they are stated here, in the House of Commons. Whether they
afforded as much entertainment to the merry gentlemen assembled
there, as some other most affecting circumstances of a similar nature
mentioned by Sir Samuel Romilly, is not recorded.
That the case of Mary Jones may speak the more emphatically for itself,
I subjoin it, as related by SIR WILLIAM MEREDITH in a speech in
Parliament, 'on Frequent Executions', made in 1777.
'Under this act,' the Shop-lifting Act, 'one Mary Jones was executed,
whose case I shall just mention; it was at the time when press warrants
were issued, on the alarm about Falkland Islands. The woman's
husband was pressed, their goods seized for some debts of his, and she,
with two small children, turned into the streets a-begging. It is a
circumstance not to be forgotten, that she was very young (under

nineteen), and most remarkably handsome. She went to a linen-draper's
shop, took some coarse linen off the counter, and slipped it under her
cloak; the shopman saw her, and she laid it down: for this she was
hanged. Her defence was (I have the trial in my pocket), "that she had
lived in credit, and wanted for nothing, till a press-gang came and stole
her husband from her; but since then, she had no bed to lie on; nothing
to give her children to eat; and they were almost naked; and perhaps
she might have done something wrong, for she hardly knew what she
did." The parish officers testified the truth of this story; but it seems,
there had been a good deal of shop-lifting about Ludgate; an example
was thought necessary; and this woman was hanged for the comfort and
satisfaction of shopkeepers in Ludgate Street. When brought to receive
sentence, she behaved in such a frantic manner, as proved her mind to
he in a distracted and desponding state; and the child was sucking at
her breast when she set out for Tyburn.'


Chapter 1
In the year 1775, there stood upon the borders of Epping Forest, at a
distance of about twelve miles from London--measuring from the
Standard in Cornhill,' or rather from the spot on or near to which the
Standard used to be in days of yore--a house of public entertainment
called the Maypole; which fact was demonstrated to all such travellers
as could neither read nor write (and at that time a vast number both of
travellers and stay-at-homes were in this condition) by the emblem
reared on the roadside over against the house, which, if not of those
goodly proportions that Maypoles were wont to present in olden times,
was a fair young ash, thirty feet in height, and straight as any arrow that
ever English yeoman