Page:Dictionary of National Biography volume 22.djvu/204

 Gordon after a trial which lasted from 8 on Monday till 4.45  on the Tuesday.

Gordon visited Paris in 1782; he supported Fox in the Westminster election of 1784, and wrote letters to Pitt, protesting against various taxes. In November following he again appeared as a protestant champion in the quarrel between the Dutch and the Emperor Joseph. He accompanied the Dutch ambassador to St. James's (10 Nov.), dressed in a Dutch uniform with a highland broadsword, and persuaded the soldiers on guard to present arms to the ambassador and to cut their ribbons into Dutch cockades. A week later he told Pitt that he had received offers from several hundred seamen to serve against the emperor. Pitt warned him that he was acting without authority. On 30 Nov. he addressed a meeting of sailors, who offered to pull down Pitt's house, upon which he 'made a low bow and withdrew.'

The pope failed at this time in an attempt (if he made it) to poison the protestant hero. The Machiavelian policy of Pitt in giving offices to Gordon's relations is thought by his biographer to have been more successful. In 1786 he took up the case of Cagliostro, who had come to England after the diamond necklace affair. Gordon put a couple of paragraphs in the 'Public Advertiser,' accusing Marie-Antoinette of persecuting this honest man. He was meanwhile corresponding with the Jews (having had some flirtations with the quakers), and became a Jew himself, partly in order (his biographer thinks) to give celebrity to his financial scheme. He hoped that the Jews would combine to withhold loans for carrying on wars. He wrote a 'petition from the prisoners at Newgate to Lord George Gordon,' praying him to prevent them from being sent to Botany Bay, denouncing the severity of the English criminal law, inconsistent, as he thought, with the Mosaic code, and sent copies to Pitt and the keepers of Newgate. He endeavoured to obtain admission to Newgate, where he expected (reasonably enough) to find converts to his views as to the inexpediency of hanging and transporting. Some severe remarks upon British justice in this paper led to a prosecution. He was convicted of libel 6 June 1787, and on 13 June following was also convicted for the paragraphs referring to Marie-Antoinette.

Gordon went to Amsterdam, but was sent back by the magistrates. He retired to Birmingham, where he lived quietly in the house of a Jew, wearing a long beard and adopting the Jewish customs. On 28 Jan. 1788 he was brought up for judgment, sentenced to be imprisoned for five years in Newgate for the two libels, and then to pay a fine of 500l. and find two securities for his good behaviour in 2,500l. apiece.

He lived pretty comfortably in Newgate, wrote letters, including fruitless appeals to the French National Assembly to apply for his release, amused himself with music, especially the bagpipes, had six or eight persons to dinner daily, including the society of Newgate, and occasionally distinguished outsiders, who all dined on terms of strict equality; gave a ball once a fortnight, and conformed in all respects to the Jewish religion. On the expiration of the five years he was unable to obtain the securities required, and had to stay in Newgate, where he soon caught a fever, and died 1 Nov. 1793, after singing the 'Ça ira.'

Gordon would clearly have been in an asylum instead of a prison at the present day, and the severity of his punishment is probably to be explained by the fear that he might again become a hero of the mob, as was made not improbable by his dealings with the sailors in 1784. Dickens's description of Gordon and the riots of 1780 in 'Barnaby Rudge' is familiar.

[History of the Right Hon. Lord George Gordon (with speeches and letters), Edinburgh, 1780; Life by Robert Watson, M.D. 1795 (Watson saw him frequently in Newgate and was a warm admirer); Cobbett's State Trials, xxi. 485-537 (trial for the riots of 1780); The Whole Proceedings on the Trials of two Informations against Lord G. Gordon, 1787; Annual Register for 1780, 1784, 1787, &c.]  GORDON, GEORGE, fifth (1770–1836), eldest son of the fourth duke [see Gordon, Alexander (1745?-1827) (DNB00), fourth, 1745-1827], was born in Edinburgh on 2 Feb. 1770. At the age of twenty. being then Marquis of Huntly, he entered as ensign in the 35th foot, of which his brother-in-law, Colonel Lennox, afterwards fourth duke of Richmond, was lieutenant-colonel. The year after (1791) he raised an independent company of foot, from which he exchanged to the 42nd highlanders, and commanded the grenadier company of that regiment until 1793, when he was appointed captain-lieutenant and lieutenant-colonel in the 3rd footguards. He accompanied his battalion to Flanders with the Duke of York's army, and was present at St. Amand, Famars, Lounoi, Dunkirk, the siege of Valenciennes, &c. On his return to Scotland, he raised a regiment of highlanders on the paternal estates, a task in which he was actively assisted by his father and mother, both of whom recruited personally. The duchess is said to have worn the regimental colours, and to have obtained recruits for her son by 