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Powers, stood stripped and blackened piles. Riot had faced the
bayonets of authority--had for a moment seemed ready to defy them. Yet
at first nobody seems to have taken the matter seriously or gauged its
grave significance. Neither the Catholics, against whom the agitation
was levelled, nor the peers and prelates and members of Parliament who
had been so harshly treated seemed to understand the {201} sternness of
the situation. There was a sense of confidence in law and order, a
feeling of security in good administration, which lulled men into a
false confidence.

This false confidence was increased by the quiet which reigned over
Saturday, June 3. Parliament met undisturbed. An address of Lord
Bathurst's, calling for a prosecution of "the authors, abettors, and
instruments of yesterday's outrages," was carried after a rambling and
purposeless debate, and the House of Lords adjourned till the 6th,
apparently convinced that there was no further cause for alarm. This
public composure was rudely shaken on the following day, Sunday, June
4. The rioters reassembled at Moorfields. Once again the buildings
belonging to Catholics were ransacked and demolished; once again
incendiary fires blazed, and processions of savage figures decked in
the spoils of Catholic ceremonial carried terror before them. The Lord
Mayor, Kennett, proved to be a weak man wholly unequal to the peril he
was suddenly called upon to face. There were soldiers at hand, but
they were not made use of. One act of resolution might have stayed the
disorder at the first, but no man was found resolute enough to perform
the act; and rapine, raging unchecked, became more audacious and more
dangerous.

On the Monday, though the trouble grew graver, nothing was done to meet
it beyond the issuing of a proclamation offering a reward of five
hundred pounds for the discovery of the persons concerned in the
destruction of the chapels of the Bavarian and Sardinian Ambassadors.
The mob gathered again, bolder for the impunity with which it had so
far acted. Large bodies of men marched to Lord George Gordon's house
in Welbeck Street and paraded there, displaying the trophies stripped
from the destroyed chapels in Moorfields. Others began work of fresh
destruction in Wapping and in Smithfield. Sir George Savile's house in
Leicester Fields, and the houses of Mr. Rainsforth of Clare Market, and
Mr. Maberly of Little Queen Street, respectable tradesmen w