Newcastle's Mob

Abstract

“I love a mob,” the aging Duke of Newcastle said in 1768, “I headed a mob once myself. We owe the Hanoverian succession to a mob.” As I read those words I wondered if the good Duke, who was 73 when he said them, had slipped into senility or into an aged-ripened concept of the past, for the textbooks tell of the Jacobite rioting at George I's accession and during and after the Rebellion of 1715, but not of mob action in support of the Hanovers. The more specific histories of the period such as George Rude's Hanoverian London show that some of the events which we interpret as riots were actually pitched battles between mobs of Jacobite sympathizers and friends of the new government. This shows the existence of rival forces but where was Newcastle's mob? This paper attempts to define that mob, to explain the reasons for its formation, to show its organization around the young Pelham-Hollis, Duke of Newcastle, and to illustrate its activities.