Doctor Who_ The Adventures of Henrietta Street - Lawrence Miles [17]
What was known by everyone, however, was that Scarlette had truly ‘come of age’ two years before the arrival of the Doctor, in the year when London had burned and the sky had turned to blood.
It’s perhaps surprising that the great Gordon Riots of 1780 aren’t a better-known part of English history. Possibly it’s a kind of embarrassment: the English don’t need to be reminded how easy it is for the nation, or at least its heart and capital, to slip over the edge of reason and into mass murder. The events of June 1780 are too complex, bloody and vicious to fully explain here, but it’s enough to say that it began when Lord George Gordon – a flame-haired, wild-eyed peer of the realm quite clearly on the edge of a complete nervous collapse – led a mob of fifty thousand Catholic-hating citizens, plus various opportunistic criminals and prostitutes, in a march on Parliament itself. The crowd held the honourable members hostage for a whole day, while Gordon burst into the House of Commons to threaten, cajole and harangue the nation’s leading politicians, who could do little but shrink back in fear.
In itself, the notion that a man could do such a thing to the throne of democratic power is surprising. But so began nearly a week of carnage, In which rioters burned down entire neighbourhoods at the dead heart of the city. Innocent bystanders were burned alive or hacked to pieces; every prison in the city was razed to the ground, and every prisoner released; streets were flooded with blood, alcohol and vomit; the watch stood by and did nothing, or in some cases urged the rioters on; extortion gangs began to divide up the whole of urban London between them; and for the best part of a week the night sky was lit up in bright red as the entire horizon caught light. By day, all was quiet. By night, the people of London became beasts. Stories circulated that the King had been butchered, in circumstances not unlike the later Revolution in France, while there were several tales of animals being released from zoos and slaughtering passers-by in the urban jungle. There was, as there often is in such circumstances, at least one report of human cannibalism.
Until the sixth day of the riots, many genuinely believed that English civilisation had fallen for ever. Some said the carnage had been masterminded by the French, or even by American manipulators like that sinister Freemason and lightning-god, Benjamin Franklin. Those with more arcane minds held that something had been awoken under the city, that tunnels full of satanic monks were performing foul rituals beneath the capital, spilling English blood in the name of pagan gods. It’s certainly true that John Wilkes, former Mayor of London and fallen member of the Hellfire Club, seemed determined to stop this vicious and chaotic kind of black magic.
Newgate Prison was burned to the ground on June 6, 1780.While those prisoners who couldn’t get out in time screamed in the debris, released mental patients stood on the windowsills and urinated into the flames under a sky full of black, fat-filled smoke. Scarlette was there: this much is certain. If there really was something ritualistic in the bloodshed, then Scarlette was undoubtedly involved in it. The Gordon Riots were her baptism of fire, her first good look into the face of the horror which her kind were, traditionally, sworn to hold back.
Though her exact role at Newgate in 1780 is unclear, it was often suggested that a man had been involved. Scarlette is known to have studied ritualism under one of the Mayakai, and such instructresses tended to frown on the male ability to ‘perform’ in a ritual sense, but it seems that an effort was made to seduce the young Scarlette by a gentleman of another tradition. This isn’t surprising.