Gin: The Much Lamented Death Of Madam Geneva: The Eighteenth Century Gin Craze - Plot & Excerpts
There was a loud bang and some smoke, and then Westminster Hall was filled with fluttering sheets of paper. It happened between one and two o’clock on a Wednesday afternoon, and the hall was crowded. In 1736, the Courts of Chancery and King’s Bench and the Court of Common Pleas all sat there, in open-plan wooden booths. Uffenbach, who visited in 1710, commented on the general chaos of people walking up and down, and the ‘stalls on both sides, where books and all kinds of wares are sold.’1 The bomb had been hidden under the Counsels’ bench in the Court of Chancery.As with the Gin Craze, the resulting panic caused as much damage as the explosion itself. The Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State with ultimate responsibility for the affairs of Middlesex, reported that ‘the noise … and smoke created a great consternation in the hall.’2 In his memoirs, Lord Hervey described ‘such a loud report from a discharge of gunpowder, that the whole Hall was in a moment in the utmost confusion; and everybody concluding it was a plot to blow up the Hall, the judges started from the benches, the lawyers were all running over one another’s backs to make their escape, some losing part of their gowns, others their periwigs, in the scuffle.’3The date was 14 July, not that there was any significance in that.
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