Priestley and other Dissenters blame the government…

July 1791 CE

Priestley and other Dissenters blame the government for the riots, believing that William Pitt and his supporters had instigated them; however, it seems from the evidence that the riots were actually organized by local Birmingham officials.

Some of the rioters acted in a coordinated fashion and seemed to be led by local officials during the attacks, prompting accusations of premeditation.

Some Dissenters discovered that their homes were to be attacked several days before the rioters arrived, leading them to believe that there was a prepared list of victims.

The "disciplined nucleus of rioters", which numbered only thirty or so, directed the mob and stayed sober throughout the three to four days of rioting.

Unlike the hundreds of others who joined in, they could not be bribed to stop their destructions.

Essayist William Hazlitt's first published work is a letter to the Shrewsbury Chronicle, printed later in July 1791, condemning the Priestley riots; Priestley had been one of (then thirteen-year-old) Hazlitt's teachers.

If a concerted effort had been made by Birmingham's Anglican elite to attack the Dissenters, it was more than likely the work of Benjamin Spencer, a local minister, Joseph Carles, a Justice of the Peace and landowner, and John Brooke (1755-1802), an attorney, coroner, and under-sheriff.

Although present at the riot's outbreak, Carles and Spencer made no attempt to stop the rioters, and Brooke seems to have led them to the New Meeting chapel.

Witnesses agreed "that the magistrates promised the rioters protection so long as they restricted their attacks to the meeting-houses and left persons and property alone".

The magistrates also refused to arrest any of the rioters and released those that had been arrested.

Instructed by the national government to prosecute the riot's instigators, these local officials dragged their heels.

When finally forced to try the ringleaders, they intimidated witnesses and made a mockery of the trial proceedings.

Only seventeen of the fifty rioters who had been charged will ever be brought to trial; four will be convicted, of whom one will be pardoned, two hanged, and the fourth transported to Botany Bay, but Priestley and others believe that these men are found guilty not because they were rioters but because "they were infamous characters in other respects".

Although King George III had been forced to send troops to Birmingham to quell the disturbances, he commented, "I cannot but feel better pleased that Priestley is the sufferer for the doctrines he and his party have instilled, and that the people see them in their true light."

The national government forces the local residents to pay restitution to those whose property had been damaged: the total will eventually amount to £23,000.

However, the process will take many years, and most residents will receive much less than the value of their property.

After the riots, Birmingham is, according to industrialist James Watt, "divided into two parties who hate one another mortally".

Initially Priestley had wanted to return and deliver a sermon on the Bible verse "Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do," but he had been dissuaded by friends convinced that it was too dangerous.

The riots reveal that the Anglican gentry of Birmingham are not averse to using violence against Dissenters whom they view as potential revolutionaries.

They have no qualms, either, about raising a potentially uncontrollable mob.

Many of those attacked leave Birmingham; as a result, the town becomes noticeably more conservative after the riots.

The remaining supporters of the French Revolution decide not to hold a dinner celebrating the storming of the Bastille the next year.