When fashionable vice was so openly and unblushingly displayed, it could not fail but that the populace of the capital should now and then break out into excesses of unbridled savagedom, as was more especially the case in the notorious No-Popery riots of 1780. Crimes increased to an extraordinary extent, not only in number, but in brutality. Horrible murders were every-day events, as a glance at the "Annual Register" will afford sickening proof. Members of the aristocracy committed the most aggravated murders. As an instance, an Irish gentleman, after waylaying a rival favoured by his mistress, offered him the choice between death and awful mutilation, and, when the latter was chosen, carried it out in such a way that the mutilated man died. The boldness of the robbers and highwaymen was unbounded. The Lord Chancellor was robbed of the great seal of England, the great Pitt of his plate, the Archbishop of Canterbury's house was broken into, and the French mail stopped and plundered in one of the busiest streets of the metropolis. In vain did a justice, which rivalled crime in barbarity, pass whole batches of death-sentences. In one year (1766), two hundred and twenty-three persons were cast for death at the Assizes, and duly hanged. In 1786, one hundred and thirty-three were sentenced to death at the Old Bailey alone. Very significant signs of the age are the repeated instances of idiotcy, insanity, and suicide. It was not at all uncommon for a noble rake-hell,[6] who had drunk the cup of licentiousness to the dregs, to collect a number of prostitutes for a final orgie, and blow out his brains, either during or immediately after the Bacchanalian revel.[7] Such was the state of society at the time when Augusta of Saxe-Coburg, Princess of Wales, was left with seven young children, and another shortly expected.[8] She was a young widow, only two-and-thirty years of age, and had not a friend to depend on in the world. The king, her papa-in-law, cordially hated her, and she had not even the consolation of regretting her husband, for, though born a princess, she was a woman after all, and had bitterly felt her late husband's open profligacy with Lady Archibald Hamilton. Prince George alone expressed any regret at his father's death, and that was in a modified form. When he was told of it, he turned pale, and laid his hand on his breast. Ayscough said, "I am afraid, sir, you are not well;" and the prince replied, "I feel something here, just as I did when I saw the two workmen fall from the scaffold at Kew."[9]