Not long after Howard’s visitation, the Fleet prison was involved with all other London prisons in the destructive mischief wreaked by the non-popery rioters, who, headed by the weak-minded Lord George Gordon, terrorized the metropolis in 1780. On Wednesday, June 7th, the rioters, now temporarily in the ascendant, sent word to all the public prisons that they were coming to burn them down. They intended to do this on the day previous, when the mob appeared before the Fleet prison and insisted that the gates should be opened and the keepers yielded to their demand. “They were then proceeding to demolish the prison, but the prisoners expostulated with them, begging that they would give them time to remove their goods. They readily condescended, and gave them a day for that purpose, in consequence of which the prisoners were removing all this day out of that place. Some of the prisoners were in for life.” In the evening of the next day, they fulfilled their threat and burned it. This was the second time, for the great fire of 1666 had previously demolished it. The evening of this Wednesday, June 7th, is described in the Annual Register as one of the most dreadful spectacles this country ever beheld. “Let those who did not see it judge what the inhabitants felt when they beheld at the same instant the flames ascending and rolling in clouds from the King’s Bench and Fleet prisons, from New Bridewell, from the toll gates on Blackfriars Bridge, from houses in every quarter of the town, and particularly from the bottom and middle of Holborn, where the conflagration was horrible beyond description.”