By that time the general paralysis of authority was ended by the king's personal intervention. As his ministers seemed afraid of incurring responsibility, George summoned a meeting of the council by special command on Wednesday morning. Finding that the council hesitated to recommend the employment of troops, he said that if they would not give him advice he would act without it, and that he could answer for one magistrate who would do his duty. He bade Wedderburn, the attorney-general, declare the law on the subject. Wedderburn replied that the king in council could order soldiers to suppress a riot without the authority of a magistrate. George at once ordered the military to act, and by Thursday morning the riots were quelled. Seventy-two houses and four gaols had been destroyed. Of the rioters, 285 were reported as killed and 173 wounded, but many more lost their lives during the riots. The trials of the rioters were conducted with moderation; of the 139 who were tried, fifty-nine were capitally convicted, and of these only twenty-one were executed. The Surrey prisoners were tried before Wedderburn, who was made chief-justice of the common pleas and created Lord Loughborough. Lord George Gordon was acquitted; he was imprisoned for a libel in 1787, and died in Newgate after having become a jew. When the lords, who adjourned on the 6th, again assembled, the great jurist Mansfield, who in his seventy-sixth year retained his mastery of constitutional law and his facility of expression, authoritatively declared that soldiers equally with civil persons might, and if required by a magistrate must, assist in suppressing riots and preventing acts of treason and felony, and that the red coat of a soldier neither disqualified him from performing the duty of a citizen nor would protect him if he transgressed it. The riots seem to have improved the position of the government, for the appeal to popular feeling and the formation of associations by which the whigs brought pressure on parliament were discredited by them, and for the moment common danger allayed political animosity. FOOTNOTES: [135] _Parl. Hist._, xix., 368-70, 409, 411, 509-12. [136] The Bute Transaction, MSS. Pitt Papers 14; Stanhope, _History_, vi., 213. [137] Lecky, _History_, iv., 83. [138] Rockingham to Chatham, Jan. 21, 1778, _Chatham Corr._, iv., 488; Burke to Rockingham, Nov. 5, 1777, _Works_, ii., 357. [139] _Memorials of C. J. Fox_, i., 211-12; Sir G. C. Lewis, _Administrations of Great Britain_, p. 16. [140] _Memorials of C. J. Fox_, i., 180, 306-23. [141] These figures present a difficulty. The votes 1771-78 appear to have been, for ordinary expenses L3,303,233, for 'extraordinaries' L2,232,694 = L5,535,927. Clowes, _Royal Navy_, iii., 327. [142] On this subject generally see _Parl. Hist._, xix., 728-30, 818-34, 874-95, xx., 204-38, 372 _sqq._; Mahan, _Influence of Sea Power_, pp. 337-41; MS. Admiralty Miscell., 567, R.O.; Keppel, _Life of Keppel_, ii., 15, 19, 21.