thumb|Gordon while head of the [[Gordon Riots#Protestant Association|Protestant Association.]]
Lord George Gordon (26 December 1751 – 1 November 1793) was a British nobleman and politician best known for lending his name to the Gordon Riots of 1780. An eccentric and flighty personality, he was born into the Scottish nobility and sat in the House of Commons from 1774 to 1780. His life ended after a number of controversies, notably one surrounding his conversion to Judaism, for which he was ostracised. He died in Newgate Prison.
Early life
George Gordon was born in London, third and youngest son of Cosmo George Gordon, 3rd Duke of Gordon, and his wife, Catherine, and the brother of Alexander Gordon, 4th Duke of Gordon. In 1759 he had been bought an ensign's commission in the army's 89th (Highland) Regiment of Foot, then commanded by his stepfather Staats Long Morris, but after completing his education at Eton, he entered the Royal Navy in 1763 at the age of 12. He received promotion to the rank of lieutenant, but his career stagnated and he received no further promotions. His behaviour in raising the poor living conditions of his sailors led to his being mistrusted by his fellow officers, although it contributed to his popularity among ordinary seamen. Lord Sandwich, then at the head of the Admiralty, refused to promise him immediate command of a ship, and he resigned his commission in 1777, without having served during the American War of Independence, which he politically opposed.
Parliamentary career
At the 1774 general election Gordon was returned unopposed as Member of Parliament for Ludgershall. The pocket borough had been bought for him by General Fraser, to fend off Gordon's threat to oppose him in Inverness-shire. Gordon was considered flighty, and was not looked upon as being of any importance. who may have shared the condemning opinion of his brother Charles Wesley.
Thanks to a strong defence by his cousin, Thomas Erskine, 1st Baron Erskine, he was acquitted on the grounds that he had had no treasonable intent.
Imprisonment
In 1786 he was excommunicated by the Archbishop of Canterbury for refusing to bear witness in an ecclesiastical suit, and in 1787 he was convicted of defaming Marie Antoinette, Jean-Balthazar d'Adhémar (the French ambassador to Great Britain) and the administration of justice in England. He was, however, permitted to withdraw from the court without bail, and made his escape to the Netherlands. On account of representations from the court of Versailles he was commanded to leave that country, and, returning to England, was apprehended in Birmingham, and in January 1788 was sentenced to five years' imprisonment in Newgate), which was located some way from the church, beside Hampstead Road, north of Warren Street – it later became St James's Gardens but from June 2017 onwards its burials were reinterred elsewhere to make way for HS2 expansions to Euston station.
Gordon's life story can be found in Yirmeyahu Bindman's dramatized biography, Lord George Gordon (1992), and a defence of his actions is undertaken in Robert Watson's The Life of Lord George Gordon, with a Philosophical Review of his Political Conduct (1795). He is also one of the subjects included by Hugh MacDiarmid in the volume Scottish Eccentrics (1936). Historical accounts of Lord George Gordon can be found in The Annual Registers from 1780 to the year of his death.