There are two sources for the story – one of which is a satirical magazine which imagines “fires ... kindled” in Smithfield, the other being William Hogarth’s 1755 painting An Election Entertainment, which shows not a riot but Whigs feasting in a tavern
If you peer *very* closely – or look at this blow-up – you can just make out a banner on the floor which says “Give us our Eleven Days”, which a Whig is supposed to have stolen from a Tory campaigner (during a fairly violent altercation, admittedly, judging by his gin-bathed head wound)
In other words, the evidence of the riot is Hogarth, a satirist, suggesting that a Tory would carry such a banner and a Whig would knock him on the head with that stick he’s holding and nick it. (The painting is in Sir John Soane’s Museum, by the way, if you want to see it)
The satirical magazine was published by Lord Chesterfield, who championed the Calendar Act, and the article (which only mentions fires to ridicule the idea) basically takes the piss out of people who complained (in a very patronising tone):
In the same issue, Horace Walpole mocks the “confusion [that] would follow if Michaelmas-day, for instance, was not to be celebrated, when stubble geese are in their highest perfection”, and the other article finishes by essentially saying “Ha, ha, idiots – we won”
“Popular clamour”, though? The Oxford History of England says “the bill ... passed without difficulty in parliament, but aroused much antagonism outside ... for some time the most popular cry in the country was ‘give us back our eleven days’.”
But a ‘popular cry’ is not a riot, it’s just a fancy way of saying people were pissed off and having a bit of a grumble about change (in Britain? Surely not?) Roy Porter, in English Society in the Eighteenth Century, says people might have quite reasonably feared a loss of wages, but...
...where Gerald Whitrow, author of Time in History, got this from is anybody’s guess. Moaning about Catholics, yes; actual riots and deaths? Complete balls
In the words of historian Robert Poole, there is, in theory, “no better illustration of the collective idiocy of the crowd”, but unfortunately, “The riots, like the Snark, are universally known but defy detection”
It’s fun to imagine people so stupid they’d riot over that, and, yes: some people are indeed stupid, and will commit acts of civil disobedience over things they don’t understand [gestures at modern Britain], but this story? Nope. Sorry
If you’re interested in Hogarth, by the way, here’s a curator at the Soane Museum taking you through one of the paintings in the series
Having been in Sir John Soames Museum, I doubt if I could find it.
Good point