The usual
scenes of mad iconoclasm were enacted--stained glass windows broken,
altars thrown down, lead stripped from the roof, brasses and effigies
defaced and broken. A creature named "Blue Dick" was the wild leader
of this savage crew of spoliators who left little but the bare walls
and a mass of broken fragments strewing the pavement. We need not
record similar scenes which took place almost everywhere.
[Illustration: House in which Bishop Hooper was imprisoned, Westgate
Street, Gloucester]
The last and grievous rule of iconoclasm set in with the restorers,
who worked their will upon the fabric of our cathedrals and churches
and did so much to obliterate all the fragments of good architectural
work which the Cromwellian soldiers and the spoliators at the time of
the Reformation had left. The memory of Wyatt and his imitators is not
revered when we see the results of their work on our ecclesiastical
fabrics, and we need not wonder that so much of English art has
vanished.
The cathedral of Bristol suffered from other causes. The darkest spot
in the history of the city is the story of the Reform riots of 1831,
sometimes called "the Bristol Revolution," when the dregs of the
population pillaged and plundered, burnt the bishop's palace, and were
guilty of the most atrocious vandalism.
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