Görres’s Gesammelte Schriften (only his political writings) appeared in six volumes (1854–1860), to which three volumes of Gesammelte Briefe were subsequently added (1858–1874). Cp. J. Galland, Joseph von Görres (1876, 2nd ed. 1877); J. N. Sepp, Görres und seine Zeitgenossen (1877), and by the same author, Görres, in the series Geisteshelden (1896). A Görres-Gesellschaft was founded in 1876.
GORSAS, ANTOINE JOSEPH (1752–1793), French publicist and politician, was born at Limoges (Haute-Vienne) on the 24th of March 1752, the son of a shoemaker. He established himself as a private tutor in Paris, and presently set up a school for the army at Versailles, which was attended by commoners as well as nobles. In 1781 he was imprisoned for a short time in the Bicêtre on an accusation of corrupting the morals of his pupils, his real offence being the writing of satirical verse. These circumstances explain the violence of his anti-monarchical sentiment. At the opening of the states-general he began to publish the Courrier de Versailles à Paris et de Paris à Versailles, in which appeared on the 4th of October 1789 the account of the banquet of the royal bodyguard. Gorsas is said to have himself read it in public at the Palais Royal, and to have headed one of the columns that marched on Versailles. He then changed the name of his paper to the Courrier des quatre-vingt-trois départements, continuing his incendiary propaganda, which had no small share in provoking the popular insurrections of June and August 1792. During the September massacres he wrote in his paper that the prisons were the centre of an anti-national conspiracy and that the people exercised a just vengeance on the guilty. On the 10th of September 1792 he was elected to the Convention for the department of Seine-et-Oise, and on the 10th of January 1793 was elected one of its secretaries. He sat at first with the Mountain, but having been long associated with Roland and Brissot, his agreement with the Girondists became gradually more pronounced; during the trial of Louis XVI. he dissociated himself more and more from the principles of the Mountain, and he voted for the king’s detention during the war and subsequent banishment. A violent attack on Marat in the Courrier led to an armed raid on his printing establishment on the 9th of March 1793. The place was sacked, but Gorsas escaped the popular fury by flight. The facts being reported to the Convention, little sympathy was shown to Gorsas, and a resolution (which was evaded) was passed forbidding representatives to occupy themselves with journalism. On the 2nd of June he was ordered by the Convention to hold himself under arrest with other members of his party. He escaped to Normandy to join Buzot, and after the defeat of the Girondists at Pacy-sur-Eure he found shelter in Brittany. He was imprudent enough to return to Paris in the autumn, where he was arrested on the 6th of October and guillotined the next day.
See the Moniteur, No. 268 (1792), Nos. 20, 70 new series 18 (1793); M. Tourneux, Bibl. de l’hist. de Paris, 10,291 seq. (1894).
GORST, SIR JOHN ELDON (1835– ). English statesman, was born at Preston in 1835, the son of Edward Chaddock Gorst, who took the name of Lowndes on succeeding to the family estate in 1853. He graduated third wrangler from St John’s College, Cambridge, in 1857, and was admitted to a fellowship. After beginning to read for the bar in London, his father’s illness and death led to his sailing to New Zealand, where he married in 1860 Mary Elizabeth Moore. The Maoris had at that time set up a king of their own in the Waikato district and Gorst, who had made friends with the chief Tamihana (William Thomson), acted as an intermediary between the Maoris and the government. Sir George Grey made him inspector of schools, then resident magistrate, and eventually civil commissioner in Upper Waikato. Tamihana’s influence secured his safety in the Maori outbreak of 1863. In 1908 he published a volume of recollections, under the title of New Zealand Revisited: Recollections of the Days of my Youth. He then returned to England and was called to the bar at the Inner Temple in 1865, becoming Q.C. in 1875. He stood unsuccessfully for Hastings in the Conservative interest in 1865, and next year entered parliament as member for the borough of Cambridge, but failed to secure re-election at the dissolution of 1868. After the Conservative defeat of that year he was entrusted by Disraeli with the reorganization of the party machinery, and in five years of hard work he paved the way for the Conservative success at the general election of 1874. At a bye-election in 1875 he re-entered parliament as member for Chatham, which he continued to represent until 1892. He joined Sir Henry Drummond-Wolff, Lord Randolph Churchill and Mr Arthur Balfour in the “Fourth Party,” and he became solicitor-general in the administration of 1885–1886 and was knighted. On the formation of the second Salisbury administration (1886) he became under-secretary for India and in 1891 financial secretary to the Treasury. At the general election of 1892 he became member for Cambridge University. He was deputy chairman of committees in the House of Commons from 1888 to 1891, and on the formation of the third Salisbury administration in 1895 he became vice-president of the committee of the council on education (until 1902). Sir John Gorst adhered to the principles of Tory democracy which he had advocated in the days of the fourth party, and continued to exhibit an active interest in the housing of the poor, the education and care of their children, and in social questions generally, both in parliament and in the press. But he was always exceedingly “independent” in his political action. He objected to Mr Chamberlain’s proposals for tariff reform, and lost his seat at Cambridge at the general election of 1906 to a tariff reformer. He then withdrew from the vice-chancellorship of the Primrose League, of which he had been one of the founders, on the ground that it no longer represented the policy of Lord Beaconsfield. In 1910 he contested Preston as a Liberal, but failed to secure election.
His elder son, Sir J. Eldon Gorst (b. 1861), was financial adviser to the Egyptian government from 1898 to 1904, when he became assistant under-secretary of state for foreign affairs. In 1907 he succeeded Lord Cromer as British agent and consul-general in Egypt.
An account of Sir John Gorst’s connexion with Lord Randolph Churchill will be found in the Fourth Party (1906), by his younger son, Harold E. Gorst.
GORTON, SAMUEL (c. 1600–1677), English sectary and founder of the American sect of Gortonites, was born about 1600 at Gorton, Lancashire. He was first apprenticed to a clothier in London, but, fearing persecution for his religious convictions, he sailed for Boston, Massachusetts, in 1636. Constantly involved in religious disputes, he fled in turn to Plymouth, and (in 1637–1638) to Aquidneck (Newport), where he was publicly whipped for insulting the clergy and magistrates. In 1643 he bought land from the Narraganset Indians at Shawomet—now Warwick—where he was joined by a number of his followers; but he quarrelled with the Indians and the authorities at Boston sent soldiers to arrest Gorton and six of his companions. He served a term of imprisonment for heresy at Charlestown, after which he was ejected from the colony. In England in 1646 he published the curious tract “Simplicities Defence against Seven Headed Policy” (reprinted in 1835), giving an account of his grievances against the Massachusetts government. In 1648 he returned to New England with a letter of protection from the earl of Warwick, and joining his former companions at Shawomet, which he named Warwick, in honour of the earl, he remained there till his death at the end of 1677. He is chiefly remembered as the founder of a small sect called the Gortonites, which survived till the end of the 18th century. They had a great contempt for the regular clergy and for all outward forms of religion, holding that the true believers partook of the perfection of God.
Among his quaint writings are: An Incorruptible Key composed of the CX. Psalms wherewith you may open the rest of the Scriptures (1647), and Saltmarsh returned from the Dead, with its sequel, An Antidote against the Common Plague of the World (1657). See L. G. Jones, Samuel Gorton: a forgotten Founder of our Liberties (Providence, 1896).
GORTON, an urban district in the Gorton parliamentary division of Lancashire, England, forming an eastern suburb of Manchester. Pop. (1901) 26,564. It is largely a manufacturing district, having cotton mills and iron, engineering and chemical works.
