The Chronicles of Newgate, vol. 1/2
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Title: The Chronicles of Newgate, vol. 1/2
Author: Arthur Griffiths
Release date: August 21, 2014 [eBook #46649]
Language: English
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[Illustration: _The Prison Gate._]
THE
CHRONICLES OF NEWGATE
BY
ARTHUR GRIFFITHS
MAJOR LATE 63RD REGIMENT; ONE OF H. M. INSPECTORS OF PRISONS
AUTHOR OF “THE MEMORIALS OF MILLBANK,” ETC., ETC.
[Illustration]
_IN TWO VOLUMES.--VOL. I._
LONDON: CHAPMAN AND HALL
(LIMITED)
1884
[_All rights reserved._]
Bungay:
CLAY AND TAYLOR, PRINTERS.
PREFACE.
When I undertook the work of which these two volumes are the result, I
scarcely realized the extent of the task before me. Now at the
termination of my labours, which have extended over a period of nearly
five years, I cannot give my work to the public without regret that it
has not been accompanied by deeper study and more widespread research.
But I have, in truth, been almost overwhelmed by the mass of materials
at hand. These always increased enormously with every digression, and I
found at length that I _must_ be satisfied with what I had instead of
seeking for more. Even with this restriction I have often been compelled
to reject much, to epitomize and perhaps unduly abbreviate what I have
used. A really copious and detailed history of Newgate would be a most
voluminous affair. This well-known prison, which has stood for centuries
upon the same site, is in itself an epitome of the criminal history of
England; to have traced its chronicles down from epoch to epoch, closely
and minutely, would have been wearisome to the reader. There is a family
resemblance in crimes in all ages; when, therefore, the more prominent
cases have been selected for description, a general impression will have
been conveyed of the whole. I have followed this principle throughout,
and have endeavoured to present a general, but not too detailed, picture
of the various criminal periods through which Newgate has passed.
But the claims of Newgate on the public interest are not limited to the
melancholy histories of those whom it has held in durance. Newgate, as
the annexe of the Old Bailey, or great criminal law court of this city,
has ever been closely connected with the administration of justice in
this country. In its records are to be read the variations of our
Statute Book. We may trace at Newgate the gradual amelioration of the
penal code, from the days of its pitiless ferocity, to the time when,
thanks to the incessant protests of humanitarian and philanthropist, a
milder system of punishment became the rule. All this has found more
than a passing mention in my pages. Again, Newgate, the city jail, the
chief prison of the chief town in the kingdom, might have been expected
to lead the van in prison reform; that it remained constantly, from the
first and almost to the last, one of the worst-kept prisons in the
kingdom, reflects but little credit upon those responsible for its
management. The fact, however, that crying evils were constantly present
in the great jail, brings Newgate at once into close connection with the
whole subject of prison reform. To represent Newgate as it existed even
before Howard commenced his crusade, and long afterwards, has naturally,
therefore, fallen within the scope of my work. Nor have I confined
myself strictly to this prison, but I have endeavoured to trace the slow
progress of improvement throughout the whole country from first to last.
I cannot conclude these brief remarks without adding a few words of
thanks to those who have assisted me in my undertaking. I have received
much valuable information from Sidney Smith, Esq., the last Governor of
Newgate; from Mr. Mapperson, its last chief warder; and from many other
officials of the prison. But most of all am I indebted to my friend,
William Linton, Esq., formerly Governor of Petworth and Nottingham
prisons, who has long rendered me the most cordial assistance and
co-operation. I am also very grateful to my friend, Colonel Goff, for
many of the original illustrations which embellish the book.
_November, 1883._
[Illustration]
CONTENTS OF VOL. I.
PAGE
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER 1
CHAPTER I.
MEDIEVAL NEWGATE 22
CHAPTER II.
NEWGATE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY 60
CHAPTER III.
NEWGATE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (DOWN TO THE GREAT
FIRE) 96
CHAPTER IV.
NEWGATE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY (AFTER THE GREAT FIRE) 143
CHAPTER V.
IN THE PRESS-YARD 199
CHAPTER VI.
EXECUTIONS 231
CHAPTER VII.
ESCAPES 286
CHAPTER VIII.
THE GAOL CALENDAR 317
CHAPTER IX.
THE GAOL CALENDAR (_continued_) 375
CHAPTER X.
THE GAOL FEVER 424
CHAPTER XI.
THE NEW GAOL 454
[Illustration]
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
VOL. I.
PAGE
THE PRISON GATE _Frontispiece_
THE GAOLER 5
THE THEW, OR PILLORY FOR WOMEN 33
ANCIENT PILLORY IN PARIS _To face_ p. 36
PORTRAIT OF RICHARD WHITTINGTON _To face_ p. 54
DEATH-BED OF WHITTINGTON 57
SKEFFINGTON’S GYVES 75
TORTURE IN THE TOWER _To face_ p. 76
THE TORTURE OF THE BOOT 81
HENRIETTA MARIA DOING PENANCE AT TYBURN _To face_ p. 112
THE GATE 145
“MULLED SACK” 173
TITUS OATES IN THE PILLORY 193
ROBERT OCKAM IN THE PILLORY 235
IN THE TORTURE CHAMBER _To face_ p. 246
THE NEW GALLOWS IN THE OLD BAILEY _To face_ p. 283
MR. AKERMAN 307
FARO’S DAUGHTERS 335
BACK PREMISES OF THE KEEPER’S APARTMENT _To face_ p. 338
ARRESTING THE HANGMAN ON A CHARGE OF MURDER 358
JAMES MACLANE 400
WILLIAM PARSONS 408
NEWGATE IN FLAMES _To face_ p. 468
CHRONICLES OF NEWGATE.
INTRODUCTORY CHAPTER.[1]
Brief survey of Newgate--The first gaol--Its antiquity--Its inmates
and general condition--Whittington’s prison--Rebuilt after the
Fire--Misgovernment, neglect, and injustice--Capital convicts and
executions--First dawn of reform--A new Newgate built by
Dance--State of interior continues deplorable--Mrs. Fry--The first
inspectors of prisons--Amelioration long insisted upon introduced
at last--Newgate closed in 1880.
In antiquity and varied interest Newgate prison yields to no place of
durance in the world. A gaol has stood on this same site for almost a
thousand years. The first prison was nearly as old as the Tower of
London, and much older than the Bastille. Hundreds of thousands of
“felons and trespassers” have from first to last been incarcerated
within. To many it must have been an abode of sorrow, suffering, and
unspeakable woe, a kind of terrestrial inferno, to enter which was to
abandon every hope. Imprisonment was often lightly and capriciously
inflicted in days before our liberties were fully won, and innumerable
victims of tyranny and oppression have been lodged in Newgate. Political
troubles also sent their quota. The gaol was the halfway-house to the
scaffold or the gallows for turbulent or short-sighted persons who
espoused the losing side; it was the starting-place for that painful
pilgrimage to the pillory or whipping-post which was too frequently the
punishment for rashly uttered libels and philippics against constituted
power. Newgate, again, was on the high road to Smithfield; in times of
intolerance and fierce religious dissensions numbers of devoted martyrs
went thence to suffer for conscience’ sake at the stake. For centuries a
large section of the permanent population of Newgate, as of all gaols,
consisted of offenders against commercial laws. While fraudulent
bankrupts were hanged, others more unfortunate than criminal were
clapped into gaol to linger out their lives without the chance of
earning the funds by which alone freedom could be recovered. Debtors of
all degrees were condemned to languish for years in prison, often for
the most paltry sums. The perfectly innocent were also detained. Gaol
deliveries were rare, and the boon of arraignment and fair trial was
strangely and unjustly withheld, while even those acquitted in open
court were often haled back to prison because they were unable to
discharge the gaoler’s illegal fees. The condition of the prisoners in
Newgate was long most deplorable. They were but scantily supplied with
the commonest necessaries of life. Light scarcely penetrated their dark
and loathsome dungeons; no breath of fresh air sweetened the fetid
atmosphere they breathed; that they enjoyed the luxury of water was due
to the munificence of a Lord Mayor. Their daily subsistence was most
precarious. Food, clothing, fuel were doled out in limited quantities as
charitable gifts; occasionally prosperous citizens bequeathed small
legacies to be expended in the same articles of supply. These bare
prison allowances were further eked out by the chance seizures in the
markets; by bread forfeited as inferior or of light weight, and meat
declared unfit to be publicly sold. All classes and categories of
prisoners were herded indiscriminately together: men and women, tried
and untried, upright but misguided zealots with hardened habitual
offenders. The only principle of classification was a prisoner’s ability
or otherwise to pay certain fees; money could purchase the squalid
comfort of the master’s side, but no immunity from the baleful
companionship of felons equally well furnished with funds and no less
anxious to escape the awful horror of the common side of the gaol. The
weight of the chains, again, which, till quite recently, innocent and
guilty alike wore, depended upon the price a prisoner could pay for
“easement of irons,” and it was a common practice to overload a
new-comer with enormous fetters and so terrify him into lavish
disbursement. The gaol at all times was so hideously overcrowded that
plague and pestilence perpetually ravaged it, and the deadly infection
often spread into the neighbouring courts of law.
The foregoing is an imperfect but by no means overcoloured picture of
Newgate as it existed for hundreds of years, from the twelfth century,
indeed, to the nineteenth. The description is supported by historical
records, somewhat meagre at first, perhaps, but becoming more and more
ample and better substantiated as the period grows less remote. We have
but scant information as to the first gate-house gaol. Being part and
parcel of the city fortifications, it was intended mainly for defence,
and the prison accommodation which the fate afforded with its dungeons
beneath, and garrets above, must have been of the most limited
description. More pains were no doubt taken to keep the exterior strong
and safe against attack, than to render the interior habitable, and we
may conclude that the moneys willed by Whittington for the
re-edification of Newgate were principally expended on the restoration
and improvements of the prison. “Whit’s palace,” as rebuilt by
Whittington’s executors, lasted for a couple of centuries, and was
throughout that period the principal gaol for the metropolis. Reference
is constantly made to it in the history of the times. It was the natural
receptacle for rogues, roysterers, and masterless men. It is described
as a hot-bed of vice, a nursery of crime. Drunkenness, gaming,
profligacy of the vilest sort, went forward in the prison without let or
hindrance. Contemporary petitions, preserved in the State papers, penned
by inmates of Newgate pining for liberty, call their prison-house a
foul and noisome den. The gaoler for the time being was certain to be a
brutal partisan of the party in power, especially bitter to religious or
political opponents who fell into his hands. But too frequently also he
was a rapacious, extortionate, over-reaching despot, whose first and
only thought was to turn the prisoners into profit, and make all the
money he could out of those whom the law put completely in his power.
[Illustration]
With occasional, but not always sufficient, repairs, but without
structural alterations, Whittington’s Newgate continued to serve down to
the seventeenth century. About 1629 it was in a state of utter ruin, and
such extensive works were undertaken to re-edify it that the security of
the gaol was said to be endangered, and it was thought better to pardon
most of the prisoners before they set themselves free. Lupton, in his
‘London Carbonadoed,’ speaks of Newgate as “new-fronted and new-faced”
in 1638. Its accommodations must have been sorely tried in the
troublous years which followed. It seems to have been in the time of the
Commonwealth when “our churches were made into prisons,” and demands for
space had greatly multiplied, that Newgate was increased by the addition
of the buildings belonging to the Phœnix Inn in Newgate Street. The
great fire of 1666 gutted, if not completely destroyed, Newgate, and its
reconstruction became imperative. Some say Wren was the architect of the
new prison, but the fact is not fully substantiated. Authentic and
detailed information has, however, been preserved concerning it; it is
figured in a familiar woodcut which may be seen in every modern history
of London, while a full description of the interior, both plan and
appropriation, has been left by an anonymous writer, who was himself an
inmate of the gaol[2]. The prison was still subordinated to the gate,
which was an ornate structure, with great architectural pretensions. But
as a writer in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ well put it about a century
ago, “The sumptuousness of the outside but aggravated the misery of the
wretches within.” Some effort was made to classify, and the Newgate of
that day contained five principal divisions or sides: there was the
master’s side, for debtors and felons respectively; the common side, for
those same two classes of prisoners; and lastly the press yard, for
prisoners of note. The right to occupy the master’s side was a luxury
dearly purchased, but the accommodation obtained, albeit indifferent,
was palatial to that provided for the impecunious on the common side.
The only inmates of the Newgate prison I am now describing who were
comparatively well off, were those admitted to the press yard; a
division composed of “large and spacious rooms” on all the three floors
of the prison, and deemed by a legal fiction to be part of the
governor’s house.
How desperate was the case of the bulk of the inmates of Newgate will be
amply set forth as my narrative proceeds. A few brief facts will suffice
here to give a general idea of this foul prison house. The whole place
except the press yard was so dark that candles, “links or burners,” were
used all day long; the air was so inconceivably disgusting, that the
ventilator on the top of the prison could exercise no remedial effect.
That malignant disease, the gaol fever, was chronic, and deaths from it
of frequent occurrence. Doctors could be got with difficulty to attend
the sick in Newgate, and it was long before any regular medical officer
was appointed to the prison. Evil was in the ascendant throughout;
wickedness and profligacy prospered; the weakest always went to the
wall. Tyranny and oppression were widely practised: not only were the
gaolers extortionate, but their subordinates, the inferior turnkeys,
even the bed-makers, and the gate-keeper’s wife levied black mail on the
pretence of affording relief, and with threats or actual ill-usage when
payment was withheld. Certain favoured prisoners wielded recognized
authority over their fellows. Unwritten but accepted customs suffered
the general body to exact “garnish,” or “chummage,” from new comers,
fees for the privilege of approaching the fire, and generally for
immunity from persecution, the sums thus raised being forthwith expended
in strong drink. The “cellarmen” were selected prisoners who could sell
candles at their own prices, and got a percentage upon the liquors
consumed, with other advantages. Other prisoners were employed in the
distribution of food; in the riveting and removing of shackles; even in
the maintenance of discipline, and when so acting were armed with a
flexible weapon, “to the great terror and smart of those who dispute
their authority.” Into these filthy dens, where misery stalked rampant
and corruption festered, unhappy prisoners brought their families, and
the population was greatly increased by numbers of innocent persons,
women, and even children, to be speedily demoralized and utterly lost.
Lunatics raving mad ranged up and down the wards, a terror to all they
encountered. Common women were freely admitted; mock marriages were of
constant occurrence, and children were frequently born within the
precincts of the gaol. There was but little restriction upon the
entrance of visitors. When any great personage was confined in Newgate,
he held daily levees and received numbers of fashionable folk. Thus
Count Konigsmark, when arrested for complicity in the murder of Mr.
Thynne, “lived nobly” in the keeper’s house, and was daily visited by
persons of quality. When political prisoners, Jacobite rebels, or
others were incarcerated, their sympathizers and supporters came to
“comfort them” by sharing their potations. Even a notorious highwayman
like Maclane, according to Horace Walpole, entertained great guests, and
it was the “mode” for half the world to drive to Newgate and gaze on him
in the “condemned hold.”
In sharp contrast with the privations and terrible discomforts of the
poorer sort was the wild revelry of these aristocratic prisoners of the
press yard. They had every luxury to be bought with money, freedom alone
excepted, and that was often to be compassed by bribing dishonest
officials to suffer them to escape. They kept late hours, collecting in
one another’s rooms to roar out seditious songs over innumerable bowls
of punch. At times they exhibited much turbulence, and refused to be
locked up in the separate chambers allotted to them. No attempt was made
to coerce them, or oblige them to observe due decorum and submit to the
discipline of the prison. Yet while they thus experienced ill-placed and
unjust leniency, others far less culpable were ground down till they
were “slowly murdered there by the intolerable horrors of the place.”
As a general rule the movement of offenders through Newgate was pretty
rapid. The period of imprisonment for debtors might be often
indefinitely prolonged, and there was the well-known case of Major
Bernardi and his companions, who were detained for forty years in
Newgate without trial or the chance of it. Some, too, languished
awaiting transfer to the West Indian or American plantations by the
contractors to whom they were legally sold. But for the bulk of the
criminal prisoners there was one speedy and effectual system of removal,
that of capital punishment. Executions were wholesale in those times.
The code was sanguinary in the extreme. The gallows tree was always
heavily laden. There was every element of callous brutality in the
manner of inflicting the extreme penalty of the law. From the time of
sentence to the last dread moment the convict was exhibited as a show,
or held up to public contempt and execration. Heartless creatures
flocked to the gaol chapel to curiously examine the aspect of condemned
malefactors. Men who had but a short time to live mingled freely with
their fellow-prisoners, recklessly carousing, and often making a boast
that they laughed to scorn and rejected the well-meant ministrations of
the ordinary.
The actual ceremony was to the last degree cold-blooded and wanting in
all the solemn attributes fitting the awful scene. The doomed was
carried in an open cart to Tyburn or other appointed place; the halter
already encircled his neck, his coffin was at his feet, by his side the
chaplain or some devoted amateur philanthropist and preacher striving
earnestly to improve the occasion. For the mob it was a high day and
holiday; they lined the route taken by the ghastly procession,
encouraging or flouting the convict according as he happened to be a
popular hero or unknown to criminal fame. In the first case they cheered
him to the echo, offered him bouquets of flowers, or pressed him to
drink deep from St. Giles’s Bowl; in the latter they pelted him with
filth and overwhelmed him with abuse. The most scandalous scenes
occurred on the gallows. The hangman often quarrelled with his victim
over the garments, which the former looked upon as a lawful perquisite,
and which the latter was disposed to distribute among his friends; now
and again the rope broke, or the drop was insufficient, and Jack Ketch
had to add his weight to the hanging body to assist strangulation.
Occasionally there was a personal conflict, and the hangman was obliged
to do his office by sheer force. The convicts were permitted to make
dying speeches, and these orations were elaborated and discussed in
Newgate weeks before the great day; while down in the yelling crowd
beneath the gallows spurious versions were hawked about and rapidly
sold. It was a distinct gain to the decency and good order of the
metropolis when Tyburn and other distant points ceased to be the places
of execution, and hangings were exclusively carried out in front of
Newgate, just over the debtors’ door. But some of the worst features of
the old system survived. There was still the melodramatic sermon, in the
chapel hung with black, before a large congregation collected simply to
stare at the convicts squeezed into one pew, who in their turn stared
with mixed feelings at the coffin on the table just before their eyes.
There was still the same tumultuous gathering to view the last act in
tragedy, the same bloodthirsty mob swaying to and fro before the gates,
the same blue-blooded spectators, George Selwyn or my Lord Tom Noddy,
who breakfasted in state with the gaoler, and so got a box seat or
rented window opposite at an exorbitant rate. The populace were like
degenerate Romans in the amphitheatre waiting for the butchery to begin.
They fought and struggled desperately for front places: people fell and
were trampled to death, hoarse roars came from thousands of brazen
throats, which swelled into a terrible chorus as the black figures of
the performers on the gallows stood out against the sky. “Hats off!”
“Down in front!” these cries echoed and re-echoed in increasing volume,
and all at once abruptly came to an end--the bolt had been drawn, the
drop had fallen, and the miserable wretch had gone to his long home.
The policy which had brought about the substitution of Newgate for
Tyburn no doubt halted halfway, but it was enlightened, and a
considerable move towards the private executions of our own times. It
was dictated by the more humane principles which were gradually making
head in regard to criminals and crime. Many more years were to elapse,
however, before the eloquence of Romilly was to bear fruit in the
softening of our sanguinary penal code. But already John Howard had
commenced his labours, and his revelations were letting in a flood of
light upon the black recesses of prison life. It is to the credit of
the authorities of the City of London that they recognized the necessity
for rebuilding Newgate on a larger and more improved plan before the
publication of Howard’s reports. The great philanthropist made his first
journey of inspection towards the end of 1773; in the following year he
laid the information he had obtained before the House of Commons, and in
1777 published the first edition of his celebrated ‘State of Prisons.’
As early as 1755 the Common Council had condemned Newgate in no measured
terms; declared it to be habitually overcrowded with “victims of public
justice, under the complicated distresses of poverty, nastiness, and
disease,” who had neither water, nor air, nor light in sufficient
quantities; the buildings were old and ruinous, and incapable of any
“improvement or tolerable repairs.” It was plainly admitted that the
gaol ought to be at once pulled down. But as usual the difficulty of
providing funds cropped up, and the work, though urgent, was postponed
for some years. The inadequacy of the prison was so obvious, however,
that the matter was presently brought before a committee of the House of
Commons, and the necessity for rebuilding clearly proved. A committee of
the Corporation next met in 1767 to consider ways and means, and they
were fortified in their decision to rebuild by convincing evidence of
the horrible condition of the existing prison. A letter addressed to the
committee by Sir Stephen Jansen stigmatizes it as “an abominable sink of
beastliness and corruption.” He spoke from full knowledge, having been
sheriff when the prison was decimated by gaol fever. In the same year
Parliamentary powers were obtained to raise money to rebuild the place,
and the new Newgate was actually commenced in 1770, when Lord Mayor
Beckford, father of “Vathek” Beckford, laid the first stone. Its
architect was George Dance, and the prison building, which still stands
to speak for itself, has been counted one of his finest works. Howard,
who gives this historic prison the first place in his list, must have
visited it while the new buildings were in progress. The plan did not
find favour with him, but he enters into no particulars, and limits his
criticisms to remarking, “that without more than ordinary care the
prisoners in it will be in great danger of gaol fever.” According to
modern notions the plan was no doubt faulty in the extreme. Safe
custody, a leading principle in all prison construction, was compassed
at the expense of most others. The prison façade is a marvel of strength
and solidity, but until reappropriated in recent years its interior was
a limited confined space, still darkened, and deprived of ventilation,
by being parcelled out into courts, upon which looked the narrow windows
of the various wards.
The erection of the “new and commodious gaol,” as it is described in an
Act of the period, proceeded rapidly, but three or four years after
Howard’s visit it was still uncompleted. This Act recites what had been
done, referring to the valuable, extensive areas, which had been taken
in for the construction of this great prison, and provides additional
funds. In 1780, however, an unexpected catastrophe happened, and the new
buildings were set on fire by the Lord George Gordon rioters, and so
much damaged that the most comprehensive repairs were indispensable.
These were executed in 1782. Many years were to elapse before any
further alterations or improvements were made.
It was soon evident that Dance’s Newgate, imposing and appropriate as
were its outlines and façade, by no means satisfied all needs. The
progress of enlightenment was continuous, while complaints that would
have been stifled or ignored previously were now occasionally heard. Yet
the wretched prisoners continued to be closely packed together.
Transportation had now been adopted as a secondary punishment, and
numbers who escaped the halter were congregated in Newgate waiting
removal beyond the seas. The population of the prison had amounted to
nearly six hundred at one time in 1785. According to a presentment made
by the Grand Jury in 1813, in the debtors’ side, built for one hundred,
no less than three hundred and forty were lodged; in the female felons’
ward there were one hundred and twenty in space intended for only sixty.
These females were destitute and in rags, without bedding, many without
shoes. In later years the figures rose still higher, and it is
authoritatively stated that there were as many as eight, nine, even
twelve hundred souls immured within an area about three-quarters of an
acre in extent. We have the evidence of trustworthy persons that
grievous abuses still continued unchecked. All prisoners were still
heavily ironed until large bribed had been paid to obtain relief. All
manner of unfair dealing was practised towards the prisoners. The daily
allowance of food was unequally divided. Bread and beef were issued in
the lump, and each individual had to scramble and fight for his share.
Prisoners had no bedding beyond a couple of dirty rugs. Exorbitant gaol
fees were still demanded on all sides; the Governor eked out his income
by what he could extort, and his subordinates took bribes wherever they
could get them. It was customary to sell the place of wardsman, with its
greater ease and power of oppression, to the highest bidder among the
prisoners. Unlimited drinking was allowed within the walls; the prison
tap, with the profits on sales of ale and spirits, was a part of the
Governor’s perquisites. All this time there was unrestrained
intercommunication between the prisoners; the most depraved were free to
contaminate and demoralize their more innocent fellows. Newgate was
then, and long continued, a school and nursery for crime. It was
established beyond doubt that burglaries and robberies were frequently
planned in the gaol, while forged notes and false money were often
fabricated within the walls and passed out into the town.
The disclosure of these frightful evils led to a Parliamentary inquiry
in 1814, and the worst facts were fully substantiated.[3] The prison
was not water-tight, rain came in through the roof; broken windows were
left unglazed; it was generally very dirty; the gaoler admitted that
with its smoked ceilings and floors of oak, caulked with pitch, it never
could look clean. The prisoners were not compelled to wash, and
cleanliness was only enforced by a general threat to shut out visitors.
Sometimes a more than usually filthy person was stripped, put under the
pump, and forced to go naked out into the yard. The poor debtors were in
terrible straits, herded together, and dependent upon the casual
charities for supplies. Birch, the well-known tavern-keeper, and others,
sent in broken victuals, generally the stock meat which had helped to
make the turtle-soup for civic feasts. The chaplain took life very easy,
and, beyond preaching to those who cared to attend chapel, ministered
but little to the spiritual wants of his charge. His indifference was
strongly condemned in the report of the Commons Committee. The chapel
congregation was generally disorderly: prisoners yawned, and coughed,
and talked enough to interrupt the service; women were in full view of
the men, and many greetings, such as “How do you do, Sall?” often passed
from pew to pew. No attempt was made to keep condemned convicts, male or
female, separate from other prisoners; they mixed freely with the rest,
saw daily any number of visitors, and had unlimited drink.
It was a little before the publication of the Committee’s Report that
that noble woman, Mrs. Fry, first visited Newgate. The awful state of
the female prison, as she found it, is described in her memoirs. Three
years elapsed between her first visit and her second. In the interval,
the report last quoted had borne some fruit. An Act had been brought in
for the abolition of gaol fees; gaol committees had been appointed to
visit and check abuses, and something had been done to ameliorate the
condition of the neglected female outcasts. Yet the scene within was
still dreadful, and permanent amelioration seemed altogether beyond
hope. What Mrs. Fry quickly accomplished against tremendous
difficulties, is one of the brightest facts in the whole history of
philanthropy. How she persevered in spite of prediction of certain
failure; how she won the co-operation of lukewarm officials; how she
provided the manual labour for which these poor idle hands were eager,
and presently transformed a filthy den of corruption into a clean and
whitewashed workroom, in which sat rows of women, recently so desperate
and degraded, stitching and sewing orderly and silent: these
extraordinary results with the most unpromising materials will be found
detailed in a subsequent page.[4]
There was no one, unfortunately, to undertake the same great work upon
the male side. “The mismanagement of Newgate had been for years
notorious,” says the Hon. H. G. Bennet, in a letter addressed to the
Common Council, “yet there is no real reform. The occasional humanity
of a sheriff may remedy an abuse, redress a wrong, cleanse a sewer, or
whitewash a wall, but the main evils of want of food, air, clothing,
bedding, classification, moral discipline remain as before.” But
appeals, however eloquent, were of small avail. Time passed, and at last
there was a general impetus towards prison reform. The question became
cosmopolitan. Close inquiry was made into the relative value of systems
of punishment at home and abroad. Millbank Penitentiary was erected at
the cost of half a million, to give full scope to the experiment of
reformation. Public attention was daily more and more called to prison
management. Yet through it all Newgate remained almost unchanged. It was
less crowded, perhaps, since having been relieved by the opening of the
Giltspur Street Compter, and that was all that could be said. In 1836,
when the newly-appointed Government inspectors made their first report,
the internal arrangements of Newgate were as bad as ever. These
inspectors were earnest men, who had made prisons and prison management
a study. One was the Rev. Whitworth Russell, for many years chaplain of
Millbank; the other Mr. Crawford, who had written an admirable State
paper upon the prisons of the United States, the result of long personal
investigation.
The report framed a strong indictment against the Corporation, who were
mainly responsible. Well might the inspectors close it with an
expression of poignant regret, not unmixed with indignation, at the
frightful picture presented of the existing state of Newgate.[5] The
charges were unanswerable, the only remedy immediate and searching
reform. As a matter of fact various abuses and irregularities were put
an end to the following year, but the alterations, so said the
inspectors in a later report, only introduced the outward semblance of
order. “The master evil, that of gaol association, and consequent
contamination, remained in full activity.” Year after year the
inspectors repeated their condemnatory criticisms, but were unable to
effect any radical change. For quite another decade, Newgate continued a
by-word with prison reformers. In 1850, Colonel, afterwards Sir Joshua
Jebb, told the select committee on prison discipline, that he considered
Newgate, from its defective construction, one of the worst prisons in
England. Captain Williams, a prison inspector, was of the same opinion,
and called Newgate quite the worst prison in his district. The fact was,
limitation of area rendered it quite impossible to reconstitute Newgate
and bring it up to the standard of modern prison requirements. Either
great additions must be made to the site, an operation likely to be
exceedingly costly, or a new building must be erected elsewhere. These
points had already been discussed repeatedly and at length by gaol
committees and the Court of Aldermen, and a decision finally arrived at,
to erect a new prison on the Tufnell Park Estate, in the north of
London. And this, now known as Holloway Prison, was opened in 1852.
Newgate, relieved of the unnatural demands upon its accommodation, was
easily and rapidly reformed. It became now simply a place of detention
for city prisoners, an annexe of the Old Bailey, filled and emptied
before and after the sessions. Considerable sums were expended in
reconstructing the interior and providing the largest possible number of
separate cells for the confinement of the limited number of prisoners
who now required to be accommodated. As such it continued to serve until
the year 1880, when, under the principles of concentration which formed
the basis of the Prison Act of 1877, it was closed. It was found the
House of Detention at Clerkenwell had sufficient space to accommodate
all prisoners awaiting trial at the Central Criminal Court, and that
Newgate prison was not wanted except when the sessions were actually
sitting. It ceased, therefore, to be used except as a temporary
receptacle at such times, but it is also still the metropolitan place of
execution.
CHAPTER I.
MEDIÆVAL NEWGATE.
Earliest accounts of Newgate prison--The New Gate, when built and
why--Classes of prisoners incarcerated--Of high degree, as well as
all categories of common criminals--Brawlers, vagabonds, and
‘roarers’ committed to Newgate; also those who sold adulterated
food--Exposure in pillory and sometimes mutilation preceded
imprisonment--The gradual concession of privileges to the
Corporation--Lord Mayor constituted perpetual justice of the
peace--Corporation obtains complete jurisdiction over Newgate--The
sheriffs responsible for the good government of prisons on
appointment--Counted prisoners held keys, and the cocket or seal of
Newgate--Forbidden to farm the prison or sell the post of
keeper--The rule in course of time contravened, and keepership
became purchaseable--Conflict of authority between sheriffs and
Corporation as to appointment of keeper--Condition of the prisoners
in mediæval times--Dependent on charity for commonest necessaries;
food, clothing, and water--A breviary bequeathed--Gaol falls into
ruin and is rebuilt by Whittington’s executors in 1422--This
edifice two centuries later is restored, but destroyed in the great
Fire of 1666.
The earliest authentic mention of Newgate as a gaol or prison for felons
and trespassers occurs in the records of the reign of King John. In the
following reign, A.D. 1218, Henry III. expressly commands the sheriffs
of London to repair it, and promises to reimburse them for their outlay
from his own exchequer. This shows that at that time the place was
under the direct control of the king, and maintained at his charges. The
prison was above the gate, or in the gate-house, as was the general
practice in ancient times. Thus Ludgate was long used for the
incarceration of city debtors. To the gate-house of Westminster were
committed all offenders taken within that city; and the same rule
obtained in the great provincial towns, as at Newcastle, Chester,
Carlisle, York, and elsewhere. Concerning the gate itself, the New Gate
and its antiquity, opinions somewhat differ. Maitland declares it to be
“demonstrable” that Newgate was one of the four original gates of the
city; “for after the fire of London in 1666,” he goes on to say, “in
digging a foundation for the present Holborn bridge, the vestigia of the
Roman military way called Watling Street were discovered pointing
directly to this gate; and this I take to be an incontestable proof of
an original gate built over the said way in this place.” Maitland in
this conjecture altogether departs from the account related by Stowe.
The latter gives a precise and circumstantial description of the
building of Newgate, which he calls the fifth principal gate of the
city. There is, however, every reason to suppose that a gate had existed
previously hereabouts in the city wall, and the site of the new gate is
identical with one which was long called Chamberlain’s Gate, because
that official had his court in the Old Bailey hard by. According to
Stowe, Newgate was erected about the time of Stephen or the first Henry
under the following circumstances. After the destruction of the old
cathedral church of St. Paul in 1086, Mauritius, Bishop of London,
resolved to build an entirely new edifice upon the site, intending to
construct a work so grand that “men judged it would never be performed,
it was so wonderful to them for height.”[6] In pursuance of his great
scheme the Bishop enclosed a large space of ground for cemetery and
churchyard, and in doing so stopped up and obstructed the great
thoroughfare from Aldgate in the east to Ludgate in the west. The
traffic now was driven to choose between two long detours: one passing
to the northward of the new cemetery wall, and so by Paternoster Row,
Ave Maria Lane, and Bowyer Row, to Ludgate; the other, still more
circuitous, by Cheape and Watling Street, thence southward through Old
Change, west through Carter Lane, up Creadlam north, and finally
westward again to Ludgate. These routes, as Stowe observes, were “very
cumbersome and dangerous both for horse and man. For remedy whereof a
new gate was made and so called, by which men and cattle, with all
manner of carriages, might pass more directly (as before) from Aldgate
through West Cheape to St. Paul’s on the north side, through St.
Nicholas Shambles and Newgate market to Newgate, and from thence to any
part westward over Holborn Bridge, or turning without the gate into
Smithfield and through Iseldon (Islington) to any part north and by
west.”
Of that ancient Newgate, city portal and general prison-house combined,
but scant records remain. A word or two in the old chroniclers, a
passing reference in the history of those troublous times, a few brief
and formal entries in the city archives--these are all that have been
handed down to us. But we may read between the lines and get some notion
of mediæval Newgate. Foul, noisome, terrible are the epithets applied to
this densely-crowded place of durance.[7] It was a dark, pestiferous
den, then, and for centuries later, perpetually ravaged by deadly
diseases.
Its inmates were of all categories. Prisoners of State and the most
abandoned criminals were alike committed to it. Howel, quoted by
Pennant, states that Newgate was used for the imprisonment of persons of
rank long before the Tower was applied to that purpose. Thus Robert de
Baldock, Chancellor of the realm in the reign of Edward II., to whom
most of the miseries of the kingdom were imputed, was dragged to Newgate
by the mob. He had been first committed to the Bishop’s prison, but was
taken thence to Newgate as a place of more security; “but the unmerciful
treatment he met with on the way occasioned him to die there within a
few days in great torment from the blows which had been inflicted on
him.” Again, Sir Thomas Percie, Lord Egremond, and other people of
distinction, are recorded as inmates in 1457. But the bulk of the
prisoners were of meaner condition, relegated for all manner of crimes.
Some were parlous offenders. There was but little security for life or
property in that old London, yet the law made constant war against the
turbulent and reckless roughs. Stowe draws a lively picture of the state
of the city at the close of the twelfth century. One night a brother of
Earl Ferrers was slain privately in London. The king (Edward I.) on
hearing this “swore that he would be avenged on the citizens.” It was
then a common practice in the city for “an hundred or more in company of
young and old to make nightly invasions upon the houses of the wealthy,
to the intent to rob them, and if they found any man stirring in the
city they would presently murder him, insomuch that when night was come
no man durst adventure to walk in the streets.” Matters at length came
to a crisis. A party of citizens young and wealthy, not mere rogues,
attacked the “storehouse of a certain rich man,” and broke through the
wall. The “good man of the house” was prepared and lay in wait for them
“in a corner,” and saw that they were led by one Andrew Bucquinte, who
carried a burning brand in one hand and a pot of coals in the other,
which he essayed to kindle with the brand. Upon this the master, crying
“Thieves!” rushed at Bucquinte and smote off his right hand. All took
to flight “saving he that had lost his hand,” whom the good man in the
next morning delivered to Richard de Lucy, the king’s justice. The thief
turned informer, and “appeached his confederates, of whom many were
taken and many were fled.” One, however, was apprehended, a citizen “of
great countenance, credit, and wealth, named John Senex, or John the
Old, who, when he could not acquit himself by the water dome, offered
the king 500 marks for his acquittal; but the king commanded that he
should be hanged, which was done, and the city became more quiet.”
Long before this, however, Edward I. had dealt very sharply with
evil-doers. By the suspension of corporation government following that
king’s conflict with the city authority, “all kinds of licentiousness
had got leave to go forward without control.” At length the frequency of
robberies and murders produced the great penal statute of the 13 Edward
I. (1287). By this Act it was decreed that no stranger should wear any
weapon, or be seen in the streets after the ringing of the couvre-feu
bell at St. Martin’s-le-Grand; that no vintners and victuallers should
keep open house after the ringing of the said bell under heavy fines and
penalties; that “whereas it was customary for profligates to learn the
art of fencing, who were thereby emboldened to commit the most
unheard-of villanies, no such school should be kept in the city for the
future upon the penalty of forty marks for every offence.” Most of the
aforesaid villanies were said to be committed by foreigners who from all
parts incessantly crowded to London; it was therefore ordered that no
person not free of the city should be suffered to reside therein; and
even many of those that were were obliged to give security for their
good behaviour.[8]
The ‘Liber Albus,’ as translated by Riley, gives the penalties for
brawling and breaking the peace about this date. It was ordained that
any person who should draw a sword, _misericorde_ (a dagger with a thin
blade used for mercifully despatching a wounded enemy), or knife, or any
arm, even though he did not strike, should pay a fine to the city of
half a mark, or be imprisoned in Newgate for fifteen days. If he drew
blood the fine was twenty shillings, or forty days in Newgate; in
striking with the fist two shillings, or eight days’ imprisonment, and
if blood was drawn forty pence, or twelve days. Moreover, the offenders
were to find good sureties before release, and those on whom the offence
was committed had still “recovery by process of law.”
Nor were these empty threats. The laws and ordinances against prowlers
and vagabonds, or “night-walkers,” as they were officially styled, were
continually enforced by the attachment of offenders. Many cases are
given in the memorials of London. Thus, 4 Edw. II. A.D. 1311: Elmer de
Multone was attached on indictment as a common night-walker in the ward
of Chepe; “in the day,” it was charged, “he was wont to entice persons
and strangers unknown to a tavern and there deceive them by using false
dice.” He was furthermore indicted “in Tower ward for being a cruiser
and night-walker against the peace, as also for being a common
‘rorere.’[9] Multone was committed to prison. Others met with similar
treatment. John de Rokeslee was attached as being held suspected of evil
and of beating men coming into the city;” “Peter le Taverner, called
Holer,” the same, and for going with sword and buckler and other arms;
John Blome was indicted “as a common vagabond[10] for committing
batteries and other mischiefs in the ward of Aldresgate and divers other
wards.” “A chaplain,” our modern curate, Richard Heryng, was attached on
similar charges, but was acquitted. Not only were the “roarers”
themselves indicted when taken in this act, but also those who harboured
them, like John Baronu mentioned in the same document as attached “for
keeping open house at night, and receiving night-walkers and players at
dice.” The prohibition against fencing-masters was also rigorously
enforced, as appears by the indictment of “Master Roger le Skirmisour,
for keeping a fencing school for divers men, and for enticing thither
the sons of respectable persons so as to waste and spend the property of
their fathers and mothers upon bad practices, the result being that
they themselves become bad men. Master Roger, upon proof of a jury that
he was guilty of the trespasses aforesaid, was committed to Newgate.”
[Illustration]
Incarceration in Newgate, however, was meted out promptly for other
offences than those against which the last-mentioned legislation was
directed. Priests guilty of loose living, Jews accused rightly or
wrongly, now of infanticide, of crucifying children, now of coining and
clipping, found themselves in the gaol for indefinite periods. People,
again, who adulterated or sold bad food were incontinently clapped into
gaol. Thus William Cokke of Hesse (or Hayes) was charged with carrying a
sample of wheat in his hand in the market within Newgate, and following
one William, the servant of Robert de la Launde Goldmsith, about from
sack to sack, as the latter was seeking to buy wheat, telling him that
such wheat as the sample could not be got for less than twenty-one pence
per bushel, whereas on the same day and at the same hour the same
servant could have bought the same wheat for eighteen pence. Cokke, when
questioned before the Mayor, Recorder, and certain aldermen,
acknowledged that he had done this to enhance the price of wheat to the
prejudice of all the people. He was in consequence committed to gaol,
and sentenced also to have the punishment of the pillory. The same fate
overtook Alan de Lyndeseye and Thomas de Patemere, bakers, who were
brought before the bench at Guildhall, and with them “bread they had
made of false, putrid, and rotten materials, through which persons who
bought such bread were deceived and might be killed.” The fear of
imprisonment, again, was before the eyes of all who sought to interfere
with the freedom of the markets. Thus it is recorded in the ordinances
of the cheesemongers, that “whereas the hokesters (hucksters) and other
who sell such wares by retail do come and regrate such cheese and butter
before prime rung, and before that the commonalty had been served, may
it be ordained that no such hokesters shall buy of any foreigner before
the hour of prime on pain of imprisonment at the will of the Mayor.”
Similar penalties were decreed against “regrating” fish and other
comestibles for the London markets.
In 1316 Gilbert Peny was bound in the third time in default for selling
bread deficient in weight. He had been twice drawn on the hurdle, and it
was therefore now adjudged that he should be drawn once more, and should
then forswear the trade of a baker in the city for ever. One of many
similar cases is that of William Spalyng, who, for selling putrid beef
at “les Stokkes,” the stocks market near Walbrook, was put upon the
pillory, and the carcases were burnt beneath. Another who made shoes of
unlawful material had them forfeited. Bakers who stole dough from the
moulding-boards of other bakers were exposed on the pillory with the
dough hung about their necks[11].
[Illustration]
Richard le Forester, for attempting to defraud with a false garland or
metal chaplet for the head, was sentenced to stand in the pillory, and
afterwards to forswear the city for a year and a day. Traders convicted
of having blankets vamped in foreign parts with the hair of oxen and of
cows were punished, and the blankets were burnt under the pillory on
Cornhill. Similarly, false gloves, braces, and pouches were burnt in the
High Street of Chepe near the stone cross there. John Penrose, a
taverner, convicted of selling unsound wine, was adjudged to drink a
draught of the said wine, and the remainder was then poured out on his
head. Alice, wife of Robert de Cranstom, was put in the thew, or pillory
for women, for selling ale by short measure; and so was Margery Hore for
selling putrid soles, the fish being burnt, and the cause of her
punishment proclaimed. Two servants of John Naylere were placed in the
stocks upon Cornhill for one hour, and their sacks burnt beside them,
for selling a deficient measure of charcoal, while their master’s three
horses were seized and detained by the Mayor’s sergeant until he
(Naylere) came and answered for the aforesaid falsity and deceit.
William Avecroft, having unsound wine, the sheriffs were ordered to pour
all the wine in the street and wholly make away with it, according to
the custom of the city.
The ‘Liber Albus’ contains other ordinances against brawlers and loose
livers. The former, whether male or female, were taken to the thew, a
form of pillory, carrying a distaff dressed with flax and preceded by
minstrels. The latter, whether male, female, or clerics, were marched
behind music to Newgate, and into the Tun in Cornhill.[12] Repeated
offences were visited with expulsion, and the culprits were compelled to
forswear the city for ever. The men on exposure had their heads and
beards shaved, except a fringe on their heads two inches in breadth;
women who made the penance in a hood of “rag” or striped cloth had their
hair cut round about their heads. Worse cases of both sexes were shaved
like “an appealer,” or false informer. The crime of riotous assembling
was very sharply dealt with, as appears from the proclamation made in
the King’s (Edward III.) departure for France. It was then ordained that
“no one of the city, of whatsoever condition he shall be, shall go out
of the city to maintain parties, such as taking leisure, or holding days
of love (days of reconciliation between persons at variance), or making
other congregations within the city or without in disturbance of the
peace of our lord the king, or in affray of the people, and to the
scandal of the city.” Any found guilty thereof were to be taken and put
into the prison of Newgate, and there retained for a year and day; and
if he was a freeman of the city, he lost his freedom for ever.
The city authorities appear to have been very jealous of their good
name, and to have readily availed themselves of Newgate as a place of
punishment for any who impugned it. A certain John de Hakford, about the
middle of the fourteenth century, was charged with perjury in falsely
accusing the chief men in the city of conspiracy. For this he was,
presumably upon proof, remanded by the Mayor and aldermen to Newgate,
there to remain until they shall be better advised as to their judgment.
A little later on, Saturday the morrow of St. Nicholas (6 Dec., 1364),
this judgment was delivered, to the effect that the said John shall
remain in prison for one whole year and a day, and the said John within
such year shall four times have the punishment of the pillory, that is
to say, one day in each quarter of the year, beginning on the Saturday
aforesaid, and in this manner: “The said John shall come out of Newgate
without hood or girdle, barefoot and unshod, with a whetstone hung by a
chain from his neck and lying on his breast, it being marked with the
words ‘a false liar,’ and there shall be a pair of trumpets trumpeting
before him in his way to the pillory, and there the cause of this
punishment shall be solemnly proclaimed, and the said John shall remain
in the pillory for three hours of the day, and from thence shall be
taken back to Newgate in the same manner, there to remain until his
punishment be completed in manner aforesaid.” This investiture of the
whetstone was commonly used as a punishment for misstatement;[13] for it
is recorded in 1371 that one Nicholas Mollere, servant of John
Toppesfield, smith, had the punishment of the pillory and whetstone for
“circulating lies,” amongst others that the prisoners at Newgate were to
be taken to the Tower of London, and that there was to be no longer a
prison at Newgate.
Again in 1383, William Berham for slandering the Mayor was adjudged to
be put upon the pillory on the same day, there to stand for one hour of
the day with one large whetstone hung from his neck in token of the lie
he told against the Mayor, and another smaller whetstone in token of a
lie told against a lesser personage. After that he was to be taken back
to Newgate, and thence for the five following days
[Illustration: ANCIENT PILLORY IN PARIS.]
to be taken to the pillory, before noon on one day and after noon on the
next, and there exposed with the whetstone as before. A few years later
one Robert Stafferstone for slandering an alderman was adjudged to be
imprisoned in Newgate for the next forty days, “unless he should find
increased favour.” This favour he did subsequently find, and “upon his
humiliation he was committed to prison until the morrow, namely, Palm
Sunday, and on the same Sunday should be taken from the prison to his
house, and from thence proceed between the eighth and ninth hour, before
dinner, with his head uncovered, and attended by an officer of the city,
carrying a lighted wax candle weighing two pounds through Walbrook
Bokelersbury, and so by Conduit and Chepe to St. Lawrence Lane in the
Old Jewry, and on to the chapel of the Guildhall, where he was to make
offering of the candle. That done, all further imprisonment was to be
remitted and forgiven.”
A sharper sentence was meted out about the same date to William Hughlot,
who for a murderous assault upon an alderman was sentenced to lose his
hand, and precept was given to the sheriffs of London to do execution of
the judgment aforesaid. Upon this an axe was brought into court by an
officer of sheriffs, and the hand of the said William was laid upon the
block there to be cut off. Whereupon John Rove (the alderman aggrieved),
in reverence of our lord the king, and at the request of divers lords,
who entreated for the said William, begged of the Mayor and aldermen
that the judgment might be remitted, which was granted accordingly. The
culprit was, however, punished by imprisonment, with exposure on the
pillory, wearing a whetstone, and he was also ordered to carry a lighted
wax candle weighing three pounds through Chepe and Fleet Streets to St.
Dunstan’s church, where he was to make offering of the same.
But, however sensitive of their good name, the Mayor and aldermen of
those times seem to have been fairly upright in their administration of
the law. The following case shows this. A man named Hugh De Beone,
arraigned before the city coroner and sheriff for the death of his wife,
stood mute, and refused to plead, so as to save his goods after
sentence. For thus “refusing his law of England,” the justiciary of our
lord the king for the delivery of the gaol of Newgate, committed him
back to prison, “there in penance to remain until he should be
dead.”[14]
The punishment inflicted, the goods thus saved were handed over to the
defunct criminal’s executor as appears from the following. “Be it
remembered that on Saturday next before the Feast of the Apostles Simon
and Jude (28 October), in the eleventh year of King Edward, after the
conquest, the third, came John Fox, citizen and vintner of London,
before Gregory de Nortone, Recorder, and Thomas de Margus, chamberlain
of the Guildhall of London, into the chamber of the Guildhall aforesaid,
and acknowledged that he had received of Walter de Moedone and Ralph de
Uptone, late sheriffs of London, the goods and chattels underwritten in
the presence of John de Shirborne, coroner, and the Sheriff of London
aforesaid, on the oath of Edward de Mohaut, pellifer,[15] and others.”
The inventory of goods is curious, and is perhaps worth quoting at
length. There were--
One mattress, value 4_s._; six blankets and one serge, 13_s._ 6_d._; one
green carpet, 20_s._; one torn coverlet, with shields of cendale, 4_s._;
one coat, and one surcoat, of _worstede_, 40_d._; one robe perset,
furred, 20_s._; one robe of medly, furred, one mask, one old fur, almost
consumed by moths, 6_d._; one robe of scarlet, furred, 16_s._; one robe
of perset, 7_s._; one surcoat, with a hood of ray, 2_s._ 6_d._; one
coat, with a hood of perset, 1_s._ 6_d._; one surcoat, and one coat of
ray, 6_s._ 1_d._; one green hood of cendale, with edging, 6_d._; seven
linen sheets, 5_s._; one table-cloth, 2_s._; three table-cloths, 1_s._
6_d._; and a great many other articles, including “brass pots,”
“aundirons,” “tonour,” “iron herce,” “savenapes,” bringing the total
value to £12 18_s._ 4_d._
Long years elapsed between the building of Newgate and the date when the
city gained complete jurisdiction over the prison. King Henry III.’s
orders to repair the gaol at his own charge has been mentioned already.
Forty years later the same monarch pretended to be keenly concerned in
the good government of Newgate. Returning from Bordeaux when his son
Edward had married the King of Spain’s sister, Henry had passed through
Dover and reached London on St. John’s day. The city sent to
congratulate him on his safe arrival, the messengers taking with them a
humble offering of one hundred pounds. The avaricious king was
dissatisfied, and instead of thanking them, intimated that if they would
win his thanks they must enlarge their present; whereupon they gave him
“a valuable piece of plate of exquisite workmanship, which pacified him
for the present.” But Henry was resolved to squeeze more out of the
wealthy burgesses of London. An opportunity soon offered when a clerk
convict, one John Frome, or Offrem,[16] charged with murdering a prior,
and committed for safe custody to Newgate, escaped therefrom. The
murdered man was a cousin of Henry’s queen, and the king, affecting to
be gravely displeased at this gross failure in prison administration,
summoned the mayor and sheriffs to appear before him and answer the
matter. The mayor laid the fault from him to the sheriffs, forasmuch as
to them belonged the keeping of all prisoners within the city. The mayor
was therefore allowed to return home, but the sheriffs remained
prisoners in the Tower “by the space of a month or more”; and yet they
excused themselves in that the fault rested chiefly with the bishop’s
officers, the latter having, at their lord’s request, sent the prisoner
to Newgate, but being still themselves responsible with the bishop for
his safe keeping. These excuses did not satisfy the king, who,
“according to his usual justice,” says Noorthouck, “demanded of the
city, as an atonement of the pretended crime, no less than the sum of
three thousand marks.” The fine was not immediately forthcoming,
whereupon he degraded both the sheriffs, and until the citizens paid up
the enormous sum demanded, he caused the chief of them to be seized and
clapped into prison.
The city was ready enough, however, to purchase substantial privileges
in hard cash. Many of its early charters were thus obtained from
necessitous kings. In this way the Corporation ransomed, so to speak,
its ancient freedom and the right of independent government.
In 1327 a further point was gained. The support of the citizens had been
freely given to Queen Isabella and her young son in the struggle against
Edward II. On the accession of Edward III. a new charter, dated in the
first year of his reign, was granted to the city of London. After
confirming the ancient liberties, it granted many new privileges; chief
among them was the concession that the Mayor of London should be one of
the justices for gaol delivery of Newgate, and named in every commission
for that purpose. The king’s marshal might in future hold no court
within the boundary of the city, nor were citizens to be called upon to
plead beyond them for anything done within the liberties. No market
might be kept within seven miles of London, while the citizens were
permitted to hold fairs and a court of “pye powder” therein; in other
words, a court for the summary disposal of all offences committed by
hawkers or pedlers, or perambulating merchants, who have _les pieds
poudrés_, or are “dusty-footed.”[17] Other privileges were obtained from
the king during his reign. A second charter granted them the bailiwick
of Southwark, a village which openly harboured “felons, thieves, and
other malefactors,” who committed crimes in the city and fled to
Southwark for sanctuary; and a third guaranteed them against the
competition of foreign merchants, who were forbidden to sell by retail
in the city, to keep any house, or act as broker therein. Again, the
election of the mayor was established on a more settled plan, and vested
in the mayor and aldermen for the time being. Another charter conceded
to the Corporation the honour of having gold and silver maces borne
before the chief functionary, who about this period became first
entitled to take rank as Lord Mayor. The vast wealth and importance of
this great civic dignitary was to be seen in the state he kept up. The
Lord Mayor even then dispensed a princely hospitality, and one eminent
citizen in this reign, Henry Picard by name, had the honour of
entertaining four sovereigns at his table, viz. the kings of England,
France, Scotland, and Cyprus, with the Prince of Wales and many more
notables. This Picard was one of the Guild of Merchant Vintners of
Gascony, a Bordeaux wine merchant, in fact, and a Gascon by birth,
although a naturalized subject of the English king. The Vintners gave
the city several lord mayors.
Richard II. was not so well disposed towards the city. Recklessly
extravagant, wasteful and profuse in his way of living, he was always in
straits for cash. The money needed for his frivolous amusements and
ostentatious display he wrung from the Corporation by seizing its
charters, which were only redeemed by the payment of heavy fines. The
sympathies of the city were therefore with Henry Bolingbroke in the
struggle which followed. It was able to do him good service by warning
him of a plot against his life, and Henry, now upon the throne, to show
his gratitude, and “cultivate the good understanding thus commenced with
the city, granted it a new charter.” The most important clause of
Henry’s charter was that which entrusted the citizens, their heirs and
successors, with the custody “as well of the gates of Newgate and
Ludgate, as all other gates and posterns in the same city.” The same
clause gave them the office of gathering the tolls and customs in Cheap,
Billingsgate, and Smithfield there rightfully to be taken and
accustomed;[18] “and also the tronage, that is to say, the weighing of
lead, wax, pepper, allom, madder, and other like wares, within the said
city for ever.” The great concession was, however, in the reign of
Edward IV., whose charter was the fullest and most explicit of any
previously granted. By this the mayor, recorder, and aldermen who had
been Lord Mayor were constituted perpetual justices of the peace of the
city; they were also appointed justices of _oyer_ and _terminer_; their
customs were to be accepted as established beyond controversy by the
declaration of the mayor through the recorder; they were exempted from
serving as jurors, and so forth, beyond the city. The borough of
Southwark was once more clearly placed under the jurisdiction of the
city; the citizens were entitled to the goods and chattels of traitors
and felons, and the privilege of the annual Southwark Fair, with the pie
powder court, was confirmed.
By this time the gate and prison must have passed under the control of
the civic authorities. They had, however, already enjoyed the privilege
of contributing to its charges. This appears from an entry as far back
as September 1339, in the account of expenditure of Thomas de Maryus,
chamberlain. The item is for “moneys delivered to William Simond,
Sergeant of the Chamber, by precept of the mayor and aldermen, for
making the pavement within Newgate, £7 6_s._ 8_d._” How complete became
the power and responsibility of the Corporation and its officers is to
be seen in the account given in the ‘Liber Albus’ of the procedure when
new sheriffs were appointed.[19] They were sworn on appointment, and
with them their officers, among whom were the governor of Newgate and
his clerk. After dinner on the same day of appointment the old and new
sheriffs repaired to Newgate, where the new officials took over all the
prisoners “by indenture” made between them and the old.[20] They were
also bound to “place one safeguard there at their own peril,” and were
forbidden to “let the gaol to fenn or farm.” Other restrictions were
placed upon them. It was the sheriffs’ duty also, upon the vigil of St.
Michael, on vacating their office, to resign into the hands of the mayor
for the time being the keys of Newgate, the Cocket or Seal of Newgate,
and all other things pertaining unto the said sheriffwick.[21] All the
civic authorities, mayor, sheriffs, aldermen, and their servants,
including the gaoler of Newgate, were forbidden to brew for sale, keep
an oven, or let carts for hire; “nor shall they be regrators of
provisions, or hucksters of ale, or in partnership with such.” Penalties
were attached to the breach of these regulations. It was laid down that
any who took the oath and afterwards contravened it, or any who would
not agree to abide by the ordinance, should be forthwith “ousted from
his office for ever.” It was also incumbent upon the sheriffs to put “a
man sufficient, and of good repute, to keep the gaol of Newgate in due
manner, without taking anything of him for such keeping thereof, by
covenant made in private or openly.” Moreover, the gaoler so appointed
swore before the Lord Mayor and aldermen that “neither he nor any of
them shall take fine or extortionate charge from any prisoner by putting
on or taking off his irons, or shall receive moneys extorted from such
prisoners.” He was permitted to levy fourpence from each upon release,
“as from ancient time has been the usage, but he shall take fees from no
person at his entrance there;” indeed, he was warned that if he
practised extortion he would be “ousted from his office,” and punished
at the discretion of the mayor, aldermen, and common council of the
city.
It will be made pretty plain, I think, in subsequent pages, that these
wise and righteous regulations were both flagrantly ignored and
systematically contravened. The rule against farming out the prison may
have been observed, and it may not be clearly proved that the sheriffs
ever took toll from the gaoler. But the spirit of the law, if not its
letter, was broken by the custom which presently grew general of making
the gaolership a purchaseable appointment. The buying and selling of
offices, of army commissions, for instance, as we have seen practised
within recent years, at one time extended also to the keeperships of
gaols. It is recorded in the Calendar of State papers that one Captain
Richardson agreed for his place as keeper of Newgate for £3000. A larger
sum, viz. £5000, was paid by John Huggins to Lord Clarendon, who “did by
his interest” obtain a grant of the office of keeper of the Fleet prison
for the life of Huggins and his son. One James Whiston, in a book
entitled ‘England’s Calamities Discovered, or Serious Advice to the
Common Council of London,’[22] strongly remonstrates against this
practice, which he stigmatizes as “bartering justice for gold.” His
language is plain and forcible. “Shall the public houses built at the
city charges [it appears that at that time Ludgate, Newgate, the Fleet,
and the Compters were all put up to the highest bidder] be sold for
private lucre?... He that sells a gaoler’s place sells the liberty, the
estate, the person, nay, the very lives of the prisoners under his
jurisdiction.” “Purchased cruelty,” the right to oppress the prisoners,
that is to say, in order to recover the sums spent in buying the place,
“is now grown so bold that if a poor man pay not extortionary fees and
ruinous chamber-rent, he shall be thrown into holes and common sides to
be devoured by famine, lice, and disease. I would fain know,” he asks,
“by what surmise of common sense a keeper of a prison can demand a
recompense or fee from a prisoner for keeping him in prison?... Can he
believe that any person can deserve a recompense for opening the door of
misery and destruction?... But now such is the confidence of a
purchaser, that to regain his sum expended he sells his tap-house at
prodigious rates, ... he farms his sheets to mere harpies, and his great
key to such a piece of imperious cruelty (presumably his chief turnkey)
as is the worst of mankind.” Following the same line of argument, he
says “it will perhaps be thought impertinent to dispute a gaoler’s
demands for admitting us into his loathsome den, when even the common
hangman, no doubt encouraged by such examples, will scarce give a
malefactor a cast of his office without a bribe, demands very formally
his fees, forsooth, of the person to be executed, and higgles with him
as nicely as if he were going to do him some mighty kindness.”
Eventually an act was passed specifically forbidding the sale of such
places. This statute affirms that “none shall buy, sell, let, or take to
farm, the office of under-sheriff, gaoler, bailiff, under pain of £500,
half to the king and half to him that shall sue.”
Before leaving the subject of the sheriffs’ jurisdiction in regard to
Newgate, it may be interesting to refer to a conflict between them and
the Corporation as to the right to appoint the gaoler. It is recorded in
the State papers, under date March 1, 1638, that Isaac Pennington and
John Wollaston were elected and sworn sheriffs for the ensuing year.
They went, according to ancient custom, to Newgate, where, having
received the keys and the charge of the prisoners from the former
sheriffs, they substituted for the actual keeper one James Francklin,
who about the 15th of the following October died. Accordingly the
sheriffs appointed and settled Henry Wollaston as keeper of the gaol,
who peaceably executed the duties of that place for six weeks. The rest
of the story is best told in the language of the record. After that time
“the Lord Mayor and aldermen, never charging Wollaston with any
miscarriage, sent for him to their court at Guildhall, and demanded of
him the keys of the said prison, who refusing to deliver them to any
without the consent of the sheriffs, was then detained until some
officers were sent from the said court, who forcibly brought the
officer’s servants intrusted with the said keys and prisoners by the
said Wollaston, and, without the knowledge or consent of the said
sheriffs, delivered them to Richard Johnson, a young man not free of the
city, clerk to the recorder, whom they (the sheriffs, from whom this
protest comes) consider to be very unfit for such a trust. For redress,
the sheriffs by all fair means have applied themselves divers times to
the Lord Mayor and court of aldermen, who refuse to restore the said
Wollaston. The sheriffs conceive that the trust and keeping of the said
gaol, both by law and reason, ought to be in their disposition, and that
it is inseparable, incident to, and of common right belonging to their
office, they being liable to punishments for any escapes, and
amerciaments for non-appearance of prisoners in Her Majesty’s courts of
justice, with many other such like damages and fears.”
How the case was finally settled does not appear. But the matter was one
in which the king (Charles I.) would probably claim to have a voice. The
appointment might be in the gift and actually made by the Corporation,
but the city authorities were often invited by the Court to put in some
royal nominee, a request which might easily be interpreted into a
command. Thus in April 1594, the Lords of the Council addressed the
mayor, aldermen, and sheriffs, soliciting them to appoint Richard
Hutchman, one of Her Majesty’s sergeants-at-arms, keeper of Newgate,
_vice_ Dios, deceased. In June the Corporation reply that they regret
they cannot appoint Hutchman. The Lords’ Council now issue a peremptory
order to place him in office, which was done, but the Corporation was
not to be beaten. Next year a fresh representation is made to the Lords
in Council, stating the reasons why the city authorities had dismissed
Mr. Hutchman from his place.
Another State paper, dated 1633, gives a draft of a letter recommending
one A. B. for the appointment of keeper, vacant by the “nomination of
one not deemed to have been legally put in.” Some seventy years later,
according to another authority, the question was definitely settled. In
this (dated 1708) it is set forth that “the keeper of the prison holds
that place of great trust under the queen (Anne), giving about £8000
security, and the prison is turned over to each of the new sheriffs when
sworn in by delivering them a key. The place is in the gift of the Lord
Mayor and aldermen.”
Let us return to Mediæval Newgate. Whatever the authority, whether royal
or civic, the condition of the inmates must have been wretched in the
extreme, as the few brief references to them in the various records will
sufficiently prove. The place was full of horrors; the gaolers rapacious
and cruel. In 1334 an official inquiry was made into the state of the
gaol, and some of the atrocities practised were brought to light.
Prisoners detained on minor charges were cast into deep dungeons, and
there associated with the worst criminals. All were alike threatened,
nay tortured, till they yielded to the keepers’ extortions, or consented
to turn approvers and swear away the lives of innocent men. These poor
prisoners were dependent upon the charity and good-will of the
benevolent for food and raiment. As far back as 1237 it is stated that
Sir John Pulteney gave four marks by the year to the relief of prisoners
in Newgate. In the year 1385 William Walworth, the stalwart mayor whose
name is well remembered in connection with Wat Tyler’s rebellion, gave
“somewhat” with the same good object. “So have many others since,” says
the record. The water supply of the prison, Stowe tells, was also a
charitable gift. “Thomas Knowles, grocer, sometime Mayor of London, by
license of Reynold, prior of St. Bartholomew’s in Smithfield, and also
of John Wakering, master of the hospital of St. Bartholomew, and his
brethren, conveyed the waste of water at the cistern near unto the
common fountain and Chapel of St. Nicholas (situate by the said
hospital) to the gaols of Ludgate and Newgate, for the relief of the
prisoners.”
In 1451, by the will of Phillip Malpas, who had been a sheriff some
twelve years previous, the sum of £125 was bequeathed to “the relief of
poor prisoners.” This Malpas, it may be mentioned here, was a courageous
official, ready to act promptly in defence of city rights. In 1439 a
prisoner under escort from Newgate to Guildhall was rescued from the
officer’s hands by five companions, after which all took sanctuary at
the college of St. Martin’s-le-Grand.[23] “But Phillip Malpas and Robert
Marshal, the sheriffs of London, were no sooner acquainted with the
violence offered to their officer and the rescue of their prisoner, than
they, at the head of a great number citizens, repaired to the said
college, and forcibly took from thence the criminal and his rescuers,
whom they carried in fetters to the Compter, and thence, chained by the
necks, to Newgate.”
For food the prisoners were dependent upon alms or upon articles
declared forfeit by the law. Thus some bread of light weight, seized on
the 10th August 1298, was ordered to be given to the prisoners in
Newgate. Again, the halfpenny loaf of light bread of Agnes Foting of
Stratford was found wanting 7 shillings (or 4⅕ oz.) in weight;
therefore it was adjudged that her bread should be forfeited, and it
also was sent unto the gaol. All food sold contrary to the statutes of
the various guilds was similarly forfeited to the prisoners. The
practice of giving food was continued through succeeding years, and to a
very recent date. A long list of charitable donations and bequests might
be made out, bestowed either in money or in kind. A customary present
was a number of stones of beef. Some gave penny loaves, some oatmeal,
some coals. Without this benevolence it would have gone hard with the
poor population of the Gatehouse gaol. It was not strange that the
prison should be wasted by epidemics, as when in 1414 “the gaoler died
and prisoners to the number of sixty-four;” or that the inmates should
at times exhibit a desperate turbulence, taking up arms and giving
constituted authority much trouble to subdue them, as in 1457 when they
broke out of their several wards in Newgate, and got upon the leads,
where they defended themselves with great obstinacy against the sheriffs
and their officers, insomuch that they, the sheriffs, were obliged to
call the citizens to their assistance, whereby the prisoners were soon
reduced to their former state.
The evil effects of incarceration in Newgate may be further judged by
the fate which overtook the city debtors who were temporarily removed
thither from Ludgate. An effort had been made in 1419 to put pressure
upon them as a class. An ordinance was issued by Henry V. closing the
Ludgate prison for debtors. It had been found that “many false men of
bad disposition and purpose have been more willing to take up their
abode there, so as to waste and spend their goods upon the ease and
license that there is within, than pay their debts.” Wherefore it was
ordained that “all prisoners therein shall be removed and safely carried
to Newgate, there to remain each in such keeping as his own deserts
shall demand.” The order was, however, very speedily rescinded. A later
ordinance in the same year sets forth that “whereas, through the
abolition and doing away with the prison of Ludgate, which was formerly
ordained for the good and comfort of citizens and other reputable
persons, and also by reason of the fœtid and corrupt atmosphere that
is in the hateful gaol of Newgate, many persons who lately were in the
said prison of Ludgate, who in the time of William Sevenoke, late mayor,
for divers great offences which they had there compassed were committed
to the said gaol (of Newgate), are now dead, who might have been living,
it is said, if they had
[Illustration]
remained at Ludgate abiding in peace there; and seeing that every person
is sovereignly bound to support and be tender to the lives of men, the
which God hath bought so dearly with His precious blood; therefore
Richard Whittington, now mayor (1419), and the aldermen, on Saturday the
2nd November, have ordained and established that the gaol of Ludgate
shall be a prison from henceforth to keep therein all citizens and other
reputable persons whom the mayor, aldermen, sheriffs, or chamberlain of
the city shall think proper to commit and send to the same, provided
always that the warder shall be a good and loyal man, giving sufficient
surety,” &c. Ten or twelve years later a similar exodus from Ludgate to
Newgate and back again took place. “On the Tuesday next after Palm
Sunday 1431, all the prisoners of Ludgate were conveyed into Newgate by
Walter Chartsey and Robert Large, sheriffs of London, and on the 13th
April the same sheriffs (through the false suggestion of John Kingesell,
gaoler of Newgate) did fetch from thence eighteen persons, freemen, and
these were led to the Counters pinioned as if they had been felons. But
on the 16th June Ludgate was again appointed for freemen, prisoners for
debt, and the same day the same freemen entered by ordinance of the
mayor, aldermen, and commons; and by them Henry Deane, tailor, was made
keeper of Ludgate.”
One other charitable bequest must be referred to here, as proving that
the moral no less than the physical well-being of the prisoners was
occasionally an object of solicitude. In the reign of Richard II. a
prayer-book was specially bequeathed to Newgate in the following
terms:--
“Be it remembered that on the 10th day of June, in the 5th year (1382),
Henry Bever, parson of the church of St. Peter in Brad Street (St. Peter
the Poor, Broad Street), executor of Hugh Tracy, Chaplain, came here
before the mayor and aldermen and produced a certain book called a
‘Porte hors,’[24] which the same Hugh had left to the gaol of Newgate,
in order that priests and clerks there imprisoned might say their
service from the same, there to remain so long as it might last. And so
in form aforesaid the book was delivered unto David Bertelike, keeper of
the gate aforesaid, to keep it in such manner so long as he should hold
that office; who was also then charged to be answerable for it. And it
was to be fully allowable for the said Henry to enter the gaol aforesaid
twice in the year at such times as he should please, these times being
suitable times, for the purpose of seeing how the book was kept.”[25]
We are without any very precise information as to the state of the
prison building throughout these dark ages. But it was before everything
a gate-house, part and parcel of the city fortifications, and therefore
more care and attention would be paid to its external than its internal
condition. It was subject, moreover, to the violence of such disturbers
of the peace as the
[Illustration: DEATH-BED OF WHITTINGTON.]
followers of Wat Tyler, of whom it is written that, having spoiled
strangers “in most outrageous manner, entered churches, abbeys, and
houses of men of law, which in semblable sort they ransacked, they also
brake up the prisons of Newgate and of both the Compters, destroyed the
books, and set the prisoners at liberty.” This was in 1381. Whether the
gaol was immediately repaired after the rebellion was crushed does not
appear; but if so, the work was only partially performed, and the
process of dilapidation and decay must soon have recommenced, for in
Whittington’s time it was almost in ruins. That eminent citizen and
mercer, who was three times mayor, and whose charitable bequests were
numerous and liberal, left moneys in his will for the purpose of
rebuilding the place, and accordingly license was granted in 1422, the
first year of Henry VI.’s reign, to his executors, John Coventre, Jenken
Carpenter, and William Grove, “to re-edify the gaol of Newgate, which
they did with his goods.” This building, such as it was, continued to
serve until the commencement of the seventeenth century.
In 1629 a petition from the gaoler to the king sets forth[26] that “by
reason of the great ruins of the gaol it is now in hand to be repaired.”
The gaoler further states that there is great danger lest in time of
repair some of the prisoners should escape, and prays directions to the
Lord Mayor and Recorder to certify how many prisoners are capable of His
Majesty’s mercy, and to the Attorney General to prepare pardons. This
document is under-written, “Reference to Recorder to certify, and to the
Attorney General to prepare, a pardon;” following which is a
recommendation from Sir Heneage Finch (the first-named official) to
release forty-four. Subsequently the east side of Newgate was “begun to
be repaired, Sir James Campbell being mayor, and finished the year
following, Sir Robert Drury, Baronet, being mayor.” The expense was
borne wholly or partly by the locality, as the records show in 1632 an
account of the assessment of the parish of St. Stephen Walbrook, in
which “two fifteenths were to be gathered for repairing Newgate.” It is
this re-edification which is referred to in Lupton’s ‘London
Carbonadoed,’ 1638, who speaks of Newgate as new fronted and new faced.
I have been unable to ascertain any exact figure of this old Newgate,
either in its ancient or improved aspect. The structure, such as it was,
suffered so severely in the great fire of 1666 that it became necessary
to rebuild it upon new and more imposing lines.
This may be described as the third edifice: that of the twelfth century
being the first, and Richard Whittington’s the second. Of this third
prison details are still extant, and I propose to describe it fully on a
later page.[27]
CHAPTER II.
NEWGATE IN THE SIXTEENTH CENTURY.
Prison records meagre--Administration of justice and state of
crime--Lenity alternates with great severity--Disturbances in
London--The ‘Black Waggon’--A ’prentice riot--Criminal inmates of
Newgate--Masterless men--Slandering the Corporation--Robbery with
violence--Debtors--Conscience prisoners--Martyrs in reign of Henry
VIII.--Religious dissidents: Porter, Anne Askew--Maryan
persecutions--Rogers--Bishop Hooper--Philpot--Alexander the cruel
gaoler of Newgate--Underhill the hot gospeller in Newgate--Crime in
Elizabeth’s reign--The training of young thieves--Elizabethan
persecutions: both puritans and papists suffered--The seminary
priests--Political prisoners--Condition of gaol--Oppression of the
inmates and their disorderly conduct--Gaolers of that period
generally tyrants--Crowder, keeper of Newgate, called to account.
The prison records of the sixteenth century are very meagre. No
elaborate system of incarceration as we understand it existed. The only
idea of punishment was the infliction of physical pain. There were
prisons, but these receptacles, except for debtors, were only the ante
chambers of the pillory and the scaffold. The penalties inflicted were
purely personal, and so to speak final; such as chastisement,
degradation, or death. England had no galleys, no scheme of enforced
labour at the oar, such as was known to the nations of the
Mediterranean seaboard, no method of compelling perpetual toil in quarry
or mine. The germ of transportation no doubt was to be found in the
practice which suffered offenders who had taken sanctuary to escape
punishment by voluntary exile,[28] but it was long before the plan of
deporting criminals beyond seas became the rule. In Henry VIII.’s time,
says Froude, “there was but one step to the gallows from the lash and
the branding-iron.” Criminals did not always get their deserts, however.
Although historians have gravely asserted that seventy-two thousand
executions took place in this single reign, the statement will not bear
examination, and has been utterly demolished by Froude.[29] As a matter
of fact offenders far too often escaped scot free through the
multiplication of sanctuaries, which refuges, like that of St.
Martin’s-le-Grand, existed under the very walls of Newgate, the
negligence of pursuers, and not seldom the stout opposition of the
inculpated.[30] Benefit of clergy claimed and conceded on the most
shadowy grounds was another easy and frequent means of evading the law.
Some judges certainly had held that the tonsure was an indispensable
proof; but all were not so strict, and “putting on the book,” in other
words, the simple act of reading aloud, was deemed sufficient. So
flagrant was the evasion of the law, that gaolers for a certain fee
would assist accused persons to obtain a smattering of letters, whereby
they might plead their “clergy” in court. It may be added that although
the abuse of the privilege was presently greatly checked, it was not
until the reign of William and Mary that benefit of clergy was
absolutely denied to burglars, pickpockets, and other heinous offenders.
Yet there were occasional spasmodic intervals of extraordinary severity.
Twenty thieves, says Sir Thomas More in his ‘Utopia,’ might then be seen
hanging on a single gibbet. Special legislation was introduced to deal
with special crimes. Although there was an appropriateness in the
retribution which overtook him, the sentence inflicted upon the Bishop
of Rochester’s cook in 1531, under a new act passed on purpose, was
ferociously cruel. This man, one Richard Rose or Rouse, was convicted of
having poisoned sixteen persons with porridge specially prepared to put
an end to his master. The crime had been previously almost unknown in
England, and special statutory powers were taken to cope with it. An act
was at once passed defining the offence to be high treason, and
prescribing boiling to death as the penalty. Rose was accordingly, after
conviction, boiled alive in Smithfield. It may be added that this cruel
statute, which may be read _in extenso_ in Froude, was soon afterwards
repealed, but not before another culprit, Margaret Davy by name, had
suffered under its provisions for a similar offence.
Newgate, like all other gaols, was at times scandalously over-crowded,
not only with the felons and trespassers who long languished waiting
trial, but with far less guilty offenders. There were also the debtors
and the conscience prisoners: the delinquents whose crime was
impecuniosity or commercial failure, and the independent thinkers who
stoutly maintained their right to profess forms of belief at variance
with the government creed of the hour. It is only a passing glimpse that
we get of the meaner sort of criminal committed to Newgate in these
times. The gaol, as I have said, was but the ante-chamber to something
worse. It was the starting-point for the painful promenade to the
pillory. The jurors who were forsworn “for rewards or favour of parties
were judged to ride from Newgate to the pillory in Cornhill with paper
mitres on their heads, there to stand, and from thence again to
Newgate.”[31] Again, the ringleaders of false inquests, Darby, Smith,
and Simson by name, were, in the first year of Henry’s reign (1509),
condemned to ride about the city with their faces to the horses’ tails,
and paper on their heads, and were set on the pillory at Cornhill.
After that they were brought back to Newgate, where they died for very
shame.[32]
A longer story and a heavier doom was that of the ’prentice lads who
upon ‘Evil May-day,’ as it was afterwards called, raised a tumult in the
city against the competition of foreign workmen, who were about this
time established in great numbers in the suburbs. One John Lincoln, a
meddlesome city broker, was so much exercised at this foreign
interference that he went about seeking a parson who would declaim
against it from the pulpit. One Dr. Bell or Bele, who was to preach at
the Spital Church, agreed to read from the pulpit a bill which this
Lincoln had drawn up, and which set forth the wrongs suffered by native
artificers and merchants. Dr. Bell followed the reading by an
inflammatory sermon upon the text _Pugna pro Patria_, by which “many a
light-headed person took courage and openly spoke against” the
foreigners. As divers ill things had been done of late by these
strangers, the people’s rancour was kindled most furiously against them.
Conflicts took place in the streets between “the young men of the city”
and the strangers, so that several of the former were committed to
Newgate. Among others Stephen Studley, skinner, and Stephenson Betts.
Then arose “a secret rumour that on May-day following the city would
slay all the aliens.” News thereof reached Cardinal Wolsey, who summoned
the Lord Mayor, and desired him to take all due precautions. It was
settled by agreement between the Corporation and the cardinal that
every citizen should be commanded to shut up his doors after nine at
night, and keep his servants within. It so chanced that Alderman Sir
John Mundy the same night, coming from his ward, found two young men
playing at the bucklers, and many others looking on. The order for early
closing had not indeed been fully circulated as yet. Sir John Mundy
ordered the combatants to desist, and on their hesitation was for
sending them to the Compter. But the apprentices rose against the
alderman, crying, “’Prentices! clubs! clubs!” A crowd soon collected,
the alderman took to flight, and by eleven at night there were in Cheap
six or seven hundred “serving-men, watermen, courtiers, and others,” and
out of St. Paul’s Churchyard came some three hundred more. The mob,
growing riotous, attacked the Compter and released all prisoners
confined therein for “hurting the strangers”; thence they went to
Newgate and set free Studley and Betts. Gaining courage by these
excesses, they ranged the streets, throwing sticks and stones, spoiling
all they found. The strangers were the principal victims. The house of
one Mewtas, a Picard, and those of other Frenchmen residing at the
Greengate, Leadenhall, were broken open and plundered. The riot
continued till three in the morning, “at which time they began to
withdraw, but by the way were taken by the mayor and others, and sent to
the Tower, Newgate and the Compters to the number of three hundred.”
The king took very summary measures for the punishment of the rioters.
Bell the preacher was arrested and sent to the Tower. A commission of
_oyer_ and _terminer_ was forthwith opened at the Guildhall, and the
whole of the prisoners, to the number of two hundred and seventy-eight,
were marched through the streets, tied with ropes, and put upon their
trial. Lincoln the ringleader and other thirteen were sentenced to be
hanged, drawn, and quartered; for execution whereof ten pairs of gallows
were put up in divers parts of the city: “before each of the Compters,
at Newgate, St. Martin’s, Aldersgate, and Bishopgate, which gallows were
set on wheels, to be removed from street to street and door to door as
the prisoners were to be executed.” Lincoln suffered death, but the rest
were reprieved pending the king’s pleasure. He lay at his manor of
Greenwich just then, and thither the mayor, recorder, and divers
aldermen repaired to beg mercy for the city. But Henry VIII. was not to
be easily appeased. He still blamed the city authorities for not
checking these disorders in a more determined fashion, and referred them
for answer to his chancellor the cardinal. Wolsey granted them his
favour for a consideration, and counselled them to again petition the
king. They came to him, therefore, at his palace of Westminster, to the
number of four hundred men, in their shirts, bound together with ropes,
and with halters about their necks, and were at first sharply rebuked by
the cardinal, who told them they deserved death. But at the earnest
entreaty of the attendant lords, who were much moved by the humiliating
sight, they were pardoned and dismissed. The gallows in the city were
taken down, and all in durance were set free. Thus ended the “black
waggon,” as the procession of citizens was called, but “not, as it is
thought, without paying a considerable sum of money to the cardinal to
stand their friend, for at that time he was in such power he did all
with the king.”[33]
A few further extracts will serve to describe some other criminal
inmates of Newgate in those times. The quotations are from the
‘Remembrancia,’ 1579-1664. Searches appear to have been regularly made
for suspected persons, who when caught were committed to ward. Thus,
1519, a search was made in the house of William Solcocke in Holborne,
and it was found that one Christopher Tyllesley had lain there two
nights. “He has no master, and is committed to Newgate.” Again, “in the
house of Christopher Arundell one Robert Bayley: has no master, and is
committed to Newgate.” To Newgate were also committed any who were bold
enough to malign the great Cardinal Wolsey, in the plenitude of his
power, as was Adam Greene in June 1523, a prisoner in Ludgate, who
repeated to the keeper what he had heard from a “bocher” (butcher), to
the effect that Wolsey had told the king that all London were traitors
to his Grace. Greene was warned to keep silent, but he said “he would
abide by it, for he had it from a substantial man who would also abide
by it.”
It was not less dangerous to let the tongue wag too freely against the
city authorities. Articles are exhibited (April, 1524) against “John
Sampye, tailor, for saying (1) that he had been wrongfully imprisoned in
the Compter by the Mayor of London and Nicholas Partriche, alderman; (2)
that they had no power to send any man to ward; (3) that many were cast
away by lying in the Compter and Newgate at the command of the
Corporation.” The Corporation appear also to have dealt in a very
high-handed fashion with the city bakers, possibly to break down their
monopoly, but a little on personal private grounds. In 1526 the bakers
petition Wolsey for redress, setting forth that they have always been
accustomed to “occupy the making and selling of bread for the city, and
since the time of Edward II. have been used to take up wheat arriving in
London at the price given them by the mayor; but within the last five
years certain persons, aldermen and others, out of malice to the mystery
and under colour of common weal, have procured that all the wheat coming
to the city should be garnered at the Bridge House, and the bakers
suffered to buy no other.... Lately the mayor and aldermen tried to
compel the bakers to buy two thousand quarters of musty wheat at 12_s._
when sweet wheat may be bought for 7_s._ or 8_s._” When some bakers
refused the mayor sent them to Newgate for eleven days, and shut up
their houses and shops, not allowing their wives or families to visit
them or buy their bread.
Now and again more serious crimes are recorded. In March 1528, Stephen
reports to Thomas Cromwell that between the hours of six and seven,
“five thieves knocked at the door of Roderigo the Spaniard, which
dwelleth next the goldsmith against your door.[34] Being asked who was
there, they answered one from the Court, to speak with Roderigo. When
the door was opened three of them rushed in and found the said Roderigo
sitting by the fire with a poor woman dwelling next to Mrs. Wynsor. Two
tarried and kept the door, and strangled the poor woman that she should
not cry. They then took Roderigo’s purse, and killed him by stabbing him
in the belly, but had not fled far before two of them were taken and
brought to Newgate.”
Debtors were too small fry to be often referred to in the chronicles of
the times. Now and again they are mentioned as fitting objects for
charity, royal and private. In the king’s book of payments is the
following entry, under date May 1515. “Master Almoner redeeming
prisoners in Newgate, Ludgate, and the Compter, £20.” The State Papers,
1581, contain a commission to the Lord Mayor, recorder, and sheriffs of
London, and many others, all charitable folk, and some sixty in number,
to compound with the creditors of poor debtors, at that time prisoners
in Newgate, Ludgate, and the two Compters of the city. Although debtors
in gaol who volunteered for service on shipboard were discharged by
proclamation from the demands of their creditors, as a general rule
committal to Newgate on account of monetary mismanagement appears to
have been more easily compassed than subsequent release. The same volume
of State Papers contains a petition from Richard Case to Lord Burghley,
to the effect that he had been committed to Newgate “upon the unjust
complaint of Mr. Benedict Spinola, relative to the lease of certain
lands and tenements in London.” The petitioner further “desires to be
discharged from prison, and to have the queen’s pardon,” but there is no
allusion to his enlargement.[35] The impolicy of confining debtors was
not to be fully realized till three more centuries had passed away. But
as early as 1700 a pamphlet preserved in the ‘Harleian Miscellany,’ and
entitled ‘Labour in Vain,’ anticipates modern feeling and modern
legislation. The writer protests against the imprisonment of debtors,
which he compares to shutting up a cow from herbage when she gives no
milk. “In England we confine people to starve, contrary to humanity,
mercy, or policy. One may as reasonably expect his dog,” he says, “when
chained to a post should catch a hare, as that poor debtors when in gaol
should get wherewithal to pay their debts.”
Details of the incarceration and sufferings of prisoners for conscience
sake, in an age when polemics were backed up by the strong arm of the
law, are naturally to be met with more frequently in the partisan
writings of the time. Throughout the reigns of Henry VIII., Mary, and
even in that of Elizabeth, intolerance stalked rampant through the land,
filling the prisons and keeping Smithfield in a blaze. Henry was by
turns severe on all creeds. Now Protestants, now Catholics suffered. He
began as an ardent champion of Romish doctrines, and ended by denying
the supremacy of the Pope. In the first stage he persecuted so-called
heretics, in the second he despoiled Church property, and sent monks and
priors to gaol and to the gallows. Foxe gives a long and detailed list
of the Protestant martyrs from first to last. One of the most prominent
was Richard Bayfield, a monk of Bury, who became an inmate of Newgate.
Foxe relates[36] that a letter of inquiry was issued by the Bishop of
London to the Lord Mayor and sheriffs to be present at St. Paul’s on the
20th November 1531, to receive the said Richard Bayfield, alias
Soundesam, “a relapsed heretic after sentence.” The sheriffs carried him
to Newgate, whence they were commanded again to bring him into Paul’s
upper choir, there to give attendance upon the bishop. Later on they are
ordered to have him into the vestry, and then to bring him forth again
in Antichrist’s apparel to be degraded before them. “When the bishop had
degraded him,” says old Foxe, “kneeling upon the highest step of the
altar, he took his crosier staff and smote him on the breast that he
threw him down backwards and brake his head, and that he swooned; and
when he came to himself again he thanked God that he was delivered from
the malignant Church of Antichrist, and that he was come into the true
sincere Church of Jesus Christ militant here on earth; ... and so was he
led forth through the choir to Newgate, and there rested about an hour
in prayer, and so went to the fire in his apparel manfully and joyfully,
and there for lack of a speedy fire was two quarters of an hour alive.”
Henry was, however, impartial in his severity. In 1533 he suffered John
Frith, Andrew Hewett, and other Protestants, to the number of
twenty-seven, to be burned for heresy. The years immediately following
he hunted to death all who refused to acknowledge him as the head of the
Church. Besides such imposing victims as Sir Thomas More, and Fisher,
Bishop of Rochester, many priests suffered. In 1534 the prior of the
London Carthusians, the prior of Hexham, Benase, a monk of Sion College,
and John Haite, vicar of Isleworth, together with others,[37] were
sentenced to be hanged and quartered at Tyburn. In 1538 a friar, by
name Forrest, was hanged in Smithfield upon a gallows, quick, by the
middle and armholes, “and burnt to death for denying the king’s
supremacy and teaching the same in confession to many of the king’s
subjects.” Upon the pile by which Forrest was consumed was also a wooden
image, brought out of Wales, called “Darvell Gatheren,” which the
Welshmen “much worshipped, and had a prophecy amongst them that this
image would set a whole forest on fire, which prophecy took effect.”[38]
The greatest trials were reserved for the religious dissidents who dared
to differ with the king. Henry was vain of his learning and of his
polemical powers. No true follower of Luther, he was a Protestant by
policy rather than conviction, and he still held many tenets of the
Church he had disavowed. These were embodied and promulgated in the
notorious Six Articles, otherwise “the whip with six tails,” or the
Bloody Statute, so called from its sanguinary results. The doctrines
enunciated were such that many could not possibly subscribe to them; the
penalties were “strait and bloody,” and very soon they were widely
inflicted. Foxe, in a dozen or more pages, recounts the various
presentments against individuals, lay and clerical, for transgressing
one or more of the principles of the Six Articles; and adds to “the
aforesaid, Dr. Taylor, parson of St. Peter’s, in Cornhill; South, parish
priest of Allhallows, in Lombard Street; Some, a priest; Giles, the
king’s beerbrewer, at the Red Lion, in St. Katherine’s; Thomas
Lancaster, priest; all which were imprisoned likewise for the Six
Articles.” “To be short,” he adds, “such a number out of all parishes in
London, and out of Calais, and divers other quarters, were then
apprehended through the said inquisition, that all prisons in London,
including Newgate, were too little to hold them, insomuch that they were
fain to lay them in the halls. At last, by the means of good Lord
Audeley, such pardon was obtained of the king that the said Lord
Audeley, then Lord Chancellor, being content that one should be bound
for another, they were all discharged, being bound only to appear in the
Star Chamber the next day after All Souls, there to answer if they were
called; but neither was there any person called, neither did any
appear.”[39]
Bonner, then Bishop of London, and afterwards one of the queen’s
principal advisers, had power to persecute even under Henry. The Bible
had been set up by the king’s command in St. Paul’s, that the public
might read the sacred word. “Much people used to resort thither,” says
Foxe, to hear the reading of the Bible, and especially attended the
reading of one John Porter, “a fresh young man, and of a big stature,”
who was very expert. It displeased Bonner that this Porter should draw
such congregations, and sending for him, rebuked him very sharply for
his reading. Porter defended himself, but Bonner charged him with making
expositions on the text,
[Illustration: SKEFFINGTON’S GYVES.]
and gathering “great multitudes about him to make tumults.” Nothing was
proved against Porter, but “in fine Bonner sent him to Newgate, where he
was miserably fettered in irons, both legs and arms, with a collar of
iron about his neck, fastened to the wall in the dungeon; being there so
cruelly handled that he was compelled to send for a kinsman of his,
whose name is also Porter, a man yet alive, and can testify that it is
true, and dwelleth yet without Newgate. He, seeing his kinsman in this
miserable case, entreated Jewet, the keeper of Newgate, that he might be
released out of those cruel irons, and so, through friendship and money,
had him up among other prisoners, who lay there for felony and murder.”
Porter made the most of the occasion, and after hearing and seeing their
wickedness and blasphemy, exhorted them to amendment of life, and “gave
unto them such instructions as he had learned of in the Scriptures; for
which his so doing he was complained, and so carried down and laid in
the lower dungeon of all, oppressed with bolts and irons, where, within
six or eight days, he was found dead.”
But the most prominent victim to the Six Articles was Anne Askew, the
daughter of Sir William Askew, knight, of Lincolnshire. She was married
to one Kyme, but is best known under her maiden name. She was persecuted
for denying the Real Presence, but the proceedings against her were
pushed to extremity, it was said, because she was befriended in high
quarters. Her story is a melancholy one. First one Christopher Dene
examined her as to her faith and belief in a very subtle manner, and
upon her answers had her before the Lord Mayor, who committed her to the
Compter. There, for eleven days, none but a priest was allowed to visit
her, his object being to ensnare her further. Presently she was released
upon finding sureties to surrender if required, but was again brought
before the king’s council at Greenwich. Her opinions in matters of
belief proving unsatisfactory, she was remanded to Newgate. Thence she
petitioned the king, also the Lord Chancellor Wriottesley, “to aid her
in obtaining just consideration.” Nevertheless, she was taken to the
Tower, and there tortured. Foxe puts the following words into her mouth:
“On Tuesday I was sent from Newgate to the sign of the Crown, where
Master Rich and the Bishop of London, with all their power and
flattering words, went about to persuade me from God, but I did not
esteem their glosing pretences.... Then Master
[Illustration: TORTURE IN THE TOWER.]
Rich sent me to the Tower, where I remained till three o’clock.” At the
Tower strenuous efforts were made to get her to accuse others. They
pressed her to say how she was maintained in prison; whether divers
gentlewomen had not sent her money. But she replied that her maid had
“gone abroad in the streets and made moan to the ’prentices,” who had
sent her alms. When further urged, she admitted that a man in a blue
coat had delivered her ten shillings, saying it came from my Lady
Hertford, and that another in a violet coat had given her eight
shillings from my Lady Denny--“whether it is true or not I cannot tell.”
“Then they said three men of the council did maintain me, and I said no.
Then they did put me on the rack because I confessed no ladies or
gentlemen to be of my opinion, and thereon they kept me a long time; and
because I lay still, and did not cry, my Lord Chancellor and Master Rich
took pains to rack me with their own hands till I was nigh dead. Then
the lieutenant (Sir Anthony Knevet) caused me to be loosed from the
rack. Incontinently I swooned, and then they recovered me again. After
that I sat two long hours, reasoning with my Lord Chancellor, on the
bare floor.” At last she was “brought to a house and laid in a bed with
as weary and painful bones as ever had patient Job; I thank my Lord God
there-for. Then my Lord Chancellor sent me word, if I would leave my
opinion, I should want nothing; if I did not, I should forthwith to
Newgate, and so be burned....”
Foxe gives full details of her torture in the Tower. At first she was
let down into a dungeon, and the gaoler, by command of Sir Anthony
Knevet, pinched her with the rack. After this, deeming he had done
enough, he was about to take her down, but Wriottesley, the Lord
Chancellor, “commanded the lieutenant to strain her on the rack again;
which, because he denied to do, tendering the weakness of the woman, he
was threatened therefore grievously of the said Wriottesley, saying he
would signify his disobedience to the king. And so consequently upon the
same, he (Wriottesley) and Master Rich, throwing off their gowns, would
needs play the tormentors themselves.... And so, quietly and patiently
praying unto the Lord, she abode their tyranny till her bones and joints
were almost plucked asunder, in such sort as she was carried away in a
chair.” Then the chancellor galloped off to report the lieutenant to the
king; but Sir Anthony Knevet forestalled by going by water, and obtained
the king’s pardon before the complaint was made. “King Henry,” says
Foxe, “seemed not very well to like of their so extreme handling of the
woman.”
Soon after this Mistress Askew was again committed to Newgate, whence
she was carried in a chair to Smithfield, “because she could not walk on
her feet by means of her great torments. When called upon to recant she
refused, as did the martyrs with her.” Whereupon the Lord Mayor,
commanding fire to be put under them, cried, “Fiat Justitia,” and they
were burned.
The Maryan persecutions naturally filled Newgate. It would weary the
reader to give lengthened descriptions of the many martyrs who passed
through that prison to Smithfield. But a few of the victims stand
prominently forward. Two of the earliest were John Rogers, vicar of St.
Sepulchre and prebendary of St. Paul’s, and Hooper, Bishop of
Gloucester. Rogers was the proto-martyr--the first sacrificed to the
religious intolerance of Mary and her advisers. Foxe says that after
being a prisoner in his own house for a long time, Rogers was “removed
to the prison called Newgate, where he was lodged among thieves and
murderers for a great space.” He was kept in Newgate “a full year,”
Rogers tells us himself, “at great costs and charges, having a wife and
ten children to find; and I had never a penny of my livings, which was
against the law.” He made “many supplications” out of Newgate, and sent
his wife to implore fairer treatment; but in Newgate he lay, till at
length he was brought to the Compter in Southwark, with Master Hooper,
for examination. Finally, after having been “very uncharitably
entreated,” he was “unjustly, and most cruelly, by wicked Winchester
condemned.” The 4th February, 1555, he was warned suddenly by the
keeper’s wife of Newgate to prepare himself for the fire, “who being
then found asleep, scarce with much shogging could be awakened.” Being
bidden to make haste, he remarked, “If it be so, I need not tie my
points.” “So was he had down first to Bonner to be degraded, whom he
petitioned to be allowed to talk a few words with his wife before his
burning”--a reasonable request, which was refused. “Then the sheriffs,
Master Chester and Master Woodroove, took him to Smithfield; and his
wife and children, eleven in number, ten able to go, and one at the
breast, met him as he passed. This sorrowful sight of his own flesh and
blood could nothing move him, but that he constantly and cheerfully took
his death with wonderful patience in the defence and quarrel of Christ’s
gospel.”[40]
While detained in Newgate, Master Rogers devoted himself to the service
of the ordinary prisoners, to whom he was “beneficial and liberal,”
having thus devised “that he with his fellows should have but one meal a
day, they paying, notwithstanding, the charges of the whole; the other
meal should be given to them that lacked on the other (or common) side
of the prison. But Alexander their keeper, a strait man and a right
Alexander, a coppersmith indeed, ... would in no case suffer that.”
This Alexander Andrew, or Alexander, as he is simply called, figures in
contemporary records, more especially in the writings of Foxe, as a
perfect type of the brutal gaoler. “Of gaolers,” says Foxe, “Alexander,
keeper of Newgate, exceeded all others.” He is described as “a cruel
enemy of those that lay there (Newgate) for religion. The cruel wretch,
to hasten the poor lambs to the slaughter, would go to Bonner, Story,
Cholmley, and others, crying out,
[Illustration: THE TORTURE OF THE BOOT.]
‘Rid my prison! rid my prison! I am too much pestered by these
heretics.” Alexander’s reception of an old friend of his, Master
Philpot, committed to Newgate,[41] is graphically told by the old
chronicler. “‘Ah, thou hast well done to bring thyself hither,’ he says
to Philpot. ‘I must be content,’ replied Philpot, ‘for it is God’s
appointment, and I shall desire you to let me have some gentle favour,
for you and I have been of old acquaintance.’ ‘Well,’ said Alexander,
‘I will show you great gentleness and favour, so thou wilt be ruled by
me.’ Then said Master Philpot, ‘I pray you show me what you would have
me to do.’ He said, ‘If you will recant I will show you any pleasure I
can.’ ‘Nay,’ said Master Philpot, ‘I will never recant whilst I have my
life, for it is most certain truth, and in witness thereof I will seal
it with my blood.’ Then Alexander said, ‘This is the saying of the whole
pack of you heretics.’ Whereupon he commanded him to be set upon the
block, and as many irons upon his legs as he could bear, for that he
would not follow his wicked mind.... ‘But, good Master Alexander, be so
much my friend that these irons may be taken off.’ ‘Well,’ said
Alexander, ‘give me my fees, and I will take them off; if not, thou
shalt wear them still.’ Then Master Philpot said, ‘Sir, what is your
fee?’ He said four pounds was his fee. ‘Ah,’ said Master Philpot, ‘I
have not so much; I am but a poor man, and I have been long in prison.’
‘What wilt thou give me, then?’ said Alexander. ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘I will
give you twenty shillings, and that I will send my man for, or else I
will lay my gown to gage. For the time is not long, I am sure, that I
shall be with you, for the bishop said I should be soon despatched.’
Then said Alexander unto him, ‘What is that to me?’ and with that he
departed for a time, and commanded him to be had into limbo. And so his
commandment was fulfilled; but before he could be taken from the block
the clerk would have a groat. Then one Willerence, steward of the house,
took him on his back and carried him down his man knew not whither.
Wherefore Master Philpot said to his man, ‘Go to Master Sheriff, and
show him how I am used, and desire Master Sheriff to be good unto me;’
and so his servant went straightway, and took an honest man with him.
“And when they came to Master Sheriff, which was Master Ascham, and
showed him how Master Philpot was handled in Newgate, the sheriff,
hearing this, took his ring off his finger and delivered it unto that
honest man that came with Master Philpot’s man, and bade him go unto
Alexander the keeper and command him to take off his irons and handle
him more gently, and give his man again that which he had taken from
him. And when they came to the said Alexander and told their message
from the sheriff, Alexander took the ring, and said, ‘Ah, I perceive
that Master Sheriff is a bearer with him and all such heretics as he is,
therefore to-morrow I will show it to his betters;’ yet at ten by the
clock he went to Master Philpot where he lay and took off his irons, and
gave him such things as he had taken before from his servant.”
Alexander’s zeal must have been very active. In 1558 it is recorded that
twenty-two men and women were committed to Newgate for praying together
in the fields about Islington. They were two and twenty weeks in the
prison before they were examined, during which Alexander sent them word
that if they would hear a mass they should be delivered. According to
Foxe a terrible vengeance overtook this hard-hearted man. He died very
miserably, being so swollen that he was more like a monster than a man.
The same authority relates that other persecutors came to a bad end.
Bishop Hooper soon followed Rogers to the stake. The same Monday night,
Feb. 4, 1555, the keeper of Newgate gave him an inkling that he should
be sent to Gloucester to suffer death, “and the next day following,
about four o’clock in the morning before day, the keeper with others
came to him and searched him and the bed wherein he lay, to see if he
had written anything, and then he was led to the sheriffs of London and
other their officers forth of Newgate, to a place appointed not far from
Dunstan’s Church, Fleet Street, where six of the Queen’s Guards were
appointed to receive him and to carry him to Gloucester, ...” where
execution was to be done.
We obtain a curious insight into the gaol at Newgate during Mary’s reign
from the narrative of the ‘Hot Gospeller.’ Edward Underhill, a yeoman of
the Guard, was arrested in 1553 for “putting out” a ballad which
attacked the Queen’s title. Underhill was carried before the Council,
and there got into dispute with Bourne, a fanatic priest whom he called
a papist. “Sir John Mason asked what he meant by that, and he replied,
‘If you look among the priests of Paul’s you will find some
mumpsimusses there. This caused much heat, and he was committed to
Newgate.” At the door of the prison he wrote to his wife, asking her to
send his night-gown, Bible, and lute, and then he goes on to describe
Newgate as follows:[42]--
“In the centre of Newgate was a great open hall; as soon as it was
supper-time the board was covered in the same hall. The keeper, whose
name was Alexander, with his wife came and sat down, and half a dozen
prisoners that were there for felony. Underhill being the first that for
religion was sent into that prison. One of the felons had served with
him in France. After supper this good fellow, whose name was Bristow,
procured one to have a bed in his (Underhill’s) chamber who could play
well upon a rebeck. He was a tall fellow, and after one of Queen Mary’s
guard, yet a Protestant, which he kept secret, or else he should not
have found such favour as he did at the keeper’s hands and his wife’s,
for to such as loved the gospel they were very cruel. ‘Well,’ said
Underhill, ‘I have sent for my Bible, and, by God’s grace, therein shall
be my daily exercise; I will not hide it from them.’ ‘Sir,’ said he, ‘I
am poor; but they will bear with you, for they see your estate is to pay
well; and I will show you the nature and manner of them, for I have been
here a good while. They both do love music very well; wherefore, you
with your lute, and I to play with you on my rebeck, will please them
greatly. He loveth to be merry and to drink wine, and she also. If you
will bestow upon them, every dinner and supper, a quart of wine and some
music, you shall be their white son, and have all the favour they can
show you.’
“The honour of being ‘white son’ to the governor and governess of
Newgate was worth aspiring after. Underhill duly provided the desired
entertainment. The governor gave him the best room in the prison, with
all other admissible indulgences.
“At last, however, the evil savours, great unquietness, with over many
draughts of air, threw the poor gentleman into a burning ague. He
shifted his lodgings, but to no purpose; the evil savours followed him.
The keeper offered him his own parlour, where he escaped from the noise
of the prison; but it was near the kitchen, and the smell of the meat
was disagreeable. Finally the wife put him away in her store closet,
amidst her best plate, crockery, and clothes, and there he continued to
survive till the middle of September, when he was released on bail
through the interference of the Earl of Bedford.”
There was a truce to religious persecution for some years after Mary’s
death. Throughout Edward’s reign and the better part of Elizabeth’s it
was only the ordinary sort of criminal who was committed to the gaol of
Newgate. The offences were mostly coining, horse-stealing, and other
kinds of thefts. “One named Ditche was apprehended at the sessions
holden at Newgate on 4th December, 1583, nineteen times indicted,
whereof he confessed eighteen, who also between the time of his
apprehension and the said sessions impeached many for stealing horses,
whereof (divers being apprehended) ten were condemned and hanged in
Smithfield on the 11th December, being Friday and horse-market
there.”[43] The ‘Remembrancia’ gives a letter from Mr. Valentine Dale,
one of the masters of the Court of Requests, to the Lord Mayor, stating
that the wife of John Hollingshead had petitioned the Queen to grant a
reprieve and pardon to her husband, a condemned felon, and directing the
execution to be stayed, and a full account of his behaviour and offence
forwarded to Her Majesty. The Lord Mayor in reply says that he had
called before him the officers of Newgate, who stated that Hollingshead
had been for a long time a common and notorious thief. This was the
fourth time he had been in Newgate for felonies, and upon the last
occasion he had been branded with the letter T (thief). Coiners were
very severely dealt with. The offence was treason, and punished as such.
There are many cases on record, such as--“On the 27th of January Phillip
Meshel, a Frenchman, and two Englishmen were drawn from Newgate to
Tyburn, and there hanged. The Frenchman quartered who had coined gold
counterfeit; of the Englishmen, the one had clipped silver, and the
other cast testers of tin.” “The 30th of May Thomas Green, goldsmith,
was drawn from Newgate to Tyburn, and there hanged, headed, and
quartered, for clipping of coin, both gold and silver.”
Towards the end of the reign, in spite of the stringent acts against
vagrancy, the country swarmed with rogues and beggars--vagabonds who
laid the farmers under contribution, and terrified all honest folk out
of their lives. In London crime was rampant. Even then it had its
organization; there were houses which harboured thieves, in which
schools were maintained for the education of young pickpockets. Maitland
tells us that in the spring of 1585, Fleetwood the recorder with several
other magistrates searched the town and discovered seven houses of
entertainment for felons. They found also that one Walton, a gentleman
born, once a prosperous merchant, “but fallen into decay,” who had kept
an alehouse which had been put down, had begun a “new business.” He
opened his house for the reception of all the cut-purses in and about
the city. In this house was a room to learn young boys to cut purses.
Two devices were hung up; one was a pocket, the other was a purse. The
pocket had in it certain counters, and was hung round with hawk’s bells,
and over them hung a little sacring[44] bell. The purse had silver in
it, and he that could take out a counter without any noise was allowed
to be a public _foyster_; and he that could take a piece of silver out
of the purse without noise of any of the bells was adjudged a clever
_nypper_. These places gave great encouragement to evil-doers in these
times, but were soon after suppressed.
In 1581 a fresh religious persecution began, happily without the
sanguinary accessories of that of Mary’s reign. Elizabeth had no love
for the puritans; she also began now to hate and fear the papists.
Orthodoxy was insisted upon. People who would not go to church were sent
first to prison, then haled before sessions and fined a matter of twenty
pounds each. Still worse fared the adherents or emissaries of Rome.
Years before (1569) a man, John Felton, had been drawn from Newgate into
Paul’s Churchyard, and there hanged and quartered as a traitor for
affixing a bull of Pope Pius V. on the gate of the Bishop of London’s
palace. In 1578 it is recorded that “the papists are stubborn.” So also
must have been the puritans. “One Sherwood brought before the Bishop of
London behaved so stubbornly that the bishop will show no more favour to
those miscalled puritans.” Next began a fierce crusade against the
“seminary” priests, who swarmed into England like missionaries,
despatched _in partibus infidelium_ to minister to the faithful few and
bring back all whom they could to the fold. Newgate was now for ever
full of these priests. They adopted all manner of disguises, and went
now as soldiers, now as private gentlemen, now openly as divines. They
were harboured and hidden by faithful Roman Catholics, and managed thus
to glide unperceived from point to point intent upon their dangerous
business. But they did not always escape observation, and when caught
they were invariably laid by the heels and hardly dealt with. Gerard
Dance, alias Ducket, a seminary priest, was arraigned (1581) at the Old
Bailey before the Queen’s justices, and affirmed that although he was in
England, he was subject to the Pope in ecclesiastical causes, and that
the Pope had now the same authority in England that he had a hundred
years past, and which he had at Rome, “with other traitorous speeches,
for the which he was condemned to be hanged, drawn, and quartered.” The
same year William Dios (a Spaniard?), keeper of Newgate, sends a
certificate of the names of the recusants now in Newgate, “viz. Lawrence
Wakeman and others, ... the two last being of the precise sort.” April
20, 1586, Robert Rowley, taken upon seas by Captain Burrows going to
Scotland, is committed first to the Marshalsea, and from thence to
Newgate. Next year, August 26, Richard Young reports to Secretary
Walsyngham that he has talked with sundry priests remaining in the
prisons about London. “Some,” he says, “are very evil affected, and
unworthy to live in England. Simpson, alias Heygate, and Flower,
priests, have justly deserved death, and in no wise merit Her Majesty’s
mercy. William Wigges, Leonard Hide, and George Collinson, priests in
Newgate, are dangerous fellows, as are also Morris Williams and Thomas
Pounde, the latter committed as a layman, but in reality a professed
Jesuit. Francis Tirrell is an obstinate papist, and is doubted to be a
spy.”
We read as follows in an intercepted letter from Cardinal John Allen,
Rector of the English College at Rheims, to Mr. White, seminary priest
in the Clink,[45] and the rest of the priests in Newgate, the Fleet, and
the Marshalsea. “Pope Sextus sends them his blessing, and will send them
over for their comfort Dr. Reynolds, chief Jesuit of the college at
Rheims, who must be carefully concealed,” ... with others, ... “whose
discourses would be a great joy to all heretics. They will bring some
consecrated crucifixes, late consecrated by his Holiness, and some books
to be given to the chiefest Catholics, their greatest benefactors.” This
letter was taken upon a young man, Robert Weston, travelling to seek
service, “who seems to have had considerable dealings with recusants,
and to have made very full confessions.”
It was easier for all such to get into Newgate just then--than to obtain
release. Henry Ash and Michael Genison, being prisoners in Newgate,
petition Lord Keeper Pickering for a warrant for their enlargement upon
putting in good security for their appearance; “they were long since
committed by Justice Young and the now Bishop of London for recusancy,
where they remain, to their great shame and utter undoing, and are
likely to continue, unless he extend his mercy.” In 1598 George
Barkworth petitions Secretary Cecil “that he was committed to Newgate
six months ago on suspicion of being a seminary priest, which he is not;
has been examined nine times, and brought up at sessions four times;
begs the same liberty of the house at Bridewell which was granted him
at Newgate.”
Political prisoners were not wanting in Newgate in the Elizabethan
period. In 1585 instructions are given[46] to the recorder to examine
one Hall, a prisoner in Newgate, charged with a design for conveying
away the Queen of Scots. This was a part of Babington’s conspiracy, for
which Throgmorton also suffered. Other victims, besides the unfortunate
Queen herself, were Babington, Tichbourne, and many more, who after
trial at the Old Bailey, and incarceration in Newgate, were hanged in
St. Giles’s Fields. The execution was carried out with great barbarity;
seven of the conspirators were cut down before they were dead and
disembowelled. Another plot against Elizabeth’s life was discovered in
1587, the actors in which were “one Moody, an idle, profligate fellow,
then prisoner in Newgate, and one Stafford, brother to Sir Edward
Stafford.” The great Queen Bess in these last days of her reign went in
constant terror of her life; and a third conspiracy to poison her,
originating with her own physician and Lopez, a Jew, led to their
execution as traitors. Again, Squires, a disbanded soldier, was charged
with putting poison on the pommel of her saddle, and although he
admitted his guilt upon the rack, he declared when dying that he was
really innocent.
All this time within Newgate there was turbulence, rioting, disorders,
accompanied seemingly by constant oppression. The prisoners were ready
to brave anything to get out. General gaol deliveries were made
otherwise than in due course of law. Those that were fit to serve in the
sea or land forces were frequently pardoned and set free. A petition to
the Lord Admiral (1589) is preserved in which certain prisoners, shut
out from pardon because they are not “by law bailable,” beg that the
words maybe struck out of the order for release, and state that they
will gladly enter Her Majesty’s service. Many made determined efforts to
escape. “The 16th December, 1556,” says Hollinshed, “Gregory, Carpenter,
Smith, and a Frenchman born were arraigned for making counterfeit keys
wherewith to have opened the locks of Newgate, to have slain the keeper
and let forth the prisoners; at which time of his arraignment, having
conveyed a knife into his sleeve, he thrust it into the side of William
Whiteguts, his fellow-prisoner, who had given evidence against him, so
that he was in great peril of death thereby; for the which fact he was
immediately taken from the bar into the street before the justice hall,
when, his hand being first stricken off, he was hanged on a gibbet set
up for the purpose.
“The keeper of Newgate was arraigned and indicted for that the said
prisoner had a weapon about him and his hands loose, which should have
been bound.”
Yet the keeper of Newgate and other gaolers were by no means
irresponsible agents. Two cases may be quoted in which these officials
were promptly brought to book. In 1555 the keeper of the Bread Street
Compter, by name Richard Husband, pasteler, “being a wilful and
headstrong man,” who, with servants like himself, had dealt hardly with
the prisoners in his charge, was sent to the gaol of Newgate by Sir
Rowland Hill, mayor, with the assent of a court of aldermen. “It was
commanded to the keeper to set those irons on his legs which were called
widows’ alms; these he wore from Thursday till Sunday in the afternoon.”
On the Tuesday he was released, but not before he was bound over in an
hundred marks to act in conformity with the rules for the managing of
the Compters. “All which notwithstanding, he continued as before: ...
the prisoners were ill-treated, the prison was made a common
lodging-house at fourpence the night for thieves and night-walkers,
whereby they might be safe from searches that were made abroad.” He was
indicted for these, and other enormities, “but did rub it out, and could
not be reformed, till the prisoners were removed; for the house in Bread
Street was his own by lease or otherwise, and he could not be put from
it.”[47] A searching inquiry was also made into the conduct of Crowder,
the keeper of Newgate in 1580,[48] or thereabouts. The State Papers
contain an information of the disorders practiced by the officers of
Newgate prison, levying fines and taking bribes, by old and young
Crowders, the gaolers. “Crowder and his wife,” says the report, “be
most horrible blasphemers and swearers.” The matter is taken up by the
lords of the council, who write to the Lord Mayor, desiring to be fully
informed of all disorders committed, and by whom. “They are sending
gentlemen to repair to the prison to inquire into the case, and
requesting the Lord Mayor to appoint two persons to assist them.” Sir
Christopher Hatton also writes to the Lord Mayor, drawing attention to
the charges against Crowder. The Lord Mayor replies that certain persons
had been appointed to inquire, but had not yet made their report. The
Court of Enquiry are willing to receive Crowder, but he persists in
refusing (to explain). “He would not come to their meeting, but stood
upon his reputation.” The result, so far as can be guessed, was that
Crowder was pensioned off. But he found powerful friends in his
adversity. His cause was espoused by Sir Thomas Bromley, Lord
Chancellor, who informs the Lord Mayor that he thinks Crowder has been
dealt with very hardly, and that his accusers were persons unworthy of
credit. Apparently Crowder had no chance of being reinstated, for his
friend the Lord Chancellor tries next to get his pension raised. The
exact amount is not stated, but Sir Thomas Bromley suggests that it
should be made up to £40, twenty nobles of which should be paid by his
successor. There is no mention of any such increase having been
conceded.
CHAPTER III.
NEWGATE IN THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURY
(DOWN TO THE GREAT FIRE).
More Jesuit emissaries in Newgate--Richardson and others--Their
fate--Some escape--Greater favour shown them under Charles I.
through intercession of Henrietta Maria--But freedom not easily
procured--Case of Thomas Coo--Of John Williams--The Mayor of
Sudbury in Newgate--Also an alderman--Pardons and release still
given on condition of military service--Troubles with King fill
Newgate--Ship-money--Speaking ill of King’s sister entails
imprisonment in Newgate for life--Parliament growing more powerful
insists of execution of six Jesuits suffered to linger on in
Newgate--Irish rebels taken on high seas, in Newgate--Also
offenders against plague ordinances, and against religion or
morality--Strange news from Newgate--Interior of gaol--Condition of
prisoners--Fanatical conduct of keeper--Nefarious practices of
turnkeys--They levy black mail--“Coney catching” described--Several
cases of such swindling--Civil war reflected in prison
records--More Irish arrested at Devonshire--Sent to London and
lodged in Newgate for examination--Arbitrary imprisonment imposed
by House of Lords on Richard Overton--Case of Colonel
Lilburne--“Free born John”--Newgate annals record transfer of power
to Commonwealth--Royalists in gaol--Also prisoners of mark--The
Portuguese ambassadors’ brother in Newgate charged with murder, and
executed--Also Lord Buckhurst and others.
The disturbing elements of society continued much the same in the early
part of the seventeenth century as in the years immediately preceding.
There were the same offences against law and order, dealt with in the
same summary fashion. Newgate was perpetually crowded with prisoners
charged with the same sort of crimes. Bigotry and intolerance continued
to breed persecution. All sects which differed from that professed by
those in power were in turn under the ban of the law. The Romish priest
still ventured into the hostile heretic land where his life was not
worth a minute’s purchase; Puritans and Nonconformists were committed to
gaol for refusing to surrender their heterodox opinions: these last
coming into power were ruthlessly strict towards the openly irreligious
backslider. Side by side with these sufferers in the cause of
independent thought swarmed the depredators, the wrong-doers, whose
criminal instincts and the actions they produced were much the same as
they had been before and as they are now.
The devoted courage of the Jesuit emissaries in those days of extreme
peril for all priests who dared to cross the channel claims for them a
full measure of respect. They were for ever in trouble. When caught they
met hard words, scant mercy, often only a short shrift. Repeated
references are made to them. In the State Papers July 1602 is a list of
priests and recusants in prison, viz. “Newgate--Pound (already
mentioned), desperate and obstinate; ... in the Clink, Marshalsea,
King’s Bench, are others; among them Douce, a forward intelligence,
Tichborne, Webster, perverter of youth,” &c. They were ever the victims
of treachery and espionage.[49] “William Richardson, a priest of
Seville College (the date is 1603), was discovered to the Chief Justice
by one whom he trusted, and arraigned and condemned at Newgate for being
a priest and coming to England. When examined he answered stoutly, yet
with great modesty and discretion, moving many to compassionate him and
speak against the Chief Justice, on whom he laid the guilt of his
blood.” He was executed at Tyburn, hanged and quartered, but his head
and quarters were buried. “Such spectacles,” says the writer, Ant.
Rivers, to Giacomo Creleto, Venice, “do nothing increase the gospel....”
A further account says that William Richardson, alias Anderson, was
betrayed by a false brother, sent to Newgate, and kept close prisoner
over a week, no one being allowed to see him. The Chief Justice,
interrupting other trials, called for him, and caused him to be indicted
of high treason for being a priest and coming to England. All of which
he confessed, and there being no evidence against him, the Chief Justice
gave his confession in writing to the jury, who found him guilty. “He
thanked God and told the Chief Justice he was a bloody man, and sought
the blood of the Catholics. He denied that he was a Jesuit or knew
Garnet[50]....”
These priests were not very rigorously guarded. On the 27th November
1612 seven escaped from Newgate. They must also have been very
indifferently lodged. When a number of them were transferred for greater
security to Wisbeach Castle, they petitioned that they were unable to
provide themselves with bedding and other necessaries for their removal,
and begged that orders might be taken for their providing. The keeper
was closely watched lest he should be too easy with his prisoners.
Questions are suggested to be put to him, examining him as to his
connivance with recusants, and allowing them to escape or enjoy great
liberty. In 1611 Sir Thomas Lake writes to Lord Salisbury to the effect
that the king is resolved the keeper of Newgate shall be very severely
punished for allowing reverence to priests and masses to be said in the
prison.[51] It was evident they were permitted some license, although
contraband, for Secretary Conway issues instructions on May 13, 1626, to
the provost marshal of Middlesex directing him to search for popish
books, massing stuff, and reliques of popery in Newgate. Even in
Elizabeth’s time it appears that mass was said in Newgate, and one John
Harrison, when charged in 1595 with being in possession of certain
popish relics and papers, admitted that he had been married in Newgate
by an old priest then in prison with his (H.’s) wife and himself.
Somewhat better times dawned for the Roman Catholic ministers after the
accession of Charles I. His queen, Henrietta Maria, was able to help
them. Her favouring of papists was indeed one of the many causes of the
discontent which culminated in civil war. The king himself addresses the
keeper of Newgate to the effect that “at the instance of the queen we
have granted Pulteney Morse, lately indicted upon suspicion of being a
priest, and still prisoner at Newgate, to be enlarged upon security to
appear before the council when he shall be thereunto called. He has
given security to that purpose; we therefore command you to set him at
liberty.” The queen herself at times personally applied for the release
of prisoners confined in Newgate for matters of religion. Often priests
committed escaped incarceration, and were found to be at liberty after
arrest. But it was not always easy to obtain enlargement when once laid
by the heels. Here is the petition to the queen (State Papers, May 1634)
of Thomas Reynolds, a secular priest, who has been more than five years
in Newgate, “where by the unwholesomeness of the air, the strictness of
the imprisonment, and his great age he is fallen into many dangerous
infirmities. He now prays the queen to move the king to release him. His
application is backed up by a medical certificate signed by three
doctors that petitioner is affected with sciatica, colic, defluxion of
rheum, and the stone. He is fifty-eight years of age.” The result of the
petition is not given.
It was not only in the case of the religious prisoners that freedom was
difficult to compass. A very hard case is that of Thomas Coo, committed
to Newgate on grounds that are not traceable. He states, October 1618,
to Sir Julius Cæsar and Sir Fulk Greville that his loyal service in
preserving the life of his sovereign by discovering the London
insurrection has been rewarded with famine and a dungeon. He is resolved
to live no longer, leaving his son “to conceal his mystical
designs.”[52] Fifteen years later, but still in Newgate, he makes his
“submission from Newgate dungeon dunghill, almost famished;
acknowledging his contrition of heart, and stating his readiness to do
any penance the council may command, beseeches to know what his
punishment may be.” His long imprisonments in Newgate and elsewhere have
“stript petitioner, even of clothes from his back, and from that of the
bearer of the letter, his lame child.” He prays that he may be forthwith
either banished according to their order of the 28th October of the 5th
King Charles (1630), or be allowed close prisoner in some other place
where he may have some allowance to preserve him from starving. Six
years more pass, and again (1639) he petitions the council, stating that
there was neither legal warrant for his commitment to the Fleet eight
years, nor for his six years’ detention in Newgate, whither he was
thence removed. There were sent with him certain transcribed papers,
importing some orders and rules issuing out of the Star Chamber,
Chancery, and King’s Bench, in which courts the prisoner was never
defendant, convented, nor convicted. The only paper against him was a
supposed Inner Star Chamber order of voluntary banishment, to the effect
that the petitioner was to depart the kingdom within twenty days, dated
1629. “Gaolers,” says the poor prisoner, “are made his judges, and
jurors only give their verdict to whom his carcase belongs to be
interred.”
A light matter sufficed to secure committal to Newgate. John Williams in
a petition states that he was committed to Newgate for being one at the
depopulation of the forest of Dean. There he has remained for five
years, and now prays enlargement, not having wherewith to maintain
himself in prison with his wife and poor children, who were seemingly
incarcerated with him. The coachmen of even great people were committed
to Newgate for contravening the Star Chamber order as to the route they
should take to and from the playhouse in Blackfriars. Frequenters were
invited to go to and fro by water, but if they drove they were to be set
down by the west end of St. Paul’s Churchyard or Fleet Conduit. Again
Robert Coleman (1631), having found certain writings of the secretary
and other noble personages, and thinking they belonged to the Earl of
Dorset, went to the Old Bailey, where Lord Dorset was sitting on the
bench, to deliver them up. “One Barnes was to be tried,” states Coleman
subsequently in a petition, “and there was some one there to beg his
estate, whereupon the Earl of Dorset committed the prisoner (Coleman) to
Newgate, where he has been ever since detained, and could not bring the
writings to the secretary;” “prays that he may be allowed to come to him
for that purpose.” Christopher Crowe, a prisoner in Newgate, and another
victim to the oppression of a great noble, about the same date (1632)
petitions the council: “I am in great misery,” he says, “having no
friends nor means.” For six weeks he has had for his allowance but a
halfpenny in bread one day and a farthing’s worth the next. “Is heartily
sorry for his words spoken against the Marquis of Hamilton, and prays
enlargement.” Others in Newgate sought noble protection, and petitioned
the great peers to procure release. John Meredith petitions Henry Earl
of Holland, Captain of the Guard, reminding him that when he (Meredith)
and his wife were committed to Newgate, his lordship on their appeal had
sent an order for their discharge, which had been disregarded, and now,
“having lain in prison a fortnight, he prays that he and his wife may
forthwith be enlarged.” This has no effect, so Meredith and his wife
Joan petition the Earl of Manchester, Lord President. “They had now
remained in prison three weeks; pray for an enlargement from Newgate
gratis,[53] and that the sergeants who arrested them may be committed.”
Prisoners of still greater consequence languished often hopelessly in
Newgate Gaol. Now it is the wardens of divers city companies for not
making up their proportion towards the previous year’s provision of
corn; now a respectable freeman and stationer, William Cooke, who had
built a shed of timber in the open street in High Holborn adjoining
Furnival’s Inn. He was committed to Newgate till he should demolish the
same. But, as Inigo Jones and others represent to the council, “he lies
in prison, and the shed continues,” and they suggest an order to the
principals of Furnival’s Inn, or to the sheriffs of London, to take the
shed away. Next comes a greater personage, John Andrews, the Mayor of
Sudbury, who has unhappily fallen foul of a messenger of the Star
Chamber named Potter. This messenger came to Andrews with a warrant
claiming his assistance for the apprehension of certain unlicensed
dealers in tobacco in Sudbury, to which warrant he “gave due obedience.”
Potter was presently himself brought before the mayor, “accused of many
blasphemies and oaths,” and for compounding for money with the culprit
who had unlawfully trafficked in tobacco. Upon this the mayor told
Potter that he thought him worthy to be committed to prison. Potter then
fell to abusing the mayor in scoffs and threatening speeches, telling
him that he would have him set in the stocks, and that he cared not a
pin for the mayor’s authority. The exasperated Andrews committed Potter
to prison. But Potter’s threats were not without substantial
foundation, for Andrews’ action is deemed improper, and he is himself
committed to Newgate. From thence he humbly submits himself, and prays
discharge from that loathsome prison.
Even an alderman was not safe. Thomas Middleton in 1603, having been
duly elected alderman, refused to be sworn, whereupon he was committed
to Newgate by the Lord Mayor and court of aldermen, “according to their
oaths and the custom of the city.” For this they were sharply reproved
by the king, and ordered to release him immediately, “as he was employed
in important state service which privileged him from arrest.”
These were days of widespread oppression, when Strafford, Laud, the Star
Chamber, and ecclesiastical courts gave effect to the king’s eager
longings for arbitrary power. The following is from a half-mad fanatic
who has offended the relentless archbishop. “The petition of Richard
Farnham, a prophet of the most high God, a true subject to my king, and
a prisoner of my saviour Christ, in Newgate, to Archbishop Laud and the
rest of the high commissioners, whom he prays to excuse his plainness,
being no scholar.... Desires to know the cause of his being detained so
long in prison, where he has been kept a year next April without coming
to his answer. Thinks they have forgotten him. If he be a false prophet
and a blasphemer and a seducer, as most people report that he is, the
high commissioners would do well to bring him to trial. What he wrote
before he came into prison and what he has written since he will stand
to.... If he does not get his answer this summer he intends to complain
to the king, believing that it is not his pleasure his subjects should
suffer false imprisonment to satisfy the archbishop’s mind.” Of the same
year and the same character is this other petition from William King, a
prisoner in Newgate “for a little treatise delivered to Lord
Leppington.” Has remained in thraldom twenty-seven months; expresses
contrition and prays enlargement on bail, or that he may be called to
answer. Forty years more were to elapse before the passing of the Habeas
Corpus Act; but the forgoing will show how grievously this so-called
palladium of an Englishman’s liberties was required.
Pardons free or more or less conditional were, however, vouchsafed at
times. Release from prison was still, as before, and for long after,
frequently accompanied by the penalty of military service. This had long
been the custom. On declaration of war in the earlier reigns, it was
usual to issue a proclamation offering a general pardon to those guilty
of homicides and felonies on condition of service for a year and a day.
Even without this obligation prisoners in durance might sue out a pardon
by intercession of some nobleman serving abroad with the king. But later
on the release was distinctly conditional on personal service. The Lord
Mayor certifies to the king (1619) that certain prisoners in Newgate,
whose names and offences are given, are not committed for murder; so
they are reprieved, as being able-bodied and fit to do service in
foreign parts. Another certificate states that William Dominic,
condemned to death for stealing a purse value £4, is reprieved, “this
being his first offence, and he an excellent drummer, fit to do the king
service.” Again, the king requires the keeper of Newgate to deliver
certain reprieved prisoners to Sir Edward Conway, junior, to be employed
in His Majesty’s service in the Low Countries. Recorder Finch reports
that he has furnished “Conway’s son with seven prisoners fit for
service; sends a list of prisoners now in Newgate, but reprieved. Some
have been long in gaol, and were saved from execution by the prince’s
return [with Buckingham from Spain?] on that day. They pester the gaol,
which is already reported crowded, this hot weather, and would do better
service as soldiers if pardoned, ‘for they would not dare to run away.’”
A warrant is made out June 5, 1629, to the sheriffs of London to deliver
to such persons as the Swedish ambassador shall appoint forty-seven
persons, of whom one was Elizabeth Leech--was she to be employed as a
sutler or _vivandière_?--being prisoners condemned of felonies, and
remaining in the gaols of Newgate and Bridewell, who are released “to
the end that they may be employed in the service of the King of
Sweden”--Gustavus Adolphus, at that time our ally. There are numerous
entries of this kind in the State papers. Sometimes the prisoners
volunteer for service. “John Tapps, by the displeasure of the late Lord
Chief Justice and the persecution of James the clerk and one of the
keepers,[54] has been kept from the benefit of the pardon which has been
stayed at the Great Seal. Begs Lord Conway to perfect his work by moving
the Lord Keeper in his behalf, and in the mean time sending some
powerful warrant for his employment as a soldier.” Certain other
convicted prisoners in Newgate, who had been pardoned in respect of the
birth of Prince Charles (Charles II.), petition that they are altogether
impoverished, and unable to sue out their pardons. They pray that by
warrant they may be transported into the State of Venice under the
command of Captain Ludovic Hamilton. This document is endorsed with a
reference to the Lord Chief Justice of the Common Pleas to certify
concerning these delinquents and their crimes. George Gardener, a
prisoner in Newgate, also petitions the king in March 1630, stating that
he was committed by the council on the information of James Ingram,
deputy warden of the Fleet, to prevent petitioner prosecuting the said
Ingram for his notorious extortions. He has remained in Newgate since
April previous, and by Ingram’s procurement was shut up amongst felons
in the common gaol, whereby he might have been murdered. “Prays that he
may be allowed to go abroad on security.” Here is another petition, that
of Bridget Gray to the council. She states (July 19, 1618) that her
grandson, John Throckmorton, is a prisoner in Newgate for felony, and
prays that he may be discharged, this being his first offence, and Sir
Thomas Smythe being ready to convey him beyond seas. Upon this is
endorsed an order that if the mayor or recorder will certify that
Throckmorton was not convicted of murder, burglary, highway robbery,
rape, or witchcraft, a warrant may be made for his banishment. The
certificate is forthcoming, and is to the effect that Throckmorton’s
crime was aiding in stealing a hat, value 6s., for which the principal,
Robert Whisson, an old thief, was hanged.
The gaol calendar reflects the vicissitudes of these changing, troublous
times. There were many London citizens who, sharing the patriotic spirit
of Hampden and Pym, found themselves clapped into prison for refusing to
submit to the illegal taxations of Charles I. In a long statement, 16th
April, 1639, from Edward Rossingham to Lord Conway he says that the Lord
Mayor labours hard to get in the ship-money. “Some pay and many refuse;
but such as do refuse he requires to enter into a recognizance of so
much money to attend the council. Three citizens stand committed to
Newgate, not because they refuse to pay ship-money, but because they
refuse to enter into bond to attend the Board to answer their not paying
the same. Divers others refused, and were sent to Newgate; but upon
better consideration they paid their money, and were released again.”
The temper of the Government as regards ship-money is further shown by
the arrest and trial of the keeper of Newgate for permitting a prisoner
committed for non-payment of this unlawful tax to go at large. It
appears that the offender, Richard Chambers, had been several times
remanded to the same custody, and had been allowed to escape.
It was highly dangerous to speak lightly of dignities in these ticklish
times. The State trials give an account of the hard measure meted out to
one Edward Floyde for scandalizing the princess palatine, Elizabeth,
James I.’s daughter, and titular Queen of Bohemia. Floyde was charged
with having said, while a prisoner in the Fleet, “I have heard that
Prague is taken, and goodman Palsgrave and goodwife Palsgrave
(Elizabeth) have taken to their heels and run away.” This puerile,
gossip seriously occupied both houses of Parliament, and eventually the
Lords awarded and adjudged that Edward Floyde be deemed an infamous
person, incapable of bearing arms as a gentleman, whose testimony was
not to be taken in any court or cause. He was also sentenced to ride
with his head to his horse’s tail from Westminster to the pillory in
Cheapside; after this to be whipped from the Fleet to Westminster, there
again to stand on the pillory. He was to pay a fine of £5000 to the
king, and imprisoned in Newgate during his life.
In 1642, according to a published document,[55] Newgate “hath not been
more replenished with prisoners these many years than now, there being
very nigh three hundred prisoners committed to that infamous castle of
misery.” It was still the mere gatehouse prison, and its accommodation
must have been of the most limited description. Chief among these
inmates were six Jesuit priests who had been condemned to die, but had,
no doubt through the powerful advocacy of Henrietta Maria, obtained a
reprieve. “Whereupon did arise a tumultuous mutiny among the other
prisoners, who refused to die without the Jesuits; but afterwards they
(the mutineers) were mitigated in a kind of pacified tranquillity.”
Parliament had also petitioned that “execution might be imposed upon”
these priests; but the king would not condescend thereunto till his
further pleasure, “whereupon they (the Jesuits) have continued secure in
Newgate ever since, one man being solely excepted, viz. Goodman, who
died last Good Friday, and at once deceived both Gregory[56] and
Tyburn.” But the Parliament was at this date too near its rupture with
the king to submit to be thus put off, and re-petitioned, stating “these
Jesuits were an obstacle to their assiduous proceedings;” and His
Majesty replied that if they were “the obstruction and hindrance of
reformation in the Church they might be forthwith executed without
further delay.” Henrietta Maria’s strong attachment to the Roman
Catholic faith is satirized in the old German print, which I have taken
from the Crowle ‘Pennant’s London’, and which represents the Queen doing
penance at Tyburn over the grave of some recently executed priests. It
is said that “the pore queen” walked afoot--some say barefoot--from St.
James to Tyburn in the dead of night. A state coach followed with
attendants, and her father confessor. The whole story is probably
apocryphal, but the print is interesting as one of the earliest
representations of Tyburn tree. The pilgrimage took place in 1628, but
the print is of a later date.
Other prisoners at this time were certain Irishmen suspected to be
rebels who had apparently been captured on the high seas, and eventually
committed to Newgate. When formally examined before the Parliament, the
servants, seamen, and soldiers were remitted; only the master of the
ship, the captain, lieutenants, and ancients were detained, “and still
continue in prison.” The court was to examine them further; but as this
did not come off, the Parliament would, it was thought, censure them.
These, found to be ten in number, five of them friars, four soldiers,
and one a pilgrim, were at length examined “before a committee in the
court of wards, who demanded of them their intents in coming over to
Ireland, and to what effect: four of which very peremptorily denied, and
said they came over with occasions of merchandize, but one of them
betrayed the rest, and affirmed that they were friars, and came over
into England to save souls for heaven.” The other five were carried down
unto
[Illustration: _Henrietta Maria doing penance at Tyburn._]
Westminster before the same committee. The master of the ship, being
called first, “did show a commission unto them for his going; they then
asked him whether he would take the oath of allegiance, which he was
willing to take. When asked as to the oath of supremacy, he replied that
he was an ignorant man, and did not understand what it meant.” Three of
the others could not speak a word of English, whereupon the master did
interpret what they spake. “It seems by the exposition of the master of
the ship that they have been in service under the Prince of Orange half
a year; they were taken captives at Flanders; they served in France two
years, and a half-year in Spain, and now come into their own country.”
Neglect of the stringent ordinances passed to protect life during the
constant visitations of that fearful scourge the plague brought down the
one universal penalty, committal to Newgate, upon offenders. Here is a
long story about Stephen Smith, a fishmonger, whose door was by the
sufferance of the warder broken open, and William Fenn, servant to
Smith, who had already been indicted for offences committed during the
several infections of that house, entered the house and brought a
quantity of salted fish to the door for sale. Yet all the time Susan
Wheelyer, a maid-servant of Smith’s, was shut up in the house infected
with the plague. Smith had unlawfully abandoned his house. Fenn was
apprehended and shut up with the late infected servant under a better
guard. “I have committed the warder,” says Sir William Slingsby, who
makes the report, “and commanded the fish to be carried in again, and
the doors locked and guarded.... These proceedings I suspect to be done
by the private directions of Smith.” The orders of the council on the
above were prompt and severe. Stephen Smith was at once committed to
Newgate, “there to be kept under strong bolts until further orders,”
while William Fenn was sent to the pest-house, and a weight of iron
placed on his heels to keep him safe and quiet there. It was ordered
further, that the warders for their great neglect be put in the stocks
before Smith’s house.
Newgate, during the last great plague epidemic, received all offenders
against the sanitary rules. These were enforced by the Middlesex
justices, who were directed to be most careful for the relief of the
citizens and for the prevention of the spreading of infection. Diligent
circumspection was to be used to prevent the removal of goods or persons
from London or Westminster to other towns and villages, or up and down
the Thames; also to put pressure upon those belonging to infected
families who refused to shut themselves up. Refusal to obey or neglect
of these orders was to be visited with committal to Newgate and
indictment at the next sessions.
Offences against morality and religion were met with the same penalty of
imprisonment. Incontinence and loose living were high misdemeanours. In
an extract from the register of the High Court of Commission we find
that Nicholas Slater of Royden, Essex, a married man, had run off with
Blanche Cowper, another man’s wife. Defendants lived together in various
places. “Slater, like a vagabond, without license had wandered up and
down the kingdom professing physic and surgery, and carried Blanche
about with him from place to place.” Slater was committed close prisoner
to Newgate, there to remain during pleasure, and Blanche to Bridewell.
There was added penance in Ware and Stepney, while Slater was fined
£1000 and Blanche £100 to His Majesty. The last part of the sentence
points to Charles’s shifts to raise money. This was in 1638. Another
story of the same kind, but with a different issue, is of the same date.
George Harrison in Newgate petitions the Archbishop of Canterbury and
the Lords of the High Commission Court for enlargement. A certain John
Cock had, it appears, discovered the incontinent life of John Thierry
and Ursula Baythorpe. The latter offered Cock £27 to be silent, which he
was willing to accept, and went with the petitioner Harrison to a
tavern, the place appointed for the handing over of the money. But they
fell into a trap, and were arrested at the tavern; thence they were
carried to the Compter and committed to Newgate. Afterwards at a
sessions they were indicted, and, on the testimonies of the merchant and
the said Ursula’s sister and her husband, were whipped three times to
the pillory, where they stood eleven hours. They were not suffered to
come down till they had asked Thierry’s and Ursula’s forgiveness before
all the spectators, and so were three times whipped back again. “By the
extremity of which execution petitioner lost his speech and almost his
understanding, and Cock was carried home dead in the cart. By which
cruelty and disgrace petitioner, who was formerly well respected, is now
utterly undone.” Thierry must have had good friends at court. But the
informer seems to have been right in his denunciation, for both the
accused were subsequently “detected to the court,” and it was proved
that the said poor men had only suffered for “meddling with the truth.”
Petitioner now prays that the merchant (Thierry) may be ordered to give
him and his poor children relief and restitution for their sufferings.
A quaint pamphlet entitled ‘Strange News from Newgate,’ dated 1647,
states that on the 10th January, “being the blessed sabbath, at
Botolph’s Church near Bishopgate, in sermon time, there arose a great
disturbance by one Evan Price, a tailor, who stood up and declared
himself to be Christ, which words much amazed the people, and divers
timorous spirits into a great fear.... Whereupon he was immediately
apprehended and carried before the Right Honourable the Lord Mayor,
where he was examined seriously and at length, although no doubt a
religious lunatic.” He was asked whether he had worked miracles, whether
he was married, ... “with divers other arguments objected against him,
which he was not able to answer, but remained obstinate in his devilish
and satanical opinion.” But after some time spent upon his examination,
“as he still remained in his hell-bred opinion, not hearkening to any
advice or counsel whatsoever,” it was ordered that he should be
committed to Newgate, which was accordingly performed. “Five days later
he was arraigned at the Old Bailey, and coming to the bar, was examined
by the judges, but seemed resolute not to make any confession.” The
pamphlet ends abruptly, and does not give the result of his trial.
It must have been consequent on some conflict with the ecclesiastical
authority that Edward Powell, alias Anderson, was sent from Ely as a
prisoner to Newgate. The story rests on a report from Bishop Wren of Ely
to the council, dated 5th June 1638. Powell had been apprehended upon a
riot committed by an assemblage which went by the name of Anderson’s
Camp, but was not imprisoned for his share therein, but for his
misdemeanours and foul speeches at the time of arrest. He was accused of
being an abettor of the riot, although not present at it. When he had
been at Newmarket the previous Lent, Powell paid the town-crier twopence
to proclaim a gathering of the people to go to the king with a petition
about their fens; “for the losing of the fens would be the losing of
their livelihood.” Upon this Powell was summoned before Mr. Justice
Goodrick, but denied the charge. Next day Mr. Goodrick, going into the
market-place, found a crowd there with cudgels in their hands, and
Powell with them. Powell, interrogated, asked whether the king’s market
was not open to all, and rejoined his company. As the result of these
disturbances, Powell was arraigned and sentenced to a fine of £200, and
to be imprisoned, and “now lies in execution for the same. Since his
removal from the prison at Ely to Newgate, the poor people are very
quiet and in good order.” Powell from his captivity addresses his
“loving friends and neighbours in the city of Ely, and others,” in
letters which were seized. In these he expresses a hope of deliverance
when the king comes to London, and that he has refused to give up his
friends’ names, whereby they might be fined and imprisoned, although
daily urged to do so by fair offers and large promises, and also by
threatening language, terrible speech, and protestation of perpetual
imprisonment. He then asks these friends to make a collection for him
and his family, and gives a dark picture of his prison--“this loathsome
gaol, in which we are accompanied with noisome stinks, cold, lousy to
dying, and almost all other miseries.”
There is nothing especially remarkable in the purely criminal cases of
this period; offences have a strong family likeness to those of our own
day. Culprits are “cast” for “taking a chest of plate out of a house;”
for “taking £100 from a gentleman,” and so forth. Now and again appears
a case of abduction, a common crime in those and later days. Sarah Cox
prays the king’s pardon for Roger Fulwood, who was convicted of felony
for forcibly marrying her against her will. But she begs at the same
time her protection for person and estate from any claims in regard to
the pretended marriage. Knights of the road have already begun to
operate; they have already the brevet rank of captain, and even lads of
tender years are beguiled into adopting the profession of highway
robber. Counterfeiting the king’s or other great seals was an offence
not unknown. A Captain Farrar is lodged in Newgate (1639), accused of
counterfeiting His Majesty’s signature and privy signet. His method of
procedure was simple. Having received a document bearing His Majesty’s
privy seal for the payment of a sum of £190, he removed the seal and
affixed it to a paper purporting to be a license from the king to levy
and transport two hundred men beyond seas. This he published as a royal
license. When arraigned he admitted that the charge was true, but
pleaded that he had done the same according to the king’s commands. He
was reprieved until further orders.
The condition of the prisoners within Newgate continued very deplorable.
This is apparent from the occasional references to their treatment. They
were heavily ironed, lodged in loathsome dungeons, and all but starved
to death. Poor Stephen Smith, the fishmonger,[57] who had contravened
the precautionary rules against the plague, petitions the council that
he has been very heavily laden with such intolerable bolts and shackles
that he is lamed, and being a weak and aged man, is like to perish in
the gaol. “Having always lived in good reputation and been a liberal
benefactor where he has long dwelt, he prays enlargement on security.”
The prison is so constantly over-crowded that the prisoners have “an
infectious malignant fever which sends many to their long home. The
magistrates who think them unfit to breathe their native air when living
bury them as brethren when dead.” All kinds of robbery and oppression
were practised within the precincts of the gaol. Inside, apart from
personal discomfort, the inmates do much as they please. “There are
seditious preachings by fifth monarchy men at Newgate,” say the records,
“and prayers for all righteous blood.” Some time previous, when the
Puritans were nominally the weakest, they also held their services in
the prison. Samuel Eaton, a prisoner committed to Newgate as a dangerous
schismatic, is charged with having conventicles in the gaol, some to the
number of seventy persons. He was, moreover, permitted by the keeper to
preach openly. The keeper was petitioned by one of the inmates to remove
Eaton and send him to some other part of the prison, but he replied
disdainfully, threatening to remove the petitioner to a worse place. He,
the keeper himself, attended the conventicles, “calling it a very fair
and goodly company, and staying there some season.” Besides this, he
gave license to Eaton to go abroad, to preach, contrary to the charge of
the High Commission (1638). Another complaint made by the petitioner is
that the keeper caused petitioner’s sister to be removed out of the
prison contrary to the opinion of a doctor, and that she died the very
next day. Her chamber after her removal was assigned to Eaton, it being
the most convenient place in the prison for holding his conventicles.
This keeper may be condemned as a fanatical partizan at worst. But he
had predecessors who were active oppressors, eager to squeeze the
uttermost farthing out of their involuntary lodgers. The bar kept within
the prison must have been a cause of continued extortion, although those
who pandered to the cupidity of the bar-keepers occasionally got into
trouble. Sir Francis Mitchell, we read, was sent on foot and bareheaded
to the Tower on account of his patent for ale-houses. “He is a justice
of Middlesex, and had a salary of £40 a year from Newgate prison on
condition of sending all his prisoners there,” ... no doubt to drink the
liquor supplied to the prison bar.
But still worse was the conduct of the under-strappers. An instruction
to the Lord Mayor and sheriffs in the State Papers (Dec. 1649) directs
them to examine the miscarriages of the under officers of Newgate who
were favourers of the felons and robbers there committed, and to remove
such as appear faulty. The nefarious practices of the Newgate officers
were nothing new. They are set forth with much quaintness of diction and
many curious details in a pamphlet of the period, entitled the ‘Black
Dogge of Newgate.’ There was a tavern entitled the ‘Dogge Tavern in
Newgate,’ as appears by the State Papers, where the place is indicted
by an informer for improper practices. The author of the pamphlet
pretends that the dog has got out of prison and leapt into a sign-board.
“‘What the devil’s here?’ quoth a mad fellow going by, seeing the black
cur ringed about the nose with a golden hoop, having two saucer-like
eyes, and an iron chain about his neck. The public-house must be a
well-customed house where such a porter keeps the door and calls in
company.” The writer enters it and describes the scene. He finds
“English, Scottish, Welsh, Irish, Dutch, and French in several rooms;
some drinking the neat wine of Orleans, some the Gascony, some the
Bordeaux. There wanted neither sherry sack nor charnico, paligo nor
Peter Seeme, amber-coloured canary or liquorish Ipocras, brown beloved
Bastard, fat Alicant, or any quick-spirited liquor that might draw their
will into a circle....” Not desiring to mix with such company, the
writer sat himself and called for his “whole pint” alone. Presently he
was joined by a “poor thin-gut fellow with a face as red as the gilded
knobs of an alderman’s horse-bridle, who as it seemed had newly come out
of limbo.” The two treated each other, and then exchanged opinions as to
the sign of the tavern, wondering how it came first to be called the
Black Dog of Newgate; and the writer maintained that he had read in an
old chronicle “that it was a walking spirit in the likeness of a black
dog, gliding up and down the streets a little before the time of
execution, and in the night while the sessions continued.” From this
archæological exercise they pass on to discuss the prison and its
officers. This part of the pamphlet sheds a strong light upon the
evil-doings of the turnkeys, who appear to have been guilty of the
grossest extortion, taking advantage of their position as officers of
the law to levy black-mail alike on criminals and their victims. Of
these swindling turnkeys or bailiffs, whom the writer designates
“coney-catchers,” he tells many discreditable tales, one or two of which
may be worth transcribing.
The term coney-catching had long been in use to define a species of
fraud akin to our modern “confidence trick,” or, as the French call it,
the _vol à l’Americain_. Shakespeare, in the ‘Merry Wives of Windsor,’
makes Falstaff call Bardolph, Nym, and Pistol “coney-catching rascals.”
The fraud was then of but recent introduction. It is detailed at length
by Robert Greene in his ‘Notable Discovery of Cozenage,’ published in
1591. He characterizes it as a new art. Three parties were needed to
practise it, called respectively the setter, the verser, and the
barnacle; their game, or victim, was the coney. The first was the decoy,
the second was a confederate who plied the coney with drink, the third
came in by accident should the efforts of the others to beguile the
coney into “a deceit at cards have failed.” In the end the countryman
was completely despoiled. Later on there was a new nomenclature: the
setter became the beater, the tavern to which the rogues adjourned was
the “bush,” and the quarry was the bird. The verser was the retriever,
the barnacle was the pot-hunter, and the game was called bat-fowling.
Greene’s exposure was supposed to have deprived the coney-catchers of a
“collop of their living.” But they still prospered at their nefarious
practices, according to the author of the ‘Black Dogge,’ to whom I will
now return.
This was their plan of procedure. Two coney-catchers enter a tavern
together, and there find a gentleman drinking wine. They note his
appearance, his weapons, his good cloak and his neat apparel, and are
clear that he has a good store of money; so they make up to him. The
three become friendly, and the gentleman stands treat. After two or
three pottles of wine are disposed of one of the rogues says to their
entertainer, “I pray you heark in your ear. Thus it is; my fellow hath a
warrant to take you, therefore in kindness I pray you draw your purse
and give him an angel to spend in drink, and I will undertake we will
not see you at this time.” The stranger, however, would not be imposed
upon, and said they were coney-catching knaves, and that they should not
wrong him in any respect. “Whereupon the two sent for a constable, and
charged the other with felony. The constable, recognizing the two as
officials, took the stranger into custody and deprived him of his
weapons. Then the two told the constable they would be answerable for
his prisoner, and took charge of him. Now mark what followed. As these
two knaves were bringing the party charged with felony to Newgate, one
of them offered yet xx shillings to set him free, of which, when the
party had considered, knowing though he was clear of that he was
charged, yet if he lay in prison till the Sessions it would be greater
charges. When he was on Newgate stairs ready to go into the gaol, he was
content to leave his cloak, what money he had in his purse, and his
weapons, which were in the constable’s hand, in pawn for the xx
shillings, which the coney-catchers took, and discharged the prisoner
without any more to do.”
A little later the same victim is again encountered, with a companion,
in a tavern without Bishopgate, where he “had spoke for supper.” In came
the swindling turnkeys, whereat the other set on the best face he could,
and bade them welcome. The coney-catchers accepted the invitation, and
ate and drank merrily. Supper being ended, the reckoning was called for,
the shot paid, and, all things discharged, the coneys would fain have
been gone. “But one of the knaves said nay: ... thus it is, such a man
was robbed within this week, and hath got out a warrant for you by name.
He hath lost £10; now, if you will restore the money, and bestow xx
shillings on us two to drink for our pains, we will undertake to satisfy
the party and be your discharge. If not, we have a warrant, and you must
answer it at Newgate. This back reckoning is something sharp, but there
is no remedy; either pay so much money, or else must a constable be sent
for, and so to Newgate as round as a hoop.”
“To be short, this was the conclusion: the coney put down £10, every
penny whereof was to be paid to the man in the moon, for I dare take it
upon my death neither of these coneys did offend any such man in manner
these knaves had charged them.”
A favourite hunting-ground for these swindlers was at Westminster Hall
during term time. Their method was to send confederates in among the
thickest of the crowd, where the cut-purses were likely to be busiest,
and there “listen if any purse were cut that day.” The coney-catchers
themselves were posted, one by the water stairs, the other at the gate,
where they could not fail to intercept the cut-purse who had committed
the theft. Presently they recognize him, accost and stop him. The
cut-purse, anxious to curry favour, offers to stand both wine and a
breakfast, but the coney-catcher will not tarry. He declares with an
oath that he is really sorry to have met the cut-purse that day, “for
there is a mischief done, and he fears some one will smoke for it.” At
this time the cut-purse is afraid, but for that time he scapeth their
fingers. After this the swindler makes it his business to seek out the
victim of the robbery, and on discovering him, promises that if he will
only be guided by him he will help him to most of his money again. The
honest fellow, a countryman, delighted, offers “at first word” one half
to get other half back, the whole amount being ten pounds. “Then away
goeth the coney-catcher to a justice,” from whom he obtains a warrant to
take up all suspected persons. The warrant obtained, the coney-catcher
is as “pleasant as a pie,” and with his countryman spend some time
drinking a pottle of wine, after which the turnkey takes leave of his
client, who goes to his lodging, and “the coney-catcher about his
faculty.” Now, woe to the cut-purses we may meet, for they must to
Newgate on his warrant; but although he apprehends twelve or sixteen,
the real culprit is certainly not among them. “The honest company of
cut-purses being all in Newgate, H. (the coney-catcher) goes presently
and certifies the justice what a set of notable thieves he has taken,
and desiring the justice to examine them about the theft, warning him
that they will confess nothing, which indeed the justice findeth true.”
They are remanded to Newgate, and _en route_ beg H. to stand their
friend, “assuring him of their innocency; yet rather than be in prison
one offereth ten shillings, some more, some less, as they are of
ability, with promise of more if H.’s good words gain them their
release.”
“Now the coney-catcher hath the matter as he would wish it, and taking
their money, first he goeth presently to the justice and certifieth him
that these which he had apprehended did none of them cut the purse, and
for that he hath gotten knowledge who did, he desireth that they may be
bailed.” The justice, glad to hear the culprit is known, yields ready
assent, and the captive cut-purses are set free.
H.’s next business is to hunt up the real thief, and meeting him,
“spareth not to tell him how sore the justice is against him, and how
earnestly the countryman will pursue the law; and further, he sweareth
that some of those that were in Newgate told the justice plainly that he
cut the purse. This peal ringeth nothing well in the cut-purse’s ears,
who can find no favour but to Newgate.” So he entreats the coney-catcher
to stand his friend, who promises at length to do any good he can, at
the same time cautioning the cut-purse to confess nothing, “what proof
soever come against him,” assuring him further, that the man who lost
the money, although sore bent against, “yet he will partly be ruled by
him, H.” But the arrest is made; the thief is conveyed to Newgate, and
there, by way of welcome, a good pair of bolts and shackles are clapped
upon his legs. Then H. sends for the countryman, telling him the good
news that the thief is taken and in limbo; and together they go before
the justice, to whom H. “signifieth how the case standeth, railing
mightily against the cut-purse,” whose guilt can easily be proved, and
begging his worship to summon the thief. The cut-purse is sent for, and
“having taken out his lesson,” doggedly refuses to confess, upon which
the justice returneth him to Newgate, there to abide till the next
sessions. The countryman is bound over to give evidence, but he,
“dwelling far from London, and it being long to next Law Day, allegeth
he cannot be in the city at that time, for he is a poor man, and hath
great occasion of business.”
On leaving the justice H. returns to Newgate, and assures the cut-purse
that he has laboured hard “with him who had his purse cut to take his
money again, and not to give evidence against him; that if he may have
his money again he will presently go out of town.” The cut-purse, taking
H.’s hand (as witness) that no man shall give evidence against him at
the sessions, doth presently send abroad to his friends for the money;
which as soon as it cometh he delivereth to H., and withal a large
overplus, because he will be thus sure of H.’s favour.
“This done, H. goes to the countryman and tells him he got no more but
six or seven pounds, of which, if he will accept, and proceed no further
against the party, he hath it to pay him; marry he will not be known to
the countryman, but that he had that money of some friend of the
cut-purse’s, who upon the former condition is willing it should be paid,
if not, to have his money again.
“The countryman, having haste out of the city, is glad to take it, out
of which sum, if it be seven pounds, H. must have half; so that the poor
man, of ten pounds hath but three pounds ten shillings, whereas the
coney-catcher by this account hath got at one hand and another very near
forty marks. The money shared, the countryman takes horse and away he
rides. Again H.’s mouth is stopt, and the next sessions the cut-purse is
quit by proclamation, no man being there to give evidence against him.”
Plain symptoms of the approaching struggle between the king and the
commons are to be met with in the prison records. Immediately after the
meeting of the Long Parliament, orders were issued for the enlargement
of many victims of Star Chamber oppression. Among them was the
celebrated Prynne, author of the ‘Histriomatrix,’[58] who had lost his
ears in the pillory; Burton a clergyman, and Bastwick a physician, who
had suffered the same penalties, all came out of prison triumphant,
wearing ivy and rosemary in their hats. Now Strafford was impeached and
presently beheaded; Laud also was condemned. The active interference of
Parliament in all affairs of State extended to the arrest of persons
suspected of treasonable practices. A curious document issues from
Newgate in 1642, where several supposed rebels and others have been
imprisoned. It is a petition[59] which was presented to Parliament by
Colonel Goret, who had commanded some of them in France. The petition
sets forth that Daniel Dalley, master of a small barque, of “Kinsaile in
Ireland,” had been freighted, about the 10th November, 1641, out by two
gentlemen, merchants of Kingsale, with beef, tallow, and hides for “St.
Mallowes in France.” There these commodities had been “vended,” and the
same merchants laid out their money in wine and fruits to freight the
vessel home again. “All being done, and they ready to set sail, the
governor (of St. Mallowes) sent a command to Daniel Dalley the master,
that he should take nine gentlemen with him, which should pay for their
passage.” “By reason of the troubles,”[60] the master refused; but
Dalley was obliged to take them on board, under threat of committal to
gaol, and by the governor’s warrant and command. He then set sail, and
two days after he had gone to sea a storm rose at south and S. S. W.,
which drove them into Saltcombe in the west country, “where the
passengers went ashore and took lodging till it would please God to send
fair weather.” However, notice of their landing came to Captain Foskew,
“one that had command of a fort of his majesty’s there,” who summoned
them before him and examined them. Finding they could not give a good
account of their designs, he committed them, with the merchants and the
ship’s company, until he communicated with Parliament. In reply the
Parliament sent for them to London, and lodged them in Newgate. There
they lay from day to day expecting to be called up by Parliament, but
this being so long delayed, they petitioned for enlargement.
On the Parliament side it appeared that information had been given the
House of Commons that certain mariners and commanders were proceeding
from France to Ireland to take part in the rebellion, they having a
commission about them for the purpose. Also that one Captain Foskew had
taken and stayed the said mariners and sea captains. “The honourable
assembly,” therefore, as well out of their pious and grave consideration
for the better satisfaction of the kingdom, as for the prevention of
such dangers as might follow from their landing in Ireland, made an
order to bring the prisoners to London for examination. This was done
with all proper precaution. Each sheriff saw to their safe conduct in
his own county, “not suffering them to go together, but the commanders
to be kept away from the rest.” By virtue of the Speaker’s (Lenthall)
warrant, they were delivered by the sheriff of Devon to the next
sheriff, and so from county to county, until they came to Middlesex,
where they were received by the sheriffs of Middlesex, and committed to
Newgate, the county gaol, “where they were with much care imprisoned and
strictly kept, some of them being placed in the master’s, others in the
common side.”
The petition already mentioned set forth that the said captains, “being
all strangers and destitute of acquaintance, except with a few persons
of this town. They declared that they were his majesty’s true and loyal
subjects, most of them born within the king’s realm of Ireland, all
strictly obliged and most ready to defend his rights and privileges to
the utmost of their power. Being ‘necessitated in their native country,’
they repaired three years previously to France, where they served in
martial affairs under Colonel Goret, till they were disbanded, and
resolved to return home. They were, however, detained at Saltcombe, in
the county of Devon, where they were imprisoned and their goods seized.
Since then they had lain in Newgate, ‘where they are liable to remain in
great misery, to their loss of time, and utter destruction and ruin.’
They begged, therefore, that they might be ‘forthwith convented before
the honourable assembly to answer their charge,’ and having proved their
loyalty, might be restored to their former liberty and fortunes.” The
answer to this petition is not recorded, except that the prisoners hoped
daily to be sent for, a committee of the House having been appointed to
examine them. Meantime they carried themselves civilly in the gaol, and
with patience looked for the time when they should be called for their
answer. They were conscious of innocence; they denied “all intentions of
assisting the rebels in Ireland, or any act which might tend to their
disloyalty,” the true cause of their return home being a want of
employment in France.
There are other cases of imprisonment more or less arbitrary in these
troubled times. Another petition may be quoted, that of Richard Overton,
“a prisoner in the most contemptible gaol of Newgate,” under an order of
the House of Lords. Overton tells us how he was brought before that
House “in a warlike manner, under pretence of a criminal fact, and
called upon to answer interrogations concerning himself which he
conceived to be illegal and contrary to the national rights, freedoms,
and properties of the free commoners of England, confirmed to them by
Magna Charta, the Petition of Right, and the Act for the Abolishment of
the Star Chamber.” Overton was therefore emboldened to refuse subjection
to the said House. He was adjudged guilty of contempt, and committed to
Newgate, where he was seemingly doomed to lie until their lordships’
pleasure shall be further signified, which “may be perpetual if they
please, and may have their wills, for your petitioner humbly conceiveth
that he is made a prisoner to their wills, not to the law, except their
wills may be a law.” On this account he appealed to the Commons “as the
most sovereign Court of Judicature in the land,” claiming from them
“repossession of his just liberty and freedom, or else that he may
undergo the penalty prescribed by the law if he be found a
transgressor.” Whether Overton was supported by the Commons against the
Lords does not appear, but within three years the Lower House abolished
the House of Peers.
Here is yet another petition from a better known inmate of Newgate, the
obstinately independent Colonel Lilburne, commonly called “Freeborn
John.” Lilburne was always at loggerheads with the government of the
city. In 1637, when following the trade of bookseller, he was convicted
by the Star Chamber for publishing seditious libels, and sentenced to
the pillory, imprisonment, and a fine of £5000. In 1645 he falls foul of
the Parliament, and writes a new treatise, calling in question their
power. For this, although he had already done good service to the
Parliamentary cause and had earned the grade of Lieutenant-Colonel in
the field, he is first questioned, then sent to Newgate. He dates from
thence, in 1646, a letter to Mr. Wollaston, the keeper of Newgate, or
his deputy. He states that he has seen a warrant commanding the keeper
to produce him before the House of Lords, but that the warrant expresses
no reason why he should “dance attendance before them,” nor does he know
any reason why he should, or any law that compels him thereto. The Lords
had already endeavoured illegally to try him, a commoner, before their
bar, for which, under hand and seal, he protested to their faces against
them as violent and illegal encroachers upon his rights and liberties,
and appealed to the proper tribunal, the Commons, for which appeal he
was arbitrarily committed to gaol. Lilburne goes on to say,--
“Sir, I am a freeman of England, and therefore I am not t
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