Non-Criminal Prisons
by Arthur Griffiths · English · Gutenberg #48792 · 443,842 chars · public domain (US)
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Title: Non-Criminal Prisons
Author: Arthur Griffiths
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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK NON-CRIMINAL PRISONS ***
The History and
Romance of
Crime
FROM THE EARLIEST TIMES
TO THE PRESENT DAY
[Illustration: colophon]
THE GROLIER SOCIETY
LONDON
[Illustration: _Prison Hulks at Portsmouth_
Old hulks of English warships were first used as prisons when the
American War of Independence closed the shores of the colonies to the
convict-exile and rendered some additional prison space in England
immediately necessary. Used as prisons of war: many American prisoners
were confined there after the War of 1812,--loathsome places of durance
from which escape was difficult. They were also used for temporary
detention of prisoners sentenced to penal servitude in the colonies over
seas.]
Non-Criminal Prisons
ENGLISH DEBTOR’S PRISONS AND PRISONS
OF WAR
FRENCH WAR PRISONS
AMERICAN WAR PRISONS
WITH REFERENCES TO THOSE OF
OTHER LANDS
_by_
MAJOR ARTHUR GRIFFITHS
_Late Inspector of Prisons in Great Britain_
_Author of
“The Mysteries of Police and Crime
“Fifty Years of Public Service,” etc._
[Illustration: colphon]
THE GROLIER SOCIETY
EDITION NATIONALE
Limited to one thousand registered and numbered sets.
NUMBER 307.
INTRODUCTION
The word prison connotes crime; a place of punishment and detention
where misdeeds are expiated and penalties enforced. A certain sense of
shame attaches to all who have been committed to durance; for according
to the old law, the “natural inherent right of liberty cannot be
surrendered or forfeited unless by the commission of some great or
atrocious crime.” This doctrine was coeval in one country at least,
England, with the foundation of the constitution. Yet the seclusion and
detention of individuals who had done no wrong, was long the rule in
most civilised countries, and many prisons, which are to all intents and
purposes non-criminal, have existed and been constantly filled with
unfortunate persons guilty of no real offence against the law.
Of these there have been two principal classes: The debtors--those who
had become bound to others for the repayment of moneys lent or goods
purchased--and the prisoners of war,--combatants captured in the field
whom the conqueror was entitled to hold in diminution of his enemy’s
strength while hostilities continued. In both cases the right exercised
is that of the strongest and in neither is it defensible, nor has it
been always carried out fairly or humanely. The full acceptance of the
principle, however, has called many large prisons into being which have
gained great notoriety, and a description of them and the methods
pursued forms the contents of this volume.
The British, essentially a commercial people, sought very early to
control the relations between debtor and creditor, and ancient practice
greatly favoured the latter. Every assistance was given him for the
recovery of what was due him. His right to it was so amply acknowledged
that the law went farther and decreed that the debtor who could not pay
in cash was liable in person, so his services were attached to work out
the debt and he was adjudged a serf or slave to the master he could not
otherwise satisfy. The principle was derived from the Mosaic law by
which the defaulter might be sold into bondage with his family, his wife
and his wage-earning children. It was the same in ancient Greece and
Rome, where the creditor had a claim to the person of his debtor. Solon
abrogated this procedure, but it long held in Rome under very barbarous
conditions. When judgment was pronounced there against a debtor, he was
allowed thirty days to liquidate, but if at the end of that period he
was still unable to pay, he was handed over to his creditor, who might
keep him in chains for sixty days and make public exposure of him
proclaiming his failure, with permission finally to sell him or put him
to death. There were no public prisons for debtors in old Rome and the
creditor acted as his own gaoler until milder methods ruled that the
right of private imprisonment was intolerable. Nor was it permissible in
feudal times, when men were continually called upon to bear arms for
their lord and their valid effective strength would have been reduced by
locking them up in gaol.
Imprisonment for debt had its origin in the wish to foster and protect
trade. The creditor was permitted when he had proved his debt to recoup
himself by laying his debtor by the heels. Yet in England the practice
was held by jurists to be an undoubted invasion of the “Bill of Rights.”
It was distinctly laid down that no court of justice, whether at common
law or statute law, possessed the power to deprive an individual of his
personal liberty for anything less than serious and atrocious crime.
Still the right was usurped and exercised by specious means. Sellon says
in his “Practice,” “They obtained jurisdiction by a mere fiction over
actions of debt, detinue and causes of a like nature.” The judgment
pronounced in English courts against a debtor was merely to the effect
that he should pay the debt and costs, and it was incidental thereto
that “if he does not pay an execution will issue against his property.”
But no mention of imprisonment was included in the judgment, for which
there was, in fact, no authority.
This immunity from personal arrest remained in force in England long
after Magna Charta, but a change was introduced by a statute generally
known as that of “Marlbridge,” which enacted as a remedy against
absconding bailiffs and stewards that if any went off with the rents
they had collected for their employers, their bodies might be attached
when caught and they themselves held to serve to make good the loss. A
second statute called that of “Acton Burnell” (11th Edward I), allowed
merchants to arrest their debtors for acknowledged breaches of contract.
The practice was excused by the plea that traders were very constantly
foreigners and very likely to run out of the kingdom. As time passed the
chicanery of the law was further called in to protect the creditor and
the debtors’ offence was held to be a fraudulent act, a _delictum_ or
offence injurious to the plaintiff or a contempt of the court originally
moved to recover the debt. The rule then was that the creditor should
make a sworn affidavit against his debtor and that the court should
summons him to appear and answer the claim. If he neglected to attend,
the disobedience justified a presumption against him and the sheriff was
ordered to distrain his goods so as to force him to come into court. If
this procedure also failed, the defendant’s conduct was construed into
contumacy and a writ of _capias_ was issued for the seizure of his
person.
Herein there was clearly a great stretch of power and an unlawful
interference with personal liberty, yet the procedure was acquiesced in
on account of its general convenience. Still the public suffered in its
broad interests and the debtor was undoubtedly damnified and afterward
horribly ill-used. When the arrest was made, too often arbitrarily, he
was hurried off to gaol where he might be kept in durance almost
indefinitely with small hope of enlargement. He was in much worse case
than the prisoner charged with a crime, for no proper provision was made
for his support and maintenance. While the supposed lawbreaker got the
county allowance, such as it was, the debtor might starve. The latter
was no doubt entitled to claim his “groats,” fourpence per diem, from
his creditor, who was slow to pay, and did so only under compulsion
enforced by legal process, a costly matter generally beyond the means of
the insolvent and necessitous debtor. To die within the walls was easier
than to obtain release, even if he could show that he had been
wrongfully locked up. It cost money to prove that he did not owe the
debt; a suit at law must be begun and carried through, and legal process
was an expensive undertaking wholly beyond his means. This was so well
understood that a recognised and not uncommon form of charity was the
donation and bequest of moneys for the assistance of poor debtors.
Many are the painful details of the misusage of debtors, and of the
power given to one class of the community to oppress the other. The laws
relating to debtor and creditor in England were for centuries unsound,
illogical and unequal, and productive of untold misery to enormous
numbers of innocent people. The great debtors’ prisons of England will
live in history rivalling in their callous neglect and distinctly
inhuman treatment the more notorious receptacles used by high-handed and
cruel tyrants for the coercion of their helpless subjects. The
irresponsible despotic ruler who cast all who offended him into dark
dungeons and hermetically closed _oubliettes_, condemning them to a
lingering and acutely painful death, was no worse than the callous judge
who, enmeshed by complex, senseless machinery, consigned harmless people
to gaol for unlimited terms and under the most irksome conditions,
because unable to meet the smallest and not always the most righteous
pecuniary demands. It was not until John Howard laid bare the secrets of
the prison houses that the whole story was revealed or the unjust
sufferings of the debtor class fully realised.
The status of military prisons the world over has been an indictment
upon humanity. In England, the Hulks and Dartmoor; in France, Verdun and
Bitche; in Russia, Peter and Paul and the Schlüsselburg; in the United
States, Libby Prison, Andersonville and Fort Delaware are sad examples
of the cruelties of war. Idleness, starvation and homesickness conspired
to make the wretched captives prefer death or daring escape to
indefinite torture.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
INTRODUCTION 5
I. THE FLEET PRISON 15
II. ABUSES AT THE FLEET 39
III. FAMOUS DWELLERS IN THE FLEET 76
IV. THE KING’S BENCH PRISON 100
V. LIFE IN THE KING’S BENCH 127
VI. ENGLISH PRISONS OF WAR 154
VII. THE HULKS 179
VIII. AMERICAN PRISONERS IN ENGLAND 199
IX. FRENCH WAR PRISONS 231
X. LATER RECORDS 258
XI. AMERICAN WAR PRISONS 287
List of Illustrations
PRISON HULKS AT PORTSMOUTH _Frontispiece_
THE FLEET BEGGAR _Page_ 28
A FLEET WEDDING “ 68
PRINCETOWN PRISON “ 164
NON-CRIMINAL PRISONS
CHAPTER I
THE FLEET PRISON
The great debtors’ prisons of England notorious for their callous
neglect and inhuman treatment--Denounced by John Howard, the
philanthropist--The Fleet, the King’s Bench and the
Marshalsea--Origin of the Fleet--Early government--Closely
connected with religious and political persecution--Bishop
Hooper--Account of the Fleet at the beginning of the seventeenth
century--Charges of cruelty brought against Warden Alexander
Harris--Charitable bequests--Fees extorted--Prices charged for
chamber-rent--Deplorable state of the prison.
The three principal prisons in London in the fourteenth century were the
Fleet, the King’s Bench and the Marshalsea, but Newgate took precedence
in interest because identified with its earliest history. All have their
peculiar histories full of interesting associations, replete with
memories of famous inmates and striking incidents, and all are worthy of
detailed description. All alike received prisoners for debt and on
occasion, more heinous offenders, especially in the earlier years of
their existence. The old King’s Bench was the peculiar prison for the
Court of that name, but it also took debtors committed by the Court of
Exchequer and the Court of Common Pleas. The Marshalsea Court, so called
from having been originally under the control of the Knight Marshal of
the Royal Household, was at first intended to settle differences between
the lesser servants of the palace, and had its own judge, counsel and
attorneys, but none except members of Clifford’s Inn were permitted to
practise in this court. The jurisdiction of this court extended twelve
miles round Whitehall, excluding the city of London. It also served the
Admiralty Court and received prisoners charged with piracy.
The Fleet prison took its name from the little stream long stigmatised
as the “Fleet[1] Ditch,” the open sewer or water-way which rose in the
eastern ridge of Hampstead Hill, flowed by “Oldbourne” or Holborn under
four bridges to discharge into the Thames on the west side of
Blackfriars bridge. As time passed this ditch, after being deepened once
or twice to allow for water traffic, became more and more pestilential
and was at length filled up and arched over, becoming then the site of
Fleet Market in what is now known as Farringdon Street, on which the
main gates of the prison opened. The building was of great antiquity and
is first mentioned in authentic records about A. D. 1197. A deed of that
date granted it to the safe keeping of one Nathaniel de Leveland and his
son Robert, in conjunction with the King’s Houses at Westminster. It is
stated that the Fleet prison had been the inheritance of the Levelands
since the time of the Norman Conquest. Four years later this same Robert
de Leveland petitioned King John for leave to hand over the wardenship
of the Fleet to Simon Fitz-Robert, archdeacon of Wells, while he,
Leveland, proceeded with the crusaders to the Holy Land. He returned
very shortly afterward, as appears from a grant of moneys made him by
the City of London in 1205, his salary for guardianship of the prison.
His wife Margaret was also granted an allowance as keeper of the
Westminster Royal Houses.
Many entries in the records show that in those early days the Fleet was
a place of detention for offenders of all sorts as well as of ordinary
debtors, and especially of defaulters owing money to the King’s
Exchequer. The Chamberlain of Chester in the reign of Edward I was
imprisoned in the Fleet for a year on account of a debt to the King. A
similar case was that of the sheriffs of Nottingham and Derby, who were
detained in 1347 for sums owing to the Exchequer in the reign of Edward
III; another, that of William de Hedersete, who was answerable for
great “arrears to our lord the King,” through a deceased partner who had
died insolvent. The Fleet received debtors for the Court of Chancery,
and was essentially the King’s prison to which were committed all who
came under his displeasure or failed in their obligations and payments.
When one Guy de Codemore was ordered into exile and did not leave the
country, forthwith he was thrown into the Fleet. French prisoners of war
taken in the capture of Harfleur, in 1423, were brought to the Fleet.
When Sir Geoffrey Poole of Hampshire fell out with a neighbour, the Lord
Privy Seal summoned him to appear before him and committed him to the
Fleet until the King’s (Henry VIII) further pleasure should be known.
Lady Poole won her husband’s pardon this time, but Sir Geoffrey was
again in trouble the very next year for assaulting the parson of Pacton
in the county of Sussex.
In these troublous times various offenders found themselves in the
Fleet. It was a place of penitence for young gentlemen who misbehaved,
such as the son and heir of Sir Mathew Browne of Surrey who, with his
servants, was guilty of arson in a wood; a printer who sold seditious
books was committed to it in 1541; the riotous servants of a gentleman
of the Privy Chamber were laid by the heels in the Fleet. Smugglers and
all who infringed the Customs’ laws were committed to the prison as
debtors to the King. A ship master of Southampton who was “privately
conveying five packets of wool to Flanders without a license” was
arrested and sent to the Fleet, the wool being seized and the captain
fined half the value of his ship. It was made a place for the detention
of state prisoners, for when Cowley, the Master of the Rolls in Ireland,
was under examination in 1541 he was lodged in the Fleet until the King
himself should come to London. This was the fate of the illustrious
knight, Sir John Falstaff, when he bearded the Lord Chief Justice, as
Shakespeare tells us in “Henry IV”:--
“Go carry Sir John Falstaff to the Fleet,
Take all his company with him.”
Poets, dramatists and pamphleteers were from time to time cast into the
Fleet, and it was christened by Pope the “Haunt of the Muses.” Among the
first was Lord Surrey and among the latter Nash, author of the satirical
play “The Isle of Dogs.” Wycherley, the wit and dramatist, who married
the Countess of Drogheda, languished for seven years as a debtor in the
Fleet, and Sir Richard Baker, author of the famous “Chronicles,” wrote
them as a means of subsistence when an impecunious debtor there, where
he died. Francis Sandford, author of the “Genealogical History,” also
died in the prison in 1693. James Howell, who wrote the delightful
“Familiar Letters” during the troublous times of the Civil War, was a
tenant of the Fleet prison in the years 1643 to 1647. In one of his
letters dated from the Fleet in 1643, he describes his arrest one
morning betimes, by five men armed with “swords, pistols and bills,” who
took him to gaol where, as he says, “as far as I can tell I must lie at
dead anchor a long time unless some gentle gale blow thence to launch me
out.” He consoles himself, however, with the thought that all Englishmen
being islanders, are, in effect, prisoners.
The Fleet was arbitrarily used by Sir Richard Empson in the reign of
Henry VII, when that overbearing law officer was indicted for committing
to it, without process, persons accused of murder and high crimes.
Cardinal Wolsey was charged with a like invasion of the liberty of the
subject, “by his power and might contrary to right,” in the case of a
Sir John Stanley who had taken possession of a farm illegally. This man
would not yield but preferred to turn monk in Westminster monastery,
where he died.
Other prisoners were committed to the Fleet for political misdemeanours
and severely dealt with by the ruling powers. It was an offence to marry
the sister of Lady Jane Grey and for this imprisonment was adjudged to
Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. Dr. Donne, who married Sir George
More’s daughter without his knowledge, was laid by the heels; the
penalty of durance overtook Sir Robert Killigrew for entering into
conversation with Sir Thomas Overbury, when returning from a visit to
Sir Walter Raleigh, then a prisoner in the Tower. James I, when
overmuch importuned by the Countess of Dorset, who broke into the Privy
Council Chamber, sent her to the Fleet, and Lucius Carey, Lord Falkland,
was imprisoned for sending a challenge.
Many painful memories hang about the old Fleet prison in connection with
the religious and political persecutions of the fifteenth and sixteenth
centuries. It was crowded with the martyrs to intolerance in the reign
of the bigoted Queen Mary and the victims Elizabeth sacrificed in the
way of reprisals when she came to the throne. The Protestant party had
been in the ascendant under Edward VI and the old religion had been
sharply attacked, so that many eminent Catholic bishops burned at the
stake,--Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and the pious Hooper, whose chief
offence was that being a priest, he had married a wife. He was now
Bishop of Worcester but he had been in the Fleet before, imprisoned by
his own friends for refusing to wear vestments on the occasion of his
consecration. He was soon set free but came again to the Fleet on his
way to the stake.
His own account of this second confinement is to be found in Fox’s Book
of Martyrs. “On the first of September, 1553, I was committed unto the
Fleet from Richmond, to have the liberty of the prison, and within five
days after I had paid for my liberty five pounds sterling to the warden
for fees, who immediately upon the payment thereof complained unto
Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and so I was committed to close
prison one quarter of a year in the lower chamber of the Fleet and used
very extremely. Then by the means of a good gentleman, I had liberty to
come down to dinner and supper; not suffered to speak to any of my
friends, but as soon as dinner and supper were done to repair to my
chamber again. Notwithstanding ... the warden and his wife picked
quarrels with me and complained untruly of me to their great friend the
Bishop of Winchester.
“After one quarter of a year and somewhat more, Babington, the warden,
and his wife fell out with me for the wicked mass; and thereupon the
warden resorted to the bishop and obtained to put me in the ward, where
I have continued a long time, having nothing appointed to me for my bed
but a little pad of straw and a rotten covering with a tick and a few
feathers to lie on, the chamber being vile and stinking, until by God’s
means good people sent me bedding. On one side of the prison is the
stink and filth of the house and on the other side the town ditch (the
Fleet ditch) so that the evil smells have affected me with sundry
diseases. During which time I have been sick and the doors, bars, hasps
and chains being all closed and made fast upon me, I have mourned,
called and cried for help, but the warden when he hath known me many
times ready to die, and when the poor men of the ward have called to
help me, hath commanded the doors to be kept fast and charged that none
of his men should come at me saying, ‘Let him alone, it were a good
riddance of him.’”
Yet the sums extorted from the poor bishop were as high as for a peer of
the realm. A lord, spiritual or temporal, paid the sum of five pounds as
“fyne” for liberty of the house and irons on first coming in. It was a
graduated scale, each item according to rank ranging from ten pounds for
an archbishop, duke or duchess, to twenty-five shillings for an esquire.
The rates were proportionate and laid upon everything: fees for
dismission, for entering the obligation and to everyone concerned in the
administration, porter, “jayler,” chamberlain, charge for commons or
board and for “coyne.” When these fees were not promptly paid the
wretched prisoner was “left to lye in the common prison without ‘bedd’
or ‘dyete,’ subject to the discomfort of low companions and the dangers
of distemper.”
Bishop Hooper sums up his griefs thus: “I have suffered imprisonment
almost eighteen months. My goods, living, friends and comfort taken from
me; the Queen [Mary] owing me by first account eighty pounds or more,
she hath put me in prison and giveth nothing to find me; neither is
there any suffered to come at me whereby I might have relief. I am with
a wicked man and woman [the warden and his wife] so that I see no remedy
(save God’s help) but I shall be cast away in prison before I come to
judgment. But I commit my just cause to God whose will be done whether
it be life or death.” It was death, and as he esteemed it, a glorious
death, that of being burnt at the stake after some more months in
confinement, during which he was frequently examined and called upon to
recant. He was sent down for execution to Gloucester, of which diocese
he had been bishop before his translation to Worcester. He was burned
alive at a slow fire and suffered exceeding torment, but bore it with
the splendid endurance vouchsafed to so many victims to savage laws that
counted difference in religious belief an abominable crime.
We have an authentic account of the interior of the prison early in the
seventeenth century, in the volume published by the Camden Society,
entitled the “Æconomy of the Fleete” by Alexander Harris, at one time
warden there. Charges were brought against him by a number of his
prisoners, of oppression and ill-usage and he is at great pains to make
his defence. The prison, as he describes it, was no doubt identically
the same as that of earlier date. It consisted of “six great rooms and a
courtyard with Tower chambers and Bolton’s ward,” the strongest part of
the prison. There was a further sub-division. One ward of the Tower
chambers was appropriated to females exclusively; another was called the
“Twopenny” ward from the price charged; a third the “Beggars’” ward in
which nothing was demanded and nothing given. At a lower level was the
Dungeon, a receptacle for refractory prisoners where they were kept in
irons and confined in the stocks.
The inmates one and all were entirely at the mercy of the warden, who
inherited his office, or purchased it, and looked to recoup himself by
the fees he extorted from his prisoners. The place was a sort of sorry
hotel kept by a brutal and rapacious landlord, as a life tenant, with a
keen eye to profit, and who gave his lodgers nothing, exacting payment
often exorbitant for even light and air and the barest necessaries. The
English law was so neglectful and inhuman that it made no regular
provision for the imprisoned debtor. A fiction existed that the creditor
was bound to contribute four pence daily to provide him with food, but,
as has been said, as late as 1843 this payment of the “groat” was not
punctually made, if at all, and could only be enforced by slow process
of law at a cost prohibitory to the penniless prisoner, and he was
thrown on his own resources, to starve if without friends or private
means, or in the extreme case to drag out a miserable existence from the
doles of the charitable. Great numbers of hapless folk in the passing
ages were detained for five and twenty, thirty and even forty years, on
account of debts of a few pounds, grown out of a first pitifully small
sum and largely increased by arbitrary charges for fees and maintenance,
which but for unjust arrest and detention would never have existed.
Thousands died of hope deferred or slow starvation and with them
suffered those naturally dependent upon them. It was a calculation well
within the mark that every debtor was saddled with two dependents for
whom he was the stay and breadwinner. Some figures are given by John
Howard when, later, he began his self-sacrificing philanthropic labours,
and may be quoted here to show how numerous were the innocent victims of
the iniquitous and remorseless legal system in force:
“I have found,” he writes in 1777,[2] “by carefully examining sundry
gaols, that upon an average two dependents (by which I mean wives and
children only) may be assigned to each man (debtor) in prison. My
computation is confirmed by the account which we have from the
Benevolent Society at the Thatched House, October 9th, 1777. Since its
institution in 1772 there were yearly about 3,980 discharged debtors who
had 2,193 wives and 6,288 children.” From this he reasoned that as there
was a total of debtors in England and Wales of 4,084, the dependents
would be twice that number.
The sufferings entailed upon poor debtors and their families appealed
forcibly to good people and produced much spontaneous assistance.
Societies were formed having considerable sums at their disposal to be
expended in the relief of poor debtors by the payment of and legal
extinction of small debts. Other sums were subscribed, granted or
bequeathed with the direct intention of purveying to the daily crying
needs of the imprisoned, as moneys held in trust to be expended on bread
and improved dietaries for those who would otherwise starve. These
allowances survived to a comparatively recent date, and when the state
assumed control of all British prisons in 1878, a long list still
existed and was absorbed by the Charity Commissioners. These poor
creatures were active on their own behalf and collected funds by begging
openly in the public streets. This was practised by the so-called
“Running Box;” a prisoner ran about the streets adjacent, carrying a box
which he shook constantly, rattling its contents and imploring alms from
passers by for the poor prisoners in the Fleet. There was also the
prison gate or “grating,” which at the Fleet was a window barred, behind
which always sat an emaciated debtor rattling his money box and ever
chanting dolorously his appeal, “Pray remember the poor prisoners who
have no allowance.” The practice was universal and in Salisbury it went
the length in 1774--as Howard says--of exhibiting two Crown debtors at
the door of the County Gaol, who offered articles manufactured in the
prison for sale. Hard by the outer gate was a row of staples fixed in
the walls and through the rings was run a chain, to each end of which
was padlocked a “Common Side” debtor appealing to the passers by. At
Salisbury there was a custom of sending out felons to roam the city in
quest of alms; two were chained together, one carrying a money box, the
other a sack or basket for food.
No debtor was allowed to benefit by the funds thus obtained until they
had been formally sworn at the “grate,” to the effect that they were not
worth five pounds in the world. After this they were entitled to a share
in the contents of the collection box and to participate in the
donations and bequests of the charitable souls who compassionated their
poverty-stricken, hardly-used brethren.
A detailed list of the benefactors and their gifts will be found in
Howard’s “State of Prisons” (1784), and some are curious enough and may
be quoted, such as the bequest known as “Eleanor Gwynne’s bread,” which
gave the debtors in Ludgate every eighth week five shillings’ worth of
penny loaves, and the gift of Mrs. Elizabeth Mission, the yearly income
of two hundred pounds, three per cent. annuities for free bread and
coals. A mysterious gift was sent for years to the Wood Street Compter,
“nine stone of beef and fourteen quartern loaves,” but its origin was
kept secret until at the death of Princess Caroline its royal origin was
displayed, and the alms was continued by the order of George III during
his life. Mr. Allnutt, who was for many years a prisoner in the
Marshalsea for debt, came in for a good estate while incarcerated and at
his death he left one hundred pounds a year to be applied to the release
of poor debtors. In the Southwark County Gaol, once known as the
[Illustration: _The Fleet Beggar_
_From the painting by Hosmer Shepherd_
At the barred window at the gate of the Fleet prison, it was the
custom for an emaciated debtor to sit, rattling his money-box and
imploring alms. English law made no regular provision for the
imprisoned debtors. The creditor was supposed to contribute
fourpence daily to provide him with food, but this was rarely made
and could only be enforced by process of law.
]
White Lion Prison, there were sixteen legacies and donations, all
applied to the relief of debtors, and “Nell” Gwynne also bequeathed a
sum to be expended in loaves for Common Side debtors.
Returning to the misgovernment of Warden Harris, and the malfeasances
laid to his charge, one of the most serious against him was that he
allowed two prisoners, well-known to be bitter enemies and constantly
quarrelling, to consort together in the same cell or room, that called
the Tower chamber, where one fell suddenly upon the other and stabbed
him so that he presently died. The story told is much confused. It was
not clear who was the aggressor and whether or not the fatal blow was
struck in self-defence. The two prisoners in question were a Sir John
Whitebrook, against whom the warden had a grievance (no less than that
Whitebrook had murderously assaulted him), and the other was one
Boughton, of whose hostile feelings toward Whitebrook the warden
astutely availed himself.
It was stated that Whitebrook was held a close prisoner by the order of
two courts, but that he became violently disturbed, and breaking out
went to the warden’s study, where he found Harris in his gown writing. A
talk ensued as to the quality of the lodging provided and the charge for
the chamber-rent, and as the warden was using the pomice-box to dry his
writing, Sir John Whitebrook struck him on the head with the sharp end
of a hammer, inflicting four wounds upon his skull and other bruises,
before the warden could close with him. Then the assailant was thrown on
his back and the hammer taken from him so that the warden might easily
have beaten out his brains, “but that he was neither wrathful nor
daunted.” When the servants came upon the scene, Whitebrook was seized
by the butler but yet contrived to take out a stiletto and use it
fiercely. The warden’s deputy was stabbed through the hand and the
porter or doorkeeper of the house would have been killed but the
stiletto did not enter. After this the furious creature was carried in
irons to Bolton’s ward.
This affray was part of a settled plan of mutinous disturbance in which
some three score prisoners had combined to break up the strongest wards
and the massive doors of the Tower chamber. At that time Whitebrook and
Boughton agreed amicably and the malcontents set themselves to “bar out”
the warden from the prison and refused all persuasions of the officials
to “unlock” the chambers even at the request of the Lord Chancellor, the
Lord Chief Justice and the Sergeant at Arms, but they yielded to the
Clerk of the Council when sent from the Lords. Whitebrook was still
insubordinate and refused the chamber offered him but seized upon five
others which they “again fortified,” so that the warden “had no command
in that part of the prison.” The authority of the officials was at last
vindicated and the turbulent prisoners were removed into the common
prison, where Boughton and Whitebrook came together and, after a
suspension of hostilities for some months, the fatal quarrel with the
results described took place.
Another serious allegation was that a prisoner, who was in possession of
a large sum in cash, was robbed of it with the connivance of the warden.
A man named Coppin was supposed to have fifty-one pounds concealed in
his bed and orders were issued to remove him to another room and keep
him close while the turnkeys rifled his bed and carried off his
treasure. The answer given was that Coppin was known for six years past
to be quite impecunious and unable “to pay the warden one penny for
meate, drink, lodgings or attendance.” It was proved by the evidence of
other prisoners that when Coppin was transferred from the Tower Chamber
into Bolton’s ward, he took his bedding with him and that he never
complained of having lost “one penny or any other thing.”
There were many more charges against the warden, Alexander Harris, which
he answered speciously and sometimes denied categorically. He was
accused of breaking into prisoners’ rooms, forcing the locks of their
trunks, seizing their goods and cash and applying them to his own use;
but he replied that Peck, the particular complainant, although worth
money, never paid a sou and when set free left the Fleet deeply in the
warden’s debt, having occupied a good room for eight years, for which
he paid not one penny. He was a debtor whom a small sum would discharge,
but “he never paid any man.” Peck’s children were known thieves, who
sought shelter in the Fleet until the gallows got one and the other died
a natural death. Peck himself “purloyned the goods of his
fellow-prisoners and by force, with knife drawn, took away the bedding
of a dead room-mate from the mother who claimed it. Peck with his
accomplices came into the gaoler’s lodge and thrust him out, with his
aged wife, and in resisting grievously bruised the gaoler, offering to
stabb the man that was under the gaoler.”
For these foul abuses Peck was moved to Newgate by order of the Lord
Chief Justice, where he lay for a long time not daring to open his
trunks, for they were full of stolen goods; but the warden called in
neighbours and with the help of some prisoners forced them and
inventoried the contents. The warden of the Fleet found more than enough
to satisfy his debt for eight years’ lodging and fees. Peck’s remaining
property consisted of only three blankets, two pillows, “an ould
covering of darnex” and two bolsters.
Harris was also accused of impounding the moneys paid as fees to the
servant who went as escort with prisoners allowed to go at large for the
day. This curious custom obtained in the Fleet, from the earliest to the
latest times, of permitting a prisoner on payment of a fee to go at
large in the city and even into the country if accompanied by a
“baston” or tipstaff. When the practice began it was understood that no
prisoner was meant to go further than to Westminster or to his counsel,
but by degrees custom enlarged their walks all over London and indeed
far beyond it. In all cases the warden was always responsible for his
prisoner and if he escaped was mulcted to the amount of his debt.
Permission to go abroad was always preceded by the prisoner or his
friends giving security for the amount due. The extent to which this
privilege was conceded is seen by the fact that twenty officers were on
the staff of the prison for the purpose of providing the requisite
escorts. The warden estimated that he paid out to them some eighty
pounds a year, which at twenty pence a day would account for about a
thousand absences, or an average of ten days annually to say a hundred
prisoners, who could afford the luxury of an “exeat.” The warden’s risk
was great, for there were times when the aggregate of the debts owed by
the inmates of the Fleet amounted to two hundred thousand pounds,
besides the State obligations or sums owing to the king. The warden’s
emoluments were necessarily large to cover this liability, and often
exceeded two thousand pounds a year.
Residence beyond the prison within the “Rules,” was another form of
privilege. “The liberty of the rules and the ‘day rules’ of the Fleet
may be traced,” says Mr. Timbs, “to the time of Richard II, when
prisoners were allowed to go at large by bail, or with a ‘baston’
(tipstaff), for nights and days together. This license was paid at
eightpence per day and twelvepence for his keeper that shall be with
him. These were day rules. However they were confirmed by a rule of
court during the reign of James I. The rules wherein prisoners were
allowed to lodge were enlarged in 1824, so as to include the churches of
St. Bride’s and St. Martin’s, Ludgate; New Bridge Street, Blackfriars to
the Thames; Dorset Street and Salisbury Square; and part of Fleet
Street, Ludgate Hill and Ludgate Street, to the entrance of St. Paul’s
Churchyard, the Old Bailey and the lanes, courts, etc., in the vicinity
of the above; the extreme circumference of the liberty being about a
mile and a half. Those requiring the ‘rules’ had to provide sureties for
their punctual reappearance and keeping within the boundaries, and to
pay a percentage on the amount of debts for which they were detained,
which also entitled them to the liberty of the day rules, enabling them
during term or the sitting of the courts of Westminster, to go abroad
during the day, to transact or to arrange their affairs, etc. The Fleet
and the Queen’s Bench were the only prisons in the Kingdom to which
these privileges had for centuries been attached.”
The withholding discharge from those entitled by law to go at large
until all fees and duties were satisfied, an act amounting to false
imprisonment, was a frequent complaint against the warden, as against
all gaolers in the old days. This was answered by the plea that it was a
general rule to detain out-going prisoners until they had satisfied all
just dues, and the imposition of these dues was defended as having been
lawfully originated by Act of Parliament, custom or toleration of the
State and judges of courts. The warden was charged too with making
imprisonment more grievous by keeping prisoners too close, “chaining,
manacling and bolting them with irons,” and this for months and years
without order, warrant or law; but he pleaded that such treatment was
the necessary restraint of dangerous prisoners, “badd” debtors for great
sums, perjurers, “forgerors,” conspirators and such like censured
persons by whom the warden or his servants may be “out-done or slain”
through violence to his person or office, or whose cause was almost
ready for hearing by the Star Chamber.
The use of irons was justified by “ancient continuance” and custom
throughout the Kingdom which many “now in the Fleet do by suffering in
other prisons know to be true.” The fact that a fine was paid to be
freed from them “proveth the use,” said the warden, “and there be some
knights now prisoners that did wear irons for thirty years past for
misdemeanours after they had been fined to be freed from them in the
Fleet.” In support of this use of irons the opinion of the Master of the
Rolls, given twenty-three years previously, is quoted; that if abridged
the discipline of the house would be subverted. “The warden protested
that he did never show spleen or passion in the putting irons on
prisoners for private revenge, not even when several, who were in
execution for great sums, had run away and escaped and the warden was
compelled to pay their debts.”
The warden indignantly denied the charge of starving “close prisoners”
(those kept close), declaring it to be “fabulous and false and to have
no colour;” for food was supplied although no payment was made, and in
one case, when a prisoner “faigned himself sick” from starvation, the
doctor saw in the window the most part of a roasted pullet, left from
the meal before. This complaint of being starved drove a certain
prisoner to break out, behaving himself rather as a “Bedlam frantic than
a gentleman” and with others seeking “for revenge” to the utter dislike
and grief of all in the prison, “with steel chisel, mallets and hammers
cut all the stone work of the door of the Tower Chamber into which the
bolts and locks did shut, so that no door could be shut upon eighteen
prisoners of great weight.”
The exactions of the warden for chamber-rent were the cause of bitter
complaint; the order was that no man should pay more than one shilling
and threepence weekly for a room with bed and bedding, yet the price
demanded was eight shillings, ten, even twenty, per week without
bedding. The warden answered that many of his prisoners desired to have
more ease than ordinary, and sought lodgings in the warden’s own house
and would not lie in the prison. Better accommodation must be paid for
at a higher rate, if they paid at all, but “the misery is that none will
pay at all, but stand upon it they should pay nothing, which is contrary
to right, custom and usage.” Yet these defaulters also brought friends,
wives, children and servants which were no prisoners, to share their
quarters and still would pay nothing for the privilege. On the whole it
was quite a mistake to suppose that the warden’s rents “yielded a mass
of benefit each year, whereof the contrary doth appear, for prisoners
are not the best payers and some lie there many years and die without
paying and others lie many years and then become insolvent.”
It was pleaded that where in old time no rent was charged on the Common
Side, the warden Harris demanded it as if for a private chamber, and
even for the dungeon as well. The answer was that the Common Side was
the king’s ancient prison where for “many hundred years men were
imprisoned there only” and they were not exempt from payment. In the
part called the Tower Chamber there were eight bedsteads by which the
warden had made seventy-one pounds by the year. In one ward, called the
“Twopenny,” the inmates paid twopence a night; only in the “Beggars’”
ward did prisoners pay nothing and receive nothing. In this last the
insolvent debtor was forced to fend for himself; he was dependent upon
chance charity for food, fire, clothing, bedding. Many hundreds
succumbed to starvation and cold and died like dogs upon rotten straw,
their nakedness barely covered by foul scanty rags. Rarely the degraded
and neglected lodgers were suffered to go in search of water to cleanse
the ward, but these as a rule were always filthily dirty.
The state of affairs was horrible within the gaol. No order was kept.
Prisoners quarrelled and fought continually, many ranged the wards and
corridors howling like lunatics all through the night and blowing horns,
so that sleep was impossible to the sick and sorrowful. The lowest women
entered freely, thieves took refuge there and thus avoided arrest;
stolen goods were hidden in secure corners and never discovered. The
prisoners went about armed and used swords and daggers freely in brawls
and fights amongst themselves or in attacking the officers and servants
of the gaol.
CHAPTER II
ABUSES AT THE FLEET
The Fleet, the appointed prison of the Star Chamber--Trial and
conviction of Prynne and of “Freeborn” John Lilburne--Horrors in
the Fleet and other debtors’ prisons reported by Moses Pitt--House
of Commons Committee 1696--Ill treatment of Jacob Mendez Solas, a
Portuguese prisoner--Shameful malpractices of Huggins and
Bambridge--Case of Captain Mackpheadris and of Captain David
Sinclair--Committal of Huggins and Bambridge to Newgate--Their
trial and verdict of not guilty--Hogarth’s great picture of the
Fleet Committee--Howard’s visitation in 1774--Social
evils--Increase of Fleet marriages--Fleet parsons and their
practices--Passing of the Marriage Act and abuses abolished.
The Fleet was the appointed prison for the victims of the Star Chamber
from the time of Elizabeth until toward the end of the reign of Charles
I. It was essentially the King’s Prison to which State offenders might
be committed, and to which debtors to the king on so confessing
themselves might claim transfer from anywhere in the provinces if they
preferred to be imprisoned in the capital. The Star Chamber, that
oppressive, half-secret and wholly irresponsible tribunal, was
accustomed to send to it all persons who fell under its displeasure; and
this view is further confirmed by the circumstance, that whilst during
the reign of Charles I we find it frequently used in this way, we do not
notice any suggestion that the practice was then a new one. The two most
interesting cases that belong to this part of the history of the Fleet
are those of Prynne and Lilburne.
The trial of Prynne in the Star Chamber should be forever memorable as
an example of the reckless disregard for law, justice, common sense and
humanity which can be exhibited by high-handed judges. The following
extracts will give a sufficient idea of the course of the trial and the
mode of determining the sentence:--
“For the book” (the “Histriomastix” wherein he castigated the court and
society severely), said Richardson, the Lord Chief Justice, “I hold it a
most scandalous, infamous libel on the king’s majesty, a most pious and
religious king; on the queen’s majesty, a most excellent and gracious
queen, such a one as this kingdom never enjoyed the like and I think the
earth never had a better,” etc. Then followed quotations from Prynne’s
book, full of “outrageous opinions” on plays and players and dancing and
then the first part of the sentence: “Mr. Prynne, I must now come to my
sentence; I am very sorry, for I have known you long, but now I must
utterly forsake you for I find that you have forsaken God” (the whole
tenor of Prynne’s book was to lead men, in his way, to draw nearer to
God) “ ... and forsaken all goodness. Therefore, Mr. Prynne, I shall
proceed to my censure wherein I agree with my Lord Cottington: first for
the burning of your book in as disgraceful manner as may be, whether in
Cheapside or St. Paul’s Churchyard.... And because Mr. Prynne is of
Lincoln’s Inn, and that his profession may not sustain disgrace by his
punishment, I do think it fit, with my Lord Cottington, that he be put
from the Bar and degraded in the University and I leave it to my lords,
the lords bishop, to see that done; and for the pillory I hold it just
and equal though there were no statute for it. In the case of all such
crime it may be done by the discretion of the Court, so I do agree to
that too. I fine him £5,000 and I know he is as well able to pay £5,000
as one-half of one thousand; and perpetual imprisonment. I do think fit
for him to be restrained from writing--neither to have pen, ink nor
paper--yet let him have some pretty prayer book to pray God to forgive
him his sins, but to write, in good faith, I would never have him. For,
Mr. Prynne, I do judge you by your book an insolent spirit and one that
did think by this book to have got the name of a reformer, to set up the
puritan or separatist faction.”
Sir Edward Coke followed, and among other things said: “Mr. Prynne, I do
declare you to be a schism-maker in the Church, a sedition-sower in the
Commonwealth, a wolf in sheep’s clothing; in a word _omnium malorium
nequissimus_. I shall fine him £10,000, which is more than he is worth
and less than he deserveth. I will not set him at liberty no more than a
plagued man or a mad dog, who though he cannot bite will foam. He is so
far from being a sociable soul that he is not a rational soul; he is fit
to live in dens with such beasts of prey as wolves and tigers like
himself, therefore do I condemn him to perpetual imprisonment as those
monsters that are no longer fit to live among men, nor see light. Now
for corporal punishment, my Lords, I shall burn him in the forehead and
slit him in the nose.... I should be loth he should escape with his
ears, for he may get a periwig which he now so much inveighs against and
so hide them or force his conscience to make use of his unlovely love
locks on both sides.”
These abominable barbarities were all inflicted in public, the branding,
the mutilation, the loss of ears, and afterwards poor Prynne, stout and
unyielding to the last, was remanded to the Fleet where his friends on
visiting him found him “serene in spirit and still cheerfully patient.”
His chief persecutor had been Archbishop Laud who was present in Court
throughout, and this fact was remembered against the cruel prelate when
later he was himself arraigned and sentenced to death. Prynne was a
second time tried and sentenced to lose the hacked remnant of his ears.
A second victim of the Star Chamber’s intolerance of criticism was John
Lilburne, “Freeborn John,” who refused to incriminate himself, standing
on his rights as a freeborn Englishman. His alleged offence (with his
printer Wharton) was the publication of libellous and seditious books,
called “News from Ipswich.” They were both remanded to the Fleet for the
present, but on the 13th February (1638) were again brought up and
pressed to reconsider their determination. Still inflexible, they were
sent back to the Fleet under a fine of £500 each and with an addition in
Lilburne’s case of a remarkable punishment. Foiled in their attempt to
break men’s spirits by fines, imprisonments, brandings, slitting of
noses, etc., another degrading punishment was now borrowed from the
felon-code,--whipping. “To the end,” runs the sentence, “that others may
be the more deterred from daring to offend in the like manner hereafter,
the court hath further ordered and decreed that the said John Lilburne
shall be whipt through the street from the Prison of the Fleet unto the
pillory, to be erected at such time and in such place as this court
shall hold fit; and that both he and Wharton shall be set in the said
pillory and from thence returned to the Fleet.” The pillory was placed
between Westminster Hall gate and the Star Chamber and Lilburne was
whipped from the prison thither “smartly.” Rushworth says, “Whilst he
was whipt at the cart and stood in the pillory, he uttered many bold
speeches against tyranny of bishops, etc., and when his head was in the
hole of the pillory he scattered sundry copies of pamphlets (said to be
seditious) and tossed them among the people, taking them out of his
pocket.” The Star Chamber Council was sitting at the time and was
informed of this last-mentioned incident; when, consistent in their
acts, they ordered him to be gagged immediately, which was done.
Lilburne then stamped with his feet, and the people understood his
meaning well enough,--that he would speak if he were able. This was not
all. At the same sitting of the Council an order was made directing that
Lilburne should be “laid alone with irons on his hands and legs in the
wards of the Fleet, where the basest and meanest sort of prisoners”
were, with other regulations in a similar spirit. This punishment also
was carried into effect for a time, but ultimately brought to a summary
conclusion through an accident in the prison. “Lilburne,” says
Rushworth, “having for some time endured close imprisonment, lying with
double irons on his feet and hands and laid in the inner wards of the
prison, there happened a fire in the prison of the Fleet, near to the
place where he was prisoner, which gave a jealousy that Lilburne, in his
fury and anguish, was desperate and had set the Fleet Prison on fire,
not regarding himself to be burnt with it; whereupon the inhabitants
without the Fleet (the street then not being five or six yards over from
the prison door) and the prisoners all cried, ‘Release Lilburne or we
shall all be burnt!’ and thereupon they ran headlong and made the warden
remove him out of his hold, and the fire was quenched and he remained a
prisoner in a place where he had some more air.” He continued in prison
till November the 3d, 1640, when the Long Parliament began and then he
was released and immediately applied to the House of Lords for redress,
who granted it in the most satisfactory manner, not merely declaring his
sentence and punishment most unjust and illegal, but ordering the
erasure of the proceedings from the files of all courts of justice, “as
unfit to continue on record.” On the breaking out of the Civil War,
Lilburne fought bravely, we need not say on which side. Freeborn John
was one of the most impracticable as well as courageous of enthusiasts
(Marten said of him, if there were none living but himself, John would
be against Lilburne, and Lilburne against John); and the Parliament
pleased him little better than the King; so he wrote against them too,
and was banished upon pain of death if he returned. But Freeborn John
would and did return, and was immediately arraigned at the Old Bailey,
where he was publicly acquitted, “which for joy occasioned a great
acclamation of the people present.” He died a Quaker and was buried in
Moorfields, four thousand citizens and other persons honouring his
remains by following them to the grave.
Atrocities continued to be perpetrated in the Fleet after the
Restoration and the inmates endured grievous ill-treatment. Some of
these were set forth in the reign of William III in a quaint book
printed and published in 1691 by one Moses Pitt, entitled, “The Cry of
the Oppressed,” being a true and tragical account of the unparalleled
sufferings of multitudes of poor imprisoned debtors in most of the gaols
of England under the tyranny of the gaolers and other oppressors. A
chief item was the relation of “some of the barbarities of Richard
Manlove, Esq., the present warden of the Fleet, who has lately been
found guilty of oppression and extortion by a jury of twelve men.”
The said warden “locked up till opened by the worthy Mr. Justice
Lutwyche three score gentlemen and others for non-payment of exclusive
chamber rent, where was a noisome House of Office near their lodgings,
not allowing the king’s beds, but forcing them to procure beds or lie on
the ground: and keeping men dead amongst them for pretended dues till
they infected others.”
“Again Richard Brocas, Esq., was carried down thither for not paying
excessive chamber-rent and his wife and servants denied to bring him
victuals or physic; and when he died the jury summoned, could not but
find his death occasioned by cruelty and they were dismissed by
contrivance with the coroner; and when he was buried, a new jury
summoned, he taken up again and an inquisition returned contrary to law;
and Sir John Pettus of Suffolk, baronet, for not paying extorting dues,
was forced into a little room (now the warden’s coachman’s lodgings) who
being a learned studious person for want of those necessaries, he
melancholy died and was kept many days above ground; his friends being
denied his body till they paid the warden’s pretended dues.”
“Sir William Ducy, Baronet, was kept by the warden in his coach house
till he was drawn out with ropes, being so offensive, that none could
come near him. Symon Edolph, Esq., seventy-eight years of age, the son
of Sir Thomas Edolph of Kent, for not paying forty two pounds demanded
of him, when he profered thirty pounds, which was for a little room
about twelve foot square, after the rate of six shillings per week,
besides payment of the chamberlain, was dragged down to the wards in the
hard weather and there not allowed a bed but must have lain on the
ground had he not (at his own charge) procured one.” “Walter Cowdrey,
gaoler of Winchester, for about two or three months’ chamber rent, was
kept above ground till it caused a sickness in the next room, and his
friends denied to take his body without paying extorting fees. By which
may be perceived the inhumanity of this gaoler, not only to gentlemen
but one of his own trade and calling. Sir George Putsay, sergeant at
law, dying of dropsie; and being a very great fat man, was kept (for
extorting fees) till a judge’s warrant was procured for his delivery.
Moses Pitt of London, bookseller, being committed prisoner to the Fleet,
April the 20th 1689, lodged on the gentleman’s side in a chamber which
the warden values at eight shillings per week, though of right it’s but
two shillings and fourpence, the rest being exaction (and the said Moses
Pitt at the time of writing of this has two chambers within the rules of
the Kings-Bench for one shilling three pence per week, twice as good as
the said chamber), he the said Pitt continued in the said chamber from
the said 20th of April 1689 to the 26th of August 1690 which was seventy
weeks and three days, in which time the said Pitt had paid the warden
his commitment fee, two pounds four shillings and sixpence, where as
there is but fourpence due: Pitt also paid him fourteen shillings for
two day-writs, and was to pay him eight shillings and fourpence at the
going out of the gate, (every prisoner there in execution pays eleven
shillings and twopence a day when he goes abroad about his business) but
the said warden kept his said fourteen shillings and would not let him
go out of the gates of the prison by which the said Pitt lost his
tryals, which was many thousand pounds damage to him.” This Moses Pitt
was once a rich man and his printing works were established in a large
house called “the theatre” in Westminster, which he rented from Dr.
Fell, Bishop of Oxford, and where in the reign of Charles II he brought
out an atlas in twelve folio volumes and a great quantity of Bibles,
Testaments and prayer books reducing their price by more than half which
he claimed, “did at that time great good, Popery being likely to
overwhelm us.” Mr. Pitt embarked upon extensive building speculations
in Westminster and erected a great house in Duke Street which he let to
the noted Judge Jeffreys, but failed to secure a clear title to the
property. Then his creditors came down upon him and he became involved
in a mesh of borrowings and their attendant lawsuits which landed him at
length in the Fleet prison. His hardships led him to prepare his book
denouncing the evils of imprisonment for debt; and to obtain facts he
addressed a circular to sixty-five provincial prisons. The result was a
“small book as full of tragedies as pages; which were not enacted in
foreign nations among Turks and infidels, Papists and Idolaters, but in
this country by our own countrymen”--such tragedies as no age or country
can parallel.
He tells the story of a Liverpool surgeon who was so reduced by poverty,
neglect and hunger that he lived on the mice caught by his cat. When he
sought redress he was beaten and put in irons. A debtor in Lincoln who
sought restitution of a purse taken from him was “treated to a ride on
the jailer’s coach;” in other words placed upon a hurdle and dragged
about the prison yard with his head on the stones whereby he “became not
altogether so well in his intellects as formerly.” One unfortunate
wretch who dared to send out of the prison for food had the thumbscrews
put on him and was chained by the neck on tip-toe against a wall. The
frontispiece of this old book gives a quaint representation of the
interior of the Fleet prison.
These complaints led to the appointment of a committee of the House of
Commons in 1696 and a report of many great irregularities, chief among
them that the warden will let the prison for the sum of £1,500 to a
sub-tenant on the understanding that there would be some two thousand
prisoners always in custody who would pay fees to the value of twice the
rent. A second report, presumably from the same committee, disclosed a
widespread system of discharges not by regular legal process but on the
payment of bribes and it was unanimously agreed that the management of
the Fleet was “very prejudicial to personal credit and a great grievance
to the whole kingdom.”
No remedy was applied to these glaring evils, which, on the contrary,
constantly increased until they culminated in the horrible scandals laid
bare by the Parliamentary Committee appointed in 1727 to inquire into
the conduct of the then deputy warden, the infamous Bambridge, who
leased the governorship from the real warden, the no less notorious
Huggins. The most shameful malpractices had been rife since the
abolition of the Star Chamber which had reserved the place entirely for
debtors and prisoners for contempt of the Courts of Chancery, Exchequer
and Common Pleas. It seemed that whereas the fees ought to have ceased
when the prison was limited in its uses, the warden had wielded an
unwarrantable and arbitrary power in extorting them at more exorbitant
rates, enforcing payment by loading the prisoners with irons “worse
than if the Star Chamber was still existing.”
The course pursued in every case where the incoming prisoner possessed
means, was much the same. On arrest he was first conveyed to a Sponging
House, one of three attached to the Fleet, beyond the walls, all
belonging to the warden and kept by one or other of his tipstaffs. Here
the charges were so ruinous that the debtors aghast begged to be taken
at once to the Fleet itself, where at least prices were regulated by
rules. Transfer was refused until a heavy fee had been exacted and while
the prisoner still demurred his bill in the Sponging House steadily grew
in total. When at last he was removed into the Fleet he had been bled
freely, in fees alone to the amount of some fifty odd pounds. Here fresh
exactions were imposed and the debtor, refusing to submit to insatiable
demands, was sent back to the Sponging House, where a virulent small-pox
was raging at the time. The prisoner, unvaccinated in those days, and in
terror of his life, implored the ruthless warden to again remove him but
could obtain no mercy and presently, taking the fell disease, died of
it, leaving his affairs in hopeless confusion and a wife with a family
of young children to starve. This was the true story of Mr. Robert
Castell, a gentleman and a scholar, by profession an architect, whose
original liabilities had been small and whose ruin and death were to be
laid at Bambridge’s door.
Another story of like complexion was that of the Portuguese Jacob Mendez
Solas, animadverted upon by the Parliamentary committee. This hapless
foreigner enlodging in the Fleet was one day called into the Gate House
or lodge, where he was seized, fettered and removed to Corbett’s
Sponging House, whence after weeks of detention he was carried back into
the prison. Extortion had been the object of this procedure and as the
Portuguese still resisted, his life was made intolerable to him. He was
turned now into a dungeon, known as the “strong room of the Master’s
Side,” which is thus described in the Committee’s report:--
“The place is a vault, like those in which the dead are interred, and
wherein the bodies of persons dying in the said prison are usually
deposited, till the coroner’s inquest hath passed upon them. It has no
chimney nor fireplace, nor any light but what comes over the door, or
through a hole of about eight inches square. It is neither paved nor
boarded; and the rough bricks appear both on the sides and top, being
neither wainscoted nor plastered. What adds to the dampness and stench
of the place is its being built over the common shore and adjoining to
the sink and dunghill, where all the nastiness of the prison is cast. In
this miserable place the poor wretch was kept by the said Bambridge,
manacled and shackled, for near two months. At length, on receiving five
guineas from Mr. Kemp, a friend of Solas’s, Bambridge released the
prisoner from his cruel confinement. But though his chains were taken
off, his terror still remained, and the unhappy man was prevailed upon
by that terror not only to labour gratis for the said Bambridge, but to
swear also at random all that he hath required of him. And this
committee themselves saw an instance of the deep impression his
sufferings had made upon him; for, on his surmising, from something
said, that Bambridge was to return again as warden of the Fleet, he
fainted and the blood started out of his mouth and nose.”
The same report continued: “Captain John Mackpheadris, who was bred a
merchant, is another melancholy instance of the cruel use the said
Bambridge hath made of his assumed authority. Mackpheadris was a
considerable trader, and in a very flourishing condition, until the year
1720, when, being bound for large sums to the Crown, for a person
afterward ruined by the misfortunes of that year, he was undone. In
June, 1727, he was prisoner in the Fleet, and although he had before
paid his commitment fee, the like fee was extorted from him a second
time; and he having furnished a room, Bambridge demanded an extravagant
price for it, which he refused to pay, and urged that it was unlawful
for a warden to demand extravagant rents, and offered to pay what was
legally due. Notwithstanding which, the said Bambridge assisted by the
said James Barnes and other accomplices, broke open his room and took
away several things of great value, amongst others, the King’s Extent
in aid of the prisoner (which was to have been returned in a few days,
in order to procure the debt to the Crown, and the prisoner’s
enlargement), which Bambridge still detains. Not content with this,
Bambridge locked the prisoner out of his room and forced him to lie in
the open yard called the ‘Bare.’ He sat quietly under his wrongs, and
getting some poor materials, built a little hut, to protect himself as
well as he could from the injuries of the weather. The said Bambridge,
seeing his unconcernedness, said, ‘---- him! he is easy! I will put him
into the strong room before to-morrow!’ and ordered Barnes to pull down
his little hut, which was done accordingly. The poor prisoner, being in
an ill state of health and the night rainy, was put to great distress.
Some time after this he was (about eleven o’clock at night) assaulted by
Bambridge, with several other persons, his accomplices, in a violent
manner; and Bambridge, though the prisoner was unarmed, attacked him
with his sword, but by good fortune was prevented from killing him; and
several other persons coming out upon the noise, they carried
Mackpheadris for safety into another gentleman’s room; soon after which
Bambridge, coming with one Savage and several others, broke open the
door, and Bambridge strove with his sword to kill the prisoner, but he
again got away and hid himself in another room. The next morning the
said Bambridge entered the prison with a detachment of soldiers and
ordered the prisoner to be dragged to the lodge and ironed with great
irons. On which he, desiring to know for what cause and by what
authority he was to be so cruelly used, Bambridge replied, it was by his
own authority, and ---- him, he would do it and have his life. The
prisoner desired that he might be carried before a magistrate, that he
might know his crime before he was punished; but Bambridge refused, and
put irons upon his legs which were too little, so that in forcing them
on, his legs were like to have been broken and the torture was
impossible to be endured. Upon which the prisoner complaining of the
grievous pain and straitness of the irons, Bambridge answered that he
did it on purpose to torture him. On which the prisoner replying that by
the law of England no man ought to be tortured, Bambridge declared that
he would do it first and answer for it afterwards; and caused him to be
dragged away to the dungeon, where he lay without a bed, loaded with
irons so close riveted that they kept him in continual torture and
mortified his legs. After long application his irons were changed and a
surgeon directed to dress his legs; but his lameness is not, nor can be,
cured. He was kept in this miserable condition for three weeks, by which
his sight is greatly prejudiced and in danger of being lost.
“The prisoner upon this usage, petitioned the judges; and after several
meetings and a full hearing, the judges reprimanded Mr. Huggins and
Bambridge and declared that a gaoler could not answer the ironing of a
man before he be found guilty of a crime, but it being out of term, they
could not give the prisoner any relief or satisfaction.”
There were other cases, that, for instance, of Captain David Sinclair,
an old and distinguished officer whom hard fate and impecuniosity had
consigned to a debtors’ prison. Bambridge was his enemy and openly
declared that he would have Sinclair’s blood. On the king’s birthday, a
jovial occasion, on which he thought to find the captain elated with
wine, Bambridge entered his room and struck him with a cane. Then
turning to the soldiers of the escort, who came armed with musket and
bayonet, Bambridge ordered them to carry Sinclair to the strong room and
to stab him if he made any resistance. Confinement in this dark, damp
dungeon all but cost Sinclair his life; he lost the use of his limbs and
his memory went; he was left for four days without food and had he not
been removed he would certainly have died. An unfortunate Spanish
merchant, Mr. John Holder, who was confined in the Common Side under
Bambridge, was seized with a fatal illness from the miseries and
privations he endured.
It was said in the report already quoted that Bambridge, when he
manacled Solas, was the first to put a debtor in irons. This is
manifestly erroneous as is seen in the account of the charges brought
against warden Harris in 1620, for misusage of prisoners in the Fleet.
But this brutal gaoler, Bambridge, was guilty of many and great
enormities. He was proved to have defied writs of habeas corpus; to have
stolen or misappropriated charitable bequests; to have bribed or
terrified lawyers who came to champion ill-used prisoners. When Sir
William Rich was behind-hand in his chamber-rent, Bambridge threatened
to fire at him, slashed at him with a hanger, and struck him with a
stick. Rich was then thrown into the strong room, heavily ironed, and
kept there in close confinement accused of having attacked the warden
with a shoemaker’s knife, which he did, but in self-defence.
Huggins and Bambridge, in their greedy desire to increase their
emoluments, invented an astute device, that of allowing, even helping
debtors to escape from custody, whom they presently rearrested, and
having made them pay forfeit, pocketed the amounts. To facilitate this a
false gate was broken through the prison wall, through which the
fugitives were released with the co-operation of the warden, and thus
the forfeit was exacted many times over.
The same means of exit was utilised by a smuggler, in custody for
revenue fraud, who passed in and out on his own concerns, and to do
business for Mr. Huggins. This man, by name Dumay, made frequent voyages
to France, where he bought quantities of wine for Huggins and paid for
them by bills drawn upon one of the tipstaffs, which when due were
punctually met. Confidence was thus established and the traffic was
greatly developed, but when an unusually large deal had been effected
the tipstaff declined to accept the bill and the French wine merchant
was swindled out of his goods and his money.
This inquiry of 1727 resulted in the committal of both Huggins and
Bambridge to the gaol of Newgate, and their prosecution. A bill was
introduced into Parliament to remove both men from their posts and to
revise the management of the Fleet; but when these wretches were
arraigned for their misdeeds the evidence was deemed insufficient and
they escaped with a verdict of not guilty. The episode is especially
interesting as having inspired Hogarth to paint the remarkable picture
of the Fleet Prison Committee, which is said to have first brought the
painter into fame. Speaking of this picture, Horace Walpole in his
“Anecdotes of Painting” says: “The scene is the Committee; on the left
are the instruments of torture. A prisoner in rags half starved appears
before them. The poor man has a good countenance that adds to the
interest. On the other hand is the inhuman gaoler. It is the very figure
that Salvator Rosa would have drawn for Iago at the moment of
detection,--villainy, fear and conscience are mixed on his yellow and
livid countenance. His lips contracted by tremor, his legs step back as
though thinking to make his escape--one hand is thrust precipitately
into his bosom, the fingers of the other are catching uncertainly at his
button-holes. If this was a portrait it is the most striking that ever
was drawn; if not it is still finer.” There is no question that this is
Bambridge, who lingered on for twenty years disgraced and despised and
in the end committed suicide by cutting his throat.
We have two views of the interior of the Fleet and its general aspect
from two eye witnesses at a later date than the exposure of Huggins and
Bambridge. One is John Howard’s account of his visitation in 1774; the
other a volume of verse “The Humours of the Fleet, an humorous and
descriptive poem written by a gentleman of the College,” published in
London in 1749. The author was the younger Dance, son of Mr. Dance, the
architect, who rebuilt the gaol of Newgate after its destruction by the
Lord George Gordon rioters in 1780. It is described as “The Prince of
Prisons” standing “close by the borders of a slimy flood,” a structure
in whose extended oblong boundaries are shops and sheds and stalls of
all degrees, for the sale of everything from trinkets to pork and beans.
The inmates are next described:
“Without distinction intermixed is seen
A squire quite dirty, a mechanic clean;
The spendthrift new who in his chariot rolled
All his possessions gone, reversions sold.
Now mean, as once profuse, the stupid sot
Sits by a Runner’s[3] side and shules a pot.”
The first ceremony for the newcomer is to sit or stand for his portrait:
“Around you gazing jiggers[4] swarm,
Your form and features strictly they survey
Then leave you if you can, to run away.”
Then follows the description of the chamberlain “who settles the price
of quarters; one pound six and light weekly for the best room, or as low
as half a crown per month.”
“Take my advice I’ll help you to a chum;
With him you’ll pay but fifteen pence a week,”
and so on page after page illustrating the daily life, sorrows, dirt and
rags; the sports--backgammon, Mississippi, portobello, racquets,
billiards, fives; increasing drought quenched by gin; rough horseplay
with newcomers who are borne to the pump and drenched, the whole
presented in a picture crowded with the ragged, slipshod figures
standing treat to the tipstaffs and one another. The poem concludes with
the closing of the prison when
“The warning watchman walks about
With dismal tone repeating ‘who goes out.’”
The cry is heard from half-past nine till the clock of St. Paul’s
strikes ten, very like the familiar shout on shipboard “Any more for the
shore.” The final “all told” was the signal to shut and lock the gate
after which no person was permitted to pass either in or out.
The philanthropist’s inspection, naturally, was a more serious matter,
and his account of what he found in the Fleet was a striking item in his
general indictment of British prisons. The Fleet at that date held three
hundred and twenty-four inmates in the “House” and one hundred resided
within the “Rules.” The prison buildings were partly old and partly new,
having been rebuilt a few years previous. It now consisted of a long
house (198 feet) facing a narrow courtyard and having four stories or
galleries with a basement or cellar floor called Bartholomew Fair, which
was appropriated to the Common Side or the solvent pauper debtors. In
the galleries the rooms opened on either side of a central passage,
narrow and dark, with one window at each end. The rooms were for the
most part 14½ feet in length by 12½ feet wide, and 9½ feet in height,
all provided with fire-place and chimney, and lighted with one window.
On the ground-floor or Hall Gallery were a chapel, a tap-room, a
coffee-room and eighteen chambers for prisoners; on the first floor
twenty-five rooms, on the second twenty-seven, with prisoners’
committee-room, the infirmary and a “dirty billiard table, kept by the
prisoners who slept in that room.” This billiard table was open to
outsiders, and Howard saw “several butchers and others from the market
playing, who were admitted as at any public house. Besides the
inconvenience to prisoners,” says Howard, “the frequenting a prison
lessens the dread of being confined in one.” The gallery rooms on the
top floor were reserved for Master’s Side debtors who paid the warden’s
rent, nominally, at the rate of one shilling and three pence weekly, a
price liable to be much increased. They fell to prisoners in succession,
and when any became vacant it was taken by the first on the warden’s
lists who had paid his full entrance fee. If all rooms were occupied, a
newcomer must hire of some tenant a part of his room or shift as he
could. The same practice obtained some fifty years later as described by
Charles Dickens when telling of the imprisonment of Mr. Pickwick.
The discipline was very lax, due to the unrestrained admission of all
classes, male and female, the latter often of very indifferent
character. “Social evenings” were of common occurrence; on Monday nights
a wine club, on Thursdays a beer club, each lasting until one or two in
the morning. “I need not say,” remarks Howard, “how much riot these
meetings occasioned, and how the sober prisoners are annoyed by them.”
Master’s Side debtors, mostly well disposed, respectable people, were
moved to maintain order and better government and formed themselves into
a committee to establish rules and insist upon their observance. This
committee was chosen every month and consisted of three members from
every gallery, with a president and secretary. They met every Thursday
in their own committee room and at other times when summoned by the
cryer (the servant of the prison who called persons from within when a
visitor came to see them), at command of the president or a majority of
their own number. This committee raised contributions by assessment,
heard complaints, determined disputes, advised fines and seized goods
for payment. It claimed to speak the sense of the whole House. The
president held the cash and the committee disposed of it. It appointed a
scavenger who washed the galleries once a week, watered them and swept
them daily, every morning before eight, and who swept the yards twice a
week, and lit the lamps all over the House. The cryer’s fee for calling
a prisoner to any stranger who visited the prison was one penny; from a
complainant who desired that the committee might be brought together he
got a fee of twopence. The tax levied on a newcomer, besides the two
shillings for “garnish” to be spent in wine, was one shilling and
sixpence to be appropriated for the use of the House. Distinction of
rank was overlooked in the Fleet, for Common Side debtors were confined
to their own apartments in Bartholomew Fair and were forbidden to
associate with “the lawmakers.”
There were public regulations also in force dating, it was said, from
the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Among other orders the warden was
empowered to appoint turnkeys with arms, to prevent persons from
bringing arms past the gate, and to watch if any escape was being
agitated. Such as attempted to escape or greatly misbehaved might be
shut up in a close room or dungeon, which must be certified to by four
judges as “boarded, wholesome and dry.” Clandestine Fleet marriages were
forbidden, but to very little purpose, seeing that they were constantly
performed. (Fleet marriages of imprisoned debtors were legitimate and
openly solemnised in the Fleet Prison chapel till 1686.) Other rules
ignored were those against the demand for “garnish” and that which
forbade the detention of a debtor in a Sponging House, an order
constantly contravened by Huggins and Bambridge, as we have seen. A
portion of the infirmary (two rooms) was to be allotted to Common Side
debtors and it was strictly prescribed that no prisoner should be
obliged to sleep in a bed with any one diseased. A coroner’s inquest
must be held upon any dead prisoner and the body delivered to friends
free of cost, but these very important provisions were constantly
evaded.
A chaplain was appointed to the Fleet, his salary of thirty pounds per
annum being paid by the warden, supplemented by a fee of twopence to
fourpence per head from each prisoner. The Fleet had its own chapel, in
which marriages might be legally performed, the earliest on record being
that of a prisoner, Mr. George Lester, who in 1613 married a woman of
good fortune, Mistress Babington by name. In a contemporary letter, it
is stated that “she is a woman of good wealth, so that now the man will
be able to live and maintain himself in prison, for hitherto he has been
of poor estate.” We are not told why his rich wife did not proceed to
pay his debts and secure his enlargement. Soon after this, the system of
clandestine and irregular marriages, which afterwards became notorious,
began to be practised within the Fleet and the Rules beyond. The
practice seems to have originated in the desire to escape the expense
attending a regular wedding at which it was the fashion to make a great
show in feasting and entertainment lasting several days. Besides the
costs of marriage settlements, presents, pin-money and so forth had to
be met. To avoid all this wasteful outlay, the weddings became private
and unpretending. A French traveller in England, one Henri Mission,
describes one of these ordinary or incognito marriages,--
“The bridegroom, that is to say, the husband that is to be, and the
bride, who is the wife that is to be, conducted by their parents and
accompanied by two bridesmen and two bridesmaids go early in the morning
with a license in their pocket and call up Mr. curate and his clerk,
tell them their business; are married with a low voice, and the doors
shut; tip the minister a guinea and the clerk a crown; steal softly out,
one one way, and t’other another, either on foot or in coaches; go
different ways to some tavern at a distance from their own lodgings, or
to the house of some trusty friend, there have a good dinner and return
home at night as quietly as lambs. If the drums and fiddles have notice
of it, they will be sure to be with them by day break, making a horrible
racket, till they have got ‘the pence;’ and, which is worst of all, the
whole murder will come out.”
Although the law prescribed that marriages should be only performed by
licenses or the giving out of banns, there were many churches and
chapels towards the end of the seventeenth century which claimed to be
“peculiar” and exempt from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London. But
the rector of one of these, St. James, Duke’s Place, was proceeded
against under the ecclesiastical law and suspended from duty for three
years on a charge of having married persons without banns or license.
Other churches claimed to be “peculiar” such as the chapel of Holy
Trinity, Minories, on the ground that it was a crown living and entitled
to the same privileges as Westminster Abbey or the Deanery of Windsor;
so did the chapels of the Tower and the Savoy as royal chapels. The
number of chapels where irregular marriages took place was about ninety,
and it became necessary to check them by obliging incumbents to keep
registers under a penalty of one hundred pounds, and the same amount
was levied on them for every irregular marriage. This penalty was
extended to the gaolers or keepers of prisons who permitted marriages to
be performed within the walls, which had now become a very common
practice in the metropolis. These Fleet parsons were not clergymen, but
mere laymen who assumed the garb of cassock, gown and bands. These sham
marriages were solemnised in a room in the Fleet, called the “Lord
Mayor’s chapel,” where the prison parson received the couples bent on
matrimony. The officiating parson was Mr. John Mottram who transacted an
enormous amount of business, and performed in one year alone as many as
two thousand two hundred marriages. He was convicted of unlawful
practices and fined £200 but he was not deterred from repeating them, or
giving false dates to their certificates to suit the desire and
convenience of the contracting parties. Pennant in his account of London
(1793) tells us that as he walked the streets near the Fleet prison he
was invited to walk in and be married. The sign over the door portrayed
a male and female hand joined with the words, “Marriages performed
within.” A tout or “plyer” as he was called, stood there soliciting the
passers-by and swearing that his employer would do the job cheaper than
any one else. Sometimes the parson himself, temporarily at large, was to
be seen walking before his shop: “A squalid, profligate figure, clad in
a tattered plaid night-gown, with a fiery face, ready to couple you for
a dram of gin or a roll of tobacco.”
These Fleet parsons drove a roaring trade. There were a great number of
them and a long list is given by no means exhaustive in Burns’ “History
of Fleet Marriages,” of some sixty in all who flourished between 1681
and 1752. Among the most notorious was John Gaynam who was commonly
known as the “Bishop of Hell.” He is credited with having performed two
thousand marriages within a few years. In person he was of commanding
presence and swaggered along Fleet Street in his silk gown and white
flowing bands drawing admiring attention to his handsome rubicund face.
He was always smug and self-satisfied. Nothing, and no one, could put
him out of countenance. When in the witness box to give evidence in a
trial for bigamy, a cross examining counsel asked him if he was not
ashamed to confess that he had made so many clandestine marriages, he
laughingly replied, “_Video meliora deteriora sequor_.” When someone
chastised him with a stick he took his punishment with well bred
composure. It was said of him that although he was bishop of an
extremely hot diocese he was personally remarkable for his coolness in
demeanour and language. Another popular Fleet parson was Daniel Wigmore,
who was not satisfied with his marriage fees, but was convicted in 1738
before the Lord Mayor of selling spirituous
[Illustration: _A Fleet Wedding_
_From the picture by Hogarth_
The Fleet Prison was a popular place for clandestine marriages in
the seventeenth century, and the Fleet parsons, so-called, did a
thriving business. Two thousand marriages were performed within a
few years by one of the parsons entitled the “Bishop of Hell,” who
was, like most of them, merely a layman assuming cassock and gown.
Bridegrooms were kept on hand for emergency, and a “plyer” stood
outside soliciting business for his employer, the “parson.”
]
liquors contrary to the law. Edward Ashwell, known as the “archdeacon”
was a third. He was a notorious scoundrel, a bigamist three times over
who yet dared to preach in church when he could get a pulpit. This Dr.
Ashwell died within the Rules of the Fleet in 1746 and was recorded as
“the most noted operator in marriages since the death of the
never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Gaynam.”
Walter Wyatt did a very profitable business and made a large income out
of his clandestine marriages, no less then £700 a year, equal to four
times that sum in our modern money. On the cover of one of his registers
still preserved, he gives notice that “Mr. Wyatt, minister of the Fleet,
is removed from the Two Sawyers, at the corner of Fleet Lane (with all
the register books) to the Hand and Pen near Holborn Bridge, where
marriages are solemnised without impositions.” But there seem to have
been other establishments which traded on Wyatt’s sign, probably because
he was so prosperous. Joshua Lilley kept the “Hand and Pen” near Fleet
Bridge. Matthias Wilson’s house of the same sign stood on the bank of
the Fleet ditch; John Burnford had a similar name for his house at the
foot of Ludgate Hill and Mrs. Balls also had an establishment with the
same title.
One of these “Hand and Pen” public houses was kept by a turnkey of the
Fleet prison, who had a room in his house for solemnising marriages with
the assistance of mock clergymen, one of whom he pretends in one of his
handbills to be a “gentleman regularly bred at one of our universities
and lawfully ordained according to the institutions of the Church of
England and ready to wait on any person in town or country.”
There was a Peter Symson who performed marriages from 1731 to 1754, and
who claimed to have been educated at the University of Cambridge and to
have been late chaplain to the Earl of Rothes. His chapel was at the
“Old Red Hand and Mitre” three doors from Fleet Lane. When examined in
court on one occasion, he declared that he had been ordained in
Grosvenor Square Chapel by the Bishop of Winchester.
Another Fleet parson was William Dare, who had so large a connection
that he employed a curate. John Lands had been chaplain on board a
man-of-war and boasted that he had “gloriously distinguished himself in
defence of his King and Country.” His chapel was at the corner of Half
Moon Court, at the corner of the Old Bailey. Lands advertised that he
was a regularly bred clergyman and no mere Fleet parson, and “conducted
everything with the utmost decency and regularity such as shall always
be supported in law and equity.”
There was competition further afield and in such outwardly respectable
chapels as that of Mayfair, built in 1736, to meet the needs of a
growing neighbourhood. It was situated in Chapel Place off Curzon
Street, and was pulled down in 1900, to give place to the imposing town
mansion of the Duke of Marlborough, which now bears the name of
Sunderland House. Its first incumbent was the Rev. Alexander Keith, a
properly ordained clergyman who did a great trade in irregular
marriages. It was in Mayfair Chapel that the Duke of Hamilton wedded the
youngest of the beautiful Gunnings, in such indecent haste that the
ceremony was performed with a ring from the bed curtain at half an hour
past midnight. Besides the Mayfair Chapel, Mr. Keith had a small private
chapel of his own near Hyde Park Corner and he was so active in the two
that he interfered greatly with the vested interests of the neighbouring
clergy. One of these, Dr. Trebeck, rector of St. George’s, Hanover
Square, brought an action against him and he was sentenced to
excommunication. Keith retaliated by excommunicating the Bishop of
London, the judge who had condemned him and the prosecutor Dr. Trebeck,
but nothing came of it all except a warrant for Mr. Keith’s
apprehension, on which he was committed to the Fleet prison. He lay
there for some fifteen years, during which other parsons performed his
functions, notably the Peter Symson mentioned above. Keith, in the end,
fell into great poverty, for the Marriage Act introduced by Lord
Hardwicke in 1754 summarily put a stop to these illegal practices. The
new law came into force on March 25th, 1754, but the evil custom died
hard. On the day before, according to one register alone, two hundred
and seventeen couples were married in the Fleet and its purlieus and
sixty-one in Mayfair Chapel.
Keith, in his later days, made a piteous appeal for charity. In an
advertisement to the compassionate he used the following plea:--“By the
late Marriage Act the Rev. Mr. Keith from a great degree of affluence is
reduced to such a deplorable state of misery as is much better to be
conceived than related, having scarce any other thing than bread and
water to subsist on. It is to be hoped he will be deemed truly
undeserving of such a fate and the public are assured that not
foreseeing such an unhappy stroke of fortune as the late Act, he yearly
expended almost his whole income (which amounted to several hundred
pounds per annum) in relieving not only single distressed persons, but
even whole families. Mr. Keith’s present lamentous situation renders him
perhaps as great an object of charity himself.”
No record has been preserved of the response made to this appeal or of
the amount of assistance, if any, accorded to him. His distress did not,
however, prevent him from making a joke of it and Horace Walpole tells
in one of his letters of a “_bon mot_ of Keith’s the marriage broker.”
“So the Bishops,” he said, “will hinder my marrying. Well, let ’em, but
I’ll be revenged; I’ll buy two or three acres of ground and I’ll under
bury them all.” At the same time he had the impudence to take high
ground in a pamphlet he wrote about this date. “If the present Act in
the form it now stands,” he said, “should (which I am sure is
impossible) be of any service to my country, I shall then have the
satisfaction of having been the occasion of it, because the compilers
thereof have done it with a pure design of suppressing my chapel, which
makes me the most celebrated man in this kingdom though not the
greatest.”
Some of the outrages and infractions of the law due to these irregular
Fleet marriages may be specified. An heiress, Mistress Anne Leigh, was
decoyed in 1719 from her friends in Buckinghamshire, carried forcibly to
the Fleet, married against her consent and barbarously ill-used by the
abductors. In 1737 one Richard Leaver, being tried for bigamy, swore
that he knew nothing of his first wife to whom he had been married in
the Fleet when drunk. Bridegrooms were kept on hand. A man was married
four times over under different names and each time paid a fee of no
more than five shillings. Couples were tied together without giving more
than their Christian names. The certificate was dated as the parties
desired, or to please the parents. Sometimes a newly married woman ran
across Ludgate Hill in her shift under a popular delusion that her
husband would not be responsible for her antenuptial debts. Marriages
were kept secret for various reasons; one was that if the woman was a
widow she wished to save a jointure allowed her so long as she did not
remarry.
It has been said that irregular marriages were resorted to for ceremony
and despatch. Members of all classes, high and low, sought the
assistance of the Fleet parson--aristocrats, celebrities, roughs and
desperadoes, peers and paupers. Among the first were Lord Abergavenny,
the Honourable John Bourke, afterward Lord Mayo, Sir Marmaduke Gresham,
Lord Montague, afterward Duke of Manchester, the Marquis of Annandale
and Henry Fox who became Lord Holland, and of whose marriage Horace
Walpole wrote: “The town has been in a great bustle about a private
match but which by the ingenuity of the ministry has been made politics.
Mr. Fox fell in love with Lady Caroline Lennox (eldest daughter of the
Duke of Richmond), asked her, was refused and stole her. His father was
a footman, her great-grandfather a king. All the blood royal has been up
in arms.”
The marriage act of 1754 was first designed by the Marquis of Bath, but
was drawn so badly that the Lord Chancellor Hardwicke revised and
carried it against a strong opposition. The new law was evaded by the
Rev. John Wilkinson, who claimed to issue licenses on his own authority,
and in 1755 married nearly two thousand couples. When the law began to
look ugly, he appointed a curate to perform the ceremony and kept out of
the way, although he still gave the licenses. Two members of Garrick’s
company were thus united, but the great actor prosecuted the curate, who
was convicted and sentenced to transportation.
CHAPTER III
FAMOUS DWELLERS IN THE FLEET
Deplorable condition of debtors throughout the country as detailed
by Howard--Famous Inmates--The Chevalier Desseasau, the
Prussian--Captain Johnson R. N., a professional smuggler employed
in naval expeditions--Arrest--Daring escape--Employed as pilot for
the Walcheren expedition--His project for rescuing Napoleon from
St. Helena--The “no-Popery riots”--The Fleet burned and
rebuilt--Royal Commission to inquire into imprisonment for
debt--Debtors’ privileges and extravagances--Graphic picture of the
Fleet given by Charles Dickens--The Common Side--The death of “the
Chancery prisoner”--The closing days of the Fleet--Abolished in
1840.
The condition of debtors as shown by Howard was deplorable all through
the country. The prisons were often the property of great personages.
Cheyney Court at Winchester was owned by the bishop of the diocese, so
was that at Durham, and here the debtors were in such evil case that
those on the Common Side had no subsistence for a whole twelve month
more than a diet of boiled bread and water. His Majesty the King kept a
prison for debtors in Windsor Castle in which Howard found two
prisoners. The place was governed by the Duke of Montague as constable,
and under him a janitor and deputy-janitor were appointed, the latter
receiving free house-rent as his salary. The prison of Chester Castle
was also the property of the King, who leased it to his constable or
patentee, who in his turn received rent from the gaoler, forty pounds a
year. The debtors were lodged in the so-called “Pope’s kitchen,” an
imaginary free ward. This “Pope’s kitchen” was underground, dark and
ill-ventilated, so that Howard when inside with the door shut felt that
his situation brought to mind what he had heard of the Black Hole of
Calcutta. In striking contrast to this, Howard speaks in commendation of
the noble prison for debtors in the spacious area within York Castle,
and of the admirable arrangements for the weighing and issuing of bread
for the supply of which many charities existed. Elsewhere they were
cruelly neglected; the keeper of Bodmin prison bore witness that in
twenty years only four prisoners had received the “groats” or allowance
from their creditors. At Exeter, during twelve years, only four or five
had received it besides the inmates of the Common Side ward known as the
“Shoe” because those inside were in the habit of lowering a shoe through
the window, to collect alms in the street. At this time the total number
of debtors in custody in England and Wales averaged about two thousand.
We may contrast the culpable neglect and ill-treatment of debtors in
Great Britain with the milder and more humane customs generally
prevailing at that time on the Continent of Europe. In Prussia a money
payment of two groschen (threepence farthing) was made by the creditors,
and if omitted for one whole week, the prisoner was set free. In Holland
creditors were bound to support their debtors with an allowance varying
from sixpence to two and three shillings a day. In Flanders the creditor
was obliged to pay for a month’s support in advance. At Cologne no
debtors who were quite penniless might be confined. In Paris a new
prison, La Force, had been constructed and occupied from January, 1782.
It was a spacious building with the means of separation of the sexes and
classes; the charge for a bed was from five to thirty sous a night, but
there were also free beds, and poor prisoners were supplied with
rations, soup and a pound and a half of bread daily. The rule obtained
in France that the bailiff who arrested a debtor must pay the gaoler on
committal a month’s allowance in advance for food. Moreover, the French
law obliged creditors to give bail for small sums even where the debtor
was insolvent. There was a general rule in Germany that the wives and
children of debtors were not allowed to reside within the prison.
Foreigners sometimes came within the grip of the English law and became
liable to imprisonment for debt. They did not all fare so well as that
eccentric character, the Chevalier Desseasau, who was well known to
Londoners at the latter end of the eighteenth century. He was a native
of Prussia, of French extraction, who had borne a commission in the
Prussian army, but having been involved in a quarrel with a brother
officer and fought a duel, in which his antagonist had been dangerously
wounded, he fled to England, where he eked out a precarious living in
literary pursuits. His line was poetry and his production very mediocre.
One verse inspired by his excessive vanity was often quoted against
him,--
“Il n’y a au monde que deux héros,
Le roi de Prusse et Chevalier Desseasau.”
He was to be met with in the best literary circles, was well known to
Dr. Johnson, Goldsmith, Foote, Murphy and to every publisher in the
trade. His appearance was so remarkable that he attracted amused
attention in the streets. Short of stature and of slender figure, he
always wore a black suit, cut in an ancient fashion, and carried in his
hands a gold headed cane, a roll of his poetry and a sword or two, so as
to be ready to fight at a moment’s notice. He did not greatly prosper as
time went on and found himself committed to the Fleet prison, where he
took advantage of the “Rules” and was suffered to go about as much as he
pleased. His chief places of resort were Anderton’s Coffee House in
Fleet Street, “the Barn” in St. Martin’s Lane and various taverns and
places of public resort in and about Covent Garden. Being a man of
originality and good-nature, his company was much courted. He was buried
in St. Bride’s Churchyard.
A rather remarkable character was an inmate of the Fleet and of other
London prisons at the end of the eighteenth century. This was Captain
Johnson, a sea-faring man, noted for his daring exploits and more or
less criminal pursuits throughout his long and diversified career. He
was a man of middle stature, with intelligent features and of striking
personal appearance, a native of Ireland and in religion a Catholic,
according to contemporary accounts. He was before all else a smuggler in
a very large way of business, constantly engaged in running profitable
cargoes, well known all along the southern sea-coast, full of guile in
evading capture, but desperately bold in defending his ill-gotten spoil.
He made London his headquarters and lived in Fitzroy Square “keeping up
an establishment fit for a nobleman,” with a stable full of horses and a
large staff of servants. On one occasion, when about to run a large
cargo into London, he was invited to assist four persons charged with
forgery out of the kingdom. After secreting them in the empty carts, he
got them on board ship near Folkestone and despatched them safely to
Flushing; returning with his smuggled goods, he fell in with a riding
revenue officer with a cavalry escort and was made prisoner. He was
lodged in the new prison in the Borough, no doubt the Queen’s Bench,
but when brought up for trial boldly made his escape in the open court.
A series of hairbreadth adventures followed. Johnson was hunted from
place to place but by moving constantly to and fro and assuming many
disguises he continued to keep at large, until his services being
urgently needed to pilot an expedition to Ostend, he was granted a
pardon. No one knew the Dutch coast better, and although the earliest
operations were unsuccessful, he was again employed to assist in landing
troops at the Helder. He was of immense service and gained a rich
reward; his pardon was confirmed, he was granted the rank and pay of
post-captain in the British Navy and was much esteemed as “a bold
intrepid, high-couraged Englishman” on the testimony of such officers as
Sir Home Popham and Sir Ralph Abercromby.
Johnson had become concerned with contracts for the provisions of the
troops and his money matters were so much mixed that he was arrested for
a large sum said to be owing to the crown, and lodged in the Fleet
prison. He brought counter charges and was in due course bailed out,
cleared of the debt. He had a further claim on the government, an income
promised him by Mr. Pitt of a thousand pounds a year if he would give up
smuggling. He could not substantiate the claim and was once more thrown
into the Fleet where he lived well and entertained largely, although
£13,000 was the amount of his liabilities. Very little restraint was
put upon him as he had given a bond to the warden against making an
escape. Soon he was identified by certain revenue officers as the
ringleader of a gang of smugglers who had attacked them, and from being
merely a debtor, he was constituted a prisoner awaiting trial on a
capital charge. An order was therefore issued for his removal to
Newgate, and to make sure of his person until transferred, he was lodged
in the strong room of the Fleet.
Matters now began to look serious and he secretly turned over in his
mind the possibility of escape. He withdrew therefore from his bond by
making it appear that he had quarrelled with his attorney, who would no
longer be responsible for him. After this Johnson commenced active
operations. The strong room was at the opposite end of the coffee-house
gallery; he could not file the window bars, the noise of which would
have betrayed him, but he bored through the panels of his double doors
with strong gimlets and after much patient labour broke them out. The
panels yielded to a tremendous blow delivered by one of the iron pulleys
of his window sash and the noise was deadened by the loud shouting and
bellowing of a neighbouring prisoner who was believed to be mad, and who
readily consented to give this assistance. When once through the panel,
he stole along the gallery and upstairs to an attic with a window
opening on the outside. From this he reached the boundary wall headed
with its _chevaux de frise_ and creeping along till he found a foothold
made fast a rope he had brought with him to one of the spikes just over
Fleet market. Here he lowered the rope, and slid down in safety only to
find the exterior watchman on his beat below, whom he would have shot
dead on the spot had he been observed, which fortunately for him was not
the case.
Johnson had taken the preliminary precaution to put on the uniform of a
lieutenant of the Hussars, before he climbed through the panel, the
clothes having been introduced into the prison for this purpose. The
Hussar regiment was stationed at Brighton and the supposed lieutenant,
with the help of a friend, secured a post chaise for the journey.
Arrived at Brighton, Johnson changed his clothes and went on board one
of his own cutters awaiting him at Hove. He must have gone to sea
forthwith and remained abroad, or in some secure hiding place, for he
was not heard of again until 1809 when he was again employed by the
government as pilot and guide upon the ill-starred _Walcheren_. His
active spirit prompted him to proffer advice to the dilatory commanders
and he strongly urged them to capture Flushing and proceed up the
Scheldt and lay siege to Antwerp. They would not listen to him and
turned a deaf ear also to his proposal but they approved of an attempt
to blow in the walls of Flushing by a submarine torpedo, his own
invention and presumably the first idea of that esteemed weapon of
modern warfare. Johnson himself took charge of the enterprise and
approaching the walls in a small boat, he swam up to them and fastened a
block with rope attached to a part of the piles on which the town was
built. The other end of this rope was fastened to the torpedo which was
run out and the match ignited, but there was no explosion. The engine
was imperfect, as Johnson afterward discovered, because the water had
entered and wet the powder through a hole drilled in the gunlock.
Johnson always attributed this to the jealousy of the inventor of the
Congreve rocket, Sir William Congreve, who was present at the siege, but
his charge it is difficult to believe. The torpedo which had failed at
Flushing was afterward successfully tried upon a barge in the Thames,
moored in midstream.
It is well known in history that Napoleon had still many active
sympathisers after his downfall. More than one friend in adversity would
have helped him to escape from St. Helena. Captain Johnson, although
still calling himself an officer of the Royal Navy, was willing enough
to give his aid and accepted a proposal to construct two submarine
vessels, to spirit the fallen emperor from his iron prison. These ships,
the _Eagle_, 110 tons, 84 feet long and 18 feet beam, and the _Etna_, 23
tons, 40 feet long, 10 feet beam, were to be built in a yard in
Battersea; they were to be propelled by steam, still in its infancy,
and were so constructed and provided with artificial air supply that
they could be submerged on the approach of an enemy, and use their
torpedoes with murderous effect. Nothing came of this extravagant
project, for before the ships were completed news came that Napoleon was
dead. Captain Johnson has left a detailed account of the steps by which
he hoped to accomplish the rescue. His two vessels were to lie submerged
close to the rocky shore and to rise to the surface after nightfall.
Captain Johnson would get ashore, taking with him the end of a rope
fastened to a mechanical chair which should be eventually raised to such
a height as to receive the person of the fugitive, who would then be
lowered on to the deck of the _Etna_. Napoleon was actually to be
smuggled out of Longwood disguised as a servant in livery.
Johnson was to have received £40,000 directly his submarine boats got
into blue water and a further sum if the escape was successfully carried
out. In his latter days Captain Johnson resided at Flushing, engaged in
mercantile pursuits, but he was looked upon with little favour, for his
services during the war were not forgotten or forgiven. He busied
himself with the proposal to defend the Dutch coast and rivers, with his
favourite device of submarines, but did not think it advisable to remain
in the country.
Not long after Howard’s visitation, the Fleet prison was involved with
all other London prisons in the destructive mischief wreaked by the
non-popery rioters, who, headed by the weak-minded Lord George Gordon,
terrorized the metropolis in 1780. On Wednesday, June 7th, the rioters,
now temporarily in the ascendant, sent word to all the public prisons
that they were coming to burn them down. They intended to do this on the
day previous, when the mob appeared before the Fleet prison and insisted
that the gates should be opened and the keepers yielded to their demand.
“They were then proceeding to demolish the prison, but the prisoners
expostulated with them, begging that they would give them time to remove
their goods. They readily condescended, and gave them a day for that
purpose, in consequence of which the prisoners were removing all this
day out of that place. Some of the prisoners were in for life.” In the
evening of the next day, they fulfilled their threat and burned it. This
was the second time, for the great fire of 1666 had previously
demolished it.
The evening of this Wednesday, June 7th, is described in the Annual
Register as one of the most dreadful spectacles this country ever
beheld. “Let those who did not see it judge what the inhabitants felt
when they beheld at the same instant the flames ascending and rolling in
clouds from the King’s Bench and Fleet prisons, from New Bridewell, from
the toll gates on Blackfriars Bridge, from houses in every quarter of
the town, and particularly from the bottom and middle of Holborn, where
the conflagration was horrible beyond description.”
The Fleet Prison was rebuilt immediately after the riots in 1780 on
almost exactly the same lines. Howard’s description of it as it stood
before the fire coincides pretty closely with later descriptions, after
the fire. Of these the most graphic is that familiar to the whole world
as given by Charles Dickens in the “Pickwick Papers.” The great literary
master no doubt drew upon his own personal knowledge, for he was
intimately acquainted with the London of his time, as he once resided
with his father within the limits of another great debtor’s prison, the
Marshalsea. In 1818, a Royal Commission was appointed as the outcome of
increasing agitation against imprisonment for debt, and the report
issued supplied much valuable information as to the state of the Fleet
and the Marshalsea at this period. There was little improvement in
either prison; they were still hot-beds of vice. While the poorer
starved, all who had command of money spent it freely in a reckless and
riotous fashion, little in keeping with the quiet decorum of a prison.
Outsiders came in at pleasure, women of loose morals, and men to play
the games provided for the prisoners. There was a racquet court, a
skittle ground and “forecorner” ground, all open to the strangers who
came in constantly and were a source of great profit to the racquet
masters, many of whom have been from time immemorial considered very
eminent players. The post of racquet master was in great request. It was
in the gift of the collegians (prisoners) who elected to it once a year
at Christmas tide. The canvassers for votes issued handbills. One reads
as follows: “I feel that the situation is one that requires attention
and increasing exertion, not so much for the individual position as from
the circumstance that the amusement and--what is more vitally
important--the health of my fellow inmates is in some measure placed in
the hands of the person appointed.”
The prison was not closed and lights put out till a late hour, when
gambling was in progress and riots frequent; when drunken persons
resisted the turnkeys and fought with the coffee-house and tap-room
keepers, who sought to put them out of the rooms at eleven o’clock at
night. If finally expelled, they resorted to secret gin shops kept in
the prisoners’ rooms, where they gambled and played at cards half
through the night. Clubs still existed as when reported by Howard, and
met regularly to sing and carouse at social evenings. It was impossible
to check the introduction of spirits, although prohibited by act of
Parliament, and a large quantity was consumed within the prison so that
drunkenness was very prevalent. A number of coffee-houses and public
houses were held to be within the “Rules” and were much frequented,
among the last the London Coffee-House, and the Belle Sauvage Inn at
Ludgate Circus. Grand dinners were frequently given at the latter by
prisoners “of great consideration, men of title and consequence.” Much
money was also spent within the walls. The warden told the committee
that he had seen a prisoner’s servant bringing in a pail of ice to cool
his master’s bottle of wine. He told another story of an Italian lady, a
prisoner, who was living under the protection of a gentleman outside and
who would not pay for a bushel of coals she had ordered. She struck the
messenger who brought the bill, but when she was threatened with removal
to the strong room she produced a guinea from her pocket and begged the
man’s pardon for the blows.
At this time there were many lodged in the Common Side without means of
subsistence beyond the county allowance of three and six pence a week,
or what they could earn by menial service,--cleaning boots, making beds
and dusting rooms, for their fellow prisoners. Sometimes after long
residence a poor debtor might succeed to be “the owner of a room” and
was permitted to levy “chummage” or rent from the “chums” who lodged
with him; their number was not limited. Debtors were entirely free from
supervision in their rooms. The warden and his officers held no master
keys and could only enter a room when its occupants unlocked it to them.
No numbering took place, and it was never certainly known that the
proper number were present.
The warden was responsible for safe custody and might suffer serious
loss for the escape of prisoners committed for heavy debts. In one case
he was mulcted in £2,500 for the escape of a French count who had got
over an old wall, afterward made more secure, but as the warden
philosophically remarked: “there can be no wall built which a prisoner
cannot get over if he is a clever fellow; a sailor who has the use of
his limbs can get over any wall.” On the other hand he pointed out that
“it seldom answers the purpose of any man to escape out of the Fleet
prison unless it is a foreigner who has no residence in this kingdom or
a smuggler who can live anywhere. Many people come to the prison for
their own benefit, that is for the purpose of taking the benefit of some
act passed to allow them to plead insolvency, and so purge their debts.”
With all his risks the warden had a considerable margin in the handsome
total of his fees and other receipts. These averaged yearly for the
three years ending 1818 as much as £3,008, from which his outgoings had
to be deducted, amounting to £1,125, leaving him a net annual income of
£1,883. The deductions were made up of an average of £300 per annum for
losses by escapes, a sum of £368.11.0 for rates and taxes on all
premises, and the rest for chaplain’s salary and servants’ wages,
lighting, coals and so forth.
At this date the prison population, taking the total inside the walls
and those located within the “Rules,” seldom exceeded three hundred.
The prisoners taken as a body were an idle, disorderly set of men with
vicious habits. Thefts from one another were very common, although
articles stolen were sometimes surrendered at the summons of the “crier”
who publicly announced things lost or found. Divine service was
performed on Sundays, Christmas Day and Good Friday, but prisoners
seldom attended. The chaplain, an earnest, painstaking man, thought the
hour of service inconveniently early and changed it to one o’clock in
the afternoon, but found his flock as indolent at that hour as when the
service was at eleven o’clock. The rule of attendance at chapel was laid
down, but it could not be enforced. Neither the warden nor his deputy
nor yet any of his turnkeys attended, but the latter sometimes drove
away idle boys and people who make a disturbance at the chapel doors.
The coffee-house and the “cellar head” tap were not closed during hours
of divine worship. The warden was an aged man, blind, deaf, and infirm,
who had delegated his duties to a deputy for fifteen years past, but who
took the emoluments and risks, only paying the warden a fixed annuity of
£500 a year. The rest of the staff consisted of a “clerk of the papers,”
three turnkeys, a watchman who acted also as scavenger and the “crier.”
There was no regular medical attendance, but a general practitioner from
the neighbourhood was called in when required.
The foregoing conditions still obtained at the date of Charles Dickens’
description. “Pickwick” first appeared in 1836, but the observations on
which the account of the Fleet was based were no doubt made much earlier
and the picture drawn is strikingly realistic, as a few quotations will
abundantly show.
When Mr. Pickwick accompanied by his astute solicitor Mr. Perker and his
faithful bodyservant Sam Weller was committed to the Fleet at the suit
of Messrs. Dodson and Fogg, he went through the usual preliminaries, sat
for his portrait and was duly passed through the inner gate and found
himself within the “lock” as imprisonment was euphemistically described.
His further progress in search of quarters for the night is thus
described: “It was getting dark; that is to say, a few jets were kindled
in this place, which was never light, by way of compliment to the
evening which had set in outside. As it was rather warm some of the
tenants of the numerous little rooms which opened into the gallery on
either hand had set their doors ajar. Mr. Pickwick peeped into them as
he passed along, with great curiosity and interest. Here four or five
great hulking fellows, just visible through a cloud of tobacco-smoke,
were engaged in noisy and riotous conversation over half-emptied pots of
beer or playing at ‘all-fours’ with a very greasy pack of cards. In the
adjoining room some solitary tenant might be seen, poring, by the light
of a feeble tallow candle, over a bundle of soiled and tattered papers,
yellow with dust and dropping to pieces from age, writing, for the
hundredth time, some lengthened statement of his grievances, for the
perusal of some great man whose eyes it would never reach, or whose
heart it would never touch. In a third, a man, with his wife and a whole
crowd of children, might be seen, making up a scanty bed on the ground
and upon a few chairs, for the younger ones to pass the night in. And in
a fourth, and a fifth, and a sixth and a seventh, the noise and the beer
and the tobacco smoke, and the cards all came over again in greater
force than before.
“In the galleries themselves and more especially on the staircases,
there lingered a great number of people who came there, some because
their rooms were empty and lonesome, others because their rooms were
full and hot, and the greater part because they were restless and
uncomfortable, and not possessed of the secret of exactly knowing what
to do with themselves. There were many classes of people here--from the
labouring man in his fustian jacket to the broken-down spendthrift in
his shawl dressing-gown, most appropriately out at elbows; but there was
the same air about them all--a listless, jail-bird, careless swagger, a
vagabondish who’s afraid sort of bearing, which is wholly indescribable
in words.”
The visit to the Common Side is brought forcibly before us in the
following admirable description:
“The poor side of a debtor’s prison is, as its name imports, that in
which the most miserable and abject class of debtors are confined. A
prisoner having declared upon the poor side, pays neither rent nor
‘chummage.’ His fees upon entering and leaving the jail are reduced in
amount, and he becomes entitled to a share of some small quantities of
food, to provide which a few charitable persons have from time to time
left trifling legacies in their wills. Most of our readers will remember
that, until within a few years past, there was a kind of iron cage in
the wall of the Fleet Prison, within which was posted some man of hungry
looks, who from time to time rattled a money box and exclaimed in a
mournful voice, ‘Pray remember the poor debtors; pray remember the poor
debtors.’ The receipts of this box, when there were any, were divided
among the poor prisoners; and the men on the poor side relieved each
other in this degrading office.
“Although this custom has been abolished and the cage is now boarded up,
the miserable and destitute condition of these unhappy persons remains
the same. We no longer suffer them to appeal at the prison gates to the
charity and compassion of the passers-by; but we still leave unblotted
in our statute book, for the reverence and admiration of succeeding
ages, the just and wholesome law which declares that the sturdy felon
shall be fed and clothed, and that the penniless debtor shall be left to
die of starvation and nakedness. This is no fiction. Not a week passes
over our heads but, in every one of our prisons for debt, some of these
men must inevitably expire in the slow agonies of want, if they were not
relieved by their fellow-prisoners.”
No finer effort of genius has been shown than the pathetic episode of
the death of the Chancery prisoner:
“The turnkey led the way in silence; and gently raising the latch of the
room door, motioned Mr. Pickwick to enter. It was a large, bare,
desolate room, with a number of stump bedsteads made of iron, on one of
which lay stretched the shadow of a man, wan, pale and ghastly. His
breathing was hard and thick and he moaned painfully as it came and
went. At the bedside sat a short old man in a cobbler’s apron, who, by
the aid of horn spectacles, was reading from the Bible aloud.
“The sick man laid his hand upon his attendant’s arm and motioned him to
stop. He closed the book and laid it on the bed.
“‘Open the window,’ said the sick man.
“He did so. The noise of carriages and carts, the rattle of wheels, the
cries of men and boys--all the busy sounds of a mighty multitude
instinct with life and occupation, blended into one deep murmur, floated
into the room. Above the hoarse, loud hum arose from time to time, a
boisterous laugh; or a scrap of some jingling song, shouted forth by one
of the giddy crowd, would strike upon the ear for an instant and then be
lost amidst the roar of voices and the tramp of footsteps--the breaking
of the billows of the restless sea of life that rolled heavily on
without. Melancholy sounds to a quiet listener at any time; how
melancholy to the watcher by the bed of death!
“‘There is no air here,’ said the sick man, faintly. ‘The place pollutes
it. It was fresh round about when I walked there, years ago; but it
grows hot and heavy in passing these walls. I cannot breathe it.’
“‘We have breathed it together for a long time,’ said the old man.
‘Come, come.’
“There was a short silence, during which the two spectators approached
the bed. The sick man drew a hand of his old fellow-prisoner towards
him, and pressing it affectionately between both his own, retained it in
his grasp.
“‘I hope,’ he gasped, after a while, so faintly that they bent their
ears close over the bed to catch the half-formed sounds his pale lips
gave vent to--‘I hope my merciful Judge will bear in mind my heavy
punishment on earth. Twenty years, my friend, twenty years in this
hideous grave! My heart broke when my child died, and I could not even
kiss him in his little coffin. My loneliness since then, in all this
noise and riot, has been very dreadful. May God forgive me! He has seen
my solitary, lingering death.’
“He folded his hands and murmuring something more they could not hear,
fell into a sleep--only a sleep at first, for they saw him smile.
“They whispered together for a little time and the turnkey, stooping
over the pillow, drew hastily back. ‘He has got his discharge by G--!’
said the man.
“He had. But he had grown so like death in life that they knew not when
he died.”
As the years drew on the Fleet prison was more and more denounced and
discredited. While a certain section of those detained spent their days
in dissipation and excess, a much larger number, three-fourths of the
whole, were still destitute and unable to provide themselves with bread.
A case given in the _Morning Herald_ of August 12, 1833, may be cited in
this connection. “A gentleman complained that the overseers of St.
Bride’s Parish had refused to relieve a distressed prisoner in the
Fleet. The prisoner was Mr. Timothy Sheldrake, who had been well known
for his skill in treating deformities of the body. He once kept his
carriage and obtained £4,000 by his practice but he was now quite
destitute--when applicant saw him he had actually fasted forty-eight
hours.” There was some dispute as to the liability of the parish of St.
Bride’s, but it was decided to appropriate relief out of the County
Rate.
The hardships inflicted upon the poorer inmates of the Fleet were not
the only evils that prevailed in that mismanaged establishment. It was a
school of crime and more than one offender owed his lapse from honesty
to his residence in the Fleet. It came out that the ringleader of a gang
of utterers of forged bank-notes lived constantly in the prison. He made
it his business to ingratiate himself with young men of good appearance
who were fellow prisoners and to lead them into giving their services in
passing spurious notes when again at large. One of these was convicted
and only escaped the gallows by taking poison the night before his
execution. He had been a captain in the army and was of good family and
showy appearance. The gang at last committed a robbery on a bank in
Cornwall and was entirely broken up. From that time the instigator, who
had resided within the Fleet, disappeared entirely, although he was not
one of those convicted or even suspected of the crime in Cornwall.
At last the days of the Fleet prison were numbered. The act of 1 and 2
Queen Victoria C-110 abolished arrest on mesne process and no more
debtors were to be sent by the courts of Chancery, Exchequer and Common
Pleas to the Fleet: all debtors and bankrupts to go in future to the
Queen’s Bench prison in Southwark, or to the new prison in Whitecross
Street, which shall be dealt with in due course. These prisons were to
be fully utilised and the Fleet pulled down, with a considerable saving
to the Exchequer in its maintenance and the sale of its valuable site.
The change was not made without protest and the bill was opposed in
Parliament, but it passed in due course into law. There were several
strict clauses regulating the future governance of the Queen’s Bench,
all aimed at “preventing extravagance and luxury and enforcing due order
and discipline within the prison.”
CHAPTER IV
THE KING’S BENCH PRISON
Earliest mention--Lord Chief Justice and Prince Hal--The first
prison destroyed by the Lord George rioters--Rebuilt--Notable
inmates--Richard Baxter--Sir William
Reresbury--Chatterton--Smollett’s description in “Roderick
Random”--George Morland frequently a prisoner--John Wilkes
imprisoned and the disturbances that resulted--His career and
death--William Hone, the well known litterateur, lodged in the
King’s Bench for debt, where he compiled his “Every Day Book,”
“Table Book,” and “Year Book”--Colonel Hanger, soldier, courtier,
beau--A chosen companion of the Prince of Wales--His services in
the American War--His difficulties and arrest--Lord Cochrane, a
distinguished naval officer--Committal to the King’s Bench--Plot of
which he was the victim--His adventures in the King’s Bench--Method
of escape and appearance in Parliament--Later career in South
America. Brilliant services and tardy rehabilitation by the British
government.
The first King’s Bench Prison stood on the east side of the High Street
Borough, Southwark, near the Marshalsea and dated from 1377, the time of
Richard II. It is memorable as the prison to which Chief Justice
Gascoigne committed Prince Hal, the heir apparent of the English throne,
and later King Henry V, the hero of Agincourt. The royal offender,
Prince Hal, had been guilty of contempt of court in taking one of his
suite from the custody of the court and offering violence to the judge
on his bench. The story is held by some to be apocryphal, but the
Prince’s prison chamber was still shown in the time of Oldys,[5] the
historian. The prison was moved to the southwest corner of Blackman’s
Street and the entrance of the Borough Road, and was standing there when
burned down by the Lord George Gordon rioters in 1780, but was rebuilt
on the lines described by Mr. Allen in his history of Surrey, and
survived until a quite recent date. According to the account there
given, it occupied an extensive area of ground and consisted of one
large pile of buildings about 120 yards long. The south or principal
front had a pediment under which was the chapel. There were four pumps
of spring and river water in the interior. It contained 224 rooms or
apartments, eight of which being much larger than the others were called
staterooms. A coffee-house and two public houses were to be found within
the walls, with shops and stalls for the sale of meat, vegetables and
necessaries like any public market. “The number of people walking
about,” says Allen, “or engaged in various amusements are little
calculated to impress the stranger with an idea of distress or even of
confinement.” The walls surrounding the prison were thirty feet high
and were crowned with a _chevaux de frise_ to prevent escape. The
“Rules” were extensive and included all St. George’s Fields, one side of
Blackman Street, and part of the Borough High Street, enclosing
altogether an area of three miles in circumference. These “Rules” were
purchasable by prisoners at various rates; when the debt was
considerable the price was eight guineas for the first hundred, and half
that sum for every hundred in addition. Day rates cost 4_s_ 2_d_ for the
first day and 3_s_ 10_d_ for the days following. The exact limits of the
Rules were never strictly defined and Lord Ellenborough, when Chief
Justice of the King’s Bench, being asked to extend them, said he saw no
necessity, as to his certain knowledge they already included the East
Indies, implying that fugitives had fled there. Of course in such a case
the marshal was held responsible for the debt of the one who had run
away. The practice of permitting prisoners to live beyond the prison
originated, it was said, in the days of the Plague.
Among the earliest records of the King’s Bench prison of Southwark was a
petition from the prisoners to the Privy Council for its enlargement and
the erection of a chapel. It was pleaded that at this time, through
over-crowding, there was “much sickness in the house.” In later days
under the Commonwealth it was called the “Upper Bench Prison.” Among the
early inmates of any note was Dr. Robert Recorde, said to have been
physician to King Edward VI and Queen Mary; he was a Fellow of All
Souls, Oxford, and died in the King’s Bench in 1558, when confined there
for debt. John Rushworth, author of the “Historical Collections” of
facts, 1618-1648, was a prisoner in the Bench for six years, and the
notorious Judge Jeffreys committed Richard Baxter, the non-conformist
advocate, to it for eighteen months. An inmate of title who had fallen
sadly away from his high estate was Sir William Reresby, the son and
heir of Sir John, whose “Memoirs and Travels,” with anecdotes and secret
history of the courts of Charles II and James II are full of interest.
Sir William was the third baronet, a reckless spendthrift and gamester
who wasted large sums at the tables and in cock-fighting. He lost his
fine estate of Dennaby at a single throw of the dice and was afterward
tried and imprisoned for cheating in 1711. He eventually became a
tapster in the King’s Bench.
Chatterton, the youthful poet, who forged the apocryphal poems of Thomas
Rowley, the supposititious monk of the fifteenth century, was at one
time a prisoner in the King’s Bench, whence he dated a letter, May 14th,
1770, saying that a gentleman had recommended him as the travelling
companion for the young Duke of Northumberland, but that alas! he spoke
no language but his own. Chatterton’s fraud was one of the most curious
crimes in literary history. He was a native of Bristol and an attorney’s
clerk, when he pretended to have discovered an ancient manuscript,
which he put forward as authentic, but which was soon pronounced a
forgery by Mason and Gray and other contemporary poets. Nothing daunted,
Chatterton came to London to seek his fortune in literature; he produced
great numbers of satirical poems, political essays and critical letters
which found their way into print, but without remuneration. When
threatened with penury, he committed suicide at his lodgings in Brook
St., Holborn. He was undoubtedly a genius and he has been called the
greatest prodigy in literature, for he was no more than eighteen when he
died and he had already produced some fine, vigorous work.
A good picture of the King’s Bench is given by Smollett about this date
(1750) in his “Roderick Random:” “The prison is situated in St. George’s
Fields, about a mile from the end of Westminster Bridge, and it appears
like a neat little regular town, consisting of one street, surrounded by
a very high wall, including an open piece of ground which may be termed
a garden, where the prisoners take the air, and amuse themselves with a
variety of diversions. Except the entrance, where the turnkeys keep
watch and ward, there is nothing in the place that looks like a gaol, or
bears the least colour of restraint. The street is crowded with
passengers; tradesmen of all kinds here exercise their different
professions; hawkers of all sorts are admitted to call and vend their
wares as in any open street in London. There are butchers’ stands,
chandlers’ shops, a surgery, a tap-house well frequented, and a public
kitchen, in which provisions are dressed for all the prisoners gratis,
at the expense of the publican. Here the voice of misery never
complains; and indeed little else is to be heard but the sounds of mirth
and jollity. At the further end of the street, on the right hand, is a
little paved court leading to a separate building, consisting of twelve
large apartments called ‘State rooms,’ well furnished, and fitted up for
the reception of the better sort of Crown prisoners; and on the other
side of the street, facing a separate piece of ground, is the Common
Side, a range of rooms occupied by prisoners of the lowest order, who
share the profits of the begging-box, and are maintained by this
practice and some established funds of charity. We ought also to observe
that the gaol is provided with a neat chapel, in which a clergyman in
consideration of a certain salary, performs divine service every
Sunday.”
Artists shared with men of letters the honours of the King’s Bench. One
whose work is perhaps more highly appreciated to-day than in his own
time was George Morland, the painter, who was born in London on the 26th
June, 1763, and was the son of Henry Robert Morland and grandson of
George Henry Morland. He is said by Cunningham to have been lineally
descended from Sir Samuel Morland, while other biographers go so far as
to assert that he had only to claim the baronetcy in order to get it.
He began to draw at three years old and at the age of ten (1773) his
name appears as an honorary exhibitor at the Royal Academy. Although the
publishers reaped the principal profit from the sale of his works,
Morland’s credit and resources enabled him for some years to lead the
rollicking life he loved without much pressure of monetary care. At one
period he kept eight saddle horses at the White Lion Inn. But as time
passed he became crippled with debts and a prey to creditors who gave
him no peace. He lived a hunted life and was only able to escape from
the bailiffs by his knowledge of London and the assistance of friends
and interested picture dealers. He fled from one house to another,
residing now in Lambeth, now in East Sheen, now Queen Anne Street, the
Minories, Kensington or Hackney. At this last place his strict seclusion
aroused a suspicion that he was a forger of bank notes and his premises
were searched at the instance of the bank directors, who afterward made
him a present of £40 for the inconvenience caused by their mistake.
In November, 1799, Morland was at last arrested for debt, and he was
allowed to take lodgings “within the Rules” of the King’s Bench to which
his most discreditable friends constantly flocked. During this mitigated
imprisonment he sank lower and lower. According to the “Dictionary of
National Biography” he was often drunk for days together and generally
slept on the floor in a helpless condition. It is probable that these
stories are exaggerated, for he still produced an enormous quantity of
good work. “For his brother alone,” says Redgrave, “he painted 192
pictures between 1800 and 1804, and he probably painted as many more for
other dealers during the same period, his terms being four guineas a day
and his drink.” Another account says that during his last eight years he
painted 490 pictures for his brother and probably 300 more for others,
besides making hundreds of drawings. His total production is estimated
at no less than four thousand pictures. In 1802 he was released under
the Insolvent Debtors’ Act but his health was ruined and his habits
irremediable. About this time he was seized with palsy and lost the use
of his left hand so that he could not hold his palette. Notwithstanding
this, he seems to have gone on painting to the last, when he was
arrested again for a publican’s score and died in a sponging house in
Eyre Street, Cold Bath Fields, on 27th October, 1804. His much wronged
wife was so afflicted at the news of his death that she died three days
afterward and both were buried together in the burial ground attached to
St. James’ Chapel in the Hampstead Road.
Morland’s epitaph on himself was, “Here lies a drunken dog.” His
propensities to drink and low pleasure appear to have been unusually
strong. He had opportunities of indulging them at an unusually early
age and throughout life, except for a short interval of courtship and
domesticity, he was surrounded by associates who encouraged his
debauchery. “But though he was vain and dissolute he was generous, good
natured and industrious and appears to have been free from the meaner
and more malicious forms of vice. It should also be placed to his credit
that however degraded his mode of life, he did not degrade his art to
the same level.”
It would be difficult to define the exact place of John Wilkes in the
history of this time, but he figures largely in that of the King’s Bench
prison, both as an inmate and the cause of much loss of life in the
disturbances to which his committal gave rise. To-day he is rightly
judged as an insolent demagogue who misled the ignorant public by his
intemperate attacks upon the government and his offensive writings in
the _North Briton_, which cost him several duels and an embittered
prosecution. He gained immense popularity with the mob as his long trial
proceeded, which culminated in serious riots when the case at last went
against him, and he was sent to the King’s Bench. The carriage in which
he was conveyed was seized by the crowd, the horses removed, and the
vehicle was dragged to a public house in Spital Fields north of the
present Liverpool Street Railway Station. Here he was allowed to alight
and at eleven o’clock at night to escape from his over zealous friends,
taking immediate advantage of his liberty to surrender himself at the
King’s Bench prison. The next day a vast mob collected outside the
prison, and some hostile demonstration was feared. Nothing worse
occurred than the tearing down of the fences surrounding the prison and
burning them in a bonfire, while the residents in the neighbourhood were
compelled to illuminate their windows. Legal proceedings were resumed in
the days following and Wilkes’ counsel pleaded for arrest in judgment on
the ground of illegal action, but the Crown would not yield, and a day
was fixed for the final discussion whether or not the sentence of
outlawry passed on him should be maintained.
The malcontents held their ground about the prison in threatening
numbers, and resisted all efforts of the civil authority to disperse
them, and the troops were called out. The riot act was read and after
the warning the order given to fire, which was promptly obeyed with
fatal results. A number of persons were killed and wounded, the shots
aimed high after taking effect upon those at a distance. Further violent
outrages were not committed. Later a mob attacked the house of Lord
Bute, hated Prime Minister of that day, and the Mansion House and
private apartments of the Lady Mayoress were invaded and wrecked. People
were everywhere forced to illuminate their windows and the street echoed
with cries of “Wilkes and Liberty.” The rioters were guilty of many
outrages. Several quiet folk were killed, numbers wounded, windows were
broken, furniture destroyed, royal residences even were threatened. The
tumults extended to the provinces, the working classes were disaffected
and demanded higher wages, and when denied went out on strikes, the
earliest instances of them known. The disturbances were taken up by the
seamen in the Pool, and a body of thousands of sailors marched in
procession to the St. James Palace with drums beating and colours flying
to present a petition to the King, praying for a relief of grievances.
The following day they assembled in a great multitude in Palace Yard,
boisterously clamouring for an increase of wages, but dispersed on an
assurance from two M. P.’s that their requests should receive attention.
A fresh tumult arose at Limehouse where several outward bound vessels
were boarded and prevented from going to sea. All workers in
London--sawyers, hatters, watermen and the Spital Fields
weavers--combined in demanding an increase of wages, and confusion and
unrest were general throughout London. The commotion gradually subsided
and the principal rioters were brought to justice, while Wilkes still
remained in the King’s Bench prison. The sympathy shown him took a very
practical form. Some £20,000 were subscribed for the payment of his
fines and debts, many valuable gifts were presented to him: plate,
jewels, wine, furniture and purses embroidered in gold and containing
specie.
A word or two about John Wilkes will illuminate the foregoing recital.
He was born in 1727, the son of a brewer or distiller at Clerkenwell,
and had been well educated at the University of Leyden. On his return to
England at the early age of twenty-two he married an heiress, Miss Mead,
ten years his senior. Although he was without personal attraction, his
ready wit and charming manner gave him such an advantage with the fair
sex that he was fond of saying that he was only ten minutes behind the
handsomest man in a room. He kept a good table and soon won a large
circle of friends, but his extravagant ways and love of dissipation
involved him in difficulties. He quarrelled with his wife, they
separated, and in the lawsuit his character and reputation were much
damaged. When in 1757 he entered the House of Commons as a member for
Aylesbury, he joined the agitation against that already most unpopular
minister, Lord Bute, and founding the notorious _North Briton_,
succeeded by persistent attacks in the paper in driving him from office.
The next minister was no less fiercely assailed and Wilkes so far forgot
himself as to charge the King (George III) with telling a lie. For this
his house was entered and his papers seized and he himself committed to
the Tower, but released on his claiming privilege as a member of
Parliament. The _North Briton_ was publicly burned by order of the House
of Commons; Wilkes retaliated by an action against the Government for
the improper seizure of his papers, and he was awarded £1,000 damages
with a dictum from the Lord Chief Justice that general warrants were
illegal.
Wilkes then was expelled from the House of Commons and went over to
France. In his absence the Government proceeded to blacken his character
by publishing an obscene poem of which he was the joint author, but it
was shown that a printed copy had been obtained by underhand methods,
the ministers incurring so much odium that they were driven from office.
When the new Government was formed Wilkes returned to England and was
now elected member for Middlesex. It was at this time that the riots
described above occurred. Wilkes impugned the conduct of ministers and
accused them of responsibility for the “massacre in St. George in the
Field.” This was held in the House of Commons to be a seditious libel
and Wilkes was again expelled from the House. The electors of Middlesex
protested by returning him again and again, defying the House of Commons
and glorifying Wilkes--who was still imprisoned in the King’s Bench--as
the champion of national liberty. Wilkes was now the most popular man in
England. Soon afterward he won a suit against Lord Halifax with £4,000
damages and in the following year was released on giving a bond for
seven years’ good behaviour. Three years after he was made Lord Mayor of
London and once again elected as member for Middlesex, which he now
represented for several years. Wilkes in his last days sank into
comparative obscurity and died an “extinct volcano” in 1792. Wilkes was
not the immediate cause of the confinement in the King’s Bench prison of
William Hone, but this well-known writer owed his protracted trials
directly to the famous demagogue. He was arraigned at the Guildhall in
1817, charged with having printed and published the profane but curious
“Wilkes’ Catechism,” which purported “to have been from the original
manuscript in Mr. Wilkes’ handwriting and never before printed.” It was
described as a catechism or “Instructions to be learned of every person
before he be brought to be confirmed a placeman or pensioner by the
minister.” The first questions and answers indicate its character. “Q.
What is your name? A. Lickspittle. Q. Who gave you this name? A. My
sureties to the ministry in my political change wherein I was made a
member of the majority, the child of corruption and a locust to devour
the good things of the kingdom.” Then follows the “belief,” which is too
blasphemous for quotation, and the commandments, one of which ran,
“Honour the Regent and the helmets of the Lifeguards, that thy stay may
be long in the place which the Lord thy ministry giveth thee.” The
general tenor of this catechism will be seen in the question “What is
thy duty towards thyself?” and the answer, “My duty towards myself is to
love nobody but myself and to do unto most men what I would not that
they should do unto me; to sacrifice unto my own interest even my father
and mother; to pay little reverence to the King, but to compensate that
omission by my servility to all that are out in authority under him,”
and so on.
The prosecution was no doubt inspired by the fierce party spirit
prevailing at the time and caused great excitement; the Court, that of
the King’s Bench in Guildhall, was densely crowded by an audience by no
means in sympathy with the Attorney General when he unsparingly
denounced the publication, and the violent coughing and other marks of
disapprobation during his address roused the judge, Mr. Justice Abbott,
to declare that he would clear the court. Mr. Hone defended himself
ably, pleading that the whole publication was intended as a parody, but
that he had stopped its sale directly he found it was looked upon as
profane. A verdict of “not guilty” was speedily brought in by the jury,
which was received with loud demonstrations of approval. Mr. Hone was
again put on his trial, first for publishing a parody entitled “The
Political Litany,” and again for publishing a parody on the “Athanasian
Creed” styled the “Sinecurist Creed.” His defence, which he again
conducted personally with such great boldness that the sitting judge,
Lord Ellenborough, designated it as outraging decency and propriety,
resulted in another verdict of “not guilty,” a decision greeted with
loud cheers extending far beyond the limits of the court. These matters
would have no permanent interest nor would William Hone call for
reference here, but that he was afterward arrested by a creditor and
lodged in the King’s Bench when he was engaged upon the production of
his “Everyday Book,” a work full of curious and useful information,
completed within the walls of the prison. He also began and finished
there his “Table Book” and his “Year Book,” productions that have long
survived the personality of their author.
An interesting character, the hero of many striking adventures and who
passed through some strange vicissitudes and misfortunes, found himself
more than once in the King’s Bench at the latter end of the eighteenth
century. This was Colonel Hanger, commonly known as George Hanger, for
although he eventually succeeded to his father’s title of Lord
Coleraine, he steadfastly objected to assume it. He was a man of
substance in his time, having property in his own right, and he early
entered the army as an officer in the 1st regiment of Guards, from which
he passed during the war with the American Colonies into the service of
the Landgrave of Hesse Cassel. He was a prominent dandy in his time,
lived fashionably, spent large sums on his clothes, and although he
played little at cards, he gambled continually and for large sums on the
turf. It was the rule for well-born youths in his time to dress
extravagantly; young Hanger tells us in his memoirs that one set of
winter dress clothes cost him £900 and he adds, “This should not so much
astonish the reader as the fact that I actually paid the tailor.” The
expense of appearing properly on the King’s birthday was enormous, an
officer of the Guards being obliged to have two suits, and he says: “My
morning vestments cost me nearly £80 and those for the state ball above
£180. It was a satin coat and the first that had made its appearance in
this country; shortly after, satin dress clothes became common among
well-dressed men.... I had no office of emolument, advantage or trust
about his Majesty’s person, except an ensigncy, the pay of which did not
amount to four shillings per day, a sum insufficient to meet the
tailor’s charges for one single button and button-hole to my gala suit;
the very stitching of a button-hole in those days cost me more, and the
embroidered gold clocks on my stockings in which I never failed to
appear at a ball were very expensive.” Hanger became one of the chosen
companions of the Prince of Wales (George IV) and lived at the same
pace. He kept race-horses, backed them for considerable sums and once
stood to win or lose 3,000 guineas on one race. “I can with truth say
the turf had done me justice,” he writes, “but the extravagance of the
times, the delightful pleasure of that age and the frailty of my own
nature were my ruin.” He lived in fact far above his income which never
exceeded eleven hundred pounds a year, and presently he became
seriously involved. He had recourse to a mortgage on his estate for
£13,000, and as he became more and more indebted was obliged in due
course to sell it when it fetched rather less than half the sum at which
it had been originally valued. He accompanied his regiment to America,
took part in the war of Independence, but made the mistake of leaving
the British Guards for the Hessian service. He found friends in Sir
Harry Clinton and Colonel Tarleton, by whom he was appointed to the
British Legion, and distinguished himself in the field.
When the war ended and Major Hanger was due to return to England, his
affairs were so straitened that he took refuge in Calais, leaving
friends to act for him at home and arrange with his creditors. But for
the generous assistance of Mr. Richard Tattersal he could not have
landed in England, for he was now completely beggared, and when directly
he reappeared in the world, was arrested by his creditors. It was at
this time that his estate was forcibly sold at such a loss. He now
surrendered himself at the King’s Bench, where he was detained for some
months but by the help of friends was admitted to take the “Rules.” His
detention was brief, but his experiences as told in his “Life and
Adventures” throw a strong light upon the iniquitous system still in
force with regard to debtors as described later.
A distinguished naval officer, Lord Cochrane, afterward Earl of
Dundonald, was committed a prisoner to the King’s Bench in 1815, on
conviction of seeking to influence the stock markets by the
dissemination of false news. His eminent services in the late war with
France were forgotten and he was denied a fair, unprejudiced trial. It
was clear that he was the victim of a dastardly plot and was sacrificed
to the treachery of the villainous author of it. Lord Cochrane had
recently been given the command of a King’s ship, and was on the point
of sailing for the North American station. One day a visitor named de
Berenger called at his house, pretending to be an officer and prisoner
for debt, within the Rules of the King’s Bench. He said he had come to
Lord Cochrane to implore him to release him from his difficulties and
give him a passage across the Atlantic. His application was refused,--it
was forbidden indeed according to naval rules,--and de Berenger was sent
away. But before he left the house he pleaded piteously that to return
to the King’s Bench prison in full uniform would attract suspicion. It
was not stated how he had evaded its jurisdiction, but he no doubt
implied that he had escaped and changed into uniform somewhere. Why he
did not go back to the same place to resume his plain clothes did not
appear. Lord Cochrane only knew that in answer to his urgent entreaty he
lent him some clothes (the room was at that moment littered with
clothes, which were to be sent on board the _Tonnant_). He unguardedly
gave de Berenger a “civilian’s hat and coat.” This was a capital part of
the charge against Lord Cochrane.
De Berenger had altogether lied about himself. He had not come from
within the Rules of the King’s Bench but from Dover, where he had been
seen the previous night at the Ship Hotel. He was then in uniform and
pretended to be an aide-de-camp to Lord Cathcart, who was the bearer of
important despatches. He made no secret of the transcendent news he
brought. Bonaparte had been killed by the Cossacks, Louis XVIII
proclaimed and the allied armies were on the point of occupying Paris.
To give greater publicity to the intelligence he sent it by letter to
the port-admiral at Deal, to be forwarded to the Government in London by
means of the semaphore telegraph. The effect of this startling news was
to send up stocks ten per cent., and many speculators who sold on the
rise realised enormous sums.
De Berenger, still in uniform, followed in a post-chaise, but on
reaching London he dismissed it, took a hackney coach and drove straight
to Lord Cochrane’s. He had some slight acquaintance with his lordship
and had already petitioned him for a passage to America but the
application had been refused. There was nothing extraordinary, then, in
de Berenger’s visit. His lordship, again, claimed that de Berenger in
calling on him, instead of going straight to the Stock Exchange to
commence operations, indicated that he had weakened in his plot and did
not see how to carry it through. “Had I been his confederate,” says Lord
Cochrane in his affidavit, “it is not within the bounds of credibility
that he would have come in the first instance to my house and waited two
hours for my return home in place of carrying out the plot he had
undertaken, or that I should have been occupied in perfecting my lamp
invention for the use of the convoy of which I was in a few days to take
charge, instead of being on the only spot where any advantage to be
derived from the Stock Exchange hoax could be realised had I been a
participator in it. Such advantage must have been immediate, before the
truth came out; and to have reaped it, had I been guilty, it was
necessary that I should not lose a moment. It is still more improbable
that being aware of the hoax, I should not have speculated largely for
the special risk of that day.”
We may take Lord Cochrane’s word, as an officer and a gentleman, that he
had no guilty knowledge of de Berenger’s scheme; but here again the luck
was against him, for it came out in evidence that his brokers had sold
stock for him on the day of the fraud. Yet the operation was not an
isolated one, made on that occasion only. Lord Cochrane declared that he
had for some time past anticipated a favourable conclusion to the war.
“I had held shares for the rise,” he said, “and had made money by sales.
The stock I held on the day of the fraud was less than I usually had,
and it was sold under an old order given to my brokers to sell at a
certain price. It had necessarily to be sold.” It was clear to Lord
Cochrane’s friends--who, indeed, and rightly, held him to be incapable
of stooping to fraud--that had he contemplated it he would have been a
larger holder of stock on the day in question when, actually, he held
less than usual. On these grounds alone they were of opinion that he
should have been absolved from the charge.
The part taken by the late Lord Playfair in the rehabilitation of Lord
Cochrane has been told by Sir Wemyss Reid in his admirable “Memoirs” of
Playfair. The Earl of Dundonald died in October, 1860. To his grandson,
the present gallant earl, whose brilliant achievements as a cavalry
leader in the great Boer War have shown him to be a worthy scion of a
warrior stock, his last will bequeathed as follows: “All sums due to me
by the British Government for my important services, as well as the sums
of pay stopped under perjured evidence for the commission of a fraud
upon the Stock Exchange. Given under my trembling hand this 21st day of
February, the anniversary of my ruin.”
Lord Playfair was an intimate friend of the much-worried admiral, and
while he was a member of the House of Commons he made a strenuous effort
to carry out the terms of the above will by recovering the sums
mentioned in it. What followed shall be told in Playfair’s own words.
“In 1814 Lord Dundonald and Lady X were in love and though they did not
marry, always held each other in great esteem for the rest of their
lives. Old Lady X was still alive in 1877, and she sent me a letter
through young Cochrane, the grandson, authorising me to use it as I
thought best. The letter was yellow with age, but had been carefully
preserved. It was written by Lord Dundonald and was dated from the
prison on the night of the committal. It tried to console the lady by
the fact that the guilt of a near relative of hers was not suspected,
while the innocence of the writer was his support and consolation.
“The old lady must have had a terrible trial. It was hard to sacrifice
the reputation of her relative; it was harder still to see injustice
still resting upon her former lover. Lord Dundonald had loved her and
received much kindness from her relative, so he suffered calumny and the
injustice of nearly two generations rather than tell the true story of
his wrong.
“I had long suspected the truth, but I never heard it from Lord
Dundonald. The brave old lady tendered this letter as evidence to the
Committee, but I declined to give it in, knowing that had my friend been
alive he would not have allowed me to do so. At the same time I showed
the letter to the members of the Committee individually and it had a
great effect upon their minds and no doubt helped to secure the report
recommending that the Treasury should pay the grandson the back salary
of the admiral.
“The interesting letter itself I recommended should be put in the
archives of the Dundonald family and this I believe has been done.”
Lord Cochrane’s incarceration in the King’s Bench was the cause of
considerable trouble. He had been committed there in default of a
payment of the fine of a thousand pounds and with a sentence of one
year’s imprisonment during which, in company with his alleged
confederates, he was to stand once on the pillory in the open space
before the Royal Exchange. Lord Cochrane was at that time a member of
the House of Commons and it was moved in the House that he should be
expelled, which was carried by a large majority. He found many warm
friends, however, and chief among them Sir Francis Burdett, who, when
the seat of Westminster was declared vacant, proposed Lord Cochrane for
re-election, and his lordship was unanimously returned. He continued,
however, to reside in the King’s Bench until the time of the next
session approached, and he was resolved to break prison in order to
appear in his place when the House met. He did, in effect, but in none
of the ways reported at the time. One report was that he went out
concealed in a sofa bedstead; another that he was sewn up inside a
mattress with the feathers; a third that he passed the gates in
disguise, but not unknown to the authorities, whom he had bribed to wink
at his departure. The real truth was that having arranged for the visit
of three or four Life guardsmen, he exchanged clothes with one of the
troopers and walked out unmolested wearing the soldier’s uniform.
Lord Cochrane remained at large for a fortnight and evaded pursuit until
he presumed to enter the House of Commons where he found a seat upon the
Treasury bench. While he was addressing the House and reading the
documents connected with his own case, the marshal of the King’s Bench,
who had been notified, accompanied by several officers, walked into the
House and proceeded to arrest his lordship, who immediately demanded the
authority. He was told that it was the public proclamation offering a
reward for his apprehension. Lord Cochrane demurred, violently resisted
his capture, and something like a free fight occurred upon the floor of
the House; eventually his lordship was overpowered and reconducted to
the King’s Bench. Mr. Jones, the marshal, no doubt a little unhappy at
his temerity, humbly submitted himself to the Speaker, hoping he had not
been guilty of disrespect, for if he was wrong it was from an error of
judgment and due to no wish to offend the House. The matter was made the
subject of some debate, but when referred to the Committee of Privilege,
they considered that the case was quite novel and it did not appear to
them that the privileges of the House had been violated or that there
was any call for interference. The time remaining for the completion of
the term of imprisonment Lord Cochrane spent in a conflict with the
marshal as to his accommodation and general treatment in the prison, in
which Mr. Jones was ultimately exonerated and Lord Cochrane admitted
that he had no complaint to make of the marshal, or of any of the
officers of the prison.
Lord Dundonald’s later career is in a sense outside of my subject, but
it was distinguished by many brave exploits and his capacity as a naval
leader was usefully exercised in the service of another country than his
own; his merits were recognised by the Emperor of Brazil, who gave him
the command of the Brazilian fleet and created him a marquis. Through
his able leadership the South American colonies of Spain gained their
freedom and he assisted largely in the Greek war of independence. At
length in 1830, tardy justice was done him and Earl Grey, now in office,
believing him to have been the victim of a cruel and unjust persecution,
restored him to his rank in the British navy. He was granted the Grand
Cross of the Bath and appointed to a command, as an admiral. He was a
man of strong character, remarkable for his inventive genius, a skilled
and adventurous seaman, who won renown afloat although constantly
opposed to forces superior to his own in numbers and metal. At the end
of his life he enjoyed the sympathetic esteem of his fellow countrymen.
His heirs were eventually granted compensation for the pay and
allowances as a naval officer so long withheld from him, while under a
cloud.
CHAPTER V
LIFE IN THE KING’S BENCH
Relations between debtor and creditor in England continue a
disgrace--Abuses in procedure--Writs issued in error--Excessive
costs the cause of prolonged detention--Processes irksome, very
sweeping in their action and entailing disastrous consequences on
many prisoners--Debtors’ prisons and their purlieus centres of
vicious life--Drunkenness, gaming, self-indulgence prevailed--The
“Rules” enclosed an area swarming with idle, reckless, dissipated
persons--A prisoner regularly drove the night coach from London to
Birmingham--Many notable residents--Theodore Hook--Benjamin Robert
Haydon, the painter--A scene in the King’s Bench, “The Mock
Election”--The Marshalsea--Death-place of Bishop Bonner--Prison
described by John Howard and by Charles Dickens--Disappearance of
the Marshalsea and the Fleet--Replaced by the Whitecross Street
Prison, the last place of the kind.
The relations between debtor and creditor in England continued to be a
disgrace to any so-called free and enlightened country far into the
nineteenth century. The procedure was full of abuses and the system in
force subjected the debtor to great and manifest hardships without
benefiting the creditor or securing him the repayment of his debt. It
was customary to serve the debtor with a writ, which was returnable only
in term time, and if issued between terms it could be evaded by giving
bail to the sheriff. But if the debtor was a poor man, or without
friends and therefore unable to procure bail, he paid in person and was
taken off to prison. Here he might lie almost indefinitely waiting,
hopelessly, for money from the skies to enable him to liquidate the
claim or defend the action. Often enough the writ had been issued on no
clear grounds; the debt may never have existed in fact and innocent
persons were arrested upon the affidavits of scoundrels impelled by
unworthy motives, which might be revenge or extortion. Not only was it
often the case that the prisoner lay in prison until he discharged a
debt he had never incurred, but even when the claim was undoubted and
for a small amount, the liability was soon swollen by the lawyers’ costs
amounting to three or four times the original debt. People were still
detained who owed no more than three or four pounds which they could
pay, until they could satisfy the attorneys for the costs of twenty and
thirty pounds they did not really owe. “I, myself,” says Colonel Hanger,
“for a debt of four pounds, thirteen shillings, and for one of six
pounds, sixteen shillings, have paid ten, twelve or fourteen pounds
costs.” Once caught in the meshes of the law it was not enough to pay
the original debt, and the creditor, when he received it, could not
release the debtor until the attorney’s costs were liquidated. The
records of the King’s Bench show that hundreds of debtors who in the
first instance owed no more than ten pounds were still detained for
twice or three times the amount claimed by the attorneys.
As a natural result, the debtors’ prisons, especially the King’s Bench,
were constantly crowded with persons of all classes and
callings,--“Nobles and ignobles, parsons, lawyers, farmers, tradesmen,
shopmen, colonels, captains, gamblers, horse-dealers, publicans and so
forth.” The wives of many of these shared the fortunes and misfortunes
of their husbands. It has been calculated that at times the population
of the prison averaged eight hundred or a thousand individuals. This
total was presently much reduced by the institution of a court for the
relief of insolvent debtors, and the number was further kept down by a
charitable society which used considerable sums collected for the
extinction of small debts. Nevertheless numbers still languished within
the walls in a state bordering upon utter destitution. Colonel Hanger
testifies that out of 355 prisoners, he could with truth assert there
were seldom fifty who had any regular means of subsistence. “I do not
mean to say,” he continues, “that prisoners have been absolutely starved
to death; but this I positively assert,--that numbers of the lower
order, and many officers confined, some even for small debts under fifty
pounds, who have served their country with gallantry and fidelity and
have bled in her defence, have often gone a whole week with not above
three or four meals; nay more, have frequently been destitute of a
penny to buy them a roll of bread for breakfast.” The same difficulty as
that already mentioned of obtaining the “groats” or creditor’s allowance
for food still obtained. It was greatly increased by legal
technicalities, for it could only be sued for in term time and a debtor
arrested in June when the term was over must wait to take action till
November, five months that is to say, during which he might starve and
was wholly dependent upon the charity of generous fellow prisoners and
others. Judgment on the case might still be prolonged until the
following May, so that many gentlemen as well as others of superior
stations in life had for successive days never known what it was to
enjoy one good meal.[6]
The perfectly regular payment of the “groats” (the allowance was really
sixpence per diem) would not have gone far. “Will any man venture to
assert,” asks Colonel Hanger, “that a man can live on such a stipend,
for a sufficient quantity of bread and small beer to satisfy appetite
and thirst cannot be purchased for that money.” The price of provisions
in 1798 barely allowed the purchase of one pound of bread and one pint
of porter per day for sixpence. “The felon in Newgate and the prisoner
in the Penitentiary house, Cold Bath fields, for high crimes and
misdemeanours against the State, whatever his sufferings, has one
comfort--he knows not the pangs of hunger; but the gentleman, the
citizen, the sailor or the soldier, who may have bled in their country’s
defence, if oppressed by sinful poverty, that worst of crimes, is
allowed only sixpence per day for all his wants, and has not even a bed
or fire found him to rest his wearied limbs or warm his half-starved
frame.”
The evils above described do not exhaust the sufferings that were
inflicted upon debtors. It often happened that a writ was served and an
arrest made at a distance from London. The man taken was carried to the
county gaol and when the time came for surrender, after being bailed, he
must perforce do so in London at the King’s Bench prison. And he must
make the journey as best he could according to his means. Hanger quotes
a case of an aged man, between seventy and eighty years, who trudged all
the way from Cumberland and arrived at the prison barefooted and almost
exhausted. He was, however, unprovided with the proper forms for
surrender and was refused admittance until he had paid his fees in
Chancery Lane, when at last he was received. Colonel Hanger, when in the
King’s Bench, was removed to the Fleet on _habeas corpus_ to meet a writ
returnable there and was mulcted in further costs before he was allowed
to go back to the King’s Bench.
Much more might be said in condemnation of the old system of
imprisonment for debt, which was rightly characterised by a competent
writer as “the curse and disgrace of England.” We have seen how in the
earliest times it directly contravened the principles of constitutional
freedom, which forbade it for simple pecuniary obligations unaccompanied
by fraud. It was extended alike to early youth and decrepit old age; a
minor might be laid by the heels and an old man of ninety arrested on
his dying bed. Until more humane laws were passed the boy prisoner might
be confined _sine die_. Incarceration too often paralysed the bread
winner; the prisoner was unable to earn wages for himself and his
family, to his own great loss and a diminution of the wealth of the
country.
The moral side of the question remains. Debtors’ prisons and their
purlieus were seething centres of vicious life. Idlers and dissolute
persons congregated therein; drunkenness, gaming, dissipation of all
kinds constantly prevailed. Dealers in contraband commodities traded
without let or hindrance. Game was exposed for sale within the walls by
unlicensed dealers without interference. These traders were prisoners,
of course, who were lodged under fictitious arrests of their own
contriving to facilitate their operations. “Tap-shops” and “whistling
shops” for the illegal consumption of spirits were plentiful within the
prison and were supplied under the very noses of the authorities by
clandestine means. On one occasion, an inmate who had been a smuggler
got in seventeen two-gallon tubs of brandy, which lay hidden in a
friend’s room till they could be distributed through the prison. The
supplies on sale were so good that much custom was attracted from
outside. It was calculated that at the “tap” or public bar room, three
butts of porter were drawn daily to meet the demands of outsiders with a
nice taste for beer. Amusements and games were continually in progress.
Crowds came in to see the racquet players reputed the best in the
metropolis; on festivals and holidays--Easter Monday, Whit Monday,
Boxing Day--sports were held, such as racing and hopping in sacks and
blind man’s buff, the whole under the supervision of a clerk of the
courts, Captain Christie, who was long a prisoner but married a rich
wife and so at last gained his liberty.
The King’s Bench, with its dependent “Rules,” was like a modern Alsatia,
swarming with idle, self-indulgent men living a dissipated life,
spending recklessly the means that should have gone to the liquidation
of their debts and which belonged really to their creditors. At one time
they freely entered all taverns and theatres, but were presently
restricted to one “Lowthorpes,” in front of the Asylum for the Blind
near the Obelisk in St. George’s in the Fields. This limitation was due
to Lord Chancellor Thurlow, who was annoyed by the trespass on his
grounds of a number of “Rulers” on their way to the Derby. No
restriction was placed upon the movements of the “Rulers” provided they
showed themselves once in every twenty-four hours. On the strength of
this concession a prisoner, Mellor Hetherington, a famous whip, drove
the night coach from London to Birmingham for a whole month, very much
to the satisfaction of proprietor and passengers. The regular coachman
had been taken ill and his temporary substitute comported himself so
well that he would have been permanently appointed but that it was
feared his creditors would interpose and impound his wages. This Mr.
Hetherington, who began life with a substantial income inherited from
his father, soon wasted his substance and found himself a prisoner in
the Fleet from which he was transferred to the King’s Bench, where he
was long resident in the “State House,” the large building close to the
entrance or lobby of the prison at one time occupied by prisoners of
State. He lived in great luxury and was allotted two rooms, but to enjoy
their peaceable occupation he was always obliged to buy out the “chums”
quartered on him. Some of these he employed as servants and assistants
in his domestic arrangements and especially in the kitchen, for he was a
lover of good cheer and had installed a kitchen range in one of the
rooms he occupied. He entertained largely, and guests in great number
gladly accepted his invitations. This Mr. Hetherington spent twenty
years as a prisoner for debt either within the walls of the Fleet or the
King’s Bench, or enjoying the privileges of the “Rules.” Finally he
took advantage of the Act as it was called, and went through the court
for the relief of insolvent debtors. He began life with a clear income
of six hundred pounds a year and finished his career of wasteful
self-indulgence without repaying a single sixpence to his creditors, who
had so foolishly and so uselessly deprived him of his liberty.
To give a full and complete list of the many and varied characters that
passed through the King’s Bench would fill a great space, but some of
those mentioned in contemporary records may be briefly referred to here.
They belonged to all classes of society and often exhibited eccentric
traits. One prisoner residing in the “Rules” belonged to the family of
the Hydes, Earls of Clarendon, and he was never parted from the coffin
which was ultimately to receive him. It was a fine coffin of solid oak,
grown upon his own estate in Kent and hollowed out with a chisel. Its
owner was in the habit of getting into the coffin at night and sleeping
there “with great composure and serenity.” Its weight was five hundred
pounds and on one occasion when it was filled with punch it held upwards
of forty-one gallons. John Palmer, the actor, when a prisoner within the
Rules in 1789 was committed to the Surrey gaol for accepting an
engagement at the Royal Circus theatre, as acting manager at a salary of
twenty pounds a week. This led, it is said (but the statement is at
variance with that already given), to the prohibiting by Lord Chief
Justice Kenyon of debtors to enter theatres.
Literature and the arts were constantly represented in the King’s Bench.
It was the home of William Combe, the author of “Dr. Syntax,” a poem
“written to cuts” as the saying is, or planned for a series of
Rowlandson’s drawings, which were forwarded to Combe when residing in
the Rules. As Horace Smith tells us, “he was a ready writer of all work
for the booksellers.” Another notable resident was Theodore Hook, who
never cleared himself from his liability to the Crown for the moneys
that went astray when he was acting as treasurer in the colony of
Mauritius. There was a deficit in his accounts of a sum of twelve
thousand pounds for which he was held responsible, although there was
never any charge of dishonesty and the law officers said no grounds
existed for criminal proceedings. He was, however, arrested after his
arrival in England and passed from a sponging house into the Rules of
the King’s Bench, from which he was soon set at liberty, but with his
liability hanging like a millstone round his neck till the day of his
death. Theodore Hook, the most famous of humourists, was the inventor of
a witticism, now a time honoured “chestnut.” On his passage home from
Mauritius, he met at Saint Helena the newly appointed governor of the
Cape, Lord Charles Somerset, who knew nothing of the arrest. Lord
Charles said, “I hope you are not going home for your health, Mr.
Hook.” “Why, why, yes,” replied Theodore, “I am sorry to say there is
something wrong with my chest.” Theodore Hook was already associated
with the once famous weekly newspaper _John Bull_, which was a thorn in
the side of the Whigs then in power. The proprietors of the paper,
Messrs. Weaver, Arrowsmith and Shackell, were prosecuted for libel of
some great personages, found guilty, heavily fined and committed to the
King’s Bench. Persons of lesser note were Jimmy Bearcroft, a hanger on
of the Mr. Hetherington, Captain Garth, Lady Hydeparker, “Pea-green”
Hayne, one or two baronets, Lord Glentworth, General Bacon and Miss
Gordon, who sold newspapers and kept a circulating library in the King’s
Bench.
Miss Gordon’s story deserves a word or two as illustrating the hardships
entailed upon the impecunious in those days. She inherited a decent
property from her father which was, however, impounded as security for a
loan of one hundred pounds advanced by a friend; she proposed to pay off
the loan, but the title deeds could not be found and the debt ran on
until the lender died, when the one hundred pounds was claimed from Miss
Gordon with the back interest, the whole amounting now to nearly a
thousand pounds. She was arrested and committed to prison where she
remained for nearly twenty years, harassed by the law’s delays, always
on the verge of starvation, but eking out a bare existence by her
traffic in books and newspapers.
The name of Benjamin Robert Haydon, a British painter, deservedly
entitled to be called a great painter, but greater still on account of
his misfortunes, is intimately associated with the King’s Bench prison.
His pictures, mainly historical and Biblical, generally of vast size,
fine in conception and admirably executed, never quite appealed to the
public taste and in the end were but little appreciated.
Haydon’s personality gained him many enemies; he was conceited,
self-opinionated, with an exaggerated idea of his own merits, and he
very unwisely entered into conflict with the Royal Academy, the feud
lasting to the end of his life. Yet he long found a few admiring patrons
and the support and countenance of numbers of warm friends. He was on
the most intimate terms with the leaders of light and learning of his
day. Sir Walter Scott warmly appreciated him; Wordsworth addressed many
sonnets to his genius; Keats and he were like brothers. He spent much of
his spare time with Charles Lamb, and lived on equal terms with the most
eminent members of his own profession, Sir David Wilkie, Northcote,
Landseer, Canova and Chantrey. Some of the greatest personages in the
land took him by the hand, gave him orders for pictures and welcomed him
gladly to their houses. Sir Robert Peel was long his good friend and
the Duke of Wellington encouraged him and wrote him many characteristic
letters.
With all his undoubted talents, his unflagging industry and ceaseless
powers for work, Haydon was cursed with one irremediable defect, an
utter incapacity for managing his own affairs. He was no spendthrift or
wastrel. He could have lived well within the income he earned, not a bad
one in those days, if he had not steadfastly forestalled it and so
reduced it sometimes by a half or a third. Very early in his career he
got behind-hand in his payments; no doubt in the first instance by the
unpunctuality of those who owed him money. He was continually driven to
pay his way by borrowing at extravagant rates, by giving bills for sums
far in excess of value received and by mortgaging his pictures before
they were finished. His hand to mouth devices might give him immediate
relief but it was by incurring future liabilities of a much more onerous
kind. His embarrassments were intensified by the existing laws and the
powers given to his creditors over his freedom and independence. He was
essentially a good man struggling with adversity, whom Tennyson tells
us, “is a sight for the gods,” and one’s heart bleeds for him under his
constant sufferings as pathetically depicted in his diaries.
He was already famous and had painted some of his earliest and best
pictures. The “Entry of Christ into Jerusalem” was finished, his
“Lazarus Raised from the Dead” was well advanced, and he was little
more than five and twenty years of age when he was arrested for debt. He
writes, that after having passed through every species of want and
difficulty often without a shilling, without ever being trusted, a man
to whom he had paid three hundred pounds arrested him out of pique for
the balance. His lawyers extricated him but within a year he enters in
his diary, “I am without a shilling in the world and with a large
picture before me not half done.” A month later he was arrested by his
artists’ colourman with whom he had dealt for fifteen years. He again
escaped, but as the months passed he was harassed with letters for money
every hour with repeated threatenings of arrest staved off by friendly
assistance from Canova, Sir Walter Scott and Mr. Coutts. Others, Lord
Mulgrave, Sir Edward Codrington, Brougham, Barnes of the _Times_ and
Miss Mitford were all prompt and helpful. Yet the next year he dated an
entry, “Well, I am in prison,” from the King’s Bench. He decided to go
through the court and was discharged without opposition. He was free
again and the future before him was clear. “He must live”--I am quoting
Tom Taylor--“He must live first of all and if possible without repeating
that untoward, that living by credit and borrowing on no better security
than high hopes and honest intentions which had ended in the King’s
Bench and insolvency.” Another year and the entry appears, “Passed in
desponding on the future, not a shilling in the world.” Later on,
“Obliged to pawn my other lay figure, the female, for five pounds,--cost
me thirty.” On the 12th January, 1827, an execution was in the house and
he was saved only by the prompt assistance of a friend, yet he was
arrested and cleared by a public subscription, after spending a month in
the prison. But this detention brought him a great opportunity; he saw
the “Mock Election,” a scene which, he says, “contrasted as it was with
sorrow and prison walls, beggars all description ... never was such an
excellent burlesque.... I saw the whole from beginning to end. I was
resolved to paint it for I thought it the finest subject for humour and
pathos on earth ... day by day the subject continued in my mind and as
soon as I was restored to my family and pursuits I returned to the
prison and sketched all the heads of the leading actors. Began the
picture directly and I finished it in four months.” This picture hung
fire for a time, but finally George IV sent to say he wished to see it
and at once bought it for five hundred guineas. It may now be seen in
the Royal Galleries at Windsor Castle. The picture portrays a curious
episode in contemporary prison life painted with great fidelity and deep
appreciation of the contrasted humour and pathos of the scene. The
principal personages are drawn to the life and from life, for the
painter went again and again to the prison to find his models. Haydon’s
own account brings the picture before us:
“In the centre is the High Sheriff with burlesque elegance of manner
begging one of the candidates not to break the peace or be irritated at
the success of his rival.... This intended member is dressed in green
with an oil silk cap and a red bow, the colours of his party. The
gentleman who actually filled this character is, I have heard, a man of
considerable fortune in Ireland.... Opposite and attired in the quilt of
his bed and in a yellow turban is the other member who actually sat in
the House two years and who by experience in the finesse of elections
was the moving spring in all the proceedings in this picture. There is
the Lord Mayor with solemn gravity, holding a white wand with a blue and
yellow bow and a sash of the same colours. He was a third candidate.
Immediately below in a white jacket is the head poll clerk swearing in
three burgesses before they are allowed to vote.... The first, a dandy
of the very first fashion, just imprisoned, with a fifty-guinea pipe in
his right hand, a diamond ring on his finger, dressed in a yellow silk
dressing gown, velvet cap and red morocco slippers; on his left stands
an exquisite, who has been imprisoned three years, smoking a three-penny
cigar, with a hole at his elbow and his toes on the ground; and the
third is one of those characters of middle age and careless dissipation
visible in all scenes of this description, dressed in a blue jacket and
green cap. There are several other groups. In one a man of family sits
sipping his claret, and a soldier who distinguished himself in Spain,
imprisoned in early life for running away with a ward in chancery.
Embarrassment followed and nine years of confinement have rendered him
reckless and melancholy. He has one of the most tremendous heads I ever
saw, something between Byron and Bonaparte. In the picture I have made
him sit at ease with a companion while champagne bottles, a dice box,
dice, cards, a racket bat and ball upon the ground announce his present
habits. Leaning on him, and half terrified at the mock threats of the
little red-nosed head constable with a mace, is an interesting girl
attached to him in his reverses, and over his head, clinging to the top
of the pump, is an elector intoxicated and huzzaing.
“A third group is composed of a good family in affliction, the wife
devoted, clinging to her husband; the eldest boy with the gaiety of a
child is cheering the others; behind is the old nurse sobbing over the
baby five weeks old; while the husband, virtuous and in trouble, is
contemplating the merry electors with pity and pain. The father and
mother are in mourning for the loss of their second boy.... The father’s
hand holds a paper, and on it is written ‘debt £26.10., costs £157.10.
Treachery, Squeeze & Co., Thieves Inn.’” Upon the whole description
Haydon comments, “What a set of beings are assembled in that
extraordinary place, that temple of debauchery.”
Another description given in Haydon’s diary reveals a more painful side
of prison life. It is an account of a Sunday in the King’s Bench. “The
day passed in all the buzz, blasphemy, hum, noise and confusion of a
prison. Thoughtless creatures! My room was close to theirs. Such
language! Such jokes! Good Heavens! I had read prayers to myself in the
morning, and prayed with the utmost sincerity for my dearest Mary and
children, and to hear those poor fellows, utterly indifferent as it
were, was really distressing to one’s feelings. One of them had mixed up
an enormous tumbler of mulled wine crusted with nutmeg and as it passed
round some one halloed out, ‘Sacrament Sunday, gentlemen!’ Some roared
with laughter, some affected to laugh and he who was drinking pretended
to sneer; but he was awfully annoyed. And then there was a dead silence,
as if the blasphemy had recalled them to their senses. After an
occasional joke or so, one, with real feeling, began to hum the 100th
Psalm, not in joke, but to expiate his previous conduct, for neither he
nor any one laughed then, but seemed to think it too serious a subject.”
This was in 1830 and in that same year he records in his diary: “This
perpetual pauperism will in the end destroy my mind. I look round for
help with a feeling of despair that is quite dreadful. At this moment I
have a sick house without a shilling for the common necessaries of life.
This is no exaggeration.” The burden of his appeal to the Directors of
the British Gallery or Institution for encouragement is couched in the
same terms. He speaks of “his present struggling condition with eight
children and nothing on earth left him in property but what he is
clothed with, after twenty-six years of intense and ardent devotion to
painting,” and was vouchsafed help to the amount of £50. Year after year
he struggled with indomitable courage to keep the wolf from the door. He
was never at any time able to cope with current expenses or to face ever
pressing liabilities. He struck at new lines in art, tried portrait
painting, produced pictures of famous men at great epochs in their
lives, “Wellington on the Field of Waterloo,” “Napoleon Musing at St.
Helena,” to be engraved for general sale. He gave public exhibitions of
his own most popular works, canvassed on every side for new commissions,
tried fresco painting and the production of cartoons. Only in one
direction did he make money, by lecturing on art, for which he had a
natural gift, and for a time, but only for a time, he drew crowded
audiences. He earned bread thus, but no more, and his necessities caused
never ending pressure, still relieved constantly by the aid of the
pawnbroker, or the money lender at usurious rates. The sheriff’s
officers again carried him off to “that blessed refuge for the
miserable--the Bench,” which, as ever, was rendered hideous by the
levity of the vicious and the thoughtless. “Gambling, swearing and
drinking went on as usual,” he relates, “and last night when I was
musing on life and death, the bloods and blackguards were singing duets
outside my door at midnight.”
Haydon fought on to the last, but the end was very near when he speaks
in 1842 of “thirty-eight years of bitter suffering, incessant industry,
undaunted perseverance, four imprisonments, three ruins and five
petitions to Parliament, never letting the subject of State support for
national art rest.” He chafed, not without reason, that at a public
inquiry then in progress, neither Chairman nor Committee, witnesses nor
pupils gave any sign that they were conscious that such a creature as
Haydon existed.
“After this,” says Taylor, “the clouds settled down upon him and grew
darker and more dense every month of his few remaining years of life. It
is painful to follow day by day his struggles with disappointment,
despondency and embarrassment.” He was vexed and harassed more and more,
misfortunes multiplied, no fresh venture prospered and his last, the
exhibition of his own cartoons, was a dismal failure. No one came to see
them, the receipts on Easter day were beggarly; he took little more than
a pound, and next door thousands and thousands thronged to see Tom
Thumb. The future had never looked so black; “the butcher, the baker,
the tax collector, the landlord gave louder knocks than before.” At
length, he says, he “came home in excruciating anxiety,” not able to
raise the money for the rent of the Egyptian Hall where his cartoons
were exhibited. Fresh executions were to be put in and he says, “I felt
my heart sink, my brain confused, I foresaw my family’s misery and a
prison!” The desperate struggle was nearly over; he held on with but
small hope of deliverance and at last gave up in despair. He entered his
painting room for the last time and there shot himself on the 22nd of
June, 1846, “when temporarily of unsound mind” as the coroner’s inquest
charitably decided.
The third great prison of old London, but which survived down to the
middle of the last century, was the Marshalsea, which stood originally
in the High Street, Southwark, and a house now numbered 119 was the site
of the chapel. But it was removed by and by to other premises nearer the
St. George’s church that stands at the corner of the High St. Borough.
This prison derived its name from the Marshals of England to whom it
appertained and whose jurisdiction extended over the King’s household.
The royal servants were arraigned in the Marshal’s Court and committed
when in fault to the Marshalsea prison. It also received debtors,
arrested for even trifling sums, within a circuit of twelve miles from
Westminster Palace, and was especially used for the confinement of
persons awaiting trial. No exact record is preserved of its first
erection. The earliest account is that of a riot by sailors in 1377. A
man belonging to the fleet c
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