TWO
Worse than the worst of the Men, not only in respect to Nastiness and Indecency of Living, but more especially as to their Conversation, which to their great Shame is as profane and wicked as Hell itself can possibly be.
(A description of female prisoners in Newgate in the early eighteenth century)
I saw the heads when they were brought up to be boiled; the hangman fetched them in a dirty dust basket; setting them down among the felons he and they made sport of them. They took them by the hair, gloating, jeering and laughing at them. The hangman put them into his kettle and par-boiled them with camphor to keep them from putrefaction.
(An inmate’s description of a Newgate ritual of the early eighteenth century)
An abode of misery and despair, a hell such as Dante might have conceived
(Casanova’s description of Newgate in the late eighteenth century)
THE GREAT FIRE
On the evening of Saturday 1 September 1666, Thomas Farynor, baker to King Charles II, retired to bed after his day’s work at his premises in Pudding Lane in the heart of the Medieval buildings of the City of London. He failed to douse the fire in his oven, the embers of which set light to some firewood stacked nearby. By one o’clock the following morning the bakery was ablaze and Farynor, with his wife and daughter, escaped the conflagration by climbing through an upstairs window and making their way along the roofs of adjacent buildings. A maid, who was too frightened to climb on to the roof, remained in the bakery and was one of only six recorded victims of the fire. There were probably many more of whose deaths no record was kept. There were casualties among the animal population, too, as Samuel Pepys recorded in his diary for 2 September, as the fire gathered strength: ‘The poor pigeons, I perceive, were loth to leave their houses but hovered about the windows and balconies till they were, some of them, burned [on] their wings and fell down.’ Fires were a common hazard in the City, where buildings were mostly constructed of wood, thatch and pitch. Indeed, it was an earlier fire, of 1633, which now saved Southwark since it had destroyed some buildings on the old London Bridge and thereby created a firebreak. However, the strong winds which prevailed on that fateful Sunday ensured that the crude apparatus of buckets and ladders which parishes were obliged to provide against such eventualities were inadequate to the task they confronted.
Samuel Pepys carried a report of the fire to the King at Whitehall, which prompted Charles to send Pepys with a message to the Lord Mayor, Bludworth, ordering that firebreaks be created by demolishing houses in the paths of the flames. Bludworth was very reluctant to do this, fearing the compensation claims that might fall upon the City Corporation. He was also no doubt troubled by the fact that, in the early stages of the fire, he had underestimated the threat it posed, declaring that ‘a woman might piss it out’. By the time Pepys delivered the King’s instruction Bludworth was in despair. Pepys described the scene in his diary of 2 September:
To St Paul’s; and there walked along Watling Street, as well as I could, every creature coming away laden with goods to save and, here and there, sick people carried away in beds. Extraordinary goods carried in carts and on backs. At last my Lord Mayor in Cannon Street, like a man spent, with a handkerchief about his neck. To the king’s message he cried, like a fainting woman, ‘Lord, what can I do? I am spent: people will not obey me.’
By the Monday the fire had engulfed Lombard Street and Cornhill and was approaching St Paul’s, which was duly destroyed in the two days that followed, some of its stones exploding in the heat while molten lead ran from the roof into the streets. By the time the fire burned itself out it had reached Fetter lane, off Fleet Street in the west, approached Smithfield in the north and stopped just short of the Tower of London in the east. Around 13,000 buildings were destroyed, some 80 per cent of the City, including the Medieval St Paul’s. Thomas Farynor insisted that the fire had been started deliberately so a scapegoat for the conflagration had to be found and several were available: French, Spanish, Irish and, in particular, Catholic residents. Suspicion fell on ‘one Grant, a papist’ a shareholder in the New River Company who had supposedly turned off the water supply needed to extinguish the fire.1 Fortunately for Grant he did not buy his shares until after the fire had done its work. Instead, the blame fell upon a young Frenchman, Robert Hubert, who confessed to starting the fire despite evidence that he had arrived in England two days after it started. He was hanged at Tyburn and when Sir Christopher Wren’s Monument was erected in 1667 on the site of Farynor’s bakery it included an inscription which attributed the disaster to a Catholic conspiracy. The inscription was removed in the nineteenth century at the behest of the solicitor to the City Corporation, Charles Pearson (1794–1862), and in 1986 the Bakers’ Company issued a belated apology for the fire.
Whittington’s Newgate prison, at the north-western extremity of the fire, was almost entirely destroyed and had virtually to be rebuilt. The rebuilt prison, completed in 1672, ‘maintained the connection with Whittington and was referred to as ‘The Whit’. It occupied a relatively small site, measuring about 26 metres by 16 metres, though it was five storeys in height. Henry Chamberlain, in his History and Survey of the Cities of London and Westminster, written in 1770, described the main gate of this gaol shortly before its replacement by a new prison. The old gaol had four niches, each containing a lifesize figure. Three of the niches were occupied by figures representing Peace, Security and Plenty. The fourth he described in some detail. In it:2
is a figure, representing Liberty, having the word Libertas, inscribed on her cap; and at her feet lies a cat, in allusion to the story of Sir Richard Whittington, a former founder, who is said to have made the first step to his good fortune by a cat.
The eighteenth-century antiquarian Thomas Pennant (1726–98) claimed that the new cat was a replacement for one that had been there in the Medieval gaol before the fire. Pennant had written of the rebuilding of Newgate by ‘the executors of the famous Sir Richard Whittington’ and added that ‘his statue, with the cat, remained in a niche to its final demolition, on the rebuilding of the present prison’.3 There is no reason to disbelieve Pennant, who was chronicling the buildings of the City rather than compiling a legend. Perhaps there is some truth in the story of the cat after all.
PRISON CONDITIONS
The condition and management of the prisoners in the old prison had been a source of concern for some time before it was destroyed in the fire. In the 1620s prisoners had occasionally been released to relieve overcrowding, either as an act of royal mercy or on condition that the freed prisoners join the army. In 1626 Sir Nicholas Poyntz, who had been gaoled for killing a man in a brawl, complained that a shortage of beds meant that he had been obliged to sleep in a coffin. In 1649 a group of seventeen prisoners, attending their own funeral in the prison chapel the day before their planned execution, started a mêlée with knives, which had been smuggled to them by their wives who had joined them in the congregation. Fifteen of them escaped. In 1662, shortly before the destruction of the prison, Colonel James Turner wrote that the prisoners in the condemned cell ‘lie like swine upon the ground, one upon another, howling and roaring – it was more terrible to me than death’.4
A number of accounts of the rebuilt prison testify to the fact that conditions were no better and, for ‘common’ prisoners, could hardly have been worse. Immediately beneath the entrance gate was a dungeon known to the inmates as ‘Limbo’, which served as the condemned cell. An open sewer ran through the middle of this chamber, emptying its contents into the River Fleet, which ran beneath the Farringdon Road a short distance to the west. The condemned cell also served as a reception area for new arrivals who were fettered in heavy irons and thereby prepared for the exactions which were to be inflicted upon them by their gaolers and fellow inmates. Batty Langley (1696–1751) left an account of the process, which was based on his experience of Newgate in 1724.5 Langley was an architect and garden designer on which subjects he was the author of more than fifty works. He was confined in Newgate for debt at this time, but was sufficiently in funds to be able to pay for admission to the some of Newgate’s more salubrious accommodation. Manacles could be attached to the wrists, shackles to the ankles and iron collars to the neck and these could in turn to be attached to rings and staples in the walls and floors. In Langley’s words, ‘It is customary when any felons are brought to Newgate to put them first in this condemned hold where they remain till they have paid two shillings and sixpence, after which they are admitted to the masters’ or common felons’ side’. The irons could remain in place until the victims paid ‘easement’ of 2s 6d6to have them removed. One prisoner died when a neck iron was fastened so tightly that it broke his spine. These were the first of many such charges, which were exacted by the gaolers or ‘keepers’ in order to repay the investment they made in purchasing the office. The gaolers thus had every reason to keep the gaol full of prisoners. One Newgate keeper paid £40 per annum to Sir Francis Mitchell, a Justice of the Peace for Middlesex, in return for which Mitchell sent all his prisoners to Newgate.
MASTERS AND COMMONS
Once the prisoners were discharged from the reception area they proceeded, with or without their fetters, into one of the eight sections into which the prison accommodation was divided. First, as in the late Medieval prison, there was separate accommodation for men and women, though in 1700 a keeper, William Robison, was found to be charging the male prisoners sixpence for the privilege of admission to the women’s quarters. This was not always unwelcome to the women since a woman condemned to hang could, by becoming pregnant, ‘plead her belly’ and escape the noose for the sake of her unborn child. There was then a further division between felons, who had committed serious criminal offences (against people or property) and debtors who had been gaoled at the behest of their disappointed creditors. The segregation between these groups was not complete and one commentator complained that, ‘The debtor, rendered unfortunate by the vicissitudes of trade, undergoes the ignominy of being confined in the same prison with the most abandoned villains’.7 Finally, within each of these categories there was the more sinister and alarming division between the Masters’ side and the Commons’.
The masters were those who could afford to pay for better accommodation and the charges were recorded by Batty Langley.8 Upon entry, debtors paid 6s 6d and an additional 10s 6d for ‘garnish’ – a supply of coal and candles. The expression ‘garnish’ was in common use at the time in connection with apprenticeships, new apprentices being called upon to pay for drinks for their older workmates when they began their indentures. This payment was made to the ‘steward’ of the ward to which the prisoner was admitted, this post normally being filled by the longest-serving inmate. The most recent arrival, the ‘constable’, was responsible for keeping the ward clean and making up the fires. Langley makes the Masters’ side sound rather like an English public school of later centuries, with a prefect in charge (the steward) and a fag (the constable) to keep the place clean and tidy.
This theme continues in Langley’s very complimentary verdict on the prison regime of Pitt, the governor at this time. In the preface to his work he gives a dedication ‘in Justice to Mr Pitt, by the care he reposes in Mr Rowse and Mr Perry (his principal Turnkeys) the Decorum [his italics] maintained in Newgate is not inferior to that of a well-regulated family’.9 The reason for his favourable view of Newgate becomes clear in the sentences which follow, in which he declares that, ‘The Master debtors’ side is an absolute Paradise compared to the best of Sponging-Houses’. These establishments, which were later caricatured in the novels of William Makepeace Thackeray and Charles Dickens, were relatively comfortable semi-official places of confinement run by bailiffs or Sheriffs. Debtors were taken to them and were detained there under threat of being taken to Newgate or other prisons until such time as they reached an accommodation with their creditors. While they were held in these establishments the unfortunate debtors were grossly overcharged for food, wine, tobacco and other essentials, most of which would be consumed by their gloating ‘hosts’. In Langley’s words, ‘The chief Swine of the Herd comes to you and, after some few Judas compliments he calls for Pipes, Tobacco and a Bottle of Wine … you must understand that Good Manners amongst Bailiffs are as scarce to be found as Honesty.’10 Langley estimated that twenty-four hours in Newgate under Pitt’s regime cost him 1s 7½d compared to 17s 6d in the bailiff’s sponging house.
Things did not go so well with those who were unable to pay the customary exactions. In the words of a contemporary report, those ‘not having the wherewithal to pay were stripped, beaten and abused in a most violent manner’.11 Garnish was also paid by felons, but they paid a higher entry charge – 14s 10d. Beds cost 3s 6d a week while a daily charge of 1s 6d was made for visitors who were received in a room known as the ‘gigger’. Prisoners also had to pay a fee to be discharged, even if they had been found not guilty of the offences of which they were accused. Many remained in custody because they lacked the discharge fee or owed money for food, and attempts by well-wishers to pay these debts could themselves be frustrated by avaricious gaolers. A Frenchman visiting England in the 1720s offered 1s to a young woman in this situation only to find the gaoler demanding half of it as his fee.12 In the mid-eighteenth century there were thirteen Common wards (cells occupied by several people) and four Masters’ wards. The prison was designed to hold 150 prisoners, but normally contained at least 250 – a number substantially exceeded immediately prior to the sessions in the Old Bailey next door.
The situation that prevailed on the ‘Common’s’ side beggars description. Batty Langley wrote that ‘such Wickedness abounds therein that the Place seems to have the exact aspect of Hell itself’ and added, as if to remove any doubts in the mind of the reader, that ‘the Augean Stable could bear no Comparison to it’.13 There were no beds and food was of the poorest quality served in the smallest portions: a daily portion of bread, with beef served once a week. They were supervised by ‘cellarmen’ or ‘partners’. These were themselves prisoners who had bid for the office and, in return, sold candles to the inmates to provide some relief to the Stygian gloom in which they lived. The partners were also responsible for removing fetters, upon payment to the keepers, and for distributing food to the inmates. The conditions were described by Daniel Defoe during his brief incarceration in words he put into the mouth of his heroine Moll Flanders who, in his novel The Fortunes and Misfortunes of Moll Flanders who was Born in Newgate described it as ‘an emblem of hell itself and a kind of entrance to it’.14
In putting these words into Moll’s mouth Defoe may have reflected the experience of Batty Langley who had described the female inmates as being ‘exceedingly worse than the worst of the Men, not only in respect to Nastiness and Indecency of Living, but more especially as to their Conversation, which to their great Shame is as profane and wicked as Hell itself can possibly be’.15 The Italian libertine Giacomo Casanova, who spent some time in Newgate following a ‘misunderstanding’ over a marriage proposal, described it as an ‘abode of misery and despair, a hell such as Dante might have conceived’.16 As we will see, these were not the only commentators to compare Newgate with the infernal regions. Lice and fleas helped to spread the typhus (‘gaol fever’) which killed far more inmates than the gallows. In 1726, for example, twenty-one prisoners from Newgate were hanged at Tyburn while eighty-three died from gaol fever.17
The keepers and their ‘partners’ or cellarmen found other ways of supplementing their pay. In 1724 the Corporation investigated complaints from prisoners that the partners had stolen charitable donations intended to relieve the suffering of the Common prisoners and, further, that they had sold to shopkeepers much of the bread intended to feed the prisoners. The charges were well founded and the Corporation insisted that, henceforward, the partners should be elected by the prisoners rather than appointed by the keepers as their accomplices in exploiting their fellow inmates.18 Further payments could be exacted from the families of prisoners who died in Newgate before the corpse was released for burial, the clothes having been removed and sold in the meantime.
THE PRESS YARD
The most salubrious accommodation was to be found in the Press Yard, that grim place of torture which had fallen out of use at Newgate by the time that Langley was writing. It was described as being for ‘prisoners of note’, but these were in practice inmates who could pay fees ranging from £20 to £500 upon admission, ‘in proportion to the Quality of the Prisoner’ according to Batty Langley – in other words according to the amount the keeper could extort at any one time. These privileged prisoners could live in the Press Yard, with their families, in conditions which were little different from their homes. A cleaner could be provided for 1s a week while the fee for a visiting prostitute was 1s a night. A Major John Bernardi married and raised three children in the Press Yard in the 1720s.
The atmosphere in the Press Yard was described by a contemporary chronicler, the anonymous author of History of the Press Yard, published in 1717. He was welcomed to Newgate by an inmate called George who had been gaoled for wearing his best suit of clothes on the birthday of the Old Pretender, ‘King James III’, who had instigated an uprising against the Hanoverian monarchy in 1715 – a victim of the politics of the time. The author described himself as one of the ‘Brethren of the Quill’,19 who had been gaoled for writing in disparaging terms about the Hanoverian succession. He explained that he had been sent to Newgate ‘there to reflect with myself on my past indiscretion and to cool my Heels, till the Act for suspending the Habeas Corpus Act should be out of force’.20He described the reception which he experienced on arriving at the gaol – a process which has all the characteristics of a ritual designed to demoralise its object and prepare him for the exactions of his gaolers.
He entered first the Keeper’s Lodge, which was on the opposite side of Newgate Street from the prison itself, joined to it by a bridge which formed an arch across the road. The writer recorded that ‘this tomb of the living was once the Phoenix Inn by Newgate Street and being contiguous to the Gaol21 of that name was added to it in the Times of Usurpation’ – presumably a reference to Cromwell’s Protectorate by this supporter of the Stuart monarchy. He was first greeted by a turnkey who, having looked him over, declared loudly, ‘We shall have a hot supper tonight, the Cull [fellow] looks as if he had the Blunt [money] and I must come in for a share of it after my few Masters have done with him.’ The new arrival then received a measure of brandy from ‘a short thick protuberance of female flesh not less than five yards in the Waist’.22 This lady appears to have been a prisoner. There followed a loud discussion between the turnkey and the protuberance as to whether 40lb weight of irons would suffice for the newcomer or whether a greater burden would be required to subdue him.
Shortly after this alarming conversation ended the author heard a disembodied voice coming from above his head. The voice cried, ‘Sir, I understand that you are a Gentleman too well Educated to take up your abode in a vault set aside only for Thieves, Parricides and Murderers … you may be removed to a Chamber equal to one in any private House where you may be furnished with the best Conversation.’ Having been softened up by his reception it is not surprising that the writer took up the gaoler’s offer, at his own expense: an entrance fee of twenty guineas and a weekly charge of 11s: far more than the exactions demanded for admission to the Masters’ side. The author speculated on the origins of the term ‘Press Yard’ and dismissed the suggestion that it referred to its use for applying Peine Forte et Dure (‘strong and harsh punishment’, see Chapter One) to those who refused to plead,23 preferring to believe that it referred to the oppressive charges levied on those who resided there. The turnkey explained that the charges were necessary because the keeper had paid £5,000 for his post and needed to recoup his investment.24
His description of the Press Yard, to which he was now admitted, makes it sound like a gentlemen’s club. His companions included a number of army officers who had backed the wrong dynasty when George I ascended the throne in 1714 as the first Hanoverian monarch. One of them was a contemporary of the Duke of Marlborough and this officer, together with another who was a septuagenarian, had both married while in Newgate. A third resident was described as an orange merchant who had been forging bills of the relatively new Bank of England by means of the application of lemon juice to their surface in some unspecified way and had been betrayed by a fellow conspirator. Others included a mathematician and a classical scholar. Evenings were spent smoking, drinking, playing skittles and conversing about former inmates of the Press Yard, with particular emphasis on the finer points of their last journeys to Tyburn. On these occasions friends, relatives, admirers and curious visitors were admitted to their circle to add to the blend of gossip, cultivated conversation and light entertainment, though they also served a less refined purpose ‘to comfort the distressed Inhabitants of this Place by the only method that is capable viz. by inordinate drinking’.25 In defence of the residents it should be added that those who, on one of these occasions, ‘had gone beyond the Rules of Decency in their Cups’ paid a fine (in drink of course) to the turnkey the following morning.
THE 1715 REBELLION
A popular subject of conversation at these gatherings concerned the prospects of the 1715 uprising, which aimed to restore the Stuart dynasty to the throne in the form of James III, the Old Pretender, son of James II who had been deposed in the Glorious Revolution of 1688. The uprising was beginning as Batty Langley entered the gaol and was the subject of much confident and optimistic speculation as the inmates contemplated the restoration of their freedom and fortunes by a newly restored Stuart dynasty. As news of the collapse of the insurrection reached the gaol it was greeted initially with disbelief and then with a learned discussion among the inmates of the faulty tactics adopted by the rebel commanders. Several of these were shortly to join the residents of the Press Yard and the chronicler was allowed to watch their arrival from a vantage point in the Keeper’s Lodge opposite the entrance to Newgate – no doubt in return for a suitable fee.
These new inmates included the notably incompetent rebel general Thomas Forster (1675–1738), who had been given the command of the largely Scottish force because of his status as a Member of Parliament rather than because of any military experience. Faced with a Royalist force at Preston, Forster lost heart and the result was the collapse of the Jacobite cause. Forster complained about his incarceration in Newgate, arguing that his status as MP entitled him to be sent to the Tower of London, the traditional lodging for high-level traitors. He was probably glad that his protest was ignored since he managed to escape from Newgate with the assistance of a key made by his servant. Pitt, the Keeper of Newgate, was taking wine with Forster, as was his custom, when he was induced to go from the room to the cellar. There Pitt was locked in while Forster made good his escape. Forster fled to France, despite a reward of £1,000 for his recapture, and died of asthma in Boulogne in 1738.
Pitt was arrested for this lapse while his Jacobite prisoners enjoyed a luxurious lifestyle thanks to the venison, ham, chicken and other comestibles supplied to these glamorous residents by female admirers.26 The mood changed, however, when the trials and executions began of those involved in the rebellion. Some of them petitioned to be treated as prisoners of war rather than traitors, hoping to persuade the retired Duke of Marlborough himself to intercede on their behalf. This stratagem having failed, some of the rebels who were executed took advantage of their dying speeches on the scaffold to trumpet their defiance. Thus, William Paul, who was executed in July 1716, advised the onlookers to ‘remember that King James III is your Rightful Sovereign … do all you can to restore him to his crown’.27
One of the evening discussions was joined by the executioner who rejoiced that one of the prospective outcomes of the 1715 uprising and the fiasco at Preston would be a significant boost to his income. He anticipated payment of £3 for beheading a peer and the same for hanging, drawing and quartering a gentleman. Additional perquisites were expected to include the clothes worn by the victims, any money in the pockets and additional fees he described as ‘respective gratifications they shall make me for a quick and easy despatch, provided the king does not spoil my market by reprieves and pardons’. Provided there was no such misguided mercy on the part of the monarch the executioner foresaw a bumper harvest of as many as seventy victims. He outlined with satisfaction his plans to invest the proceeds: ‘I shall not only purchase the title of an Esquire but the Estate too’.28
This first Jacobite uprising was even more profitable for Pitt, the Keeper of Newgate who needed to recoup the outlay of several thousand pounds that he had paid for the post. His brief incarceration for allowing Forster to escape did not prevent him from reaping a handsome profit from the remaining prisoners. They were put in Newgate’s dungeons until, in the words of an observer ‘for better lodgement they had advanced more money than would have rented one of the best houses in Piccadilly’.29 Nearly ten years later Batty Langley recorded that the weekly rents in the Press Yard had increased greatly ‘when the Preston Gentlemen were imprisoned therein’.30 Having settled into their more salubrious accommodation these unwilling guests then made further payments for fine wines, games and the admission of visitors. Pitt made about £4,000 from his exactions in four months.
JACK KETCH’S KITCHEN
There was also a punishment room known as the ‘Bilbows’ and a sinister room occupied by those about to be taken to execution known as ‘Jack Ketch’s Kitchen’ after the prison’s most notorious executioner. According to Batty Langley this room was ‘that place in which that honest fellow [the executioner] boils the quarters of such men as have been executed for treason’, this being a necessary preparation for their gibbeting, a process described in a later chapter.31 The grim ritual was described in 1661 by a visitor named Ellwood at a time when there was a steady flow of regicides’ violated corpses following the restoration of Charles II and the vengeance which he inflicted upon those who had executed his father. The procedure was carried out by the hangman assisted by some felons:
I saw the heads when they were brought up to be boiled; the hangman fetched them in a dirty dust basket; setting them down among the felons he and they made sport of them. They took them by the hair, gloating, jeering and laughing at them. The hangman put them into his kettle and par-boiled them with camphor to keep them from putrefaction.
The heads would then have been taken away to be impaled on spikes at such vantage points as Westminster, London Bridge and Newgate itself as a warning to others. The remaining bits of the victims’ quartered corpses could then be reclaimed, upon payment, for burial by their families.32
Prisoners who could no longer afford to pay for the better accommodation could be subjected to persecution in the hope that their families would come to their rescue and thereby line the gaoler’s pockets. The most notorious case occurred at the nearby Fleet prison in 1728 and was revealed by the Member of Parliament James Oglethorpe, who later founded the colony of Georgia for discharged debtors. The Keeper, Thomas Bambridge, had paid £5,000 for the office and was alarmed when a prosperous inmate, named Robert Castell, declined to make further payments for the accommodation he was renting. Bambridge therefore moved Castell to a part of the prison where there was a smallpox epidemic. Castell duly died of the horrible disease. Bambridge also had a dungeon called the Strong Room, which he kept as a place of punishment and which he sometimes used for storing corpses to keep the inmates company.
EXACTIONS BY INMATES
The financial penalties were imposed not only by the keeper and his accomplices, the cellarmen and stewards. Long-term inmates had their own methods of exacting payment from newcomers who, upon arriving at the gaol, were told to ‘pay or strip’. Either they paid out ‘rhino’ or ‘chummage’,33 a sum of money to buy drink for their fellow prisoners or their clothes were removed and sold for the same purpose.34 In the words of a contemporary:
If any prisoner comes in and has not the wherewithal to pay the garnish money he or she is presently conveyed to a place they called Tangier and there stripped, beaten and abused in a very violent manner.35
Batty Langley described the atmosphere in ‘Tangier’ in forthright terms:
The Air in this Ward is very bad, occasioned by the Multitude of Prisoners in it and the Filthiness of their Lodgings.36
An inmate called John Hall described it, at about the same time, as ‘the nastiest place in the gaol’ and stated that most of its occupants were debtors, which presumably meant that they owed money to the prison authorities rather than to creditors outside the gaol. If so, Tangier was no doubt designed to encourage them to settle their debts.37
The plight of one unconvicted prisoner, by profession a lawyer, was described by his distressed wife who told of:38
The wretches making game of him and enjoying my distress … though they could not force him to gamble he was compelled to drink and I was obliged to let him have five shillings to pay his share, otherwise he would have been stripped of his clothes.
PRISON ROUTINE
The prison routine was described in the Memoirs of the Right Villainous John Hall, published in 1708 by a robber of that name who spent his time before his execution at Tyburn in 1707 compiling an account of his experiences in the infamous gaol. Hall had previously been whipped at the cart’s tail and narrowly escaped death and transportation for housebreaking so, on his final committal to Newgate, he was not without experience of the criminal justice system. Even he was awed by Newgate. Hall’s experience of the Common side of the gaol may be contrasted with the author of The History of the Press Yard, referred to above. Upon arrival, Hall was pinioned by two ‘truncheon officers’ (turnkeys), while two others picked his pockets. He was then handed over to two convicts ‘who hovered about him like so many Crows about a Piece of Carrion’ and demanded 6s 8d garnish money ‘otherwise they strip the poor wretch if he has not the wherewithal to pay it’. Having thus ‘matriculated’ he was taken to a ward ‘which, to give the Devils their due, is kept very neat and clean’ whereas another ward, for those unable to pay, ‘one would take to be Old Nick’s backside … the Lice crawling under their feet make such a Noise as walking on Shells which are strewed over Garden Walks’ in Hall’s evocative words.39 Adjacent to this was a small room known as the ‘Buggering Hold’, possibly because it contained those convicted of sodomy. The women’s quarters contained residents whose behaviour caused even this hardened robber to blush since ‘the Licentiousness of the Women on this side is so detestable that it is an unpardonable Crime to describe their Lewdness’.40 The staff were little better. The gaoler was described as one who ‘distils money out of poor Prisoners’ Tears and grows fat by their curses’ while the condemned sermon,41 preached to those about to be taken to execution, is described as being on the subject of ‘Holy Dying; for to preach up Amendment of Life, would here be Eloquence thrown away’.42
Hall also provides an interesting insight into the hierarchy which prevailed among the prisoners and the strange prison vernacular, many of whose expressions have entered the language. Thus ‘hoisters’ helped to lift fellow criminals over walls while ‘Sneaking Badgers’ stole from market stalls – early shoplifters. A ‘Buttock and Twang’ was a woman who picked up men on the street and then confronted them with a ‘pretended husband’ who would demand money. Some idea of the low esteem in which pickpockets were held may be inferred from Hall’s comment that ‘a Pickpocket is no more a Companion for a Reputable Housebreaker than an Informer is for a Justice of the Peace’.43 He compares Newgate with a university where a first-time offender has a Bachelor’s Degree, a more experienced inmate a Master’s Degree or a Fellowship, while one who hears the condemned sermon is ‘Head of his Order’. ‘Blunt’ is money, ‘booze’ is already in use meaning strong drink, a ‘cove’ is a man, a ‘tye’ is a neckcloth, a ‘nutcracker’ is the pillory, while the word ‘fence’ already signifies one who deals in stolen goods. A ‘café’ is a bawdy-house, while Newgate is referred to as ‘The Whit’, in reference to Richard Whittington’s rebuilding.
At 7 a.m. the prisoners were awoken by a bell which summoned them from their wards to empty their chamber pots and to be counted before having their breakfasts. From breakfast until mid-afternoon the prisoners were left to their own devices, much of the time being devoted to drinking, which was a critical element of the Newgate regime and fulfilled the needs of both prisoners and gaolers. Liquor was plentiful and many prisoners lived in a state of almost permanent inebriation in order to mitigate the effects of incarceration until death mercifully released them from their sufferings. Wine was relatively costly at 2s a bottle, but a condition of senselessness could be achieved fairly cheaply with brandy at 4d for a quarter bottle.44 For the keepers, who ran the taphouse, liquor was a source of profit estimated as about £400 per annum in the eighteenth century and it was also a means of maintaining order in the overcrowded gaol. In the words of one keeper in 1787, ‘When the prisoners are drunk they tend to be docile and quite free from rioting.’45
In 1699 the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge (SPCK) appointed Dr Thomas Bray, one of its founders, to investigate conditions in Newgate and he reported on ‘the personal lewdness of the keepers’ and the practice of ‘old criminals corrupting newcomers’, the latter being a feature of prison life that would be recognised by twenty-first-century criminologists. One observer commented that, ‘instead of employing their time in the amendment of life and a religious preparation for their trial, prisoners are forced to drink, riot and game to curry favour with the gaoler and support his luxury’.46
Dr Thomas Bray (c. 1658–1730): born near Oswestry, on the Welsh borders, Bray was the son of a farmer, and was educated at the local grammar school and at All Souls, Oxford, as a poor scholar. In the seventeenth century the American colonies were technically the responsibility of the Bishop of London who in 1696 sent Bray to the colony of Maryland to find ways of increasing the numbers of Anglican clergymen available to minister to its growing population. He was remarkably successful both in recruiting clergy and in raising funds to equip them with clerical regalia and a selection of over fifty texts with which to spread the Gospel. He also founded lending libraries for poor clergy at home and overseas. In 1717 he founded ‘Dr Bray Associates’ which was devoted to the education of plantation slaves. In 1701 he persuaded William III to grant a Royal Charter for the foundation of what became the Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. He devoted much energy to the reform of prison conditions, one of the first to do so. He ended his days as incumbent of St Botolph’s, Aldgate, back in the heart of the diocese of London.
At this time there were no ordinances in place to govern the routine of the prison so in 1730 a particularly enterprising prisoner called Joseph Woolan and his wife opened a rival taphouse which, at the request of the indignant keepers, was closed by order of the City Sheriffs. Seven years later the same fate befell a still which had been designed by another inmate, but a few years after that, in 1756, the Sheriffs compelled the keeper to reimburse prisoners who had complained that the official taphouse was supplying them with ‘hogwash’ – watered-down beer. Later in the century a group of prisoners organised the ‘Free and Easy Club’, a drinking club whose avowed aim was ‘to promote tumult and disorder’ and which survived until it was banned in 1808.47
Other occupations included badger-baiting and gambling, a pastime which was especially popular among those awaiting execution and who presumably felt that they had nothing to lose by it. William Robison, the Keeper of Newgate from 1700 to 1707 referred to earlier, provided more diverse forms of entertainment by admitting whores to the prison and encouraging them to bring with them stolen goods, thus providing a ready market for this merchandise. He was only maintaining a well-established tradition since forty years earlier a Recorder had observed that ‘the Keeper of Newgate hath at this day made his house the only nursery of rogues, prostitutes, pickpockets and thieves in the world’.48 Those who had not the means to gamble could amuse themselves by tormenting the neighbours and passers-by who were liable to be bombarded with insults, the contents of chamber pots and the output of urinating and excreting prisoners, some of whom climbed on to the roof the better to spread their output.49
In the afternoon the main meal of the day was served. This included roast meat for the Masters’ side and bread and water for the Common side, where meat was served perhaps once a week unless it was purloined by the keepers and sold to local merchants. At ten o’clock the prisoners were herded to their wards by the keepers and cellarmen, ‘like drivers with so many Turkish slaves’ according to Hall.
CRIMINAL CONTACTS
Some of the minor officials at the gaol established beneficial liaisons with local criminals. Ralph Briscoe, a seventeenth-century clerk of Newgate, formed a liaison with a former inmate, the notorious Mary Frith, better known as Moll Cutpurse. Briscoe would organise the packing of a jury or a reprieve for one of Moll’s associates and in return she would lay on a particularly savage example of Briscoe’s favourite sport of bull-baiting.
The City authorities remained indifferent to these appalling conditions until, in 1750 forty-three officials, including two judges at the nearby Old Bailey, along with the Lord Mayor and many jurymen, succumbed to gaol fever (typhus). This encouraged them to install a windmill on the roof of the gaol, designed by a Dr Hales, to improve ventilation, but seven of the eleven labourers employed in installing the device themselves succumbed to the fever which is carried by fleas. The authorities now began to make plans to replace the foetid and decaying gaol with a new one designed by George Dance.
Moll Cutpurse (c. 1584–1659): born Mary Frith, in the Barbican, Moll quickly established a reputation as a hoyden, or tomboy, more interested in bull-and bear-baiting than in traditional feminine activities. An attempt by her uncle to send her to America was frustrated when she escaped from the ship before it set sail and, dressed as a man, she became a prominent member of a gang of thieves operating in the City. They specialised in the art of the cutpurse, or pickpocket, for which she was branded and spent time in Newgate, but her career as a robber ended when she carried out a highway robbery on the Parliamentary General Thomas Fairfax. After this she was caught and condemned, but secured a pardon by a payment of £2,000. She then became a ‘fence’, disposing of property stolen by others, and an organiser of crimes carried out by others. She devised a new crime, which involved stealing the unguarded ledgers of traders, containing records essential to the businesses, and charging for their return. She died shortly after the death of Oliver Cromwell and, a keen Royalist, she left £20 in her will to celebrate the forthcoming restoration of Charles II.
THE OLD BAILEY
Newgate’s neighbour and provider of many of its inmates, the Old Bailey courthouse, had also been destroyed in the Great Fire and had been reconstructed in a more enlightened manner. In 1673 it was rebuilt as a three-storey brick building in an Italianate style, described by the contemporary chronicler John Strype as ‘a fair and stately building’. The ground floor, where the courtroom was situated, was open to the elements – a device designed to ensure the free circulation of air and hence reduce the incidence of typhus passed on by the residents of the gaol when they were brought before the court. The courtyard outside accommodated spectators, some of whom were drawn by the curiosity which accompanied the trials of celebrated or notorious defendants. Others, it was suggested, were professional criminals who wished to familiarise themselves with court layout and procedure in order to plan their escapes or to devise suitable strategies for their defence should the need arise. A third category consisted of friends of infamous criminals on trial, their presence designed to ‘influence’ the deliberations of the juries.
In 1737 the building was remodelled and the open courtroom on the ground floor was enclosed, supposedly to keep out the weather, though it may have been prompted by a desire to reduce the influence of the crowds assembled in the courtyard. Thirteen years later, as we have seen, an outbreak of typhus killed forty-three people at the courthouse. This did not deter the spectators. Their visits to the courtroom itself were profitable to the court officials who levied an entry charge. In 1771 John Wilkes, then Sheriff of London, tried to stop this practice as being undemocratic, but he was persuaded to rescind his prohibition when the press of people trying to enter the court led to a near riot.
Dr Stephen Hales (1677–1761): born in Kent, Hales was a clergyman, botanist and biologist. He served as curate at Teddington, Middlesex. Like many clergymen of the age, including Gilbert White and George Crabbe, he devoted his considerable leisure time to the study of science. He was a pioneer in botany, particularly in the study of the mechanisms by which plants used water and in demonstrating that plant sap flows upwards. He studied the effect of electrical impulses on the physiology of animals and devised a method for measuring blood pressure. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1718 and in 1754 was a founder of the Society for the Encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce, later the Royal Society of Arts. He campaigned against the practice of drinking spirits and advocated the distillation of fresh water from seawater. In his honour an annual Stephen Hales prize is awarded by the American Society of Plant Biologists to a scientist who has made a noteworthy contribution to that science.
TWO CELEBRITY PRISONERS
Just as Newgate and nearby Smithfield had become notorious for the sufferings of those whose religious beliefs did not accord with the whims of Tudor monarchs, so the Stuart and early Hanoverian period became associated with prisoners who owed their celebrity either to their notoriety or to their beneficial influence on their fellow citizens. Daniel Defoe, the author of Moll Flanders, was one of these whose brief stay in Newgate provided him with material for his novel without inflicting undue hardship on the author. Defoe was born Daniel Foe in 1659 or 1660 and added the ‘De’ to his name in 1703 for reasons unknown. He was the son of a butcher of Presbyterian belief and Flemish descent in the parish of St Giles, Cripplegate. Daniel was intended for the ministry, but instead followed a chequered career as merchant, brickmaker, insurance agent and pamphleteer. He was bankrupted on more than one occasion and rescued from his creditors by patrons who valued his talents as a propagandist on behalf of the Whig party. He escaped the potentially fatal consequences of joining the Duke of Monmouth’s ill-judged rebellion in 1685 and became a supporter of William of Orange. This did not save him from Newgate and the pillory for publishing, in 1702, The Shortest Way with Dissenters, which lampooned the established Church’s intolerant view of those who deviated from its doctrines.
However, such was the sympathy of the London mob that Defoe did not suffer the painful consequences that could result from exposure in the pillory. In his honour the pillory was draped in flowers and he survived the process unscathed.50 Defoe is remembered as one of the fathers of the English novel with Robinson Crusoe, published in 1719, and Moll Flanders (1722) in which he made full use of his brief experience of Newgate. Despite these successes he was, as usual, in straitened financial circumstances at the time of his death in 1731.
An earlier, and more heroic inmate was William Penn. He was born in London in 1644 to an English father, an admiral in the navy who served both the Stuart monarchs and Oliver Cromwell with distinction. His mother Margaret was described by Samuel Pepys as a ‘well-looked, fat, short old Dutch woman, but one who hath been heretofore pretty handsome’. He entered Oxford University, but was expelled in 1661, aged 17, for views which were eventually to send him to Newgate. He showed what the authorities regarded as an unhealthy interest in dissenting religions and protested against the requirement to attend college chapel. He then attended a French Protestant university in Saumur during a brief period of comparative religious toleration in France before entering Lincoln’s Inn and acquiring the knowledge of the Common Law and judicial procedure which he would shortly need.
In 1667 he was arrested while attending a meeting of the Quakers, or Society of Friends, a sect founded by George Fox in 1647 whose emphasis on the direct relationship between believers and God, without the need for intermediaries such as clergymen to expound Christian doctrine, was regarded by the secular and ecclesiastical authorities as particularly seditious and threatening. During a short spell as a prisoner in the Tower of London Penn wrote much of the early Quaker literature which presented a historical case for religious toleration and declared, ‘I owe my conscience to no mortal man.’
He was by now identified as a serious dissident voice. The authorities duly closed the Quaker meeting house in Gracechurch Street which Penn attended, whereupon he and a fellow preacher, William Meade, held their meeting in the street. He was taken to Newgate and tried in the Old Bailey before a bench, which included the Lord Mayor,51 under a rather strangely framed charge of sedition which claimed that he and Meade, by preaching, had ‘met together with force of arms to the terror and disturbance of His Majesty’s liege subjects’. Penn, with his sharp mind and legal training, was able to challenge this absurd charge so effectively that the enraged Lord Mayor interrupted his courtroom speech, crying, ‘Stop his mouth! Bring fetters and stake him to the ground.’
The jury were not impressed and the foreman, Edmund Bushell, returned a verdict of ‘not guilty’ at which point The Lord Mayor informed them, ‘You shall not be dismissed till we have a verdict that the court will accept. You will be locked up without meat, drink, fire or tobacco. We will have a verdict by the Grace of God or you shall starve for it.’52 This rather unusual judicial pronouncement led to the incarceration of the jury in Newgate, which failed to move them, as did the fines that the Mayor imposed on the recalcitrant jurors. They were rescued from the infamous prison by a writ of habeas corpus and a decision of the Lord Chief Justice that jurors could not be coerced or punished for their verdicts: a critical decision for the rights of juries. Penn was sent to Newgate the following year by a more compliant jury. Upon entering the Common side he commented, ‘When we came to Newgate we found that side of the prison full of Friends [i.e. Quakers].’ Penn is usually remembered as the founder of the state of Pennsylvania, under a charter granted by Charles II in 1681, perhaps because the King was anxious to despatch his well-intentioned but troublesome subject across the ocean. The colony flourished, but Penn was no administrator and his own fortunes declined. He returned to England and died in 1718. He is buried in the Quaker village of Jordans, Buckinghamshire, not far from his ancestral village of Penn in the same county.
POLITICS
Penn, like many other inmates of Newgate, had been consigned to the prison by the justices of the Old Bailey for reasons that reflected the politics and fears of the age. Whereas in the reigns of the Tudors and the earlier Stuarts many of the victims had been incarcerated and executed, because their religious opinions differed from those of the sovereign, in the 1690s anxieties shifted to the coin of the realm. The foundation of the Bank of England in 1694 and the cost of William III’s wars with Louis XIV placed a new emphasis on the need to preserve the integrity of the currency. In 1696 Sir Isaac Newton, already renowned throughout Europe for his mathematical work, was appointed Warden of the Royal Mint, one of his tasks being that of preventing the debasement of the coinage. He pursued ‘coiners’ relentlessly and at this time Newgate acquired hundreds of prisoners convicted of this crime. The offence was regarded as ‘petty treason’, which meant that men were liable to be hanged, drawn and quartered while female coiners were burned. This was the fate of Elizabeth Hare who was burned in Bunhill Fields, the reprieve that was customary in such cases being opposed by the Treasury unless her accomplices were identified.
Highwaymen were also becoming a problem and some of the most notorious prisoners of the seventeenth century fell into this category, though it was not until the Hanoverian period that they acquired the status of major celebrities. Rewards as high as £40 were offered for their arrest and those suspected of the crime were paraded before the door of Newgate on horseback in the hope that their victims would recognise them – an early if crude form of identity parade. One of the most notorious was Jack Cottington, known as ‘Mulled Sack’ because of his legendary capacity for that drink (warm sherry). Having failed to pick Oliver Cromwell’s pocket at Westminster, he robbed a wagon on the Oxford Road of a sum alleged to be £4,000 intended as wages for the army. He escaped justice by bribing the Abingdon jury, which had been empanelled to try him. The abduction of heiresses was another popular crime at this time, as in the case of a Captain Clifford who spent a year in Newgate in 1683 for abducting a wealthy widow, taking her to Calais and forcing her to marry him.
As in previous centuries the pillory remained in use as an alternative or additional punishment to gaol, though the effects of this device were unpredictable and could be either fatal or benign. Thus, in 1732 John Waller, who had given false information against those accused of highway robbery, was pelted to death in the pillory by an enraged rob who looked with some favour on highwaymen, partly because of their audacity and partly because those who travelled on the highway, especially in coaches, were thought of as wealthy and well able to afford their fate. In 1765 James Williams, publisher of John Wilkes’s North Briton, was treated as a hero. The offending issue of the paper, number 45, had accused the King’s government, led by Lord Bute, of falsehood. Wilkes had escaped a charge of seditious libel when the Lord Chief Justice ruled that his status as a Member of Parliament exempted him from prosecution, so the government proceeded against Williams instead. Far from pelting Williams, the crowd protected him, collected 200 guineas for him and executed Lord Bute in effigy. A Dr Shebbeare, who was pilloried for a similar offence a few years earlier, was driven to the pillory by an under-sheriff whose footman then stood by with an umbrella to protect Shebbeare from the elements.
By this time Newgate was once again in a poor state of repair. In 1770 a programme of reconstruction began and in 1774 this was extended to its neighbour, the Old Bailey. The work was barely completed when the events of 1780 determined that the new gaol would have a very short life and would swiftly be replaced with a new design by a famous architect.