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 commanded by the Duke of Lancaster was slain by a gentleman imprisoned in the Marshalsea, whereupon the men-of-war’s men conceiving that the murderer was sheltered by great folk broke into the prison, took him and hanged him on a gallows near the gaol, and returned in triumph to their ships with trumpets sounding. The prison was again attacked four years later by the insurgents headed by Wat Tyler and at that time the marshal lost his life. On this occasion the marshal of the King’s Bench adjoining, Sir John Imworth, was seized and beheaded. Much importance attached to the prison in the reigns of Henry VIII, Mary and Elizabeth, when it was used for State purposes. Bishop Bonner, the last Roman Catholic bishop of London, was sent to it, when suspended by Queen Elizabeth. The story runs that he preserved a grim humour despite his misfortunes. When a man greeted him with the insulting address, “Good morrow Bishop Quondam,” the bishop promptly retorted, “Farewell, Knave Semper.” When on his way to the prison, some one called out, “The Lord confound thee, or else turn thy heart.” “The Lord send thee to keep thy breath to cool thy porridge,” was the defiant reply. Bonner died in the prison in 1569 after a confinement of ten years. Poets, pamphleteers and political satirists were often committed to the Marshalsea and among them George Wither, Christopher Brooke and many Puritan martyrs. After the Restoration, as John Evelyn tells us, Colonel Culpeper was sent there as the aggressor in an affray with “my lord of Devonshire,” when the latter stood very near His Majesty’s bed-chamber. Some hot words passed between them and Lord Devonshire gave Culpeper the lie. Upon which the colonel “struck him a box on the ear,” but the lord returned it and “felled him.” They were soon parted; Culpeper was seized and carried by the King’s order before the Board of Green Cloth where he got his deserts by being confined in the Marshalsea.
The Marshalsea did not escape reprehension for great abuses practised at the time when the brutal administration of the Fleet was called in question. We get a glimpse of it fifty years later in John Howard’s first report. He describes the prison as too small and greatly out of repair; “an old irregular building (rather several buildings) in a spacious yard. There are, in the whole, nearly sixty rooms; and yet only six of them now left for Common Side debtors. Of the other rooms, five are let to a man who is not a prisoner; in one of them he keeps a chandler’s shop; in two he lives with his family; the other two he lets to prisoners. Four rooms, the Oaks, are for women. They are too few for the number and the more modest women complain of the bad company in which they are confined. There are above forty rooms for men on the Master’s Side, in which are about sixty beds; yet many prisoners have no beds nor any place to sleep in but the chapel and the tap-room.”
This account tallies exactly with another later and more graphic from the hand of a great literary master, the same who has brought the Fleet prison so vividly before us. Charles Dickens knew the Marshalsea by heart for he had lived there with his father when the latter was detained there as a debtor. Dickens writes: “It was an oblong pile of barrack building, partitioned into squalid houses standing back to back, so that there were no back rooms; environed by a narrow paved yard, hemmed in by high walls duly spiked at top. Itself a close and confined prison for debtors, it contained within it a much closer and more confined jail for smugglers. Offenders against the revenue laws and defaulters to excise or customs, who had incurred fines which they were unable to pay, were supposed to be incarcerated behind an iron-plated door, closing up a second prison, consisting of a strong cell or two, and a blind alley some yard and a half wide, which formed the mysterious termination of the very limited skittle-ground in which the Marshalsea debtors bowled down their troubles.”
Here is another picture, the scene at the gate in the early morning when the prison is first opened: “There was a string of people already straggling in, whom it was not difficult to identify as the nondescript messengers, go-betweens and errand-bearers of the place. Some of them had been lounging in the rain until the gate should open; others, who had timed their arrival with greater nicety, were coming up now and passing in with damp whitey-brown paper bags from the grocers, loaves of bread, lumps of butter, eggs, milk and the like. The shabbiness of these attendants upon shabbiness, the poverty of these insolvent waiters upon insolvency, was a sight to see. Such threadbare coats and trousers, such fusty gowns and shawls, such squashed hats and bonnets, such boots and shoes, such umbrellas and walking sticks, never were seen in Rag Fair. All of them wore the cast-off clothes of other men and women; were made up of patches and pieces of other people’s individuality and had no sartorial existence of their own proper. Their walk was the walk of a race apart. They had a peculiar way of doggedly slinking round the corner as if they were eternally going to the pawnbroker’s. When they coughed, they coughed like people accustomed to be forgotten on door-steps and in draughty passages, waiting for answers to letters in faded ink, which gave the recipients of those manuscripts great mental disturbance and no satisfaction. As they eyed the stranger in passing, they eyed him with borrowing eyes—hungry, sharp, speculative as to his softness if they were accredited to him, and the likelihood of his standing something handsome. Mendacity on commission stooped in their high shoulders, shambled in their unsteady legs, buttoned and pinned and darned and dragged their clothes, frayed their button-holes, leaked out of their figures in dirty little ends of tape and issued from their mouths in alcoholic breathings.”
The Marshalsea escaped the Lord George Gordon rioters and it lived on, more and more eclipsed by its more ambitious neighbour and with uses more and more curtailed, especially when a new debtors’ prison, that of Whitecross Street, was planned in 1813. It was condemned and closed in 1842, when the prisoners remaining for any length of term were transferred to the King’s Bench. It was soon afterward pulled down and the last vestiges of it are preserved to us by Charles Dickens who visited it in 1856 in the course of demolition. He tells his friend John Forster of this visit:—“Went to the Borough yesterday morning before going to Gad’s Hill to see if I could find any ruins of the Marshalsea. Found a great part of the original building, now ‘Marshalsea Place.’ I found the rooms that had been in my mind’s eye in the story.... There is a room there still standing that I think of taking. It is the room through which the ever memorable signers of Captain Porter’s petition filed off in my boyhood. The spikes are gone and the wall is lowered; and anybody can go out now who likes to go and is not bed-ridden.”
Earliest mention by John Howard in 1756 when taken by a French privateer and lodged in the castle of Brest—Twenty-five years later again visits the French War Prisons and animadverts upon what he saw—Extends his inspection to British war prisons—Old war-ships or “hulks” brought into use in England—Many objections—Large prison establishments erected inland—Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire which accommodated five thousand—Another large prison designed in 1806 on Dartmoor—Opened in 1808—Occupied by members of many nationalities and of all classes—The lowest and most degraded, the “Romans,” akin to the “rafalés” of the hulks—Daily life at Dartmoor—Incurable passion for gambling—Curious games of chance—Duelling—Criminal pursuits not unknown—Coiners and forgers—Arrival of American war prisoners.
THE first extensive use of places for the detention of prisoners of war appears to have been in the middle of the eighteenth century, when Europe was continually harassed by conflicts among the nations and when decimation by a general massacre of captives taken under the fortune of war was no longer permissible. Of the treatment accorded to these prisoners, the earliest authentic record is to be found under John Howard’s hand. In 1756 the great philanthropist took passage in a Lisbon packet bent upon making a tour of Portugal, but his ship was captured en route by a French privateer and he was carried with his companions into Brest and subjected to extreme hardship and privation before he reached that port. He was entirely deprived of food and drink; for forty hours not one drop of water passed his lips and hardly a morsel of food. “In the castle at Brest,” he tells us, “I lay six nights upon straw, and observing how cruelly my countrymen were used there, and at Morlaix, whither I was carried next; during the two months I was at Carhaix upon parole, I corresponded with the English prisoners at Brest, Morlaix and Dinnan: at the last of those towns were several of our ship’s crew and my servant. I had sufficient evidence of their being treated with such barbarity that many hundreds had perished and that thirty-six were buried in a hole at Dinnan in one day. When I came to England, still on parole, I made known to the commissioners of sick and wounded seamen the sundry particulars, which gained their attention and thanks. Remonstrance was made to the French court; our sailors had redress, and those that were in the three prisons mentioned above were brought home in the first cartel ships. A lady from Ireland, who married in France, had bequeathed in trust with the magistrates of St. Malo, sundry charities; one of which was a penny a day to every English prisoner of war in Dinnan. This was duly paid; and saved the lives of many brave and useful men. Perhaps what I suffered on this occasion, increased my sympathy with the unhappy people whose case is the subject of this book.”
Five and twenty years later when Howard was extending his visitation through the Continent he found many more English prisoners of war in French gaols. In Dunkirk 133 prisoners were confined in five rooms; captains, mates, passengers and common sailors, all crowded together, lying on straw with one coverlet to every three persons. In three other rooms there were thirteen accommodated in a better manner, because they were “ransomers” or persons held as security for a captured ship which was to be ransomed at a certain sum. These prisoners exercised in a very small courtyard and they were kept very short of water, but fairly well fed,—“The bread, beer and soup were good and the beef tolerable;” the prison was well governed under rules made by the King of France, which prescribed certain pains and penalties and accorded certain privileges. If any one attempted escape and was retaken he was “stinted to half his pittance of food” until he had repaid the expenses caused by his pursuit and recapture. If the place was damaged, the expense of repairs was paid out of the food of those found guilty of the infringement. The prisoners were at liberty to appoint a committee of three or five of themselves to supervise the issue of food and, if they thought necessary, complain of its quality.
In the common prison at Calais, Howard found great overcrowding and many of the prisoners here and elsewhere had no change of linen, and some were almost entirely destitute of clothes. Howard contrasted the treatment of French prisoners in England with the foregoing and generally in favour of the English. In the Mill prison near Plymouth, however, there was great overcrowding and very inferior food, but this was reformed in the newer edifice erected. The number detained here rose at one time to a very high figure, 10,352, comprising four different nationalities, American, French, Spanish and Dutch, the French predominating in the proportion of two thirds. A new prison had been erected at Bristol, built on rising ground three miles from the city. Although new the building was imperfect; there were no chimneys and the wards were dirty, never being washed. Over a thousand Frenchmen were in the Winchester prison, who lay all day indolently in their hammocks and were provided with no work. Several prisoners were confined in the dark hole, sentenced to it for forty days, on half allowance, to meet the sum expended in payment for their recapture after escape, on the same principle as that which obtained in France.
Howard condemned another prison at Forton near Gosport, where the rations were bad and the bread short weight. He says: “The straw by long use was turned to dust in the mattresses and many of them, here and in other places, had been emptied to clear them of vermin. The prisons at Pembroke were very unsatisfactory and the prisoners in great destitution; most of them had no shoes or stockings and some were also without shirts; they had no victualling tables, nor did they know what was their allowance; they lay in general on the boards without straw for there were but four hammocks in two rooms. Here was a courtyard but no water or sewer.” At Liverpool the French and Spanish prisoners were kept apart because of the animosities between the two nations; here and wherever French prisoners were confined, a money allowance was made to all prisoners and regularly paid. “There was besides a supply from the same court of clothes, linen and shoes to those who were destitute of these articles, a noble and exemplary provision much to the honour of those who conducted public affairs in France.” At this same time a bounty was paid by the English government to English prisoners in France.
War prisoners were also lodged in Scotch and Irish prisons, the first fairly well, the latter indifferently. In all these prisons above mentioned, there was a proportion of Americans, whose situation was much the same as that of the French. In Pembroke prison they were without shoes and stockings, and they lay on straw which was unchanged for six or seven weeks at a time. As the eighteenth century drew to its close and the war was waged with increasing severity, more and more prisoners fell into the hands of the opposing forces. The star of Napoleon was now in the ascendant and while all Europe submitted to his conquering hand, England still stoutly maintained the combat by sea. The supremacy of the British navy, never really in doubt, was conclusively established by the victory of Trafalgar. French warships were continually captured and their crews constantly passed on to swell the total in war prisons. It became a matter of some difficulty to make proper provision for their reception and safe custody. In the earlier years the floating prisons, the old war ships, long disused, were largely utilised and great numbers of prisoners were kept on board these hulks, which were moored in harbours and river estuaries on our southern coast. The system was open to serious objection. To keep great masses of men disarmed, it is true, but distinctly hostile, and at all times potential foes, in the very heart of the kingdom within easy reach of our naval arsenals was always a source of keen disquietude. The prisoners were constantly turbulent, ripe for mutiny and ready to break into excesses. Thus a number on board the hulks at the Hamoaze managed to set fire to their ships hoping to escape in the confusion; others, again, cut through bulkheads and decks, seized boats and made for the shore, bent upon hostile attack. As the best security against these dangers, it was decided to create one or more large prison establishments inland, at some comparatively isolated spot, at a distance from any large town. Of these the principal were at Norman Cross and Dartmoor.
Norman Cross is in the parish of Yaxley, in the county of Huntingdon near that grand old thoroughfare of England, the Great North Road, along which coaches might be driven four abreast. In one corner was a large piece of pasture land, some forty acres in extent which the Government purchased in 1796, to be utilised in the erection of barracks for prisoners of war. The situation was exceedingly healthy, being at the highest point of the road sloping up for a mile and a half from what was then Whittlesea Mere. It was not too near the sea to make escape easy, yet near enough to Yarmouth, King’s Lynn and Wisbeach to facilitate the landing and transport of prisoners to their destination.
The prison consisted of sixteen large buildings of wood, very long and lofty, each two stories high, placed at the end of four rectangular pieces of land (four blocks in each), nearly in the centre of the forty acre field, and occupying altogether some fifteen acres. Each rectangular block was separated from the others and was surrounded by very high and strong palisades. They were placed symmetrically round a circular block-house, mounting guns which commanded every one of the sixteen buildings as well as the ground surrounding them. The establishment provided accommodation for five thousand prisoners and that number was frequently exceeded. Besides these central buildings, which may be called the prison proper, many others were scattered about the enclosures, intended for various purposes, such as kitchens, bakehouses, guard-rooms, turnkeys’ lodges, and more important than all to the safe custody of the prisoners, two large wooden barracks like each other, one at the east and the other at the west of the whole enclosure, for the accommodation of two regiments of infantry that formed the garrison.
The English officers were quartered in a large wooden house close to the road, towards the southeast corner of the enclosure and close to the house of the commandant. This last was the only building of brick in the whole place; and remains to this day together with the officers’ mess room and the house where they were quartered, now cased with brick. It is said that five hundred hands were employed in the construction of these buildings, and the work was steadily pressed forward toward completion. The prison possessed many natural advantages; a good soil with an abundant water supply and salubrious air. The wells were of considerable depth and yielded excellent water. In passing now along the Peterborough Road, some of these old wells may be recognised by the boards which protect them, being still in use for the cattle grazing peacefully on the old prison site.
The discipline maintained at Norman Cross was strict. “Lights out” sounded at 9 P. M., when all prisoners went into their hammocks, sentries were posted, and pickets patrolling made the round every half hour. No parole was given as it was extended only to officers residing in other parts of the United Kingdom. The rations issued were not excessive and consisted of one pound of bread, half a pound of beef with vegetables for five days in the week, and on the two remaining maigre days, Wednesday and Friday, a pound of salt cod or herring was substituted for the beef. Ale and wine could be purchased at the canteen. A market was also held within the prison enclosure for two hours every morning, when, as at Dartmoor, goods were bought and sold. The neighbours brought in supplies of food and necessaries and carried off articles manufactured by the prisoners in which they displayed much ingenuity and industry. These clever French fingers produced models of ships exact in the minutest details, a model of the west front of Peterborough Cathedral in plaited straw, many models of the death-dealing guillotine, and a great variety of boxes, fire screens, dressing cases, tea caddies, watch-stands, and crucifixes. They made money and escaped the greatest evil, the unrest that follows enforced idleness.
They were once on the eve of mutiny. A spirit of general insubordination grew among them, born of the cheerless monotony of their lives and their despairing hopelessness. The governor was harsh and unsympathetic. Mutiny was imminent, fostered by the severity of his iron rule. The presence of a masterful and intractable soul, a man who had been a revolutionary, supplied the ringleader and a conspiracy was quickly organised. One morning a red flag was hoisted on the principal barracks and the malcontents, greatly excited, filled the yards with loud shouts and threatening gestures. The commandant, a Major Kelley, promptly turned out the troops, for the most part militia, surrounded the enclosure and prepared to take summary measures. The guns of the central block house commanded all parts of the interior and he was urged to fire into all the yards, by way of warning, and follow it up by marching strong bodies of infantry inside to shoot down all who did not forthwith retire into their barracks. Meanwhile a mounted messenger was despatched to Peterborough and soon returned with several troops of yeomanry. The tumult still continued within the prison, mixed with the sounds of heavy blows aimed at the palisade. The prisoners meant to break through and succeeded at one point, where they were received at the point of the bayonet and driven back under a heavy fire. Some got through, however; nine got clear away and were never re-captured; others were caught in the next few days. This collision and the stern action of the authorities crushed the mutiny which was never renewed and the further history of Norman Cross was uneventful. The prison was completely emptied in 1814 after Napoleon’s abdication at Fontainebleau.
It will be seen further on how the great multitude of war prisoners in England (nearly fifty thousand) were located throughout the country. A large contingent (six thousand) was kept constantly at Norman Cross; nearly ten thousand were in the neighbourhood of Portsmouth, at the Forton prison and in the hulks; over five thousand were at Portchester; more than four thousand at Stapleton prison near Bristol, and twenty-five hundred in Edinburgh between the castle and Valleyfield. A very large number were confined in the far off western wilds of Dartmoor where a great war prison was constructed at Princetown in 1806.
The foundation stone of the Dartmoor prison was laid on the twentieth of March in 1806, by Sir Thomas Tyrwhitt, Lord Warden of the stannaries, the chief official of the Duchy of Cornwall, in other words, the representative of the proprietor and Lord Paramount, H. R. H., the Prince of Wales. The site was selected by a commissioner of the Transport Board, the supreme authority in the war prison department, the ground of preference being that “water was plentiful and excellent, the soil gravel, peat for fuel abundant, with convenient access to the high road and an abundant supply of granite for building.” The Prince of Wales (George IV) gave as many acres as were required by the Board so that the possibility of a garden for vegetables was an additional consideration which was likely to tend to the health and comfort of the