THE MARTYRS OF CHANCERY.
In Lambeth Marsh stands a building better known than honored. The
wealthy merchant knows it as the place where an unfortunate friend, who
made that ruinous speculation during the recent sugar-panic, is now a
denizen; the man-about-town knows it as a spot to which several of his
friends have been driven, at full gallop, by fleet race-horses and dear
dog-carts; the lawyer knows it as the "last scene of all," the
catastrophe of a large proportion of law-suits; the father knows it as a
bug-bear wherewith to warn his scapegrace spendthrift son; but the uncle
knows it better as the place whence nephews date protestations of reform
and piteous appeals, "this once," for bail. Few, indeed, are there who
has not heard of the Queen's Prison, or, as it is more briefly and
emphatically termed, "The Bench!"
Awful sound! What visions of folly and roguery, of sloth and seediness,
of ruin and recklessness, are conjured up to the imagination in these
two words! It is the "Hades" of commerce--the "Inferno" of fortune.
Within its grim walls--surmounted by a chevaux de frise, classically
termed "Lord Ellenborough's teeth"--dwell at this moment members of
almost every class of society. Debt--the grim incubus riding on the
shoulders of his victim, like the hideous old man in the Eastern
fable--has here his captives safely under lock and key, and within
fifty-feet walls. The church, the army, the navy, the bar, the press,
the turf, the trade of England, have each and all their representatives
in this "house." Every grade, from the ruined man of fortune, to the
petty tradesman who has been undone by giving credit to others still
poorer than himself, sends its members to this Bankrupts' Parliament.
Nineteen-twentieths in this Royal House of Detention owe their
misfortunes directly or indirectly to themselves; and, for them, every
free and prosperous man has his cut-and-dry moral, or scrap of pity, or
screed of advice; but there is a proportion of prisoners--happily a
small one--within those huge brick boundaries, who have committed no
crime, broken no law, infringed no commandment. They are the victims of
a system which has been bequeathed to us from the dark days of the "Star
Chambers" and "Courts of High Commission"--we mean the Martyrs of
Chancery.
These unhappy persons were formerly confined in the Fleet Prison, but on
the demolition of that edifice, were transferred to the Queen's Bench.
Unlike prisoners of any other denomination, they are frequently ignorant
of the cause of their imprisonment, and more frequently still, are
unable to obtain their liberation by any acts or concessions of their
own. There is no act of which they are permitted to take the benefit--no
door left open for them in the Court of Bankruptcy. A Chancery prisoner
is, in fact, a far more hopeless mortal than a convict sentenced to
transportation; for the latter knows that at the expiration of a certain
period, he will, in any event, be a free man. The Chancery prisoner has
no such certainty; he may, and he frequently does, waste a life-time in
the walls of a jail, whither he was sent in innocence--because,
perchance, he had the ill-luck to be one of the next of kin of some
testator who made a will which no one could comprehend, or the heir of
some intestate who made none. Any other party interested in the estate
commences a Chancery suit, which he must defend or be committed to
prison for "contempt." A prison is his portion, whatever he does; for,
if he answers the bill filed against him, and cannot pay the costs, he
is also clapped in jail for "contempt." Thus, what in ordinary life is
but an irrepressible expression of opinion or a small discourtesy, is,
"in Equity," a high crime, punishable with imprisonment--sometimes
perpetual. Whoever is pronounced guilty of contempt in a Chancery sense,
is taken from his family, his profession, or his trade, (perhaps his
sole means of livelihood,) and consigned to a jail where he must starve,
or live on a miserable pittance of three shillings and sixpence a week,
charitably doled out to him from the county rate.
Disobedience of an order of the Court of Chancery--though that order may
command you to pay more money than you ever had, or to hand over
property which is not yours and was never in your possession--is
contempt of court. No matter how great soever your natural reverence for
the time-honored institutions of your native land--no matter, though you
regard the Lord High Chancellor of Great Britain as the most wonderful
man upon earth, and his court as the purest fount of Justice, where she
sits weighing out justice with a pair of Oertling's balances, you may
yet be pronounced to have been guilty of "contempt." For this there is
no pardon. You are in the catalogue of the doomed, and are doomed
accordingly.
A popular fallacy spreads a notion that no one need "go into Chancery,"
unless he pleases. Nothing but an utter and happy innocence of the
bitter irony of "Equity" proceedings keeps such an idea current. Men
have been imprisoned for many years, some for a life-time, on account of
Chancery proceedings, of the very existence of which they were almost in
ignorance before they "somehow or other were found in contempt."
See yonder slatternly old man in threadbare garments, with pinched
features telling of long years of anxiety and privation, and want. He
has a weak, starved voice, that sounds as though years of privation have
shrunk it as much as his cheeks. He always looks cold, and (God help
him) feels so too; for Liebig tells us that no quantity of clothing will
repel cold without the aid of plenty of food--and little of that passes
his lips. His eye has an unquiet, timid, half-frightened look, as if he
could not look you straight in the face for lack of energy. His step is
a hurried shuffle, though he seldom leaves his room; and when he does,
he stares at the racket-players as if they were beings of a different
race from himself. No one ever sees his hands--they are plunged
desperately into his pockets, which never contain anything else. He is
like a dried fruit, exhausted, shrunken, and flung aside by the whole
world. He is a man without hope--a Chancery prisoner! He has lived in a
jail for twenty-eight weary years! His history has many parallels. It is
this:--
It was his misfortune to have an uncle, who died leaving him his
residuary legatee. The uncle, like most men who make their own wills,
forgot an essential part of it--he named no executor. Our poor friend
administered, and all parties interested received their dues--he, last
of all, taking but a small sum. It was his only fortune, and having
received it he looked about for an investment. There were no railways in
those days, or he might have speculated in the Diddlesex Junction. But
there were Brazilian Mining Companies, and South Sea Fishing Companies,
and various other companies, comprehensively termed "Bubble." Our friend
thought these companies were not safe, and he was quite right in his
supposition. So he determined to intrust his money to no bubble
speculation; but to invest it in Spanish Bonds. After all, our poor
friend had better have tried the Brazilian Mines; for the Bonds proved
worth very little more than the paper on which they were written. His
most Catholic Majesty did not repudiate, (like certain transatlantic
States,) but buttoned up his pockets and told his creditors he had "no
money."
Some five years after our friend was startled by being requested to come
up to Doctors' Commons, and tell the worthy Civilians there all about
his uncle's will--which one of the legatees, after receiving all he was
entitled to under it, and probably spending the money--suddenly took it
into his head to dispute the validity of. Meanwhile the Court of
Chancery also stepped in, and ordered him (pending the ecclesiastical
suit) to pay over into court "that little trifle" he had received. What
could the poor man do? His Catholic Majesty had got the money--he, the
legatee, had not a farthing of it, nor of any other money whatsoever. He
was in contempt! An officer tapped him on the shoulder, displayed a
little piece of parchment, and he found that he was the victim of an
unfortunate "attachment." He was walked to the Fleet Prison, where, and
in the Queen's Prison, he has remained ever since--a period of
twenty-eight years! Yet no less a personage than a Lord Chancellor has
pronounced his opinion that the will, after all, was a good and valid
will--though the little family party of Doctors' Commons thought
otherwise.
There is another miserable-looking object yonder--greasy, dirty, and
slovenly. He, too, is a Chancery prisoner. He has been so for twenty
years. Why, he has not the slightest idea. He can only tell you that he
was found out to be one of the relations of some one who had left "a
good bit of money." The lawyers "put the will into Chancery; and at last
I was ordered to do something or other, I can't recollect what, which I
was also told I couldn't do nohow if I would. So they said I was in
contempt, and they took and put me into the Fleet. It's a matter of
twenty years I have been in prison; of course I'd like to get out, but
I'm told there's no way of doing it anyhow." He is an artisan, and works
at his trade in the prison, by which he gains just enough to keep him
without coming upon the county-rate.
In that room over the chapel is the infirmary. There was a death lately.
The deceased was an old man of sixty-eight, and nearly blind; he had not
been many years in prison, but the confinement, and the anxiety, and the
separation from his family, had preyed upon his mind and body. He was
half-starved, too; for after being used to all the comforts of life, he
had to live in jail on sixpence a-day. Yet there was one thousand pounds
in the hands of the Accountant-General of the Court of Chancery, which
was justly due to him. He was in contempt for not paying some three
hundred pounds. But Death purged his contempt, and a decree was
afterwards made for paying over the one thousand pounds to his personal
representatives; yet himself had died, for want of a twentieth part of
it, of slow starvation!
It must not, however, be supposed that Chancery never releases its
victims. We must be just to the laws of "Equity." There is actually a
man now in London whom they have positively let out of prison! They had,
however, prolonged his agonies during seventeen years. He was committed
for contempt in not paying certain costs, as he had been ordered. He
appealed from the order; but until his appeal was heard, he had to
remain in durance vile. The Court of Chancery, like all dignified
bodies, is never in a hurry; and, therefore, from having no great
influence, and a very small stock of money to forward his interest, the
poor man could only get his cause finally heard and decided on in
December, 1849--seventeen years from the date of his imprisonment. And,
after all, the Court decided that the original order was wrong; so that
he had been committed for seventeen years _by mistake_!
How familiar to him must have been the face of that poor, tottering man,
creeping along to rest on the bench under the wall yonder. He is very
old, but not so old as he looks. He is a poor prisoner, and another
victim to Chancery. He has long ago forgotten, if he ever knew, the
particulars of his own case, or the order which sent him to a jail. He
can tell you more of the history of this gloomy place and its defunct
brother, the Fleet, than any other man. He will relate you stories of
the "palmy days" of the Fleet, when great and renowned men were
frequently its denizens; when soldiers and sailors, authors and actors,
whose names even then filled England with their renown, were prisoners
within its walls; when whistling shops flourished and turnkeys were
smugglers; when lodgings in the prison were dearer than rooms at the
west-end of the town; and when a young man was not considered to have
finished his education until he had spent a month or two in the Bench or
the Fleet. He knows nothing of the world outside--it is dead to him.
Relations and friends have long ceased to think of him, or perhaps even
to know of his existence. His thoughts range not beyond the high walls
which surround him, and probably if he had but a little better supply of
food and clothing, he might almost be considered a happy man. But it is
the happiness of apathy, not of the intelligence and the affections--the
painless condition of a trance, rather than the joyous feeling which has
hope for its bright-eyed minister. What has _he_ to do with hope? He
has been thirty-eight years a Chancery prisoner. He is another out of
twenty-four, still prisoners here, more than half of whom have been
prisoners for above ten years, and not one of whom has any hope of
release! A few have done something fraudulent in "contempt" of all law
and equity; but is not even _their_ punishment greater than their crime?
Let us turn away. Surely we have seen enough, though many other sad
tales may be told, rivaling the horrors of Speilberg and French
Lettres-de-cachet.