ABUSES AT THE FLEET
The Fleet, the appointed prison of the Star Chamber--Trial and
conviction of Prynne and of “Freeborn” John Lilburne--Horrors in
the Fleet and other debtors’ prisons reported by Moses Pitt--House
of Commons Committee 1696--Ill treatment of Jacob Mendez Solas, a
Portuguese prisoner--Shameful malpractices of Huggins and
Bambridge--Case of Captain Mackpheadris and of Captain David
Sinclair--Committal of Huggins and Bambridge to Newgate--Their
trial and verdict of not guilty--Hogarth’s great picture of the
Fleet Committee--Howard’s visitation in 1774--Social
evils--Increase of Fleet marriages--Fleet parsons and their
practices--Passing of the Marriage Act and abuses abolished.
The Fleet was the appointed prison for the victims of the Star Chamber
from the time of Elizabeth until toward the end of the reign of Charles
I. It was essentially the King’s Prison to which State offenders might
be committed, and to which debtors to the king on so confessing
themselves might claim transfer from anywhere in the provinces if they
preferred to be imprisoned in the capital. The Star Chamber, that
oppressive, half-secret and wholly irresponsible tribunal, was
accustomed to send to it all persons who fell under its displeasure; and
this view is further confirmed by the circumstance, that whilst during
the reign of Charles I we find it frequently used in this way, we do not
notice any suggestion that the practice was then a new one. The two most
interesting cases that belong to this part of the history of the Fleet
are those of Prynne and Lilburne.
The trial of Prynne in the Star Chamber should be forever memorable as
an example of the reckless disregard for law, justice, common sense and
humanity which can be exhibited by high-handed judges. The following
extracts will give a sufficient idea of the course of the trial and the
mode of determining the sentence:--
“For the book” (the “Histriomastix” wherein he castigated the court and
society severely), said Richardson, the Lord Chief Justice, “I hold it a
most scandalous, infamous libel on the king’s majesty, a most pious and
religious king; on the queen’s majesty, a most excellent and gracious
queen, such a one as this kingdom never enjoyed the like and I think the
earth never had a better,” etc. Then followed quotations from Prynne’s
book, full of “outrageous opinions” on plays and players and dancing and
then the first part of the sentence: “Mr. Prynne, I must now come to my
sentence; I am very sorry, for I have known you long, but now I must
utterly forsake you for I find that you have forsaken God” (the whole
tenor of Prynne’s book was to lead men, in his way, to draw nearer to
God) “ ... and forsaken all goodness. Therefore, Mr. Prynne, I shall
proceed to my censure wherein I agree with my Lord Cottington: first for
the burning of your book in as disgraceful manner as may be, whether in
Cheapside or St. Paul’s Churchyard.... And because Mr. Prynne is of
Lincoln’s Inn, and that his profession may not sustain disgrace by his
punishment, I do think it fit, with my Lord Cottington, that he be put
from the Bar and degraded in the University and I leave it to my lords,
the lords bishop, to see that done; and for the pillory I hold it just
and equal though there were no statute for it. In the case of all such
crime it may be done by the discretion of the Court, so I do agree to
that too. I fine him £5,000 and I know he is as well able to pay £5,000
as one-half of one thousand; and perpetual imprisonment. I do think fit
for him to be restrained from writing--neither to have pen, ink nor
paper--yet let him have some pretty prayer book to pray God to forgive
him his sins, but to write, in good faith, I would never have him. For,
Mr. Prynne, I do judge you by your book an insolent spirit and one that
did think by this book to have got the name of a reformer, to set up the
puritan or separatist faction.”
Sir Edward Coke followed, and among other things said: “Mr. Prynne, I do
declare you to be a schism-maker in the Church, a sedition-sower in the
Commonwealth, a wolf in sheep’s clothing; in a word _omnium malorium
nequissimus_. I shall fine him £10,000, which is more than he is worth
and less than he deserveth. I will not set him at liberty no more than a
plagued man or a mad dog, who though he cannot bite will foam. He is so
far from being a sociable soul that he is not a rational soul; he is fit
to live in dens with such beasts of prey as wolves and tigers like
himself, therefore do I condemn him to perpetual imprisonment as those
monsters that are no longer fit to live among men, nor see light. Now
for corporal punishment, my Lords, I shall burn him in the forehead and
slit him in the nose.... I should be loth he should escape with his
ears, for he may get a periwig which he now so much inveighs against and
so hide them or force his conscience to make use of his unlovely love
locks on both sides.”
These abominable barbarities were all inflicted in public, the branding,
the mutilation, the loss of ears, and afterwards poor Prynne, stout and
unyielding to the last, was remanded to the Fleet where his friends on
visiting him found him “serene in spirit and still cheerfully patient.”
His chief persecutor had been Archbishop Laud who was present in Court
throughout, and this fact was remembered against the cruel prelate when
later he was himself arraigned and sentenced to death. Prynne was a
second time tried and sentenced to lose the hacked remnant of his ears.
A second victim of the Star Chamber’s intolerance of criticism was John
Lilburne, “Freeborn John,” who refused to incriminate himself, standing
on his rights as a freeborn Englishman. His alleged offence (with his
printer Wharton) was the publication of libellous and seditious books,
called “News from Ipswich.” They were both remanded to the Fleet for the
present, but on the 13th February (1638) were again brought up and
pressed to reconsider their determination. Still inflexible, they were
sent back to the Fleet under a fine of £500 each and with an addition in
Lilburne’s case of a remarkable punishment. Foiled in their attempt to
break men’s spirits by fines, imprisonments, brandings, slitting of
noses, etc., another degrading punishment was now borrowed from the
felon-code,--whipping. “To the end,” runs the sentence, “that others may
be the more deterred from daring to offend in the like manner hereafter,
the court hath further ordered and decreed that the said John Lilburne
shall be whipt through the street from the Prison of the Fleet unto the
pillory, to be erected at such time and in such place as this court
shall hold fit; and that both he and Wharton shall be set in the said
pillory and from thence returned to the Fleet.” The pillory was placed
between Westminster Hall gate and the Star Chamber and Lilburne was
whipped from the prison thither “smartly.” Rushworth says, “Whilst he
was whipt at the cart and stood in the pillory, he uttered many bold
speeches against tyranny of bishops, etc., and when his head was in the
hole of the pillory he scattered sundry copies of pamphlets (said to be
seditious) and tossed them among the people, taking them out of his
pocket.” The Star Chamber Council was sitting at the time and was
informed of this last-mentioned incident; when, consistent in their
acts, they ordered him to be gagged immediately, which was done.
Lilburne then stamped with his feet, and the people understood his
meaning well enough,--that he would speak if he were able. This was not
all. At the same sitting of the Council an order was made directing that
Lilburne should be “laid alone with irons on his hands and legs in the
wards of the Fleet, where the basest and meanest sort of prisoners”
were, with other regulations in a similar spirit. This punishment also
was carried into effect for a time, but ultimately brought to a summary
conclusion through an accident in the prison. “Lilburne,” says
Rushworth, “having for some time endured close imprisonment, lying with
double irons on his feet and hands and laid in the inner wards of the
prison, there happened a fire in the prison of the Fleet, near to the
place where he was prisoner, which gave a jealousy that Lilburne, in his
fury and anguish, was desperate and had set the Fleet Prison on fire,
not regarding himself to be burnt with it; whereupon the inhabitants
without the Fleet (the street then not being five or six yards over from
the prison door) and the prisoners all cried, ‘Release Lilburne or we
shall all be burnt!’ and thereupon they ran headlong and made the warden
remove him out of his hold, and the fire was quenched and he remained a
prisoner in a place where he had some more air.” He continued in prison
till November the 3d, 1640, when the Long Parliament began and then he
was released and immediately applied to the House of Lords for redress,
who granted it in the most satisfactory manner, not merely declaring his
sentence and punishment most unjust and illegal, but ordering the
erasure of the proceedings from the files of all courts of justice, “as
unfit to continue on record.” On the breaking out of the Civil War,
Lilburne fought bravely, we need not say on which side. Freeborn John
was one of the most impracticable as well as courageous of enthusiasts
(Marten said of him, if there were none living but himself, John would
be against Lilburne, and Lilburne against John); and the Parliament
pleased him little better than the King; so he wrote against them too,
and was banished upon pain of death if he returned. But Freeborn John
would and did return, and was immediately arraigned at the Old Bailey,
where he was publicly acquitted, “which for joy occasioned a great
acclamation of the people present.” He died a Quaker and was buried in
Moorfields, four thousand citizens and other persons honouring his
remains by following them to the grave.
Atrocities continued to be perpetrated in the Fleet after the
Restoration and the inmates endured grievous ill-treatment. Some of
these were set forth in the reign of William III in a quaint book
printed and published in 1691 by one Moses Pitt, entitled, “The Cry of
the Oppressed,” being a true and tragical account of the unparalleled
sufferings of multitudes of poor imprisoned debtors in most of the gaols
of England under the tyranny of the gaolers and other oppressors. A
chief item was the relation of “some of the barbarities of Richard
Manlove, Esq., the present warden of the Fleet, who has lately been
found guilty of oppression and extortion by a jury of twelve men.”
The said warden “locked up till opened by the worthy Mr. Justice
Lutwyche three score gentlemen and others for non-payment of exclusive
chamber rent, where was a noisome House of Office near their lodgings,
not allowing the king’s beds, but forcing them to procure beds or lie on
the ground: and keeping men dead amongst them for pretended dues till
they infected others.”
“Again Richard Brocas, Esq., was carried down thither for not paying
excessive chamber-rent and his wife and servants denied to bring him
victuals or physic; and when he died the jury summoned, could not but
find his death occasioned by cruelty and they were dismissed by
contrivance with the coroner; and when he was buried, a new jury
summoned, he taken up again and an inquisition returned contrary to law;
and Sir John Pettus of Suffolk, baronet, for not paying extorting dues,
was forced into a little room (now the warden’s coachman’s lodgings) who
being a learned studious person for want of those necessaries, he
melancholy died and was kept many days above ground; his friends being
denied his body till they paid the warden’s pretended dues.”
“Sir William Ducy, Baronet, was kept by the warden in his coach house
till he was drawn out with ropes, being so offensive, that none could
come near him. Symon Edolph, Esq., seventy-eight years of age, the son
of Sir Thomas Edolph of Kent, for not paying forty two pounds demanded
of him, when he profered thirty pounds, which was for a little room
about twelve foot square, after the rate of six shillings per week,
besides payment of the chamberlain, was dragged down to the wards in the
hard weather and there not allowed a bed but must have lain on the
ground had he not (at his own charge) procured one.” “Walter Cowdrey,
gaoler of Winchester, for about two or three months’ chamber rent, was
kept above ground till it caused a sickness in the next room, and his
friends denied to take his body without paying extorting fees. By which
may be perceived the inhumanity of this gaoler, not only to gentlemen
but one of his own trade and calling. Sir George Putsay, sergeant at
law, dying of dropsie; and being a very great fat man, was kept (for
extorting fees) till a judge’s warrant was procured for his delivery.
Moses Pitt of London, bookseller, being committed prisoner to the Fleet,
April the 20th 1689, lodged on the gentleman’s side in a chamber which
the warden values at eight shillings per week, though of right it’s but
two shillings and fourpence, the rest being exaction (and the said Moses
Pitt at the time of writing of this has two chambers within the rules of
the Kings-Bench for one shilling three pence per week, twice as good as
the said chamber), he the said Pitt continued in the said chamber from
the said 20th of April 1689 to the 26th of August 1690 which was seventy
weeks and three days, in which time the said Pitt had paid the warden
his commitment fee, two pounds four shillings and sixpence, where as
there is but fourpence due: Pitt also paid him fourteen shillings for
two day-writs, and was to pay him eight shillings and fourpence at the
going out of the gate, (every prisoner there in execution pays eleven
shillings and twopence a day when he goes abroad about his business) but
the said warden kept his said fourteen shillings and would not let him
go out of the gates of the prison by which the said Pitt lost his
tryals, which was many thousand pounds damage to him.” This Moses Pitt
was once a rich man and his printing works were established in a large
house called “the theatre” in Westminster, which he rented from Dr.
Fell, Bishop of Oxford, and where in the reign of Charles II he brought
out an atlas in twelve folio volumes and a great quantity of Bibles,
Testaments and prayer books reducing their price by more than half which
he claimed, “did at that time great good, Popery being likely to
overwhelm us.” Mr. Pitt embarked upon extensive building speculations
in Westminster and erected a great house in Duke Street which he let to
the noted Judge Jeffreys, but failed to secure a clear title to the
property. Then his creditors came down upon him and he became involved
in a mesh of borrowings and their attendant lawsuits which landed him at
length in the Fleet prison. His hardships led him to prepare his book
denouncing the evils of imprisonment for debt; and to obtain facts he
addressed a circular to sixty-five provincial prisons. The result was a
“small book as full of tragedies as pages; which were not enacted in
foreign nations among Turks and infidels, Papists and Idolaters, but in
this country by our own countrymen”--such tragedies as no age or country
can parallel.
He tells the story of a Liverpool surgeon who was so reduced by poverty,
neglect and hunger that he lived on the mice caught by his cat. When he
sought redress he was beaten and put in irons. A debtor in Lincoln who
sought restitution of a purse taken from him was “treated to a ride on
the jailer’s coach;” in other words placed upon a hurdle and dragged
about the prison yard with his head on the stones whereby he “became not
altogether so well in his intellects as formerly.” One unfortunate
wretch who dared to send out of the prison for food had the thumbscrews
put on him and was chained by the neck on tip-toe against a wall. The
frontispiece of this old book gives a quaint representation of the
interior of the Fleet prison.
These complaints led to the appointment of a committee of the House of
Commons in 1696 and a report of many great irregularities, chief among
them that the warden will let the prison for the sum of £1,500 to a
sub-tenant on the understanding that there would be some two thousand
prisoners always in custody who would pay fees to the value of twice the
rent. A second report, presumably from the same committee, disclosed a
widespread system of discharges not by regular legal process but on the
payment of bribes and it was unanimously agreed that the management of
the Fleet was “very prejudicial to personal credit and a great grievance
to the whole kingdom.”
No remedy was applied to these glaring evils, which, on the contrary,
constantly increased until they culminated in the horrible scandals laid
bare by the Parliamentary Committee appointed in 1727 to inquire into
the conduct of the then deputy warden, the infamous Bambridge, who
leased the governorship from the real warden, the no less notorious
Huggins. The most shameful malpractices had been rife since the
abolition of the Star Chamber which had reserved the place entirely for
debtors and prisoners for contempt of the Courts of Chancery, Exchequer
and Common Pleas. It seemed that whereas the fees ought to have ceased
when the prison was limited in its uses, the warden had wielded an
unwarrantable and arbitrary power in extorting them at more exorbitant
rates, enforcing payment by loading the prisoners with irons “worse
than if the Star Chamber was still existing.”
The course pursued in every case where the incoming prisoner possessed
means, was much the same. On arrest he was first conveyed to a Sponging
House, one of three attached to the Fleet, beyond the walls, all
belonging to the warden and kept by one or other of his tipstaffs. Here
the charges were so ruinous that the debtors aghast begged to be taken
at once to the Fleet itself, where at least prices were regulated by
rules. Transfer was refused until a heavy fee had been exacted and while
the prisoner still demurred his bill in the Sponging House steadily grew
in total. When at last he was removed into the Fleet he had been bled
freely, in fees alone to the amount of some fifty odd pounds. Here fresh
exactions were imposed and the debtor, refusing to submit to insatiable
demands, was sent back to the Sponging House, where a virulent small-pox
was raging at the time. The prisoner, unvaccinated in those days, and in
terror of his life, implored the ruthless warden to again remove him but
could obtain no mercy and presently, taking the fell disease, died of
it, leaving his affairs in hopeless confusion and a wife with a family
of young children to starve. This was the true story of Mr. Robert
Castell, a gentleman and a scholar, by profession an architect, whose
original liabilities had been small and whose ruin and death were to be
laid at Bambridge’s door.
Another story of like complexion was that of the Portuguese Jacob Mendez
Solas, animadverted upon by the Parliamentary committee. This hapless
foreigner enlodging in the Fleet was one day called into the Gate House
or lodge, where he was seized, fettered and removed to Corbett’s
Sponging House, whence after weeks of detention he was carried back into
the prison. Extortion had been the object of this procedure and as the
Portuguese still resisted, his life was made intolerable to him. He was
turned now into a dungeon, known as the “strong room of the Master’s
Side,” which is thus described in the Committee’s report:--
“The place is a vault, like those in which the dead are interred, and
wherein the bodies of persons dying in the said prison are usually
deposited, till the coroner’s inquest hath passed upon them. It has no
chimney nor fireplace, nor any light but what comes over the door, or
through a hole of about eight inches square. It is neither paved nor
boarded; and the rough bricks appear both on the sides and top, being
neither wainscoted nor plastered. What adds to the dampness and stench
of the place is its being built over the common shore and adjoining to
the sink and dunghill, where all the nastiness of the prison is cast. In
this miserable place the poor wretch was kept by the said Bambridge,
manacled and shackled, for near two months. At length, on receiving five
guineas from Mr. Kemp, a friend of Solas’s, Bambridge released the
prisoner from his cruel confinement. But though his chains were taken
off, his terror still remained, and the unhappy man was prevailed upon
by that terror not only to labour gratis for the said Bambridge, but to
swear also at random all that he hath required of him. And this
committee themselves saw an instance of the deep impression his
sufferings had made upon him; for, on his surmising, from something
said, that Bambridge was to return again as warden of the Fleet, he
fainted and the blood started out of his mouth and nose.”
The same report continued: “Captain John Mackpheadris, who was bred a
merchant, is another melancholy instance of the cruel use the said
Bambridge hath made of his assumed authority. Mackpheadris was a
considerable trader, and in a very flourishing condition, until the year
1720, when, being bound for large sums to the Crown, for a person
afterward ruined by the misfortunes of that year, he was undone. In
June, 1727, he was prisoner in the Fleet, and although he had before
paid his commitment fee, the like fee was extorted from him a second
time; and he having furnished a room, Bambridge demanded an extravagant
price for it, which he refused to pay, and urged that it was unlawful
for a warden to demand extravagant rents, and offered to pay what was
legally due. Notwithstanding which, the said Bambridge assisted by the
said James Barnes and other accomplices, broke open his room and took
away several things of great value, amongst others, the King’s Extent
in aid of the prisoner (which was to have been returned in a few days,
in order to procure the debt to the Crown, and the prisoner’s
enlargement), which Bambridge still detains. Not content with this,
Bambridge locked the prisoner out of his room and forced him to lie in
the open yard called the ‘Bare.’ He sat quietly under his wrongs, and
getting some poor materials, built a little hut, to protect himself as
well as he could from the injuries of the weather. The said Bambridge,
seeing his unconcernedness, said, ‘---- him! he is easy! I will put him
into the strong room before to-morrow!’ and ordered Barnes to pull down
his little hut, which was done accordingly. The poor prisoner, being in
an ill state of health and the night rainy, was put to great distress.
Some time after this he was (about eleven o’clock at night) assaulted by
Bambridge, with several other persons, his accomplices, in a violent
manner; and Bambridge, though the prisoner was unarmed, attacked him
with his sword, but by good fortune was prevented from killing him; and
several other persons coming out upon the noise, they carried
Mackpheadris for safety into another gentleman’s room; soon after which
Bambridge, coming with one Savage and several others, broke open the
door, and Bambridge strove with his sword to kill the prisoner, but he
again got away and hid himself in another room. The next morning the
said Bambridge entered the prison with a detachment of soldiers and
ordered the prisoner to be dragged to the lodge and ironed with great
irons. On which he, desiring to know for what cause and by what
authority he was to be so cruelly used, Bambridge replied, it was by his
own authority, and ---- him, he would do it and have his life. The
prisoner desired that he might be carried before a magistrate, that he
might know his crime before he was punished; but Bambridge refused, and
put irons upon his legs which were too little, so that in forcing them
on, his legs were like to have been broken and the torture was
impossible to be endured. Upon which the prisoner complaining of the
grievous pain and straitness of the irons, Bambridge answered that he
did it on purpose to torture him. On which the prisoner replying that by
the law of England no man ought to be tortured, Bambridge declared that
he would do it first and answer for it afterwards; and caused him to be
dragged away to the dungeon, where he lay without a bed, loaded with
irons so close riveted that they kept him in continual torture and
mortified his legs. After long application his irons were changed and a
surgeon directed to dress his legs; but his lameness is not, nor can be,
cured. He was kept in this miserable condition for three weeks, by which
his sight is greatly prejudiced and in danger of being lost.
“The prisoner upon this usage, petitioned the judges; and after several
meetings and a full hearing, the judges reprimanded Mr. Huggins and
Bambridge and declared that a gaoler could not answer the ironing of a
man before he be found guilty of a crime, but it being out of term, they
could not give the prisoner any relief or satisfaction.”
There were other cases, that, for instance, of Captain David Sinclair,
an old and distinguished officer whom hard fate and impecuniosity had
consigned to a debtors’ prison. Bambridge was his enemy and openly
declared that he would have Sinclair’s blood. On the king’s birthday, a
jovial occasion, on which he thought to find the captain elated with
wine, Bambridge entered his room and struck him with a cane. Then
turning to the soldiers of the escort, who came armed with musket and
bayonet, Bambridge ordered them to carry Sinclair to the strong room and
to stab him if he made any resistance. Confinement in this dark, damp
dungeon all but cost Sinclair his life; he lost the use of his limbs and
his memory went; he was left for four days without food and had he not
been removed he would certainly have died. An unfortunate Spanish
merchant, Mr. John Holder, who was confined in the Common Side under
Bambridge, was seized with a fatal illness from the miseries and
privations he endured.
It was said in the report already quoted that Bambridge, when he
manacled Solas, was the first to put a debtor in irons. This is
manifestly erroneous as is seen in the account of the charges brought
against warden Harris in 1620, for misusage of prisoners in the Fleet.
But this brutal gaoler, Bambridge, was guilty of many and great
enormities. He was proved to have defied writs of habeas corpus; to have
stolen or misappropriated charitable bequests; to have bribed or
terrified lawyers who came to champion ill-used prisoners. When Sir
William Rich was behind-hand in his chamber-rent, Bambridge threatened
to fire at him, slashed at him with a hanger, and struck him with a
stick. Rich was then thrown into the strong room, heavily ironed, and
kept there in close confinement accused of having attacked the warden
with a shoemaker’s knife, which he did, but in self-defence.
Huggins and Bambridge, in their greedy desire to increase their
emoluments, invented an astute device, that of allowing, even helping
debtors to escape from custody, whom they presently rearrested, and
having made them pay forfeit, pocketed the amounts. To facilitate this a
false gate was broken through the prison wall, through which the
fugitives were released with the co-operation of the warden, and thus
the forfeit was exacted many times over.
The same means of exit was utilised by a smuggler, in custody for
revenue fraud, who passed in and out on his own concerns, and to do
business for Mr. Huggins. This man, by name Dumay, made frequent voyages
to France, where he bought quantities of wine for Huggins and paid for
them by bills drawn upon one of the tipstaffs, which when due were
punctually met. Confidence was thus established and the traffic was
greatly developed, but when an unusually large deal had been effected
the tipstaff declined to accept the bill and the French wine merchant
was swindled out of his goods and his money.
This inquiry of 1727 resulted in the committal of both Huggins and
Bambridge to the gaol of Newgate, and their prosecution. A bill was
introduced into Parliament to remove both men from their posts and to
revise the management of the Fleet; but when these wretches were
arraigned for their misdeeds the evidence was deemed insufficient and
they escaped with a verdict of not guilty. The episode is especially
interesting as having inspired Hogarth to paint the remarkable picture
of the Fleet Prison Committee, which is said to have first brought the
painter into fame. Speaking of this picture, Horace Walpole in his
“Anecdotes of Painting” says: “The scene is the Committee; on the left
are the instruments of torture. A prisoner in rags half starved appears
before them. The poor man has a good countenance that adds to the
interest. On the other hand is the inhuman gaoler. It is the very figure
that Salvator Rosa would have drawn for Iago at the moment of
detection,--villainy, fear and conscience are mixed on his yellow and
livid countenance. His lips contracted by tremor, his legs step back as
though thinking to make his escape--one hand is thrust precipitately
into his bosom, the fingers of the other are catching uncertainly at his
button-holes. If this was a portrait it is the most striking that ever
was drawn; if not it is still finer.” There is no question that this is
Bambridge, who lingered on for twenty years disgraced and despised and
in the end committed suicide by cutting his throat.
We have two views of the interior of the Fleet and its general aspect
from two eye witnesses at a later date than the exposure of Huggins and
Bambridge. One is John Howard’s account of his visitation in 1774; the
other a volume of verse “The Humours of the Fleet, an humorous and
descriptive poem written by a gentleman of the College,” published in
London in 1749. The author was the younger Dance, son of Mr. Dance, the
architect, who rebuilt the gaol of Newgate after its destruction by the
Lord George Gordon rioters in 1780. It is described as “The Prince of
Prisons” standing “close by the borders of a slimy flood,” a structure
in whose extended oblong boundaries are shops and sheds and stalls of
all degrees, for the sale of everything from trinkets to pork and beans.
The inmates are next described:
“Without distinction intermixed is seen
A squire quite dirty, a mechanic clean;
The spendthrift new who in his chariot rolled
All his possessions gone, reversions sold.
Now mean, as once profuse, the stupid sot
Sits by a Runner’s[3] side and shules a pot.”
The first ceremony for the newcomer is to sit or stand for his portrait:
“Around you gazing jiggers[4] swarm,
Your form and features strictly they survey
Then leave you if you can, to run away.”
Then follows the description of the chamberlain “who settles the price
of quarters; one pound six and light weekly for the best room, or as low
as half a crown per month.”
“Take my advice I’ll help you to a chum;
With him you’ll pay but fifteen pence a week,”
and so on page after page illustrating the daily life, sorrows, dirt and
rags; the sports--backgammon, Mississippi, portobello, racquets,
billiards, fives; increasing drought quenched by gin; rough horseplay
with newcomers who are borne to the pump and drenched, the whole
presented in a picture crowded with the ragged, slipshod figures
standing treat to the tipstaffs and one another. The poem concludes with
the closing of the prison when
“The warning watchman walks about
With dismal tone repeating ‘who goes out.’”
The cry is heard from half-past nine till the clock of St. Paul’s
strikes ten, very like the familiar shout on shipboard “Any more for the
shore.” The final “all told” was the signal to shut and lock the gate
after which no person was permitted to pass either in or out.
The philanthropist’s inspection, naturally, was a more serious matter,
and his account of what he found in the Fleet was a striking item in his
general indictment of British prisons. The Fleet at that date held three
hundred and twenty-four inmates in the “House” and one hundred resided
within the “Rules.” The prison buildings were partly old and partly new,
having been rebuilt a few years previous. It now consisted of a long
house (198 feet) facing a narrow courtyard and having four stories or
galleries with a basement or cellar floor called Bartholomew Fair, which
was appropriated to the Common Side or the solvent pauper debtors. In
the galleries the rooms opened on either side of a central passage,
narrow and dark, with one window at each end. The rooms were for the
most part 14½ feet in length by 12½ feet wide, and 9½ feet in height,
all provided with fire-place and chimney, and lighted with one window.
On the ground-floor or Hall Gallery were a chapel, a tap-room, a
coffee-room and eighteen chambers for prisoners; on the first floor
twenty-five rooms, on the second twenty-seven, with prisoners’
committee-room, the infirmary and a “dirty billiard table, kept by the
prisoners who slept in that room.” This billiard table was open to
outsiders, and Howard saw “several butchers and others from the market
playing, who were admitted as at any public house. Besides the
inconvenience to prisoners,” says Howard, “the frequenting a prison
lessens the dread of being confined in one.” The gallery rooms on the
top floor were reserved for Master’s Side debtors who paid the warden’s
rent, nominally, at the rate of one shilling and three pence weekly, a
price liable to be much increased. They fell to prisoners in succession,
and when any became vacant it was taken by the first on the warden’s
lists who had paid his full entrance fee. If all rooms were occupied, a
newcomer must hire of some tenant a part of his room or shift as he
could. The same practice obtained some fifty years later as described by
Charles Dickens when telling of the imprisonment of Mr. Pickwick.
The discipline was very lax, due to the unrestrained admission of all
classes, male and female, the latter often of very indifferent
character. “Social evenings” were of common occurrence; on Monday nights
a wine club, on Thursdays a beer club, each lasting until one or two in
the morning. “I need not say,” remarks Howard, “how much riot these
meetings occasioned, and how the sober prisoners are annoyed by them.”
Master’s Side debtors, mostly well disposed, respectable people, were
moved to maintain order and better government and formed themselves into
a committee to establish rules and insist upon their observance. This
committee was chosen every month and consisted of three members from
every gallery, with a president and secretary. They met every Thursday
in their own committee room and at other times when summoned by the
cryer (the servant of the prison who called persons from within when a
visitor came to see them), at command of the president or a majority of
their own number. This committee raised contributions by assessment,
heard complaints, determined disputes, advised fines and seized goods
for payment. It claimed to speak the sense of the whole House. The
president held the cash and the committee disposed of it. It appointed a
scavenger who washed the galleries once a week, watered them and swept
them daily, every morning before eight, and who swept the yards twice a
week, and lit the lamps all over the House. The cryer’s fee for calling
a prisoner to any stranger who visited the prison was one penny; from a
complainant who desired that the committee might be brought together he
got a fee of twopence. The tax levied on a newcomer, besides the two
shillings for “garnish” to be spent in wine, was one shilling and
sixpence to be appropriated for the use of the House. Distinction of
rank was overlooked in the Fleet, for Common Side debtors were confined
to their own apartments in Bartholomew Fair and were forbidden to
associate with “the lawmakers.”
There were public regulations also in force dating, it was said, from
the reign of Queen Elizabeth. Among other orders the warden was
empowered to appoint turnkeys with arms, to prevent persons from
bringing arms past the gate, and to watch if any escape was being
agitated. Such as attempted to escape or greatly misbehaved might be
shut up in a close room or dungeon, which must be certified to by four
judges as “boarded, wholesome and dry.” Clandestine Fleet marriages were
forbidden, but to very little purpose, seeing that they were constantly
performed. (Fleet marriages of imprisoned debtors were legitimate and
openly solemnised in the Fleet Prison chapel till 1686.) Other rules
ignored were those against the demand for “garnish” and that which
forbade the detention of a debtor in a Sponging House, an order
constantly contravened by Huggins and Bambridge, as we have seen. A
portion of the infirmary (two rooms) was to be allotted to Common Side
debtors and it was strictly prescribed that no prisoner should be
obliged to sleep in a bed with any one diseased. A coroner’s inquest
must be held upon any dead prisoner and the body delivered to friends
free of cost, but these very important provisions were constantly
evaded.
A chaplain was appointed to the Fleet, his salary of thirty pounds per
annum being paid by the warden, supplemented by a fee of twopence to
fourpence per head from each prisoner. The Fleet had its own chapel, in
which marriages might be legally performed, the earliest on record being
that of a prisoner, Mr. George Lester, who in 1613 married a woman of
good fortune, Mistress Babington by name. In a contemporary letter, it
is stated that “she is a woman of good wealth, so that now the man will
be able to live and maintain himself in prison, for hitherto he has been
of poor estate.” We are not told why his rich wife did not proceed to
pay his debts and secure his enlargement. Soon after this, the system of
clandestine and irregular marriages, which afterwards became notorious,
began to be practised within the Fleet and the Rules beyond. The
practice seems to have originated in the desire to escape the expense
attending a regular wedding at which it was the fashion to make a great
show in feasting and entertainment lasting several days. Besides the
costs of marriage settlements, presents, pin-money and so forth had to
be met. To avoid all this wasteful outlay, the weddings became private
and unpretending. A French traveller in England, one Henri Mission,
describes one of these ordinary or incognito marriages,--
“The bridegroom, that is to say, the husband that is to be, and the
bride, who is the wife that is to be, conducted by their parents and
accompanied by two bridesmen and two bridesmaids go early in the morning
with a license in their pocket and call up Mr. curate and his clerk,
tell them their business; are married with a low voice, and the doors
shut; tip the minister a guinea and the clerk a crown; steal softly out,
one one way, and t’other another, either on foot or in coaches; go
different ways to some tavern at a distance from their own lodgings, or
to the house of some trusty friend, there have a good dinner and return
home at night as quietly as lambs. If the drums and fiddles have notice
of it, they will be sure to be with them by day break, making a horrible
racket, till they have got ‘the pence;’ and, which is worst of all, the
whole murder will come out.”
Although the law prescribed that marriages should be only performed by
licenses or the giving out of banns, there were many churches and
chapels towards the end of the seventeenth century which claimed to be
“peculiar” and exempt from the jurisdiction of the Bishop of London. But
the rector of one of these, St. James, Duke’s Place, was proceeded
against under the ecclesiastical law and suspended from duty for three
years on a charge of having married persons without banns or license.
Other churches claimed to be “peculiar” such as the chapel of Holy
Trinity, Minories, on the ground that it was a crown living and entitled
to the same privileges as Westminster Abbey or the Deanery of Windsor;
so did the chapels of the Tower and the Savoy as royal chapels. The
number of chapels where irregular marriages took place was about ninety,
and it became necessary to check them by obliging incumbents to keep
registers under a penalty of one hundred pounds, and the same amount
was levied on them for every irregular marriage. This penalty was
extended to the gaolers or keepers of prisons who permitted marriages to
be performed within the walls, which had now become a very common
practice in the metropolis. These Fleet parsons were not clergymen, but
mere laymen who assumed the garb of cassock, gown and bands. These sham
marriages were solemnised in a room in the Fleet, called the “Lord
Mayor’s chapel,” where the prison parson received the couples bent on
matrimony. The officiating parson was Mr. John Mottram who transacted an
enormous amount of business, and performed in one year alone as many as
two thousand two hundred marriages. He was convicted of unlawful
practices and fined £200 but he was not deterred from repeating them, or
giving false dates to their certificates to suit the desire and
convenience of the contracting parties. Pennant in his account of London
(1793) tells us that as he walked the streets near the Fleet prison he
was invited to walk in and be married. The sign over the door portrayed
a male and female hand joined with the words, “Marriages performed
within.” A tout or “plyer” as he was called, stood there soliciting the
passers-by and swearing that his employer would do the job cheaper than
any one else. Sometimes the parson himself, temporarily at large, was to
be seen walking before his shop: “A squalid, profligate figure, clad in
a tattered plaid night-gown, with a fiery face, ready to couple you for
a dram of gin or a roll of tobacco.”
These Fleet parsons drove a roaring trade. There were a great number of
them and a long list is given by no means exhaustive in Burns’ “History
of Fleet Marriages,” of some sixty in all who flourished between 1681
and 1752. Among the most notorious was John Gaynam who was commonly
known as the “Bishop of Hell.” He is credited with having performed two
thousand marriages within a few years. In person he was of commanding
presence and swaggered along Fleet Street in his silk gown and white
flowing bands drawing admiring attention to his handsome rubicund face.
He was always smug and self-satisfied. Nothing, and no one, could put
him out of countenance. When in the witness box to give evidence in a
trial for bigamy, a cross examining counsel asked him if he was not
ashamed to confess that he had made so many clandestine marriages, he
laughingly replied, “_Video meliora deteriora sequor_.” When someone
chastised him with a stick he took his punishment with well bred
composure. It was said of him that although he was bishop of an
extremely hot diocese he was personally remarkable for his coolness in
demeanour and language. Another popular Fleet parson was Daniel Wigmore,
who was not satisfied with his marriage fees, but was convicted in 1738
before the Lord Mayor of selling spirituous
[Illustration: _A Fleet Wedding_
_From the picture by Hogarth_
The Fleet Prison was a popular place for clandestine marriages in
the seventeenth century, and the Fleet parsons, so-called, did a
thriving business. Two thousand marriages were performed within a
few years by one of the parsons entitled the “Bishop of Hell,” who
was, like most of them, merely a layman assuming cassock and gown.
Bridegrooms were kept on hand for emergency, and a “plyer” stood
outside soliciting business for his employer, the “parson.”
]
liquors contrary to the law. Edward Ashwell, known as the “archdeacon”
was a third. He was a notorious scoundrel, a bigamist three times over
who yet dared to preach in church when he could get a pulpit. This Dr.
Ashwell died within the Rules of the Fleet in 1746 and was recorded as
“the most noted operator in marriages since the death of the
never-to-be-forgotten Dr. Gaynam.”
Walter Wyatt did a very profitable business and made a large income out
of his clandestine marriages, no less then £700 a year, equal to four
times that sum in our modern money. On the cover of one of his registers
still preserved, he gives notice that “Mr. Wyatt, minister of the Fleet,
is removed from the Two Sawyers, at the corner of Fleet Lane (with all
the register books) to the Hand and Pen near Holborn Bridge, where
marriages are solemnised without impositions.” But there seem to have
been other establishments which traded on Wyatt’s sign, probably because
he was so prosperous. Joshua Lilley kept the “Hand and Pen” near Fleet
Bridge. Matthias Wilson’s house of the same sign stood on the bank of
the Fleet ditch; John Burnford had a similar name for his house at the
foot of Ludgate Hill and Mrs. Balls also had an establishment with the
same title.
One of these “Hand and Pen” public houses was kept by a turnkey of the
Fleet prison, who had a room in his house for solemnising marriages with
the assistance of mock clergymen, one of whom he pretends in one of his
handbills to be a “gentleman regularly bred at one of our universities
and lawfully ordained according to the institutions of the Church of
England and ready to wait on any person in town or country.”
There was a Peter Symson who performed marriages from 1731 to 1754, and
who claimed to have been educated at the University of Cambridge and to
have been late chaplain to the Earl of Rothes. His chapel was at the
“Old Red Hand and Mitre” three doors from Fleet Lane. When examined in
court on one occasion, he declared that he had been ordained in
Grosvenor Square Chapel by the Bishop of Winchester.
Another Fleet parson was William Dare, who had so large a connection
that he employed a curate. John Lands had been chaplain on board a
man-of-war and boasted that he had “gloriously distinguished himself in
defence of his King and Country.” His chapel was at the corner of Half
Moon Court, at the corner of the Old Bailey. Lands advertised that he
was a regularly bred clergyman and no mere Fleet parson, and “conducted
everything with the utmost decency and regularity such as shall always
be supported in law and equity.”
There was competition further afield and in such outwardly respectable
chapels as that of Mayfair, built in 1736, to meet the needs of a
growing neighbourhood. It was situated in Chapel Place off Curzon
Street, and was pulled down in 1900, to give place to the imposing town
mansion of the Duke of Marlborough, which now bears the name of
Sunderland House. Its first incumbent was the Rev. Alexander Keith, a
properly ordained clergyman who did a great trade in irregular
marriages. It was in Mayfair Chapel that the Duke of Hamilton wedded the
youngest of the beautiful Gunnings, in such indecent haste that the
ceremony was performed with a ring from the bed curtain at half an hour
past midnight. Besides the Mayfair Chapel, Mr. Keith had a small private
chapel of his own near Hyde Park Corner and he was so active in the two
that he interfered greatly with the vested interests of the neighbouring
clergy. One of these, Dr. Trebeck, rector of St. George’s, Hanover
Square, brought an action against him and he was sentenced to
excommunication. Keith retaliated by excommunicating the Bishop of
London, the judge who had condemned him and the prosecutor Dr. Trebeck,
but nothing came of it all except a warrant for Mr. Keith’s
apprehension, on which he was committed to the Fleet prison. He lay
there for some fifteen years, during which other parsons performed his
functions, notably the Peter Symson mentioned above. Keith, in the end,
fell into great poverty, for the Marriage Act introduced by Lord
Hardwicke in 1754 summarily put a stop to these illegal practices. The
new law came into force on March 25th, 1754, but the evil custom died
hard. On the day before, according to one register alone, two hundred
and seventeen couples were married in the Fleet and its purlieus and
sixty-one in Mayfair Chapel.
Keith, in his later days, made a piteous appeal for charity. In an
advertisement to the compassionate he used the following plea:--“By the
late Marriage Act the Rev. Mr. Keith from a great degree of affluence is
reduced to such a deplorable state of misery as is much better to be
conceived than related, having scarce any other thing than bread and
water to subsist on. It is to be hoped he will be deemed truly
undeserving of such a fate and the public are assured that not
foreseeing such an unhappy stroke of fortune as the late Act, he yearly
expended almost his whole income (which amounted to several hundred
pounds per annum) in relieving not only single distressed persons, but
even whole families. Mr. Keith’s present lamentous situation renders him
perhaps as great an object of charity himself.”
No record has been preserved of the response made to this appeal or of
the amount of assistance, if any, accorded to him. His distress did not,
however, prevent him from making a joke of it and Horace Walpole tells
in one of his letters of a “_bon mot_ of Keith’s the marriage broker.”
“So the Bishops,” he said, “will hinder my marrying. Well, let ’em, but
I’ll be revenged; I’ll buy two or three acres of ground and I’ll under
bury them all.” At the same time he had the impudence to take high
ground in a pamphlet he wrote about this date. “If the present Act in
the form it now stands,” he said, “should (which I am sure is
impossible) be of any service to my country, I shall then have the
satisfaction of having been the occasion of it, because the compilers
thereof have done it with a pure design of suppressing my chapel, which
makes me the most celebrated man in this kingdom though not the
greatest.”
Some of the outrages and infractions of the law due to these irregular
Fleet marriages may be specified. An heiress, Mistress Anne Leigh, was
decoyed in 1719 from her friends in Buckinghamshire, carried forcibly to
the Fleet, married against her consent and barbarously ill-used by the
abductors. In 1737 one Richard Leaver, being tried for bigamy, swore
that he knew nothing of his first wife to whom he had been married in
the Fleet when drunk. Bridegrooms were kept on hand. A man was married
four times over under different names and each time paid a fee of no
more than five shillings. Couples were tied together without giving more
than their Christian names. The certificate was dated as the parties
desired, or to please the parents. Sometimes a newly married woman ran
across Ludgate Hill in her shift under a popular delusion that her
husband would not be responsible for her antenuptial debts. Marriages
were kept secret for various reasons; one was that if the woman was a
widow she wished to save a jointure allowed her so long as she did not
remarry.
It has been said that irregular marriages were resorted to for ceremony
and despatch. Members of all classes, high and low, sought the
assistance of the Fleet parson--aristocrats, celebrities, roughs and
desperadoes, peers and paupers. Among the first were Lord Abergavenny,
the Honourable John Bourke, afterward Lord Mayo, Sir Marmaduke Gresham,
Lord Montague, afterward Duke of Manchester, the Marquis of Annandale
and Henry Fox who became Lord Holland, and of whose marriage Horace
Walpole wrote: “The town has been in a great bustle about a private
match but which by the ingenuity of the ministry has been made politics.
Mr. Fox fell in love with Lady Caroline Lennox (eldest daughter of the
Duke of Richmond), asked her, was refused and stole her. His father was
a footman, her great-grandfather a king. All the blood royal has been up
in arms.”
The marriage act of 1754 was first designed by the Marquis of Bath, but
was drawn so badly that the Lord Chancellor Hardwicke revised and
carried it against a strong opposition. The new law was evaded by the
Rev. John Wilkinson, who claimed to issue licenses on his own authority,
and in 1755 married nearly two thousand couples. When the law began to
look ugly, he appointed a curate to perform the ceremony and kept out of
the way, although he still gave the licenses. Two members of Garrick’s
company were thus united, but the great actor prosecuted the curate, who
was convicted and sentenced to transportation.