LIFE IN THE KING’S BENCH
Relations between debtor and creditor in England continue a
disgrace--Abuses in procedure--Writs issued in error--Excessive
costs the cause of prolonged detention--Processes irksome, very
sweeping in their action and entailing disastrous consequences on
many prisoners--Debtors’ prisons and their purlieus centres of
vicious life--Drunkenness, gaming, self-indulgence prevailed--The
“Rules” enclosed an area swarming with idle, reckless, dissipated
persons--A prisoner regularly drove the night coach from London to
Birmingham--Many notable residents--Theodore Hook--Benjamin Robert
Haydon, the painter--A scene in the King’s Bench, “The Mock
Election”--The Marshalsea--Death-place of Bishop Bonner--Prison
described by John Howard and by Charles Dickens--Disappearance of
the Marshalsea and the Fleet--Replaced by the Whitecross Street
Prison, the last place of the kind.
The relations between debtor and creditor in England continued to be a
disgrace to any so-called free and enlightened country far into the
nineteenth century. The procedure was full of abuses and the system in
force subjected the debtor to great and manifest hardships without
benefiting the creditor or securing him the repayment of his debt. It
was customary to serve the debtor with a writ, which was returnable only
in term time, and if issued between terms it could be evaded by giving
bail to the sheriff. But if the debtor was a poor man, or without
friends and therefore unable to procure bail, he paid in person and was
taken off to prison. Here he might lie almost indefinitely waiting,
hopelessly, for money from the skies to enable him to liquidate the
claim or defend the action. Often enough the writ had been issued on no
clear grounds; the debt may never have existed in fact and innocent
persons were arrested upon the affidavits of scoundrels impelled by
unworthy motives, which might be revenge or extortion. Not only was it
often the case that the prisoner lay in prison until he discharged a
debt he had never incurred, but even when the claim was undoubted and
for a small amount, the liability was soon swollen by the lawyers’ costs
amounting to three or four times the original debt. People were still
detained who owed no more than three or four pounds which they could
pay, until they could satisfy the attorneys for the costs of twenty and
thirty pounds they did not really owe. “I, myself,” says Colonel Hanger,
“for a debt of four pounds, thirteen shillings, and for one of six
pounds, sixteen shillings, have paid ten, twelve or fourteen pounds
costs.” Once caught in the meshes of the law it was not enough to pay
the original debt, and the creditor, when he received it, could not
release the debtor until the attorney’s costs were liquidated. The
records of the King’s Bench show that hundreds of debtors who in the
first instance owed no more than ten pounds were still detained for
twice or three times the amount claimed by the attorneys.
As a natural result, the debtors’ prisons, especially the King’s Bench,
were constantly crowded with persons of all classes and
callings,--“Nobles and ignobles, parsons, lawyers, farmers, tradesmen,
shopmen, colonels, captains, gamblers, horse-dealers, publicans and so
forth.” The wives of many of these shared the fortunes and misfortunes
of their husbands. It has been calculated that at times the population
of the prison averaged eight hundred or a thousand individuals. This
total was presently much reduced by the institution of a court for the
relief of insolvent debtors, and the number was further kept down by a
charitable society which used considerable sums collected for the
extinction of small debts. Nevertheless numbers still languished within
the walls in a state bordering upon utter destitution. Colonel Hanger
testifies that out of 355 prisoners, he could with truth assert there
were seldom fifty who had any regular means of subsistence. “I do not
mean to say,” he continues, “that prisoners have been absolutely starved
to death; but this I positively assert,--that numbers of the lower
order, and many officers confined, some even for small debts under fifty
pounds, who have served their country with gallantry and fidelity and
have bled in her defence, have often gone a whole week with not above
three or four meals; nay more, have frequently been destitute of a
penny to buy them a roll of bread for breakfast.” The same difficulty as
that already mentioned of obtaining the “groats” or creditor’s allowance
for food still obtained. It was greatly increased by legal
technicalities, for it could only be sued for in term time and a debtor
arrested in June when the term was over must wait to take action till
November, five months that is to say, during which he might starve and
was wholly dependent upon the charity of generous fellow prisoners and
others. Judgment on the case might still be prolonged until the
following May, so that many gentlemen as well as others of superior
stations in life had for successive days never known what it was to
enjoy one good meal.[6]
The perfectly regular payment of the “groats” (the allowance was really
sixpence per diem) would not have gone far. “Will any man venture to
assert,” asks Colonel Hanger, “that a man can live on such a stipend,
for a sufficient quantity of bread and small beer to satisfy appetite
and thirst cannot be purchased for that money.” The price of provisions
in 1798 barely allowed the purchase of one pound of bread and one pint
of porter per day for sixpence. “The felon in Newgate and the prisoner
in the Penitentiary house, Cold Bath fields, for high crimes and
misdemeanours against the State, whatever his sufferings, has one
comfort--he knows not the pangs of hunger; but the gentleman, the
citizen, the sailor or the soldier, who may have bled in their country’s
defence, if oppressed by sinful poverty, that worst of crimes, is
allowed only sixpence per day for all his wants, and has not even a bed
or fire found him to rest his wearied limbs or warm his half-starved
frame.”
The evils above described do not exhaust the sufferings that were
inflicted upon debtors. It often happened that a writ was served and an
arrest made at a distance from London. The man taken was carried to the
county gaol and when the time came for surrender, after being bailed, he
must perforce do so in London at the King’s Bench prison. And he must
make the journey as best he could according to his means. Hanger quotes
a case of an aged man, between seventy and eighty years, who trudged all
the way from Cumberland and arrived at the prison barefooted and almost
exhausted. He was, however, unprovided with the proper forms for
surrender and was refused admittance until he had paid his fees in
Chancery Lane, when at last he was received. Colonel Hanger, when in the
King’s Bench, was removed to the Fleet on _habeas corpus_ to meet a writ
returnable there and was mulcted in further costs before he was allowed
to go back to the King’s Bench.
Much more might be said in condemnation of the old system of
imprisonment for debt, which was rightly characterised by a competent
writer as “the curse and disgrace of England.” We have seen how in the
earliest times it directly contravened the principles of constitutional
freedom, which forbade it for simple pecuniary obligations unaccompanied
by fraud. It was extended alike to early youth and decrepit old age; a
minor might be laid by the heels and an old man of ninety arrested on
his dying bed. Until more humane laws were passed the boy prisoner might
be confined _sine die_. Incarceration too often paralysed the bread
winner; the prisoner was unable to earn wages for himself and his
family, to his own great loss and a diminution of the wealth of the
country.
The moral side of the question remains. Debtors’ prisons and their
purlieus were seething centres of vicious life. Idlers and dissolute
persons congregated therein; drunkenness, gaming, dissipation of all
kinds constantly prevailed. Dealers in contraband commodities traded
without let or hindrance. Game was exposed for sale within the walls by
unlicensed dealers without interference. These traders were prisoners,
of course, who were lodged under fictitious arrests of their own
contriving to facilitate their operations. “Tap-shops” and “whistling
shops” for the illegal consumption of spirits were plentiful within the
prison and were supplied under the very noses of the authorities by
clandestine means. On one occasion, an inmate who had been a smuggler
got in seventeen two-gallon tubs of brandy, which lay hidden in a
friend’s room till they could be distributed through the prison. The
supplies on sale were so good that much custom was attracted from
outside. It was calculated that at the “tap” or public bar room, three
butts of porter were drawn daily to meet the demands of outsiders with a
nice taste for beer. Amusements and games were continually in progress.
Crowds came in to see the racquet players reputed the best in the
metropolis; on festivals and holidays--Easter Monday, Whit Monday,
Boxing Day--sports were held, such as racing and hopping in sacks and
blind man’s buff, the whole under the supervision of a clerk of the
courts, Captain Christie, who was long a prisoner but married a rich
wife and so at last gained his liberty.
The King’s Bench, with its dependent “Rules,” was like a modern Alsatia,
swarming with idle, self-indulgent men living a dissipated life,
spending recklessly the means that should have gone to the liquidation
of their debts and which belonged really to their creditors. At one time
they freely entered all taverns and theatres, but were presently
restricted to one “Lowthorpes,” in front of the Asylum for the Blind
near the Obelisk in St. George’s in the Fields. This limitation was due
to Lord Chancellor Thurlow, who was annoyed by the trespass on his
grounds of a number of “Rulers” on their way to the Derby. No
restriction was placed upon the movements of the “Rulers” provided they
showed themselves once in every twenty-four hours. On the strength of
this concession a prisoner, Mellor Hetherington, a famous whip, drove
the night coach from London to Birmingham for a whole month, very much
to the satisfaction of proprietor and passengers. The regular coachman
had been taken ill and his temporary substitute comported himself so
well that he would have been permanently appointed but that it was
feared his creditors would interpose and impound his wages. This Mr.
Hetherington, who began life with a substantial income inherited from
his father, soon wasted his substance and found himself a prisoner in
the Fleet from which he was transferred to the King’s Bench, where he
was long resident in the “State House,” the large building close to the
entrance or lobby of the prison at one time occupied by prisoners of
State. He lived in great luxury and was allotted two rooms, but to enjoy
their peaceable occupation he was always obliged to buy out the “chums”
quartered on him. Some of these he employed as servants and assistants
in his domestic arrangements and especially in the kitchen, for he was a
lover of good cheer and had installed a kitchen range in one of the
rooms he occupied. He entertained largely, and guests in great number
gladly accepted his invitations. This Mr. Hetherington spent twenty
years as a prisoner for debt either within the walls of the Fleet or the
King’s Bench, or enjoying the privileges of the “Rules.” Finally he
took advantage of the Act as it was called, and went through the court
for the relief of insolvent debtors. He began life with a clear income
of six hundred pounds a year and finished his career of wasteful
self-indulgence without repaying a single sixpence to his creditors, who
had so foolishly and so uselessly deprived him of his liberty.
To give a full and complete list of the many and varied characters that
passed through the King’s Bench would fill a great space, but some of
those mentioned in contemporary records may be briefly referred to here.
They belonged to all classes of society and often exhibited eccentric
traits. One prisoner residing in the “Rules” belonged to the family of
the Hydes, Earls of Clarendon, and he was never parted from the coffin
which was ultimately to receive him. It was a fine coffin of solid oak,
grown upon his own estate in Kent and hollowed out with a chisel. Its
owner was in the habit of getting into the coffin at night and sleeping
there “with great composure and serenity.” Its weight was five hundred
pounds and on one occasion when it was filled with punch it held upwards
of forty-one gallons. John Palmer, the actor, when a prisoner within the
Rules in 1789 was committed to the Surrey gaol for accepting an
engagement at the Royal Circus theatre, as acting manager at a salary of
twenty pounds a week. This led, it is said (but the statement is at
variance with that already given), to the prohibiting by Lord Chief
Justice Kenyon of debtors to enter theatres.
Literature and the arts were constantly represented in the King’s Bench.
It was the home of William Combe, the author of “Dr. Syntax,” a poem
“written to cuts” as the saying is, or planned for a series of
Rowlandson’s drawings, which were forwarded to Combe when residing in
the Rules. As Horace Smith tells us, “he was a ready writer of all work
for the booksellers.” Another notable resident was Theodore Hook, who
never cleared himself from his liability to the Crown for the moneys
that went astray when he was acting as treasurer in the colony of
Mauritius. There was a deficit in his accounts of a sum of twelve
thousand pounds for which he was held responsible, although there was
never any charge of dishonesty and the law officers said no grounds
existed for criminal proceedings. He was, however, arrested after his
arrival in England and passed from a sponging house into the Rules of
the King’s Bench, from which he was soon set at liberty, but with his
liability hanging like a millstone round his neck till the day of his
death. Theodore Hook, the most famous of humourists, was the inventor of
a witticism, now a time honoured “chestnut.” On his passage home from
Mauritius, he met at Saint Helena the newly appointed governor of the
Cape, Lord Charles Somerset, who knew nothing of the arrest. Lord
Charles said, “I hope you are not going home for your health, Mr.
Hook.” “Why, why, yes,” replied Theodore, “I am sorry to say there is
something wrong with my chest.” Theodore Hook was already associated
with the once famous weekly newspaper _John Bull_, which was a thorn in
the side of the Whigs then in power. The proprietors of the paper,
Messrs. Weaver, Arrowsmith and Shackell, were prosecuted for libel of
some great personages, found guilty, heavily fined and committed to the
King’s Bench. Persons of lesser note were Jimmy Bearcroft, a hanger on
of the Mr. Hetherington, Captain Garth, Lady Hydeparker, “Pea-green”
Hayne, one or two baronets, Lord Glentworth, General Bacon and Miss
Gordon, who sold newspapers and kept a circulating library in the King’s
Bench.
Miss Gordon’s story deserves a word or two as illustrating the hardships
entailed upon the impecunious in those days. She inherited a decent
property from her father which was, however, impounded as security for a
loan of one hundred pounds advanced by a friend; she proposed to pay off
the loan, but the title deeds could not be found and the debt ran on
until the lender died, when the one hundred pounds was claimed from Miss
Gordon with the back interest, the whole amounting now to nearly a
thousand pounds. She was arrested and committed to prison where she
remained for nearly twenty years, harassed by the law’s delays, always
on the verge of starvation, but eking out a bare existence by her
traffic in books and newspapers.
The name of Benjamin Robert Haydon, a British painter, deservedly
entitled to be called a great painter, but greater still on account of
his misfortunes, is intimately associated with the King’s Bench prison.
His pictures, mainly historical and Biblical, generally of vast size,
fine in conception and admirably executed, never quite appealed to the
public taste and in the end were but little appreciated.
Haydon’s personality gained him many enemies; he was conceited,
self-opinionated, with an exaggerated idea of his own merits, and he
very unwisely entered into conflict with the Royal Academy, the feud
lasting to the end of his life. Yet he long found a few admiring patrons
and the support and countenance of numbers of warm friends. He was on
the most intimate terms with the leaders of light and learning of his
day. Sir Walter Scott warmly appreciated him; Wordsworth addressed many
sonnets to his genius; Keats and he were like brothers. He spent much of
his spare time with Charles Lamb, and lived on equal terms with the most
eminent members of his own profession, Sir David Wilkie, Northcote,
Landseer, Canova and Chantrey. Some of the greatest personages in the
land took him by the hand, gave him orders for pictures and welcomed him
gladly to their houses. Sir Robert Peel was long his good friend and
the Duke of Wellington encouraged him and wrote him many characteristic
letters.
With all his undoubted talents, his unflagging industry and ceaseless
powers for work, Haydon was cursed with one irremediable defect, an
utter incapacity for managing his own affairs. He was no spendthrift or
wastrel. He could have lived well within the income he earned, not a bad
one in those days, if he had not steadfastly forestalled it and so
reduced it sometimes by a half or a third. Very early in his career he
got behind-hand in his payments; no doubt in the first instance by the
unpunctuality of those who owed him money. He was continually driven to
pay his way by borrowing at extravagant rates, by giving bills for sums
far in excess of value received and by mortgaging his pictures before
they were finished. His hand to mouth devices might give him immediate
relief but it was by incurring future liabilities of a much more onerous
kind. His embarrassments were intensified by the existing laws and the
powers given to his creditors over his freedom and independence. He was
essentially a good man struggling with adversity, whom Tennyson tells
us, “is a sight for the gods,” and one’s heart bleeds for him under his
constant sufferings as pathetically depicted in his diaries.
He was already famous and had painted some of his earliest and best
pictures. The “Entry of Christ into Jerusalem” was finished, his
“Lazarus Raised from the Dead” was well advanced, and he was little
more than five and twenty years of age when he was arrested for debt. He
writes, that after having passed through every species of want and
difficulty often without a shilling, without ever being trusted, a man
to whom he had paid three hundred pounds arrested him out of pique for
the balance. His lawyers extricated him but within a year he enters in
his diary, “I am without a shilling in the world and with a large
picture before me not half done.” A month later he was arrested by his
artists’ colourman with whom he had dealt for fifteen years. He again
escaped, but as the months passed he was harassed with letters for money
every hour with repeated threatenings of arrest staved off by friendly
assistance from Canova, Sir Walter Scott and Mr. Coutts. Others, Lord
Mulgrave, Sir Edward Codrington, Brougham, Barnes of the _Times_ and
Miss Mitford were all prompt and helpful. Yet the next year he dated an
entry, “Well, I am in prison,” from the King’s Bench. He decided to go
through the court and was discharged without opposition. He was free
again and the future before him was clear. “He must live”--I am quoting
Tom Taylor--“He must live first of all and if possible without repeating
that untoward, that living by credit and borrowing on no better security
than high hopes and honest intentions which had ended in the King’s
Bench and insolvency.” Another year and the entry appears, “Passed in
desponding on the future, not a shilling in the world.” Later on,
“Obliged to pawn my other lay figure, the female, for five pounds,--cost
me thirty.” On the 12th January, 1827, an execution was in the house and
he was saved only by the prompt assistance of a friend, yet he was
arrested and cleared by a public subscription, after spending a month in
the prison. But this detention brought him a great opportunity; he saw
the “Mock Election,” a scene which, he says, “contrasted as it was with
sorrow and prison walls, beggars all description ... never was such an
excellent burlesque.... I saw the whole from beginning to end. I was
resolved to paint it for I thought it the finest subject for humour and
pathos on earth ... day by day the subject continued in my mind and as
soon as I was restored to my family and pursuits I returned to the
prison and sketched all the heads of the leading actors. Began the
picture directly and I finished it in four months.” This picture hung
fire for a time, but finally George IV sent to say he wished to see it
and at once bought it for five hundred guineas. It may now be seen in
the Royal Galleries at Windsor Castle. The picture portrays a curious
episode in contemporary prison life painted with great fidelity and deep
appreciation of the contrasted humour and pathos of the scene. The
principal personages are drawn to the life and from life, for the
painter went again and again to the prison to find his models. Haydon’s
own account brings the picture before us:
“In the centre is the High Sheriff with burlesque elegance of manner
begging one of the candidates not to break the peace or be irritated at
the success of his rival.... This intended member is dressed in green
with an oil silk cap and a red bow, the colours of his party. The
gentleman who actually filled this character is, I have heard, a man of
considerable fortune in Ireland.... Opposite and attired in the quilt of
his bed and in a yellow turban is the other member who actually sat in
the House two years and who by experience in the finesse of elections
was the moving spring in all the proceedings in this picture. There is
the Lord Mayor with solemn gravity, holding a white wand with a blue and
yellow bow and a sash of the same colours. He was a third candidate.
Immediately below in a white jacket is the head poll clerk swearing in
three burgesses before they are allowed to vote.... The first, a dandy
of the very first fashion, just imprisoned, with a fifty-guinea pipe in
his right hand, a diamond ring on his finger, dressed in a yellow silk
dressing gown, velvet cap and red morocco slippers; on his left stands
an exquisite, who has been imprisoned three years, smoking a three-penny
cigar, with a hole at his elbow and his toes on the ground; and the
third is one of those characters of middle age and careless dissipation
visible in all scenes of this description, dressed in a blue jacket and
green cap. There are several other groups. In one a man of family sits
sipping his claret, and a soldier who distinguished himself in Spain,
imprisoned in early life for running away with a ward in chancery.
Embarrassment followed and nine years of confinement have rendered him
reckless and melancholy. He has one of the most tremendous heads I ever
saw, something between Byron and Bonaparte. In the picture I have made
him sit at ease with a companion while champagne bottles, a dice box,
dice, cards, a racket bat and ball upon the ground announce his present
habits. Leaning on him, and half terrified at the mock threats of the
little red-nosed head constable with a mace, is an interesting girl
attached to him in his reverses, and over his head, clinging to the top
of the pump, is an elector intoxicated and huzzaing.
“A third group is composed of a good family in affliction, the wife
devoted, clinging to her husband; the eldest boy with the gaiety of a
child is cheering the others; behind is the old nurse sobbing over the
baby five weeks old; while the husband, virtuous and in trouble, is
contemplating the merry electors with pity and pain. The father and
mother are in mourning for the loss of their second boy.... The father’s
hand holds a paper, and on it is written ‘debt £26.10., costs £157.10.
Treachery, Squeeze & Co., Thieves Inn.’” Upon the whole description
Haydon comments, “What a set of beings are assembled in that
extraordinary place, that temple of debauchery.”
Another description given in Haydon’s diary reveals a more painful side
of prison life. It is an account of a Sunday in the King’s Bench. “The
day passed in all the buzz, blasphemy, hum, noise and confusion of a
prison. Thoughtless creatures! My room was close to theirs. Such
language! Such jokes! Good Heavens! I had read prayers to myself in the
morning, and prayed with the utmost sincerity for my dearest Mary and
children, and to hear those poor fellows, utterly indifferent as it
were, was really distressing to one’s feelings. One of them had mixed up
an enormous tumbler of mulled wine crusted with nutmeg and as it passed
round some one halloed out, ‘Sacrament Sunday, gentlemen!’ Some roared
with laughter, some affected to laugh and he who was drinking pretended
to sneer; but he was awfully annoyed. And then there was a dead silence,
as if the blasphemy had recalled them to their senses. After an
occasional joke or so, one, with real feeling, began to hum the 100th
Psalm, not in joke, but to expiate his previous conduct, for neither he
nor any one laughed then, but seemed to think it too serious a subject.”
This was in 1830 and in that same year he records in his diary: “This
perpetual pauperism will in the end destroy my mind. I look round for
help with a feeling of despair that is quite dreadful. At this moment I
have a sick house without a shilling for the common necessaries of life.
This is no exaggeration.” The burden of his appeal to the Directors of
the British Gallery or Institution for encouragement is couched in the
same terms. He speaks of “his present struggling condition with eight
children and nothing on earth left him in property but what he is
clothed with, after twenty-six years of intense and ardent devotion to
painting,” and was vouchsafed help to the amount of £50. Year after year
he struggled with indomitable courage to keep the wolf from the door. He
was never at any time able to cope with current expenses or to face ever
pressing liabilities. He struck at new lines in art, tried portrait
painting, produced pictures of famous men at great epochs in their
lives, “Wellington on the Field of Waterloo,” “Napoleon Musing at St.
Helena,” to be engraved for general sale. He gave public exhibitions of
his own most popular works, canvassed on every side for new commissions,
tried fresco painting and the production of cartoons. Only in one
direction did he make money, by lecturing on art, for which he had a
natural gift, and for a time, but only for a time, he drew crowded
audiences. He earned bread thus, but no more, and his necessities caused
never ending pressure, still relieved constantly by the aid of the
pawnbroker, or the money lender at usurious rates. The sheriff’s
officers again carried him off to “that blessed refuge for the
miserable--the Bench,” which, as ever, was rendered hideous by the
levity of the vicious and the thoughtless. “Gambling, swearing and
drinking went on as usual,” he relates, “and last night when I was
musing on life and death, the bloods and blackguards were singing duets
outside my door at midnight.”
Haydon fought on to the last, but the end was very near when he speaks
in 1842 of “thirty-eight years of bitter suffering, incessant industry,
undaunted perseverance, four imprisonments, three ruins and five
petitions to Parliament, never letting the subject of State support for
national art rest.” He chafed, not without reason, that at a public
inquiry then in progress, neither Chairman nor Committee, witnesses nor
pupils gave any sign that they were conscious that such a creature as
Haydon existed.
“After this,” says Taylor, “the clouds settled down upon him and grew
darker and more dense every month of his few remaining years of life. It
is painful to follow day by day his struggles with disappointment,
despondency and embarrassment.” He was vexed and harassed more and more,
misfortunes multiplied, no fresh venture prospered and his last, the
exhibition of his own cartoons, was a dismal failure. No one came to see
them, the receipts on Easter day were beggarly; he took little more than
a pound, and next door thousands and thousands thronged to see Tom
Thumb. The future had never looked so black; “the butcher, the baker,
the tax collector, the landlord gave louder knocks than before.” At
length, he says, he “came home in excruciating anxiety,” not able to
raise the money for the rent of the Egyptian Hall where his cartoons
were exhibited. Fresh executions were to be put in and he says, “I felt
my heart sink, my brain confused, I foresaw my family’s misery and a
prison!” The desperate struggle was nearly over; he held on with but
small hope of deliverance and at last gave up in despair. He entered his
painting room for the last time and there shot himself on the 22nd of
June, 1846, “when temporarily of unsound mind” as the coroner’s inquest
charitably decided.
The third great prison of old London, but which survived down to the
middle of the last century, was the Marshalsea, which stood originally
in the High Street, Southwark, and a house now numbered 119 was the site
of the chapel. But it was removed by and by to other premises nearer the
St. George’s church that stands at the corner of the High St. Borough.
This prison derived its name from the Marshals of England to whom it
appertained and whose jurisdiction extended over the King’s household.
The royal servants were arraigned in the Marshal’s Court and committed
when in fault to the Marshalsea prison. It also received debtors,
arrested for even trifling sums, within a circuit of twelve miles from
Westminster Palace, and was especially used for the confinement of
persons awaiting trial. No exact record is preserved of its first
erection. The earliest account is that of a riot by sailors in 1377. A
man belonging to the fleet 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.”