THOMAS PURENEY, Archbishop among Ordinaries, lived and preached in
the heyday of Newgate. His was the good fortune to witness Sheppard's
encounter with the topsman, and to shrive the battered soul of Jonathan
Wild. Nor did he fall one inch below his opportunity. Designed by
Providence to administer a final consolation to the evil-doer, he
permitted no false ambition to distract his talent. As some men are born
for the gallows, so he was born to thump the cushion of a prison pulpit;
and his peculiar aptitude was revealed to him before he had time to
spend his strength in mistaken endeavour.
For thirty years his squat, stout figure was amiably familiar to all
such as enjoyed the Liberties of the Jug. For thirty years his mottled
nose and the rubicundity of his cheeks were the ineffaceable ensigns of
his intemperance. Yet there was a grimy humour in his forbidding aspect.
The fusty black coat, which sat ill upon his shambling frame, was all
besmirched with spilled snuff, and the lees of a thousand quart pots.
The bands of his profession were ever awry upon a tattered shirt. His
ancient wig scattered dust and powder as he went, while a single buckle
of some tawdry metal gave a look of oddity to his clumsy, slipshod
feet. A caricature of a man, he ambled and chuckled and seized the easy
pleasures within his reach. There was never a summer's day but he caught
upon his brow the few faint gleams of sunlight that penetrated the
gloomy yard. Hour after hour he would sit, his short fingers hardly
linked across his belly, drinking his cup of ale, and puffing at a
half-extinguished tobacco-pipe. Meanwhile he would reflect upon those
triumphs of oratory which were his supreme delight. If it fell on a
Monday that he took the air, a smile of satisfaction lit up his
fat, loose features, for still he pondered the effect of yesterday's
masterpiece. On Saturday the glad expectancy of to-morrow lent him
a certain joyous dignity. At other times his eye lacked lustre, his
gesture buoyancy, unless indeed he were called upon to follow the
cart to Tyburn, or to compose the Last Dying Speech of some notorious
malefactor.
Preaching was the master passion of his life. It was the pulpit that
reconciled him to exile within a great city, and persuaded him to the
enjoyment of roguish company. Those there were who deemed his career
unfortunate; but a sense of fitness might have checked their pity, and
it was only in his hours of maudlin confidence that the Reverend Thomas
confessed to disappointment. Born of respectable parents in the County
of Cambridgeshire, he nurtured his youth upon the exploits of James
Hind and the Golden Farmer. His boyish pleasure was to lie in the
ditch, which bounded his father's orchard, studying that now forgotten
masterpiece, 'There's no Jest like a True Jest.' Then it was that he
felt 'immortal longings in his blood.' He would take to the road, so he
swore, and hold up his enemies like a gentleman. Once, indeed, he was
surprised by the clergyman of the parish in act to escape from the
rectory with two volumes of sermons and a silver flagon. The divine was
minded to speak seriously to him concerning the dreadful sin of robbery,
and having strengthened him with texts and good counsel, to send him
forth unpunished. 'Thieving and covetousness,' said the parson, 'must
inevitably bring you to the gallows. If you would die in your bed,
repent you of your evildoing, and rob no more.' The exhortation was not
lost upon Pureney, who, chastened in spirit, straightly prevailed upon
his father to enter him a pensioner at Corpus Christi College in the
University of Cambridge, that at the proper time he might take orders.
At Cambridge he gathered no more knowledge than was necessary for his
profession, and wasted such hours as should have been given to study in
drinking, dicing, and even less reputable pleasures. Yet repentance
was always easy, and he accepted his first curacy, at Newmarket, with
a brave heart and a good hopefulness. Fortunate was the choice of this
early cure. Had he been gently guided at the outset, who knows but he
might have lived out his life in respectable obscurity? But Newmarket
then, as now, was a town of jollity and dissipation, and Pureney yielded
without persuasion to the pleasures denied his cloth. There was ever a
fire to extinguish at his throat, nor could he veil his wanton eye at
the sight of a pretty wench. Again and again the lust of preaching
urged him to repent, yet he slid back upon his past gaiety, until
Parson Pureney became a byword. Dismissed from Newmarket in disgrace, he
wandered the country up and down in search of a pulpit, but so infamous
became the habit of his life that only in prison could he find an
audience fit and responsive.
And, in the nick, the chaplaincy of Newgate fell vacant. Here was
the occasion to temper dissipation with piety, to indulge the twofold
ambition of his life. What mattered it, if within the prison walls he
dipped his nose more deeply into the punch-bowl than became a divine?
The rascals would but respect him the more for his prowess, and knit
more closely the bond of sympathy. Besides, after preaching and punch
he best loved a penitent, and where in the world could he find so rich a
crop of erring souls ripe for repentance as in gaol? Henceforth he might
threaten, bluster, and cajole. If amiability proved fruitless he would
put cruelty to the test, and terrify his victims by a spirited reference
to Hell and to that Burning Lake they were so soon to traverse. At last,
thought he, I shall be sure of my effect, and the prospect flattered
his vanity. In truth, he won an immediate and assured success. Like
the common file or cracksman, he fell into the habit of the place,
intriguing with all the cleverness of a practised diplomatist, and
setting one party against the other that he might in due season decide
the trumpery dispute. The trusted friend of many a distinguished prig
and murderer, he so intimately mastered the slang and etiquette of the
Jug, that he was appointed arbiter of all those nice questions of honour
which agitated the more reputable among the cross-coves. But these were
the diversions of a strenuous mind, and it was in the pulpit or in the
closet that the Reverend Thomas Pureney revealed his true talent.
As the ruffian had a sense of drama, so he was determined that his words
should scald and bite the penitent. When the condemned pew was full of
a Sunday his happiness was complete. Now his deep chest would hurl
salvo on salvo of platitudes against the sounding-board; now his voice,
lowered to a whisper, would coax the hopeless prisoners to prepare their
souls. In a paroxysm of feigned anger he would crush the cushion with
his clenched fist, or leaning over the pulpit side as though to approach
the nearer to his victims, would roll a cold and bitter eye upon them,
as of a cat watching caged birds. One famous gesture was irresistible,
and he never employed it but some poor ruffian fell senseless to the
floor. His stumpy fingers would fix a noose of air round some imagined
neck, and so devoutly was the pantomime studied that you almost heard
the creak of the retreating cart as the phantom culprit was turned off.
But his conduct in the pulpit was due to no ferocity of temperament. He
merely exercised his legitimate craft. So long as Newgate supplied him
with an enforced audience, so long would he thunder and bluster at the
wrongdoer according to law and the dictates of his conscience.
Many, in truth, were his triumphs, but, as he would mutter in his
garrulous old age, never was he so successful as in the last exhortation
delivered to Matthias Brinsden. Now, Matthias Brinsden incontinently
murdered his wife because she harboured too eager a love of the
brandy-shop. A model husband, he had spared no pains in her correction.
He had flogged her without mercy and without result. His one design
was to make his wife obey him, which, as the Scriptures say, all
wives should do. But the lust of brandy overcame wifely obedience, and
Brinsden, hoping for the best, was constrained to cut a hole in her
skull. The next day she was as impudent as ever, until Matthias rose
yet more fiercely in his wrath, and the shrew perished. Then was
Thomas Pureney's opportunity, and the Sunday following the miscreant's
condemnation he delivered unto him and seventeen other malefactors the
moving discourse which here follows:
'We shall take our text,' gruffed the Ordinary 'From out the Psalms:
"Bloodthirsty and deceitful men shall not live out half their days."
And firstly, we shall expound to you the heinous sin of murder, which is
unlawful (1) according to the Natural Laws, (2) according to the Jewish
Law, (3) according to the Christian Law, proportionably stronger. By
Nature 'tis unlawful as 'tis injuring Society: as 'tis robbing God
of what is His Right and Property; as 'tis depriving the Slain of the
satisfaction of Eating, Drinking, Talking, and the Light of the Sun,
which it is his right to enjoy. And especially 'tis unlawful, as it
is sending a Soul naked and unprepared to appear before a wrathful and
avenging Deity without time to make his Soul composedly or to listen to
the thoughtful ministrations of one (like ourselves) soundly versed in
Divinity. By the Jewish Law 'tis forbidden, for is it not written (Gen.
ix. 6): "Whosoever sheddeth Man's Blood, by Man his Blood shall be
shed"? And if an Eye be given for an Eye, a Tooth for a Tooth, how shall
the Murderer escape with his dishonoured Life? 'Tis further forbidden by
the Christian Law (proportionably stronger).
But on this head we would speak no word, for were not you all, O
miserable Sinners, born not in the Darkness of Heathendom, but in the
burning Light of Christian England?
'Secondly, we will consider the peculiar wickedness of Parricide, and
especially the Murder of a Wife. What deed, in truth, is more heinous
than that a man should slay the Parent of his own Children, the Wife he
had once loved and chose out of all the world to be a Companion of his
Days; the Wife who long had shared his good Fortune and his ill, who
had brought him with Pain and Anguish several Tokens and Badges of
Affection, the Olive Branches round about his Table? To embrew the hands
in such blood is double Murder, as it murders not only the Person slain,
but kills the Happiness of the orphaned Children, depriving them of
Bread, and forcing them upon wicked Ways of getting a Maintenance, which
often terminate in Newgate and an ignominious death.
'Bloodthirsty men, we have said, shall not live out half their Days. And
think not that Repentance avails the Murderer. "Hell and Damnation are
never full" (Prov. xxvii. 20), and the meanest Sinner shall find a place
in the Lake which burns unto Eternity with Fire and Brimstone. Alas!
your Punishment shall not finish with the Noose. Your "end is to be
burned" (Heb. vi. 8), to be burned, for the Blood that is shed cries
aloud for Vengeance.' At these words, as Pureney would relate with a
smile of recollected triumph, Matthias Brinsden screamed aloud, and a
shiver ran through the idle audience which came to Newgate on a
Black Sunday, as to a bull-baiting. Truly, the throng of thoughtless
spectators hindered the proper solace of the Ordinary's ministrations,
and many a respectable murderer complained of the intruding mob. But the
Ordinary, otherwise minded, loved nothing so well as a packed house, and
though he would invite the criminal to his private closet, and comfort
his solitude with pious ejaculations, he would neither shield him from
curiosity, nor tranquillise his path to the unquenchable fire.
Not only did he exercise in the pulpit a poignant and visible influence.
He boasted the confidence of many heroes. His green old age cherished
no more famous memory than the friendship of Jonathan Wild. He had known
the Great Man at his zenith; he had wrestled with him in the hour of
discomfiture; he had preached for his benefit that famous sermon on the
text: 'Hide Thy Face from my sins, and blot out all my Iniquities'; he
had witnessed the hero's awful progress from Newgate to Tyburn; he had
seen him shiver at the nubbing-cheat; he had composed for him a last
dying speech, which did not shame the king of thief-takers, and whose
sale brought a comfortable profit to the widow. Jonathan, on his side,
had shown the Ordinary not a little condescension. It had been his whim,
on the eve of his marriage, to present Mr. Pureney with a pair of white
gloves, which were treasured as a priceless relic for many a year. And
when he paid his last, forced visit to Newgate, he gave the Chaplain,
for a pledge of his esteem, that famous silver staff, which he carried,
as a badge of authority from the Government, the better to keep the
people in awe, and favour the enterprises of his rogues.
Only one cloud shadowed this old and equal friendship. Jonathan had
entertained the Ordinary with discourse so familiar, they had cracked so
many a bottle together, that when the irrevocable sentence was passed,
when he who had never shown mercy, expected none, the Great Man found
the exhortations of the illiterate Chaplain insufficient for his high
purpose. 'As soon as I came into the condemned Hole,' thus he wrote, 'I
began to think of making a preparation for my soul; and the better to
bring my stubborn heart to repentance, I desired the advice of a man of
learning, a man of sound judgment in divinity, and therefore application
being made to the Reverend Mr. Nicholson, he very Christian-like gave
me his assistance.' Alas! Poor Pureney! He lacked subtlety, and he was
instantly baffled, when the Great Man bade him expound the text: 'Cursed
is every one that hangeth on a tree.' The shiftiest excuse would have
brought solace to a breaking heart and conviction to a casuist
brain. Yet for once the Ordinary was at a loss, and Wild, finding him
insufficient for his purpose, turned a deaf ear to his ministrations.
Thus he was rudely awakened from the dream of many sleepless nights. His
large heart almost broke at the neglect.
But if his more private counsels were scorned, he still had the joy
of delivering a masterpiece from the pulpit, of using 'all the means
imaginable to make Wild think of another world,' and of seeing him as
neatly turned off as the most exacting Ordinary could desire. And what
inmate of Newgate ever forgot the afternoon of that glorious day (May
the 24th, 1725)? Mr. Pureney returned to his flock, fortified with
punch and good tidings. He pictured the scene at Tyburn with a bibulous
circumstance, which admirably became his style, rejoicing, as he has
rejoiced ever since, that, though he lost a friend, the honest rogue was
saved at last from the machinations of the thief-taker.
So he basked and smoked and drank his ale, retelling the ancient
stories, and hiccuping forth the ancient sermons. So, in the fading
twilight of life, he smiled the smile of contentment, as became one who
had emptied more quarts, had delivered more harrowing discourses, and
had lived familiarly with more scoundrels than any devil-dodger of his
generation.