Arthur Griffiths

“ Against bribery there can be no protection, but long experience has established the watchful supervision, which to-day avails more than bolts and bars and blocks of stone. A prisoner can sooner win through a massive wall than elude a keen-eyed warder's care. Hence in all modern prison construction the old idea of mere solidity has been abandoned, and reliance is placed rather upon the upright intelligence of that which we may term the prison police. The minute inspection of cells and other parts occupied by prisoners; the examination of the prisoners themselves at uncertain times ”

“ Great dignitaries and high-born dames have witnessed without a shudder the tortures of an auto da fé; to this day it is the fashion for delicately nurtured ladies to flock to the Law Courts, and note the varying emotions, from keenest anguish to most brutal sang-froid, of notorious murderers on trial. It is not strange, then, that in uncultivated and comparatively demoralized ages the concourse about the gallows should be great, or the conduct of the spectators riotous, brutal, often heartless in the extreme. ”

“ All classes and categories of prisoners were herded indiscriminately together: men and women, tried and untried, upright but misguided zealots with hardened habitual offenders. The only principle of classification was a prisoner's ability or failure to pay certain fees; money could purchase the squalid comfort of the master's side, but no immunity from the baleful companionship of felons equally well furnished with funds and no less anxious to escape the awful horrors of the common side of the gaol. ”

“ Records of like cruelty and indifference to human suffering blackened the pages of English history until the merciful ministrations of John Howard and of Elizabeth Frye aroused the slumbering pity of Great Britain, and alleviated the conditions of prisoners all over the world.
[ix] In all lands, in all ages, in all stages of civilization, man has left grim records of vengeful passion. No race has escaped the stigma, perhaps no creed. It would almost seem that nations had vied with each other in the subtlety of their ingenuity for producing suffering. ”

“ The condition of the prisoners within Newgate continued very deplorable. This is apparent from the occasional references to their treatment. They were heavily ironed, lodged in loathsome dungeons, and all but starved to death. Poor Stephen Smith, the fishmonger, who had contravened the precautionary rules against the plague, petitions the council that he has been very heavily laden with such intolerable bolts and shackles that he is lamed, and being a weak and aged man, is like to perish in the gaol. ”

“ What heroic visions history conjures for us! Columbus languishing in chains in Spain; Savonarola and Jean d'Arc passing from torture to the stake; Sir William Wallace, Sidney, Raleigh, Lady Jane Grey, Sir Thomas More, irradiating the dim cells of London's Tower; Madame Roland, Charlotte Corday, Marie Antoinette, beautifying the foul recesses of the Conciergerie; gentle Madame Elizabeth soothing the sorrows of the Temple ”

“ The brutality of the stronger and governing to the weaker and subject sex was not limited to the ducking-stool and branks. It must be remembered with shame in this more humane age that little more than a hundred years ago women were publicly whipped at the whipping-post near the stocks, or at any cart's tail. The fierce statute against vagrants of Henry VIII's and Elizabeth's reign made no distinction of sex, and their ferocious provisions to the effect that offenders "should be stripped naked from the middle upwards, and whipped till the body should be bloody," long continued in force. ”

“ Mankind has exhausted its fiendish ingenuity in the invention of hideous instruments for prolonging the sufferings of its victims. When we read to-day of the cold-blooded Chinese who condemns his criminal to be buried to the chin and left to be teased to death by flies; of the lust for blood of the Russian soldier who in brutal glee impales on his bayonet the writhing forms of captive children; of the recently revealed torture-chambers of the Yildiz Kiosk where Abdul Hamid wreaked his vengeance or squeezed millions of treasure from luckless foes ”

“ The officers of the law were powerless to check the tumult; no attention was paid to the convict's dying speech—"an exhortation to shun a vicious life, addressed to thieves actually engaged in picking pockets." The culprit's prayers were interrupted, his demeanour if resigned was sneered at, and only applauded when he went with brazen effrontery to his death. "Thus," says the pamphlet, "are all the ends of public justice defeated; all the effects of example, the terrors of death, the shame of punishment, are all lost." ”

“ Baretti's assailants tried hard to push him into the puddle, and at last in self-defence he drew his pocket-knife, a knife he kept, as he afterwards declared, to carve fruit and sweetmeats, and not to kill his fellow creatures with. Being hard pushed, "in great horror, having such bad eyes," lest he should run against some, and his pursuers constantly at him, jostling and beating him, Baretti "made a quick blow" at one who had knocked off his hat with his fist; the mob cried, "Murder, he has a knife out," and gave way. ”

“ In Newgate while under sentence she was most defiant. She was the terror of her fellow prisoners, and actually stabbed a man who had given evidence against her. When the cart was drawn in under the gallows she got her arms loose, seized the executioner, struggled with him, and gave him so violent a blow on the chest that she nearly knocked him down. She dared him to hang her, and tearing off her hat, cloak, and other garments, the hangman's perquisites, distributed them among the crowd in spite of him. After a long struggle he got the rope around her neck. ”

“ Imprisonment was often lightly and capriciously inflicted in days before British liberties were fully won, and innumerable victims of tyranny and oppression have been lodged in Newgate. Political troubles also sent their quota. The gaol was the half-way house to the scaffold or the gallows for turbulent or short-sighted persons who espoused the losing side; it was the starting-place for that painful pilgrimage to the pillory or whipping post which was too frequently the punishment for rashly uttered libels and philippics against constituted power. ”

“ Sometimes the escape followed a riotous upheaval of the inmates of Newgate, as when two of the Percies and Lord Egremond were committed to Newgate for an affray in the North Country between them and Lord Salisbury's sons. Soon after their committal these turbulent aristocrats "broke out of prison and went to the king; the other prisoners took to the leads of the gate, and defended it a long while against the sheriffs and all their officers," till eventually the aid of the citizens had to be called in. ”

“ In sharp contrast with the privations and terrible discomforts of the poorer sort was the wild revelry of the aristocratic prisoners of the press-yard. They had every luxury to be bought with money, freedom alone excepted, and that was often to be compassed by bribing dishonest officials to suffer them to escape.
Taking first the punishments which fell short of death, those most common in England, until comparatively recent times, were branding, mutilation, dismemberment, whipping, and degrading public exposure. Branding was often carried out with circumstances of atrocious barbarity. ”

“ The weight of the chains, again, which innocent and guilty alike wore, depended upon the price a prisoner could pay for "easement of irons," and it was a common practice to overload a newcomer with enormous fetters and so terrify him into lavish disbursement. The gaol at all times was so hideously overcrowded that plague and pestilence perpetually ravaged it, and the deadly infection often spread into the neighbouring courts of law.
The foregoing is an imperfect but by no means highly coloured picture of Newgate as it existed for hundreds of years, from the twelfth century to the nineteenth. ”

“ From the foregoing account it is easy to draw conclusions concerning the state of public morals and manners in the eighteenth century. Both the atrocity of the crimes and the barbarity of the punishments surpass everything the twentieth century can show, while to the populace generally the highwayman and the bully were heroes. Though our century is by no means free from crime, we may congratulate ourselves that we have advanced beyond the eighteenth, at least so far as crimes of violence are concerned. ”

“ A modification of this plan has long been used at Newgate for the infliction of corporal punishment, and it may still be seen in the old ward at the back of the middle yard.
Ferocious as were most of the methods I have detailed of dealing with offenders against the law, they generally, except by accident, fell short of death. Yet were there innumerable cases in those uncompromising and unenlightened ages in which death alone would be deemed equal to the offences. Rulers might be excused, perhaps, if they were satisfied with nothing less than a criminal's blood. ”

“ All, more or less, were intended to deter from crime. The criminal had generally to pay in his person or his goods. He was either subjected to physical pain applied in degrading, often ferociously cruel ways, and endured mutilation, or was branded, tortured, put to death; he was mulcted in fines, deprived of liberty, or adjudged as a slave to indemnify by manual labour those whom he had wronged. Imprisonment as practised in modern times has followed from the last-named class of punishments. ”

“ She herself had but little hope of escape, and had been heard to cry out on her first commitment, "I am a dead woman." She was duly executed at Tyburn. The Alexanders and Tracy were discharged.
I have specially instanced these foul murders as exhibiting circumstances of atrocity rarely equalled in the records of crime. Catherine Hayes and Sarah Malcolm were unsexed desperadoes, whose misdeeds throw into the shade those of the Mannings and Kate Websters of later times. But women had no monopoly of assassination, in those days when life was held so cheap. ”

“ Newgate, [6] again, was on the highroad to Smithfield; in times of intolerance and fierce religious dissensions numbers of devoted martyrs went thence to suffer for conscience' sake at the stake. For centuries a large section of the permanent population of Newgate, as of all gaols, consisted of offenders against commercial laws. While fraudulent bankrupts were hanged, others more unfortunate than criminal were clapped into gaol to linger out their lives without the chance of earning the funds by which alone freedom could be recovered. ”

“ If we take a view of the supposed solemnity from the time at which the criminal leaves the prison to the last moment of his existence, it will be found to be a period full of the most shocking and disgraceful circumstances. If the only defect were the want of ceremony, the minds of the spectators might be supposed to be left in a state of indifference; but [208] when they view the meanness of the apparatus, the dirty cart and ragged harness, surrounded by a sordid assemblage of the lowest among the vulgar, their sentiments are inclined more to ridicule than pity. ”

“ It was then ordained that "no one of the city, of whatsoever condition he shall be, shall go out of the city to maintain parties, such as taking leisure, or holding 'days of love' (days of reconciliation between persons at variance) , or making other congregations within the city or without in disturbance of the peace of our lord the king, or in affray of the people, and to the scandal of the city." Any found guilty thereof were to be taken and put into the prison of Newgate, and there retained for a year and a day; and if he was a freeman of the city, he lost his freedom for ever. ”

“ The prison is so constantly overcrowded that the prisoners have "an infectious malignant fever which sends many to their long home. The magistrates who think them unfit to breathe their native air when living bury them as brethren when dead." All kinds of robbery and oppression were practised within the precincts of the gaol. Inside, apart from [81] personal discomfort, the inmates do much as they please. "There are seditious preachings by Fifth Monarchy men at Newgate," say the records, "and prayers for all righteous blood." ”

“ So eager was he to miss no sight worth seeing, that he went purposely to Paris to witness the torture of the unhappy Damiens. "On the day of the execution," Jesse tells us, "he mingled with the crowd in a plain undress suit and bob wig; when a French nobleman, observing the deep interest he took in the scene, and imagining from the plainness of his attire that he must be a person in the humbler ranks of life, resolved that he must infallibly be a hangman. ”

“ Classes aped the habits of the classes above their own, and the love of luxurious gratification "reached to the dregs of the people," says Fielding, "who, not being able by the fruits of honest labour to support the state which they affect, they disdain the wages to which their industry would entitle them, and abandoning themselves to idleness, the more simple and poor-spirited betake themselves to a state of starving and beggary, while those of more art and courage became thieves, sharpers, and robbers." ”