Arthur Griffiths

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:

The first ceremony for the newcomer is to sit or stand for his portrait:

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.”

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 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

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.