THE NEWGATE CHAPLAINS: SAMUEL SMITH, PAUL LORRAIN, THOMAS PURENEY—THE PRISON LIFE

The Chaplains, or Ordinaries, of Newgate were amply provided for. The presentation to the office was in the gift of the Lord Mayor and aldermen, and included a residence in Newgate street, in addition to the salary, a legacy of £10 a year paid by the Governors of St. Bartholomew's Hospital, an annual £6 from Lady Barnardiston's legacy, and what are described as "two freedoms yearly," which generally sold for £25 each. In addition to these, the city usually presented the Ordinary with one other, annually. By 1779 it appears that he no longer enjoyed the freedoms, but his salary was augmented to £180, and, in addition, he received £3 12s. 0d. a year from the sheriffs.

Surely this was a stipend ample enough for the class of men who held the office, especially as the divines who generally obtained it did very well out of the "authentic" lives of the criminals to whom they extended ghostly counsel. The "Bishop of Newgate" was the slang term for the Ordinary, and so well—though not so admirably—did the men, who, in a long succession, filled the office, fit into the place, that we but rarely find one translated to other fields of activity. They lived and died Ordinaries of Newgate. Even a good man might have become degraded by the place and its fearful management, but the men appointed were of the worst type, and a disgrace to the Church.

The Reverend Paul Lorrain and the Reverend Thomas Pureney were typical Ordinaries, blusterous, bloated, and snuffy; ready with a threadbare tag from an easy classic; profaning the Scriptures with vinous hiccoughs; more keen to nose a revelation for their delectable broadsides and hypocritical pamphlets than to lead a sinner to repentance, even if they knew the way; and always with an alert eye on the main chance.

Lorrain succeeded one Samuel Smith in 1698, and held the post until his death, in 1719. He was most diligent in the production of those "official" accounts of the lives, confessions, and last dying speeches of the criminals, which were printed and sold largely, and thus formed a considerable augmentation to the salary of himself and his kind. A collection of forty-eight of these curious pamphlets, written by him, is found in the British Museum. We turn to them with expectancy, but from them with disgust. With every advantage at their command in this peculiar form of authorship, the Reverend Paul Lorrain and his successors failed to produce anything but the most insufficient of lives, the most commonplace confessions, and the most threadbare last dying speeches, garnished with haphazard texts.

Generally published at eight in the morning of the day after the respective executions, they had their public; but the very cream of the sale was skimmed off on the actual day of the execution by unlicensed publications, and it was usually quite easy for the doomed men going to Tyburn to purchase a penny biography of themselves, and to read what they had said at the last moment, before the last moment itself was reached. In Hogarth's print of the end of the Idle Apprentice at Tyburn, the "Last Dying Speech and Confession of Thomas Idle" is being bawled out at the moment of his hearing the final ministrations in the cart. Obviously, these productions could not be "authentic," in so far, at least, as the concluding scenes were concerned; but there is that journalistic flair about many of those that have survived the bad paper and the worse ink with which they were produced, which shows a full comprehension of what the public wanted. And whatsoever the public wants, it is the journalist's business to see it duly gets. There is more resource, more touch with life, in these than in the works of the Ordinaries.

A certain low and undistinguished feeling of pedantry runs through all those clerical issues. The Reverend Mr. Paul Lorrain, or the equally Reverend Mr. Thomas Pureney, tells us of such and such an one, that, "departing from the early paths of Virtue and Integrity, where the Flowers of Innocency may be pluckt," (much they knew of such things, to be sure!) "he stray'd among the Profligate and the Abandon'd, and became a Highway Man."

Such stuff! All very well for copy-book maxims or good books for well-behaved children; but the streets wanted stronger meat than this; and they got it. In the unauthorised lives of the various malefactors, written for the appreciation of the crowd, it may be read how such a youthful innocent as the one described above in so sesquipedalian a style, "was a practis'd prig at eleven years of age. He stole his Father's Cash-Box, and, coming with it to London, spent the Contents in the gayeties of the Town." Precocious youth! But precocity is not, as many suppose, a Twentieth-Century portent.

"He soon became a Flash Cull and set up half a dozen Doxies of his own, who empty'd his Pockets as soon as he filled 'em." Nothing at all about the early paths of Virtue and Integrity in this, it will be observed.

"He then, observing that more was to be made in one Night's good-fortune under the Stars than in a week of snatching the Bung or cly-filing in the streets, and with less danger, in it, became a Collector of Tolls upon the High-Way."

That was your true penny style for the streets. It was sympathetic and understood, which the "Flowers of Innocency" business was not.

Paul Lorrain and his brethren never failed with the moral lesson, however little they themselves believed in it; and always, you will find, who read their nauseating pages, that those who had the misfortune to sit to them for their biographies were "truly penitent," "moved to contrition," or "heartily renounced their Wicked and profligate course of life," and the like.

And yet nothing is more certain than that the larger number of them went to death impenitent and hardened. The better sort were merely sulky; the worse cursed and flung indecent quips to the crowd, all the way to the gallows. Nor need there be much wonder at it. To die for taking a purse from a traveller must have seemed even to an eighteenth-century highwayman, born into this state of things and bound to suffer by it, an extravagant penalty. Temperament, sanguine or otherwise, did the rest, and conditioned his attitude on the Tyburn journey.

The Reverend Thomas Pureney had a way of his own with sinners. He could not make them truly penitent, but he could, and did, frighten them almost into convulsions by a way he had in preaching. He was a nasty person, among a succession of forbidding persons. He stumbled as he walked: his nose and cheeks flamed with intemperance in drink: he took the flavour of the pot-house with him whithersoever he went. Nay, he even, as a youth, before ever he was educated for the Church, had thoughts of himself going upon the highway, and indeed actually began the business of taking things without leave of the owners of them. His first and only essay in this sort was the handling of a silver flagon and two volumes of sermons, which he was conveying from the rectory of his native place in Cambridgeshire, when the excellent clergyman discovered him with this singular booty and lectured him, not unamiably. He would certainly end his days in Newgate, prosed the good man, if he did not instantly see the error of his youthful ways, and reform. Why, that very reform, so far as it went, served, strange to say, to land him, years later, at Newgate; and there he ended, after all; but very differently from the fashion the old clergyman had foreseen.

His respectable parent soon after this youthful escapade entered him at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and there he assimilated as much learning as sufficed to place him in holy orders. But he had not been, in any sense of the word, a moral man while at the University, and although he found a curacy at Newmarket, it was with a reputation which rather fitted him for the society of the racecourse than for the pulpit that he went there.

The eighteenth century demanded little of a clergyman, but even that little our Pureney could not render, and he was flung out with ignominy, even from Newmarket. Drink and flagrant immorality were the undoing of him there, and the rumours of his evil ways long followed him about, and prevented him securing another post, until at last that of Ordinary at Newgate was tossed contemptuously to him. The suggestion of that office—insult though it would have been to a decent man—found in him a ready and grateful acceptance. No standard of conduct was required, and, joy of joys! he became pastor among the very kind of heroes who had fired the imagination of his perusing youth.

He lorded it over those caged gaol-birds with imperious ways for thirty years, and in that time had the fortune to hob and nob with many a famous rogue. Jack Sheppard and many a lesser light sat under him in the prison chapel and listened to his outrageous sermons, promising damnation and everlasting torment; and he had the singular fortune to call the infamous Jonathan Wild a crony for some years, and in the end, when that appalling scoundrel had been found out and cast for the shameful death to which he had brought so many others, to preach the worm that dieth not to him also. It is true that, owing to his intimate acquaintance with Pureney, Wild did not greatly value his discourse, and sought and obtained the counsel and guidance of an outsider, the Reverend Mr. Nicholson, to wit, who, he says, "very Christian-like gave me his assistance"; but the Ordinary came into his own again on the Sunday, when the condemned, Wild among them, were herded into their gruesome pew in that most awful of chapels, and had to listen to his ravings.

Pureney's account of the life, crimes, conviction and confession of Jonathan Wild and of other malefactors condemned at the same time is a folio broadsheet, distinguished among a badly produced class of literature as surely the very worst-printed, on paper of the commonest. A rude woodcut at the beginning discloses the Ordinary in a black Geneva gown, preaching to his charges (an extraordinarily large Ordinary, and remarkably small convicts), with conventional representations of Heaven and Hell, to left and right. A Hand, bearing a celestial crown a good many sizes too large for any of the convicts here pictured, is seen amid clouds; the Ordinary, not at all astonished by the phenomenon, pointing to it and continuing his discourse.

Hell's mouth, smoking like the exhaust of an over-lubricated motor-car, is occupied by a very convincing Devil, armed with an undeniably business-like trident, who has most certainly got his eye rather upon the unsuspecting Ordinary than on the weak-kneed group of five malefactors, one of whom appears by his attitude to prefer Hell to any more of the Ordinary's exhortation. And, if all accounts of Pureney's life and death be true, the Devil did get him, after all.

Such was the type of publication out of which Pureney earned an addition to his income; but the tale does not quite end here. The last page is largely occupied with an advertisement of the most flagrantly indecorous and reprehensible character, of which even an eighteenth-century clergyman of the Church of England might have been ashamed. But the clergy fell generally far short of the ideal ministers and vicars of God. Whether in town or in the country, where "Parson Trullibers" abounded, they were a disgrace to their office; and even when they were earnest, which was seldom, provoked criticism by their extravagance.

In 1724, when Jack Sheppard, pickpocket and housebreaker, was again lying in Newgate, after being re-captured, his doings appealed greatly to the imagination of all. He was the most famous person of that year, and great crowds thronged to see him. Sir James Thornhill, the Royal Academician, painted his portrait; chapbooks innumerable, badly written, and ill-printed, on vile paper, were issued before his execution and sold in thousands to eager purchasers; and clergymen took his career for their texts. One ingenious preacher, given to sensational discourse, outdid all his brethren in thus improving the occasion:

"Now, my beloved, what a melancholy consideration it is, that men should show so much regard for the preservation of a poor, perishing body, that can remain at most but a few years, and can at the same time be so unaccountably negligent of eternity. Oh! what care, what pains, what diligence, and what contrivances are made use of for, and laid out upon, these frail and tottering tabernacles of clay, when, alas! the nobler part of us is allowed so very small a share of our concern that we will scarce give ourselves the trouble of bestowing a thought upon it.

"We have, dear brethren, a remarkable instance of this, in a notorious malefactor, well known by name as Jack Sheppard. What amazing difficulties has he overcome! What astonishing things has he performed, for the sake of a stinking, miserable carcase, hardly worth hanging! How dexterously did he pick the padlock of his chain with a crooked nail! How manfully burst his fetters asunder, climb up the chimney, wrench out an iron bar, break his way through a stone wall, and make the strong door of a dark entry fly before him, till he got upon the leads of the prison! And then, fixing a blanket to the wall with a spike, how intrepidly did he descend to the roof of the turner's house, and how cautiously pass down the stairs and make his escape at the street door!

"Oh! that ye were all like Jack Sheppard! Mistake me not, my brothers, I mean not in a carnal, but in a spiritual sense; for I purpose to spiritualise these things. What a shame it would be, if we did not think it worth our while to take as much pains, and employ as many deep thoughts, to save our souls, as he has done to preserve his body! Let me exhort you, therefore, to open the locks of your hearts with the nail of repentance; burst asunder the fetters of your beloved lusts; mount the chimney of hope, take from thence the bar of good resolution, break through the stone wall of despair, and all the strongholds in the dark valley of the shadow of death. Raise yourselves to the leads of divine meditation; fix the blanket of faith with the spike of the Church; let yourselves down to the turner's house of resignation, and descend the stairs of humility. So shall you come to the door of deliverance from the prison of iniquity, and escape the clutches of that old executioner, the devil, who 'goeth about like a roaring lion, seeking whom he may devour.'"

No doubt the preacher meant well, but his figurative style was too pronounced.

It is easy and proper to be severe on the subject of the Newgate chaplains, but perhaps some allowance should be made for them, on the score of the associations of prison life, always bad, but incredibly degrading in that age. If we except Pureney, who was himself an instinctive criminal, the Ordinaries could not, all at once, have become callous and depraved. They were not, of course, men distinguished for learning or piety, for it was the practice to give the chaplaincy to the dregs of the profession; but were doubtless, at the time of their appointment merely average men, eager to obtain a livelihood. They ran very grave risks, too, in those days when gaol-fever ravaged the prison, and even infected the sessions-house. It was highly dangerous to attend the prisoners, often indiscriminate in their revengeful violence, both in their cells and at the place of execution. A peculiar incident recorded of an execution at Hertford, on March 25th, 1723, shows that all manner of indignities were possible. On that day, when William Summers and another man named Tipping were turned off, the hangman was so intoxicated, that, supposing three had been ordered for execution, he insisted on putting a rope round the parson's neck as he stood in the cart, and was with difficulty prevented from stringing him up as well.

It is only charitable to suppose that the Ordinaries must needs have been shocked when first introduced to their morally and physically pestiferous charges, and gradually became used to their surroundings. Let us take a prisoner typical of those whom these divines attended:

Valentine Carrick is not so well-known a name as Maclaine, but he also formed a popular sight during the short interval between his conviction and execution. "James" Carrick, as he is also styled, was son of a retired jeweller, who was wealthy enough to set up for a gentleman, and to purchase his son an ensign's commission in the army. Like hundreds of others of his class, the young ensign gambled freely; like most, he lost, and like a large proportion of broken gamesters, he sought to replenish his pockets by emptying those of travellers on the King's highway by threats, and at the point of sword or muzzle of pistol. He was one of the most reckless blades that ever the Stone Jug had received. He applied the saying of the heedless folk mentioned in the Bible to his own situation: "Let us eat, drink, and be merry; for to-morrow we die." Others might laugh and tipple as they passed their few days in the condemned hold; he did more, for he shouted and sang, and was generally roaring drunk.

Hundreds came to see this edifying spectacle, and the Newgate turnkeys reaped a rich harvest in fees paid by eager sightseers. Such an extraordinary rush impressed even the prisoner, who appears to have thought it very stupid. "Good folks," he exclaimed, "you pay for seeing me now, but if you had suspended your curiosity till I went to Tyburn, you might have seen me for nothing." The company he kept—and was by the lax regulations of the prison readily allowed to keep—in gaol was of the most depraved type. At any rate, these dissolute companions served to keep up his spirits to the very last, and followed him to Tyburn itself, where he ended in the same vein: "When he came to the place of Execution, he smiled upon, and made his Bows to all he knew. Instead of praying with the rest of the Criminals, he employ'd that time in Giggling, taking Snuff, and making Apish Motions to divert himself and the Mob. When Prayers were over, he told them the Sheriffs had made an order that no Surgeons should touch his Body. The Ordinary advised him to consider whither he was going, to which he answered that, being a Roman Catholic, he had receiv'd no Sacrament, and prepar'd for Death in his own Way; and then, giving himself some pretty and genteel Airs (as he seem'd to think 'em) in adjusting the Halter about his Neck, the Cart was drawn away."

So far from contrition and repentance being found in Newgate, the prison was generally, as we have seen, the riotous finish of an ill-spent life. The interest with which they were regarded effectually prevented the prisoners from realising themselves the miserable sinners they were officially declared to be from the chapel pulpit on Sundays. The times were practically pagan.

William Hawke, or Hawkes, one of several men at different times styled the "Flying Highwayman," was greatly honoured. He had been condemned in July 1774, on the paltry charge of stealing a small quantity of linen: quite beneath a person of his skill, and, like many another fine fellow, received very distinguished company as he lay in his dungeon cell. Rank and fashion, wit and beauty, enlivened his days and made them pass cheerfully enough. Among others who called upon him was the eccentric Colonel George Hanger, afterwards fourth Lord Coleraine, who offered him a handsome price for his horse, to which the high-minded Hawke warmly responded: "Sir, I am as much obliged to you for your proposal as for your visit. But," he added in a low tone, and in a wary manner that implied his increasing confidence, "the mare won't suit you, perhaps, if you want her for the Road. It is not every man that can get her up to a carriage."

Hanger was so exceedingly pleased with this little trait of professional sympathy that he advanced Hawke £50, to enable him to offer bribes for his escape; but all efforts in that direction failing, the highwayman later returned the money, with his grateful thanks. He was buried in Stepney churchyard, with the following epitaph: "Farewell, vain world, I've had enough of thee," over him, by his own desire; an ineffective post-mortem repartee upon the world, which had already so emphatically proved it had had enough of him.