Chapter XV: Lady Lufton’s Ambassador (4)

[4] The damages and costs must have amounted to a round sum; but it is to me marvellous that in those days of legal chicanery the action should have been so brief, and so conclusively decided. Those were the days when, if you owed any one forty shillings, you were served with writs charging you with having committed a certain trespass, to wit at Brentford, being in the company of Job Doe (not always _John_ Doe); with “that having no settled abode, you had been lurking and wandering about as a vagabond;” with that (this was in the Exchequer) “out of deep hatred and malice to the body politic, you had kept our sovereign lord the king from being seised of a certain sum, to wit, two millions of money, for which it was desirable to escheat the sum of forty shillings towards the use of our sovereign and suffering lord aforesaid.” In the declaration, it was set forth, that you had gone with sticks and staves, and assaulted and wounded divers people; and the damages were laid at 10,000_l._, of which the plaintiff was reasonable enough to claim only the moderate sum of forty shillings. The capias took you at once for any sum exceeding 2_l._, and you had to find and justify bail, if you did not wish to pine in a spunging-house, or rot in the Fleet. These were the days, not quite five thousand, and some of them not quite one hundred and fifty years ago, when criminal indictments were drawn in Latin, and Norman-French was an important part of legal education (see Pope and Swift’s _Miscellanies_, “Stradling _versus_ Styles”), and prisoners were brought up on habeas laden with chains. See Layer’s case in the _State Trials_, Lord Campbell’s agreeable condensation in the _Lives of the Chief Justices_. Layer was a barrister, a man of birth and education, but was implicated in an abortive Jacobite plot. His chains were of such dreadful weight, that he could sleep only on his back. He was suffering from an internal complaint, and pathetically appealed to Pratt, C.J., who was suffering from a similar ailment, to order his irons to be taken off, were it only on the ground of common sympathy. The gentleman gaoler of the Tower, who stood by him on the floor of the court while he made this application, was humanely employed in holding up the captive’s fetters to ease him, partially, of his dreadful burden. Prisoner’s counsel urged that the indignity of chains was unknown to his “majesty’s prisoners in the Tower;” that the gentleman gaoler and the warders did not know how to set about the hangman’s office of shackling captives; that there were no fetters in the Tower beyond the “Scavenger’s Daughter,” and the Spanish Armada relics, and that they had been obliged to procure fetters from Newgate. But Pratt, C.J., was inexorable. He was a stanch Whig; and, so civilly, but sternly remanded the prisoner, all ironed as he was, to the Tower. Christopher Layer was soon afterwards put out of his misery by being hanged, drawn, and quartered; but he was much loved by the people, and his head had not been long on Temple Bar when it was carried off as a relic. It is almost impossible to realize this cool, civil, legal savagery, in the era so closely following Anna Augusta’s silver age. Sir Walter Scott was in evidently an analogous bewilderment of horror when he described the execution of Feargus McIvor: a fiction certainly, but with its dreadful parallels of reality in the doom of Colonel Townely, Jemmy Dawson, Dr. Cameron, and scores more unfortunate and misguided gentlemen who suffered the horrible sentence of the law of high treason at Carlisle, at Tyburn, or on Kennington Common.

[5] Hogarth painted a beautiful separate portrait of her—a loving, trustful face, and _such_ lips—which has been engraved in mezzotint. I should properly have added it to my catalogue of the Hogarthian Beauties.

[6] A similar doubt—was it not by Lord Ellenborough?—has been expressed within our own times.

[7] These horrors were not confined to the Fleet. The King’s Bench and the Marshalsea were nearly as bad: and, in the former prison, gangs of drunken soldiers—what could the officers have been about?—were frequently introduced to coerce the unhappy inmates. The Bench and Marshalsea were excellent properties. The patent rights were purchased from the Earl of Radnor for 5,000_l._, and there were some sixteen shareholders in the profits accruing from the gaol. Of the Marshalsea, evidence is given of the turnkeys holding a drinking bout in the lodge, and calling in a poor prisoner to “divert” them. On this miserable wretch they put an iron skull-cap and a pair of thumbscrews, and so tortured him for upwards of half-an-hour. Then, somewhat frightened, they gave him his discharge, as a _douceur_; but the miserable man fainted in the Borough High Street, and being carried into St. Thomas’s Hospital, presently died there.

[8] Did the poet Thomson, the kind-hearted, tender, pure-minded man, belong to the “mobbish confederation?” Hear him in the _Seasons_, in compliment to the commissioners for inquiring into the state of the gaols:—

“Where sickness pines, where thirst and hunger burn,
Ye sons of mercy, yet resume the search;
_Drag forth the legal monsters into light_!
Wrench from their hands oppression’s iron rod,
And make the cruel feel the pains they give.”

It is slightly consolatory to be told by antiquary Oldys, that Bambridge cut his throat in 1749; but the ruffian should properly have swung as high as Haman.

[9] “If a prisoner die through duresse of the gaoler, it is _murder in the gaoler_.”—St. German’s _Doctor and Student_. Why was this not quoted at Birmingham?

[10] Rev. James Dallaway, whose notes to Walpole’s _Anecdotes_ are very excellent. Mr. Wornum, the last editor of Walpole, annotated by Dallaway, puzzles me. He must be an accomplished art-scholar: is he not the Wornum of the Marlborough House School? but he calls Swift’s Legion Club the “Congenial Club,” utterly ignoring Swift’s ferocious text, an excerpt from which he quotes.

[11] The clumsy police of the time seem to have entirely ignored the existence of unchaste women till they became riotous, were mixed up in tavern brawls, had given offence to the rich rakes, or, especially, were discovered to be the mistresses of thieves and highwaymen. Then they were suddenly caught up, taken before a justice, and committed to Bridewell—either the _ergastolo_ in Bridge Street, or the _presidio_ in Tothill Fields—I take the former. Arrived there, they were kept till noon on board-day, Wednesday. Then they were arraigned before the honourable Board of Governors; the president with his hammer in his high-backed chair. The wretched Kate stands among the beadles clad in blue, at the lower end of the room, which is divided into two by folding doors. Then, the accusation being stated, the president cries, “How say you, gentlemen, shall Katherine Hackabout receive present punishment?” The suffrages are collected; they are generally against Kate, who is forthwith seized by the beadles, half unrobed, and receives the “civility of the house,” _i.e._ the correction of stripes, which torture is continued (the junior beadle wielding the lash) till the president strikes his hammer on the table as a signal for execution to stop. “Knock! Sir Robert; oh, good Sir Robert, knock!” was a frequent entreaty of the women under punishment; and “Knock, knock!” was shouted after them in derision by the boys in the street, to intimate that they had been scourged in Bridewell. Being sufficiently whealed, Kate was handed over to the taskmaster, to be set to beat hemp, and to be herself caned, or scourged, or fettered with a log, like a stray donkey, according to his fancy and the interests of the hemp manufacture. Many women went through these ordeals dozens of times. “It’s not the way to reform ’em,” observes Ned Ward; and for once, I think, the satirical publican, who travelled in “ape and monkey climes,” is right—Vide Smollett: _Roderick Random_; Cunningham: _Handbook of London_; and, _Bridewell Hospital Reports_, 1720-1799.

Written in the Deepdene Album.

Thou record of the votive throng,
That fondly seek this fairy shrine,
And pay the tribute of a song
Where worth and loveliness combine,—

What boots that I, a vagrant wight
From clime to clime still wandering on,
Upon thy friendly page should write
——Who’ll think of me when I am gone?

Go plow the wave, and sow the sand;
Throw seed to every wind that blows;
Along the highway strew thy hand,
And fatten on the crop that grows.

For even thus the man that roams
On heedless hearts his feeling spends;
Strange tenant of a thousand homes,
And friendless, with ten thousand friends!

Yet here, for once, I’ll leave a trace,
To ask in aftertimes a thought;
To say that here a resting-place
My wayworn heart has fondly sought.

So the poor pilgrim heedless strays,
Unmoved, through many a region fair;
But at some shrine his tribute pays,
To tell that he has worshipped there.

WASHINGTON IRVING.

_June 24th, 1822._

Lovel the Widower.