[73:1] Chief of the Jesuits in England, afterwards executed (1608).
[83:1] A homily against play-acting and masquerades.
CHAPTER IV
NEWGATE AFTER THE GREAT FIRE
Newgate refronted in 1638—Destroyed in great fire of 1666—Suicides frequent—The gaoler Fells indicted for permitting escapes—Crimes of the period—Clipping and coining greatly increased—Enormous profits of the fraud—Coining within the gaol itself deemed high treason—Heavy penalties—Highway robbery very prevalent—Instances—Officers and paymasters with the king's gold robbed—Stage-coaches stopped—Whitney—His capture, and attempts to escape—His execution—Efforts to check highway robbery—A few types of notorious highwaymen—"Mulled Sack"—Claude Duval—Nevison—Abduction of heiresses—Mrs. Synderfin—Miss Rawlins—Miss Wharton—Count Konigsmark—The "German Princess"—Other criminal names—Titus Oates—Dangerfield—The Fifth Monarchy men—William Penn—The two bishops, Ellis and Leyburn.
Newgate was refronted and refaced in 1638, but no further change or improvement was made in the building until a total reëdification became inevitable, after the great fire in 1666.
It is difficult to exaggerate the horrors of Newgate, the mismanagement, tyranny, and lax discipline which prevailed at that time. Its unsanitary condition was chronic, which at times, but only for influential inmates, was pleaded as an excuse for
release. Luttrell tells us Lord Montgomery, a prisoner there in 1697, was brought out of Newgate to the King's Bench Court, there to be bailed, upon two affidavits, which showed that there was an infectious fever in Newgate, of which several were sick and some dead. He was accordingly admitted to bail himself in £10,000, and four sureties—the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Yarmouth, Lord Carrington, and Lord Jeffereys—in £5,000 each. An effort to secure release was made less successfully some years later in regard to Jacobite prisoners of note, although the grounds alleged were the same and equally valid. Some effort was made to classify the prisoners: there was the master's side, for debtors and felons respectively; the common side, for the same two classes; and the press-yard, for prisoners of note.
If a prisoner was hopelessly despondent, he could generally compass the means of committing suicide. A Mr. Norton, natural son of Sir George Norton, condemned for killing a dancing-master, because the latter would not suffer him to take his wife away from him in the street, poisoned himself the night before his reprieve expired. The drug was conveyed to him by his aunt without difficulty, "who participated in the same dose, but she is likely to recover." Nor were prisoners driven to this last desperate extremity to escape from durance. Pepys tells us in 1667, August 1, that the gates of the city were shut, "and at Newgate we find them