The third great prison of old London, but which survived down to the middle of the last century, was the Marshalsea, which stood originally in the High Street, Southwark, and a house now numbered 119 was the site of the chapel. But it was removed by and by to other premises nearer the St. George’s church that stands at the corner of the High St. Borough. This prison derived its name from the Marshals of England to whom it appertained and whose jurisdiction extended over the King’s household. The royal servants were arraigned in the Marshal’s Court and committed when in fault to the Marshalsea prison. It also received debtors, arrested for even trifling sums, within a circuit of twelve miles from Westminster Palace, and was especially used for the confinement of persons awaiting trial. No exact record is preserved of its first erection. The earliest account is that of a riot by sailors in 1377. A man belonging to the fleet commanded by the Duke of Lancaster was slain by a gentleman imprisoned in the Marshalsea, whereupon the men-of-war’s men conceiving that the murderer was sheltered by great folk broke into the prison, took him and hanged him on a gallows near the gaol, and returned in triumph to their ships with trumpets sounding. The prison was again attacked four years later by the insurgents headed by Wat Tyler and at that time the marshal lost his life. On this occasion the marshal of the King’s Bench adjoining, Sir John Imworth, was seized and beheaded. Much importance attached to the prison in the reigns of Henry VIII, Mary and Elizabeth, when it was used for State purposes. Bishop Bonner, the last Roman Catholic bishop of London, was sent to it, when suspended by Queen Elizabeth. The story runs that he preserved a grim humour despite his misfortunes. When a man greeted him with the insulting address, “Good morrow Bishop Quondam,” the bishop promptly retorted, “Farewell, Knave Semper.” When on his way to the prison, some one called out, “The Lord confound thee, or else turn thy heart.” “The Lord send thee to keep thy breath to cool thy porridge,” was the defiant reply. Bonner died in the prison in 1569 after a confinement of ten years. Poets, pamphleteers and political satirists were often committed to the Marshalsea and among them George Wither, Christopher Brooke and many Puritan martyrs. After the Restoration, as John Evelyn tells us, Colonel Culpeper was sent there as the aggressor in an affray with “my lord of Devonshire,” when the latter stood very near His Majesty’s bed-chamber. Some hot words passed between them and Lord Devonshire gave Culpeper the lie. Upon which the colonel “struck him a box on the ear,” but the lord returned it and “felled him.” They were soon parted; Culpeper was seized and carried by the King’s order before the Board of Green Cloth where he got his deserts by being confined in the Marshalsea.

The Marshalsea did not escape reprehension for great abuses practised at the time when the brutal administration of the Fleet was called in question. We get a glimpse of it fifty years later in John Howard’s first report. He describes the prison as too small and greatly out of repair; “an old irregular building (rather several buildings) in a spacious yard. There are, in the whole, nearly sixty rooms; and yet only six of them now left for Common Side debtors. Of the other rooms, five are let to a man who is not a prisoner; in one of them he keeps a chandler’s shop; in two he lives with his family; the other two he lets to prisoners. Four rooms, the Oaks, are for women. They are too few for the number and the more modest women complain of the bad company in which they are confined. There are above forty rooms for men on the Master’s Side, in which are about sixty beds; yet many prisoners have no beds nor any place to sleep in but the chapel and the tap-room.”

This account tallies exactly with another later and more graphic from the hand of a great literary master, the same who has brought the Fleet prison so vividly before us. Charles Dickens knew the Marshalsea by heart for he had lived there with his father when the latter was detained there as a debtor. Dickens writes: “It was an oblong pile of barrack building, partitioned into squalid houses standing back to back, so that there were no back rooms; environed by a narrow paved yard, hemmed in by high walls duly spiked at top. Itself a close and confined prison for debtors, it contained within it a much closer and more confined jail for smugglers. Offenders against the revenue laws and defaulters to excise or customs, who had incurred fines which they were unable to pay, were supposed to be incarcerated behind an iron-plated door, closing up a second prison, consisting of a strong cell or two, and a blind alley some yard and a half wide, which formed the mysterious termination of the very limited skittle-ground in which the Marshalsea debtors bowled down their troubles.”

Here is another picture, the scene at the gate in the early morning when the prison is first opened: “There was a string of people already straggling in, whom it was not difficult to identify as the nondescript messengers, go-betweens and errand-bearers of the place. Some of them had been lounging in the rain until the gate should open; others, who had timed their arrival with greater nicety, were coming up now and passing in with damp whitey-brown paper bags from the grocers, loaves of bread, lumps of butter, eggs, milk and the like. The shabbiness of these attendants upon shabbiness, the poverty of these insolvent waiters upon insolvency, was a sight to see. Such threadbare coats and trousers, such fusty gowns and shawls, such squashed hats and bonnets, such boots and shoes, such umbrellas and walking sticks, never were seen in Rag Fair. All of them wore the cast-off clothes of other men and women; were made up of patches and pieces of other people’s individuality and had no sartorial existence of their own proper. Their walk was the walk of a race apart. They had a peculiar way of doggedly slinking round the corner as if they were eternally going to the pawnbroker’s. When they coughed, they coughed like people accustomed to be forgotten on door-steps and in draughty passages, waiting for answers to letters in faded ink, which gave the recipients of those manuscripts great mental disturbance and no satisfaction. As they eyed the stranger in passing, they eyed him with borrowing eyes—hungry, sharp, speculative as to his softness if they were accredited to him, and the likelihood of his standing something handsome. Mendacity on commission stooped in their high shoulders, shambled in their unsteady legs, buttoned and pinned and darned and dragged their clothes, frayed their button-holes, leaked out of their figures in dirty little ends of tape and issued from their mouths in alcoholic breathings.”

The Marshalsea escaped the Lord George Gordon rioters and it lived on, more and more eclipsed by its more ambitious neighbour and with uses more and more curtailed, especially when a new debtors’ prison, that of Whitecross Street, was planned in 1813. It was condemned and closed in 1842, when the prisoners remaining for any length of term were transferred to the King’s Bench. It was soon afterward pulled down and the last vestiges of it are preserved to us by Charles Dickens who visited it in 1856 in the course of demolition. He tells his friend John Forster of this visit:—“Went to the Borough yesterday morning before going to Gad’s Hill to see if I could find any ruins of the Marshalsea. Found a great part of the original building, now ‘Marshalsea Place.’ I found the rooms that had been in my mind’s eye in the story.... There is a room there still standing that I think of taking. It is the room through which the ever memorable signers of Captain Porter’s petition filed off in my boyhood. The spikes are gone and the wall is lowered; and anybody can go out now who likes to go and is not bed-ridden.”

CHAPTER VI
ENGLISH PRISONS OF WAR

Earliest mention by John Howard in 1756 when taken by a French privateer and lodged in the castle of Brest—Twenty-five years later again visits the French War Prisons and animadverts upon what he saw—Extends his inspection to British war prisons—Old war-ships or “hulks” brought into use in England—Many objections—Large prison establishments erected inland—Norman Cross in Huntingdonshire which accommodated five thousand—Another large prison designed in 1806 on Dartmoor—Opened in 1808—Occupied by members of many nationalities and of all classes—The lowest and most degraded, the “Romans,” akin to the “rafalés” of the hulks—Daily life at Dartmoor—Incurable passion for gambling—Curious games of chance—Duelling—Criminal pursuits not unknown—Coiners and forgers—Arrival of American war prisoners.

THE first extensive use of places for the detention of prisoners of war appears to have been in the middle of the eighteenth century, when Europe was continually harassed by conflicts among the nations and when decimation by a general massacre of captives taken under the fortune of war was no longer permissible. Of the treatment accorded to these prisoners, the earliest authentic record is to be found under John Howard’s hand. In 1756 the great philanthropist took passage in a Lisbon packet bent upon making a tour of Portugal, but his ship was captured en route by a French privateer and he was carried with his companions into Brest and subjected to extreme hardship and privation before he reached that port. He was entirely deprived of food and drink; for forty hours not one drop of water passed his lips and hardly a morsel of food. “In the castle at Brest,” he tells us, “I lay six nights upon straw, and observing how cruelly my countrymen were used there, and at Morlaix, whither I was carried next; during the two months I was at Carhaix upon parole, I corresponded with the English prisoners at Brest, Morlaix and Dinnan: at the last of those towns were several of our ship’s crew and my servant. I had sufficient evidence of their being treated with such barbarity that many hundreds had perished and that thirty-six were buried in a hole at Dinnan in one day. When I came to England, still on parole, I made known to the commissioners of sick and wounded seamen the sundry particulars, which gained their attention and thanks. Remonstrance was made to the French court; our sailors had redress, and those that were in the three prisons mentioned above were brought home in the first cartel ships. A lady from Ireland, who married in France, had bequeathed in trust with the magistrates of St. Malo, sundry charities; one of which was a penny a day to every English prisoner of war in Dinnan. This was duly paid; and saved the lives of many brave and useful men. Perhaps what I suffered on this occasion, increased my sympathy with the unhappy people whose case is the subject of this book.”

Five and twenty years later when Howard was extending his visitation through the Continent he found many more English prisoners of war in French gaols. In Dunkirk 133 prisoners were confined in five rooms; captains, mates, passengers and common sailors, all crowded together, lying on straw with one coverlet to every three persons. In three other rooms there were thirteen accommodated in a better manner, because they were “ransomers” or persons held as security for a captured ship which was to be ransomed at a certain sum. These prisoners exercised in a very small courtyard and they were kept very short of water, but fairly well fed,—“The bread, beer and soup were good and the beef tolerable;” the prison was well governed under rules made by the King of France, which prescribed certain pains and penalties and accorded certain privileges. If any one attempted escape and was retaken he was “stinted to half his pittance of food” until he had repaid the expenses caused by his pursuit and recapture. If the place was damaged, the expense of repairs was paid out of the food of those found guilty of the infringement. The prisoners were at liberty to appoint a committee of three or five of themselves to supervise the issue of food and, if they thought necessary, complain of its quality.

In the common prison at Calais, Howard found great overcrowding and many of the prisoners here and elsewhere had no change of linen, and some were almost entirely destitute of clothes. Howard contrasted the treatment of French prisoners in England with the foregoing and generally in favour of the English. In the Mill prison near Plymouth, however, there was great overcrowding and very inferior food, but this was reformed in the newer edifice erected. The number detained here rose at one time to a very high figure, 10,352, comprising four different nationalities, American, French, Spanish and Dutch, the French predominating in the proportion of two thirds. A new prison had been erected at Bristol, built on rising ground three miles from the city. Although new the building was imperfect; there were no chimneys and the wards were dirty, never being washed. Over a thousand Frenchmen were in the Winchester prison, who lay all day indolently in their hammocks and were provided with no work. Several prisoners were confined in the dark hole, sentenced to it for forty days, on half allowance, to meet the sum expended in payment for their recapture after escape, on the same principle as that which obtained in France.