The Fleet was arbitrarily used by Sir Richard Empson in the reign of Henry VII, when that overbearing law officer was indicted for committing to it, without process, persons accused of murder and high crimes. Cardinal Wolsey was charged with a like invasion of the liberty of the subject, “by his power and might contrary to right,” in the case of a Sir John Stanley who had taken possession of a farm illegally. This man would not yield but preferred to turn monk in Westminster monastery, where he died.
Other prisoners were committed to the Fleet for political misdemeanours and severely dealt with by the ruling powers. It was an offence to marry the sister of Lady Jane Grey and for this imprisonment was adjudged to Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. Dr. Donne, who married Sir George More’s daughter without his knowledge, was laid by the heels; the penalty of durance overtook Sir Robert Killigrew for entering into conversation with Sir Thomas Overbury, when returning from a visit to Sir Walter Raleigh, then a prisoner in the Tower. James I, when overmuch importuned by the Countess of Dorset, who broke into the Privy Council Chamber, sent her to the Fleet, and Lucius Carey, Lord Falkland, was imprisoned for sending a challenge.
Many painful memories hang about the old Fleet prison in connection with the religious and political persecutions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was crowded with the martyrs to intolerance in the reign of the bigoted Queen Mary and the victims Elizabeth sacrificed in the way of reprisals when she came to the throne. The Protestant party had been in the ascendant under Edward VI and the old religion had been sharply attacked, so that many eminent Catholic bishops burned at the stake,—Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and the pious Hooper, whose chief offence was that being a priest, he had married a wife. He was now Bishop of Worcester but he had been in the Fleet before, imprisoned by his own friends for refusing to wear vestments on the occasion of his consecration. He was soon set free but came again to the Fleet on his way to the stake.
His own account of this second confinement is to be found in Fox’s Book of Martyrs. “On the first of September, 1553, I was committed unto the Fleet from Richmond, to have the liberty of the prison, and within five days after I had paid for my liberty five pounds sterling to the warden for fees, who immediately upon the payment thereof complained unto Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and so I was committed to close prison one quarter of a year in the lower chamber of the Fleet and used very extremely. Then by the means of a good gentleman, I had liberty to come down to dinner and supper; not suffered to speak to any of my friends, but as soon as dinner and supper were done to repair to my chamber again. Notwithstanding ... the warden and his wife picked quarrels with me and complained untruly of me to their great friend the Bishop of Winchester.
“After one quarter of a year and somewhat more, Babington, the warden, and his wife fell out with me for the wicked mass; and thereupon the warden resorted to the bishop and obtained to put me in the ward, where I have continued a long time, having nothing appointed to me for my bed but a little pad of straw and a rotten covering with a tick and a few feathers to lie on, the chamber being vile and stinking, until by God’s means good people sent me bedding. On one side of the prison is the stink and filth of the house and on the other side the town ditch (the Fleet ditch) so that the evil smells have affected me with sundry diseases. During which time I have been sick and the doors, bars, hasps and chains being all closed and made fast upon me, I have mourned, called and cried for help, but the warden when he hath known me many times ready to die, and when the poor men of the ward have called to help me, hath commanded the doors to be kept fast and charged that none of his men should come at me saying, ‘Let him alone, it were a good riddance of him.’ ”
Yet the sums extorted from the poor bishop were as high as for a peer of the realm. A lord, spiritual or temporal, paid the sum of five pounds as “fyne” for liberty of the house and irons on first coming in. It was a graduated scale, each item according to rank ranging from ten pounds for an archbishop, duke or duchess, to twenty-five shillings for an esquire. The rates were proportionate and laid upon everything: fees for dismission, for entering the obligation and to everyone concerned in the administration, porter, “jayler,” chamberlain, charge for commons or board and for “coyne.” When these fees were not promptly paid the wretched prisoner was “left to lye in the common prison without ‘bedd’ or ‘dyete,’ subject to the discomfort of low companions and the dangers of distemper.”
Bishop Hooper sums up his griefs thus: “I have suffered imprisonment almost eighteen months. My goods, living, friends and comfort taken from me; the Queen [Mary] owing me by first account eighty pounds or more, she hath put me in prison and giveth nothing to find me; neither is there any suffered to come at me whereby I might have relief. I am with a wicked man and woman [the warden and his wife] so that I see no remedy (save God’s help) but I shall be cast away in prison before I come to judgment. But I commit my just cause to God whose will be done whether it be life or death.” It was death, and as he esteemed it, a glorious death, that of being burnt at the stake after some more months in confinement, during which he was frequently examined and called upon to recant. He was sent down for execution to Gloucester, of which diocese he had been bishop before his translation to Worcester. He was burned alive at a slow fire and suffered exceeding torment, but bore it with the splendid endurance vouchsafed to so many victims to savage laws that counted difference in religious belief an abominable crime.
We have an authentic account of the interior of the prison early in the seventeenth century, in the volume published by the Camden Society, entitled the “Æconomy of the Fleete” by Alexander Harris, at one time warden there. Charges were brought against him by a number of his prisoners, of oppression and ill-usage and he is at great pains to make his defence. The prison, as he describes it, was no doubt identically the same as that of earlier date. It consisted of “six great rooms and a courtyard with Tower chambers and Bolton’s ward,” the strongest part of the prison. There was a further sub-division. One ward of the Tower chambers was appropriated to females exclusively; another was called the “Twopenny” ward from the price charged; a third the “Beggars’ ” ward in which nothing was demanded and nothing given. At a lower level was the Dungeon, a receptacle for refractory prisoners where they were kept in irons and confined in the stocks.
The inmates one and all were entirely at the mercy of the warden, who inherited his office, or purchased it, and looked to recoup himself by the fees he extorted from his prisoners. The place was a sort of sorry hotel kept by a brutal and rapacious landlord, as a life tenant, with a keen eye to profit, and who gave his lodgers nothing, exacting payment often exorbitant for even light and air and the barest necessaries. The English law was so neglectful and inhuman that it made no regular provision for the imprisoned debtor. A fiction existed that the creditor was bound to contribute four pence daily to provide him with food, but, as has been said, as late as 1843 this payment of the “groat” was not punctually made, if at all, and could only be enforced by slow process of law at a cost prohibitory to the penniless prisoner, and he was thrown on his own resources, to starve if without friends or private means, or in the extreme case to drag out a miserable existence from the doles of the charitable. Great numbers of hapless folk in the passing ages were detained for five and twenty, thirty and even forty years, on account of debts of a few pounds, grown out of a first pitifully small sum and largely increased by arbitrary charges for fees and maintenance, which but for unjust arrest and detention would never have existed. Thousands died of hope deferred or slow starvation and with them suffered those naturally dependent upon them. It was a calculation well within the mark that every debtor was saddled with two dependents for whom he was the stay and breadwinner. Some figures are given by John Howard when, later, he began his self-sacrificing philanthropic labours, and may be quoted here to show how numerous were the innocent victims of the iniquitous and remorseless legal system in force:
“I have found,” he writes in 1777,[2] “by carefully examining sundry gaols, that upon an average two dependents (by which I mean wives and children only) may be assigned to each man (debtor) in prison. My computation is confirmed by the account which we have from the Benevolent Society at the Thatched House, October 9th, 1777. Since its institution in 1772 there were yearly about 3,980 discharged debtors who had 2,193 wives and 6,288 children.” From this he reasoned that as there was a total of debtors in England and Wales of 4,084, the dependents would be twice that number.