Atrocities continued to be perpetrated in the Fleet after the Restoration and the inmates endured grievous ill-treatment. Some of these were set forth in the reign of William III in a quaint book printed and published in 1691 by one Moses Pitt, entitled, “The Cry of the Oppressed,” being a true and tragical account of the unparalleled sufferings of multitudes of poor imprisoned debtors in most of the gaols of England under the tyranny of the gaolers and other oppressors. A chief item was the relation of “some of the barbarities of Richard Manlove, Esq., the present warden of the Fleet, who has lately been found guilty of oppression and extortion by a jury of twelve men.”
The said warden “locked up till opened by the worthy Mr. Justice Lutwyche three score gentlemen and others for non-payment of exclusive chamber rent, where was a noisome House of Office near their lodgings, not allowing the king’s beds, but forcing them to procure beds or lie on the ground: and keeping men dead amongst them for pretended dues till they infected others.”
“Again Richard Brocas, Esq., was carried down thither for not paying excessive chamber-rent and his wife and servants denied to bring him victuals or physic; and when he died the jury summoned, could not but find his death occasioned by cruelty and they were dismissed by contrivance with the coroner; and when he was buried, a new jury summoned, he taken up again and an inquisition returned contrary to law; and Sir John Pettus of Suffolk, baronet, for not paying extorting dues, was forced into a little room (now the warden’s coachman’s lodgings) who being a learned studious person for want of those necessaries, he melancholy died and was kept many days above ground; his friends being denied his body till they paid the warden’s pretended dues.”
“Sir William Ducy, Baronet, was kept by the warden in his coach house till he was drawn out with ropes, being so offensive, that none could come near him. Symon Edolph, Esq., seventy-eight years of age, the son of Sir Thomas Edolph of Kent, for not paying forty two pounds demanded of him, when he profered thirty pounds, which was for a little room about twelve foot square, after the rate of six shillings per week, besides payment of the chamberlain, was dragged down to the wards in the hard weather and there not allowed a bed but must have lain on the ground had he not (at his own charge) procured one.” “Walter Cowdrey, gaoler of Winchester, for about two or three months’ chamber rent, was kept above ground till it caused a sickness in the next room, and his friends denied to take his body without paying extorting fees. By which may be perceived the inhumanity of this gaoler, not only to gentlemen but one of his own trade and calling. Sir George Putsay, sergeant at law, dying of dropsie; and being a very great fat man, was kept (for extorting fees) till a judge’s warrant was procured for his delivery. Moses Pitt of London, bookseller, being committed prisoner to the Fleet, April the 20th 1689, lodged on the gentleman’s side in a chamber which the warden values at eight shillings per week, though of right it’s but two shillings and fourpence, the rest being exaction (and the said Moses Pitt at the time of writing of this has two chambers within the rules of the Kings-Bench for one shilling three pence per week, twice as good as the said chamber), he the said Pitt continued in the said chamber from the said 20th of April 1689 to the 26th of August 1690 which was seventy weeks and three days, in which time the said Pitt had paid the warden his commitment fee, two pounds four shillings and sixpence, where as there is but fourpence due: Pitt also paid him fourteen shillings for two day-writs, and was to pay him eight shillings and fourpence at the going out of the gate, (every prisoner there in execution pays eleven shillings and twopence a day when he goes abroad about his business) but the said warden kept his said fourteen shillings and would not let him go out of the gates of the prison by which the said Pitt lost his tryals, which was many thousand pounds damage to him.” This Moses Pitt was once a rich man and his printing works were established in a large house called “the theatre” in Westminster, which he rented from Dr. Fell, Bishop of Oxford, and where in the reign of Charles II he brought out an atlas in twelve folio volumes and a great quantity of Bibles, Testaments and prayer books reducing their price by more than half which he claimed, “did at that time great good, Popery being likely to overwhelm us.” Mr. Pitt embarked upon extensive building speculations in Westminster and erected a great house in Duke Street which he let to the noted Judge Jeffreys, but failed to secure a clear title to the property. Then his creditors came down upon him and he became involved in a mesh of borrowings and their attendant lawsuits which landed him at length in the Fleet prison. His hardships led him to prepare his book denouncing the evils of imprisonment for debt; and to obtain facts he addressed a circular to sixty-five provincial prisons. The result was a “small book as full of tragedies as pages; which were not enacted in foreign nations among Turks and infidels, Papists and Idolaters, but in this country by our own countrymen”—such tragedies as no age or country can parallel.
He tells the story of a Liverpool surgeon who was so reduced by poverty, neglect and hunger that he lived on the mice caught by his cat. When he sought redress he was beaten and put in irons. A debtor in Lincoln who sought restitution of a purse taken from him was “treated to a ride on the jailer’s coach;” in other words placed upon a hurdle and dragged about the prison yard with his head on the stones whereby he “became not altogether so well in his intellects as formerly.” One unfortunate wretch who dared to send out of the prison for food had the thumbscrews put on him and was chained by the neck on tip-toe against a wall. The frontispiece of this old book gives a quaint representation of the interior of the Fleet prison.
These complaints led to the appointment of a committee of the House of Commons in 1696 and a report of many great irregularities, chief among them that the warden will let the prison for the sum of £1,500 to a sub-tenant on the understanding that there would be some two thousand prisoners always in custody who would pay fees to the value of twice the rent. A second report, presumably from the same committee, disclosed a widespread system of discharges not by regular legal process but on the payment of bribes and it was unanimously agreed that the management of the Fleet was “very prejudicial to personal credit and a great grievance to the whole kingdom.”
No remedy was applied to these glaring evils, which, on the contrary, constantly increased until they culminated in the horrible scandals laid bare by the Parliamentary Committee appointed in 1727 to inquire into the conduct of the then deputy warden, the infamous Bambridge, who leased the governorship from the real warden, the no less notorious Huggins. The most shameful malpractices had been rife since the abolition of the Star Chamber which had reserved the place entirely for debtors and prisoners for contempt of the Courts of Chancery, Exchequer and Common Pleas. It seemed that whereas the fees ought to have ceased when the prison was limited in its uses, the warden had wielded an unwarrantable and arbitrary power in extorting them at more exorbitant rates, enforcing payment by loading the prisoners with irons “worse than if the Star Chamber was still existing.”
The course pursued in every case where the incoming prisoner possessed means, was much the same. On arrest he was first conveyed to a Sponging House, one of three attached to the Fleet, beyond the walls, all belonging to the warden and kept by one or other of his tipstaffs. Here the charges were so ruinous that the debtors aghast begged to be taken at once to the Fleet itself, where at least prices were regulated by rules. Transfer was refused until a heavy fee had been exacted and while the prisoner still demurred his bill in the Sponging House steadily grew in total. When at last he was removed into the Fleet he had been bled freely, in fees alone to the amount of some fifty odd pounds. Here fresh exactions were imposed and the debtor, refusing to submit to insatiable demands, was sent back to the Sponging House, where a virulent small-pox was raging at the time. The prisoner, unvaccinated in those days, and in terror of his life, implored the ruthless warden to again remove him but could obtain no mercy and presently, taking the fell disease, died of it, leaving his affairs in hopeless confusion and a wife with a family of young children to starve. This was the true story of Mr. Robert Castell, a gentleman and a scholar, by profession an architect, whose original liabilities had been small and whose ruin and death were to be laid at Bambridge’s door.
Another story of like complexion was that of the Portuguese Jacob Mendez Solas, animadverted upon by the Parliamentary committee. This hapless foreigner enlodging in the Fleet was one day called into the Gate House or lodge, where he was seized, fettered and removed to Corbett’s Sponging House, whence after weeks of detention he was carried back into the prison. Extortion had been the object of this procedure and as the Portuguese still resisted, his life was made intolerable to him. He was turned now into a dungeon, known as the “strong room of the Master’s Side,” which is thus described in the Committee’s report:—
“The place is a vault, like those in which the dead are interred, and wherein the bodies of persons dying in the said prison are usually deposited, till the coroner’s inquest hath passed upon them. It has no chimney nor fireplace, nor any light but what comes over the door, or through a hole of about eight inches square. It is neither paved nor boarded; and the rough bricks appear both on the sides and top, being neither wainscoted nor plastered. What adds to the dampness and stench of the place is its being built over the common shore and adjoining to the sink and dunghill, where all the nastiness of the prison is cast. In this miserable place the poor wretch was kept by the said Bambridge, manacled and shackled, for near two months. At length, on receiving five guineas from Mr. Kemp, a friend of Solas’s, Bambridge released the prisoner from his cruel confinement. But though his chains were taken off, his terror still remained, and the unhappy man was prevailed upon by that terror not only to labour gratis for the said Bambridge, but to swear also at random all that he hath required of him. And this committee themselves saw an instance of the deep impression his sufferings had made upon him; for, on his surmising, from something said, that Bambridge was to return again as warden of the Fleet, he fainted and the blood started out of his mouth and nose.”