With occasional, but not always sufficient, repairs, but without structural alterations, Whittington’s Newgate continued to serve down to the seventeenth century. About 1629 it was in a state of utter ruin, and such extensive works were undertaken to re-edify it that the security of the gaol was said to be endangered, and it was thought better to pardon most of the prisoners before they set themselves free. Lupton, in his ‘London Carbonadoed,’ speaks of Newgate as “new-fronted and new-faced” in 1638. Its accommodations must have been sorely tried in the troublous years which followed. It seems to have been in the time of the Commonwealth when “our churches were made into prisons,” and demands for space had greatly multiplied, that Newgate was increased by the addition of the buildings belonging to the Phœnix Inn in Newgate Street. The great fire of 1666 gutted, if not completely destroyed, Newgate, and its reconstruction became imperative. Some say Wren was the architect of the new prison, but the fact is not fully substantiated. Authentic and detailed information has, however, been preserved concerning it; it is figured in a familiar woodcut which may be seen in every modern history of London, while a full description of the interior, both plan and appropriation, has been left by an anonymous writer, who was himself an inmate of the gaol[2]. The prison was still subordinated to the gate, which was an ornate structure, with great architectural pretensions. But as a writer in the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ well put it about a century ago, “The sumptuousness of the outside but aggravated the misery of the wretches within.” Some effort was made to classify, and the Newgate of that day contained five principal divisions or sides: there was the master’s side, for debtors and felons respectively; the common side, for those same two classes of prisoners; and lastly the press yard, for prisoners of note. The right to occupy the master’s side was a luxury dearly purchased, but the accommodation obtained, albeit indifferent, was palatial to that provided for the impecunious on the common side. The only inmates of the Newgate prison I am now describing who were comparatively well off, were those admitted to the press yard; a division composed of “large and spacious rooms” on all the three floors of the prison, and deemed by a legal fiction to be part of the governor’s house.
How desperate was the case of the bulk of the inmates of Newgate will be amply set forth as my narrative proceeds. A few brief facts will suffice here to give a general idea of this foul prison house. The whole place except the press yard was so dark that candles, “links or burners,” were used all day long; the air was so inconceivably disgusting, that the ventilator on the top of the prison could exercise no remedial effect. That malignant disease, the gaol fever, was chronic, and deaths from it of frequent occurrence. Doctors could be got with difficulty to attend the sick in Newgate, and it was long before any regular medical officer was appointed to the prison. Evil was in the ascendant throughout; wickedness and profligacy prospered; the weakest always went to the wall. Tyranny and oppression were widely practised: not only were the gaolers extortionate, but their subordinates, the inferior turnkeys, even the bed-makers, and the gate-keeper’s wife levied black mail on the pretence of affording relief, and with threats or actual ill-usage when payment was withheld. Certain favoured prisoners wielded recognized authority over their fellows. Unwritten but accepted customs suffered the general body to exact “garnish,” or “chummage,” from new comers, fees for the privilege of approaching the fire, and generally for immunity from persecution, the sums thus raised being forthwith expended in strong drink. The “cellarmen” were selected prisoners who could sell candles at their own prices, and got a percentage upon the liquors consumed, with other advantages. Other prisoners were employed in the distribution of food; in the riveting and removing of shackles; even in the maintenance of discipline, and when so acting were armed with a flexible weapon, “to the great terror and smart of those who dispute their authority.” Into these filthy dens, where misery stalked rampant and corruption festered, unhappy prisoners brought their families, and the population was greatly increased by numbers of innocent persons, women, and even children, to be speedily demoralized and utterly lost. Lunatics raving mad ranged up and down the wards, a terror to all they encountered. Common women were freely admitted; mock marriages were of constant occurrence, and children were frequently born within the precincts of the gaol. There was but little restriction upon the entrance of visitors. When any great personage was confined in Newgate, he held daily levees and received numbers of fashionable folk. Thus Count Konigsmark, when arrested for complicity in the murder of Mr. Thynne, “lived nobly” in the keeper’s house, and was daily visited by persons of quality. When political prisoners, Jacobite rebels, or others were incarcerated, their sympathizers and supporters came to “comfort them” by sharing their potations. Even a notorious highwayman like Maclane, according to Horace Walpole, entertained great guests, and it was the “mode” for half the world to drive to Newgate and gaze on him in the “condemned hold.”
In sharp contrast with the privations and terrible discomforts of the poorer sort was the wild revelry of these aristocratic prisoners of the press yard. They had every luxury to be bought with money, freedom alone excepted, and that was often to be compassed by bribing dishonest officials to suffer them to escape. They kept late hours, collecting in one another’s rooms to roar out seditious songs over innumerable bowls of punch. At times they exhibited much turbulence, and refused to be locked up in the separate chambers allotted to them. No attempt was made to coerce them, or oblige them to observe due decorum and submit to the discipline of the prison. Yet while they thus experienced ill-placed and unjust leniency, others far less culpable were ground down till they were “slowly murdered there by the intolerable horrors of the place.”
As a general rule the movement of offenders through Newgate was pretty rapid. The period of imprisonment for debtors might be often indefinitely prolonged, and there was the well-known case of Major Bernardi and his companions, who were detained for forty years in Newgate without trial or the chance of it. Some, too, languished awaiting transfer to the West Indian or American plantations by the contractors to whom they were legally sold. But for the bulk of the criminal prisoners there was one speedy and effectual system of removal, that of capital punishment. Executions were wholesale in those times. The code was sanguinary in the extreme. The gallows tree was always heavily laden. There was every element of callous brutality in the manner of inflicting the extreme penalty of the law. From the time of sentence to the last dread moment the convict was exhibited as a show, or held up to public contempt and execration. Heartless creatures flocked to the gaol chapel to curiously examine the aspect of condemned malefactors. Men who had but a short time to live mingled freely with their fellow-prisoners, recklessly carousing, and often making a boast that they laughed to scorn and rejected the well-meant ministrations of the ordinary.
The actual ceremony was to the last degree cold-blooded and wanting in all the solemn attributes fitting the awful scene. The doomed was carried in an open cart to Tyburn or other appointed place; the halter already encircled his neck, his coffin was at his feet, by his side the chaplain or some devoted amateur philanthropist and preacher striving earnestly to improve the occasion. For the mob it was a high day and holiday; they lined the route taken by the ghastly procession, encouraging or flouting the convict according as he happened to be a popular hero or unknown to criminal fame. In the first case they cheered him to the echo, offered him bouquets of flowers, or pressed him to drink deep from St. Giles’s Bowl; in the latter they pelted him with filth and overwhelmed him with abuse. The most scandalous scenes occurred on the gallows. The hangman often quarrelled with his victim over the garments, which the former looked upon as a lawful perquisite, and which the latter was disposed to distribute among his friends; now and again the rope broke, or the drop was insufficient, and Jack Ketch had to add his weight to the hanging body to assist strangulation. Occasionally there was a personal conflict, and the hangman was obliged to do his office by sheer force. The convicts were permitted to make dying speeches, and these orations were elaborated and discussed in Newgate weeks before the great day; while down in the yelling crowd beneath the gallows spurious versions were hawked about and rapidly sold. It was a distinct gain to the decency and good order of the metropolis when Tyburn and other distant points ceased to be the places of execution, and hangings were exclusively carried out in front of Newgate, just over the debtors’ door. But some of the worst features of the old system survived. There was still the melodramatic sermon, in the chapel hung with black, before a large congregation collected simply to stare at the convicts squeezed into one pew, who in their turn stared with mixed feelings at the coffin on the table just before their eyes. There was still the same tumultuous gathering to view the last act in tragedy, the same bloodthirsty mob swaying to and fro before the gates, the same blue-blooded spectators, George Selwyn or my Lord Tom Noddy, who breakfasted in state with the gaoler, and so got a box seat or rented window opposite at an exorbitant rate. The populace were like degenerate Romans in the amphitheatre waiting for the butchery to begin. They fought and struggled desperately for front places: people fell and were trampled to death, hoarse roars came from thousands of brazen throats, which swelled into a terrible chorus as the black figures of the performers on the gallows stood out against the sky. “Hats off!” “Down in front!” these cries echoed and re-echoed in increasing volume, and all at once abruptly came to an end—the bolt had been drawn, the drop had fallen, and the miserable wretch had gone to his long home.
The policy which had brought about the substitution of Newgate for Tyburn no doubt halted halfway, but it was enlightened, and a considerable move towards the private executions of our own times. It was dictated by the more humane principles which were gradually making head in regard to criminals and crime. Many more years were to elapse, however, before the eloquence of Romilly was to bear fruit in the softening of our sanguinary penal code. But already John Howard had commenced his labours, and his revelations were letting in a flood of light upon the black recesses of prison life. It is to the credit of the authorities of the City of London that they recognized the necessity for rebuilding Newgate on a larger and more improved plan before the publication of Howard’s reports. The great philanthropist made his first journey of inspection towards the end of 1773; in the following year he laid the information he had obtained before the House of Commons, and in 1777 published the first edition of his celebrated ‘State of Prisons.’ As early as 1755 the Common Council had condemned Newgate in no measured terms; declared it to be habitually overcrowded with “victims of public justice, under the complicated distresses of poverty, nastiness, and disease,” who had neither water, nor air, nor light in sufficient quantities; the buildings were old and ruinous, and incapable of any “improvement or tolerable repairs.” It was plainly admitted that the gaol ought to be at once pulled down. But as usual the difficulty of providing funds cropped up, and the work, though urgent, was postponed for some years. The inadequacy of the prison was so obvious, however, that the matter was presently brought before a committee of the House of Commons, and the necessity for rebuilding clearly proved. A committee of the Corporation next met in 1767 to consider ways and means, and they were fortified in their decision to rebuild by convincing evidence of the horrible condition of the existing prison. A letter addressed to the committee by Sir Stephen Jansen stigmatizes it as “an abominable sink of beastliness and corruption.” He spoke from full knowledge, having been sheriff when the prison was decimated by gaol fever. In the same year Parliamentary powers were obtained to raise money to rebuild the place, and the new Newgate was actually commenced in 1770, when Lord Mayor Beckford, father of “Vathek” Beckford, laid the first stone. Its architect was George Dance, and the prison building, which still stands to speak for itself, has been counted one of his finest works. Howard, who gives this historic prison the first place in his list, must have visited it while the new buildings were in progress. The plan did not find favour with him, but he enters into no particulars, and limits his criticisms to remarking, “that without more than ordinary care the prisoners in it will be in great danger of gaol fever.” According to modern notions the plan was no doubt faulty in the extreme. Safe custody, a leading principle in all prison construction, was compassed at the expense of most others. The prison façade is a marvel of strength and solidity, but until reappropriated in recent years its interior was a limited confined space, still darkened, and deprived of ventilation, by being parcelled out into courts, upon which looked the narrow windows of the various wards.
The erection of the “new and commodious gaol,” as it is described in an Act of the period, proceeded rapidly, but three or four years after Howard’s visit it was still uncompleted. This Act recites what had been done, referring to the valuable, extensive areas, which had been taken in for the construction of this great prison, and provides additional funds. In 1780, however, an unexpected catastrophe happened, and the new buildings were set on fire by the Lord George Gordon rioters, and so much damaged that the most comprehensive repairs were indispensable. These were executed in 1782. Many years were to elapse before any further alterations or improvements were made.