“The door sank down again; it settled deeper in the cinders—tottered—yielded—was down!”
Dickens gives a prominent place among the rioters to John Dennis the hangman, who himself was, as the records state, sentenced to be hanged for his complicity in these dark doings. Dennis was likely to be familiar with the interior of the gaol. There were no doubt many others who had threaded its gloomy passages before. With such experienced guides the way must have been easy to find. The outer barriers down, the mob surged like a tidal wave into and through the whole gaol. I will again draw from fiction, which is the more powerful in this case that it is founded upon fact, and will quote from ‘Barnaby Rudge.’
“Now they came rushing through the gaol, calling to each other in the vaulted passages; clashing the iron gates dividing yard from yard; beating at the doors of cells and wards; wrenching off bolts and locks and bars; tearing down the door-posts to let men out; endeavouring to drag them by main force through gaps and windows where a child could scarcely pass; whooping and yelling without a moment’s rest, and running through the heat and flames as if they were cased in metal. By their legs, their arms, the hair upon their heads, they dragged the prisoners out. Some threw themselves upon their captives as they got towards the door, and tried to file away their irons; some danced about them with a frenzied joy, and rent their clothes, and were ready as it seemed to tear them limb from limb. Now a party of a dozen men came dashing through the yard, ... dragging a prisoner along the ground, whose dress they had nearly torn from his body in their mad eagerness to set him free, and who was bleeding and senseless in their hands. Now a score of prisoners ran to and fro who had lost themselves in the intricacies of the prison, and were so bewildered with the noise and the
glare that they knew not where to turn or what to do, and still cried out for help as loudly as before. Anon some famished wretch, whose theft had been a loaf of bread or a scrap of butcher’s meat, came skulking past barefooted, going slowly away because that gaol, his house, was burning; not because he had another, or had friends to meet, or old haunts to revisit, or any liberty to gain, but liberty to starve and die. And then a knot of highwaymen went trooping by, conducted by the friends they had amongst the crowd, who muffled their fetters as they went along with handkerchiefs and bands of hay, and wrapped them in coats and cloaks, and gave them drink from bottles, and held it to their lips because of their handcuffs, which there was no time to remove. All this, and Heaven knows how much, was done amidst a noise, a hurry and distraction like nothing that we know of even in our dreams; which seemed for ever on the rise, and never to decrease for the space of a single instant.”
Through all this tumult and destruction the law was paralyzed. After much delay the sheriff sent a party of constables to the gaolers’ assistance. But they came too late, and easily fell into a trap. The rioters suffered them to pass on till they were entirely encircled, then attacked them with great fury, disarmed them, took their staves, and quickly converted them at the fire into blazing brands, which they threw about to extend the flames. “It is scarcely to be credited,” says a narrator, “with what celerity a gaol which to a common observer appeared to be built with nothing that would burn, was destroyed by the flames. So efficient were the means employed, that the work of destruction was very rapid. Stones two or three tons in weight, to which the doors of the cells were fastened, were raised by that resistless species of crow known to housebreakers by the name of the pig’s foot. Such was the violence of the fire, that the great iron bars and windows were eaten through and the adjacent stones vitrified.[195] Nor is it less astonishing that from a prison thus in flames a miserable crew of felons in irons and a company of confined debtors, to the number in the whole of more than three hundred, could all be liberated as it were by magic, amidst flames and firebrands, without the loss of a single life.... But it is not at all to be wondered that by a body of execrable villains thus let loose upon the public, the house of that worthy and active magistrate Sir John Fielding should be the first marked for vengeance.” In the same way, even before the destruction of Newgate, the house of Justice Hyde, whose activity the rioters resented, had also been stripped of its furniture, which was burnt in front of the door.
Crabbe’s account written at the time to a friend is graphic, and contains several new details—“How Akerman, the governor, escaped,” he says, “or where he is gone, I know not; but just at the time I speak of they set fire to his house, broke in, and threw every piece of furniture they could find into the street, firing them also in an instant. The engines came, but they were only suffered to preserve the private houses near the prison. As I was standing near the spot, there approached another body of men—I suppose five hundred—and Lord George Gordon, in a coach drawn by the mob, towards Alderman Bull’s, bowing as he passed along. He is a lively-looking young man in appearance and nothing more, though just now the popular hero. By eight o’clock Akerman’s house was in flames. I went close to it, and never saw anything so dreadful. The prison was, as I have said, a remarkably strong building; but, determined to force it, they broke the gates with crows and other instruments, and climbed up outside of the cell part, which joins the two great wings of the building where the felons were confined; and I stood where I plainly saw their operations; they broke the roof, tore away the rafters, and having got ladders, they descended. Not Orpheus himself had more courage or better luck. Flames all around them, and a body of soldiers expected, yet they laughed at all opposition. The prisoners escaped. I stood and saw about twelve women and eight men ascend from their confinement to the open air, and they were conducted through the streets in their chains. Three of these were to be hanged on Friday (two days later).