[7] These horrors were not confined to the Fleet. The King’s Bench and the Marshalsea were nearly as bad: and, in the former prison, gangs of drunken soldiers—what could the officers have been about?—were frequently introduced to coerce the unhappy inmates. The Bench and Marshalsea were excellent properties. The patent rights were purchased from the Earl of Radnor for 5,000l., and there were some sixteen shareholders in the profits accruing from the gaol. Of the Marshalsea, evidence is given of the turnkeys holding a drinking bout in the lodge, and calling in a poor prisoner to “divert” them. On this miserable wretch they put an iron skull-cap and a pair of thumbscrews, and so tortured him for upwards of half-an-hour. Then, somewhat frightened, they gave him his discharge, as a douceur; but the miserable man fainted in the Borough High Street, and being carried into St. Thomas’s Hospital, presently died there.
[8] Did the poet Thomson, the kind-hearted, tender, pure-minded man, belong to the “mobbish confederation?” Hear him in the Seasons, in compliment to the commissioners for inquiring into the state of the gaols:—
“Where sickness pines, where thirst and hunger burn,
Ye sons of mercy, yet resume the search;
Drag forth the legal monsters into light!
Wrench from their hands oppression’s iron rod,
And make the cruel feel the pains they give.”
It is slightly consolatory to be told by antiquary Oldys, that Bambridge cut his throat in 1749; but the ruffian should properly have swung as high as Haman.
[9] “If a prisoner die through duresse of the gaoler, it is murder in the gaoler.”—St. German’s Doctor and Student. Why was this not quoted at Birmingham?
[10] Rev. James Dallaway, whose notes to Walpole’s Anecdotes are very excellent. Mr. Wornum, the last editor of Walpole, annotated by Dallaway, puzzles me. He must be an accomplished art-scholar: is he not the Wornum of the Marlborough House School? but he calls Swift’s Legion Club the “Congenial Club,” utterly ignoring Swift’s ferocious text, an excerpt from which he quotes.