Tower”—entirely ignored, and the prisoner committed to his custody had to decide between submitting to the extortion, “or take up his abode in the common gaol,” where he had thieves and villains for his associates, and was “perpetually tormented and eaten up by distempers and vermin.”
The extortion practised is graphically described by one who endured it. The author of the ‘History of the Press-yard,’ after having been mulcted on first arrival at the lodge for drink and “garnish,”[87] was, although presumably a State prisoner, and entitled to better treatment, at once cast in the condemned hold. In this gruesome place, which has been already described, he lay “seized with a panic dread” at the survey of his new tenement, and willing to change it for another on almost any terms. “As this was the design of my being brought hither, so was I made apprized of it by an expected method; for I had not bewailed my condition more than half-an-hour, before I heard a voice from above crying out from a board taken out of my ceiling, which was the speaker’s floor, ‘Sir, I understand your name is——, and that you are a gentleman too well educated to take up your abode in a vault set apart only for thieves, parricides, and murderers. From hence criminals after sentence of death are carried to the place of execution, and from hence you may be removed to a chamber equal to one in any private house, where you may be furnished with the best conversation and entertainment, on a valuable consideration.’ ” The speaker went on to protest that he acted solely from good will; that he was himself a prisoner, and had suffered at first in the same manner, but had paid a sum to be removed to better quarters, “which he thanked God he enjoyed then to his heart’s content, wanting for nothing that a gaol could afford him.” The victim begged to know the terms, and to be put in communication with the proper officer to make a contract for release. The other promised accordingly, and a quarter of an hour afterwards “clang went the chain of my door and bolts, and in comes a gentleman-like man of very smiling aspect,” who apologized profusely, swearing that those who had ill-used a gentleman in such an unhandsome manner should be well trounced for it. “He moreover excused the want of suitable entertainment for persons of condition in prison-houses, and assured me that I should be immediately conducted to the governor’s house, who would take all imaginable care of my reception. After this he very kindly took me by the hand to lead me down into the lodge, which I rightly apprehended as a motive to feel my pulse, and therefore made use of the opportunity to clap two pieces, which he let my hand go to have a fast grip of, in his.”
His deliverer was the head turnkey, by name Bodenham Rouse, whom he accompanied to the Lodge, and there again stood drink. “We gave our service to one another in a glass of wine, drawn by Dame Spurling, the fat hostess who kept the tap in the Lodge.” Over the friendly glass terms were propounded and accepted, and having paid down his twenty guineas—a large sum, excused on the grounds that Mr. Pitt the governor had paid £1000 for his place—the prisoner followed his guide through Phœnix court into the governor’s house, where he had the honour of saluting and taking a dram of arrack with the great Mr. Pitt, who “as a mark of his favourable intentions to me, gave order for furnishing me a bed with clean sheets, after I had paid the woman that brought them to my barrack of a chamber in the press-yard, whither I was soon conveyed through a door with a great iron chain to it, five shillings.”
The new-comer was cordially welcomed and introduced by “George, the cobbler of Highgate,”[88] apparently a prison official, to a congenial companion, who explained to him the ways of the place. It was in the first place incumbent on every arrival to pay his footing. About seven or eight o’clock the entrance fee was demanded. It had previously been only six bottles of wine, and tobacco in proportion. This was now raised to ten or twelve bottles, which, if a prisoner was straitened for money, “could be scored at the bar of the honest tapster, who, though he lost several hundred pounds by that method of proceeding, was not discouraged from going on with it in favour of unhappy gentlemen.” This talk lasted over pipes and a pot of stout, until notice was brought by “a person in gray hairs, who had then the keys of the press-yard, that all things were ready for an evening refreshment, and that honest Tom the butler had carried the bottles, pipes, and tobacco into our refectory, called the tap-room.” Here the giver of the entertainment seated himself at the head of the table, and the guests on each side of him. Among them was a major who had been in the army[89] so long that he was of the same standing as the Duke of Marlborough, and “commanded over General Mallow, now a great officer in Spain, when he was an ensign on the Irish establishment.” Another was “a gentleman, who being of the late King James’s Horse Guards, had adhered to that exiled monarch’s fortunes till he was driven out of Ireland.” Both these gentlemen had married since their confinement, the one, though near seventy,[90] “to a young woman not much above twenty … the other, of less advanced years, to a widow gentlewoman of a like age, who lived very comfortably with him—” of course in the prison.
They met the new-comer with “all possible civility, and indeed made the hours pass over more agreeably than he could have expected in that place.” They drank deep and late. “I continued whipping out sixpences to advance more bottles, till our cheerfulness was turned into drowsiness, and merriment became the subject of dispute with some of my fellow-prisoners, so it was thought high time by the most sober of us to break up and retire to our chambers, with the ceremony of the turnkeys locking each of the two staircase-doors after us.” The new prisoner, furnished with a clay candlestick, “because he had not yet equipped himself with one of earthenware,” found his way up three pairs of stairs to a large room, which had its entrance through the chapel. The bars were as thick as his wrist, and very numerous. The stone walls, which had borne the same hue for above half a century, were bedaubed with texts of Scripture written in charcoal, such as “Man is born to trouble, as the sparks fly upward,” “Before I was afflicted I went astray, but now I have kept Thy word.” There were bedsteads made of boards for the bedding, but neither “flocks nor feathers to make one.” The tables and chairs were of like antiquity and use. “And Potiphar’s wife’s chambermaid’s hat at the coffee-house in Chelsea had as fair a claim to any modern fashion as any one thing in the room.” Our author is disgusted at the accommodation provided for the price, twelve shillings a week, and another twelve pence for the woman or nurse who cleaned the place. But he is consoled by being told what he had escaped by not being locked up on the master’s side, “where, besides a thousand other inconveniences, I must have paid one and sixpence per diem for leave to associate myself with pickpockets in a dark and stinking cellar.”
The following morning he was admitted into other mysteries of the place. All who had exceeded the previous night had to pay the usual forfeit, a groat in drink for the turnkeys, which the latter collect very punctually, and at the payment of the forfeit, “as many persons as think fit may be present.” The names of the offenders having been called over with all ceremony, all pleaded guilty and promptly paid the fine, which was forthwith spent in liquor, to be consumed by the cobbler of Highgate and his fellows. From this time forward the novice was free of the place, and was looked upon by the other prisoners as one of themselves. The morning passed with the ordinary diversions. Talk over the persons of distinction who had gone to Tyburn out of such and such a room, was varied by the perusal of newspapers hired out by the turnkeys, and the discussion of the literary merits of the last dying speech composed by a condemned prisoner, who was on the brink of the gallows. One is given by the author of ‘The Press-yard’ in extenso, the oration of one J—— B—ggs, an “orange merchant,” sentenced to die for outwitting the Bank of England, a flowery piece of rhetoric, hardly worth transcribing, which wound up with these words—
“So much by way of oration. Here, Jack (Ketch), do your office decently and with despatch; these clothes, hat, and wig are yours; you will find fifteen shillings and some grocery in my pocket. Now, Mr. Ordinary, you may sing the psalm if you please, and I’ll endeavour as well as it is possible to bear a bob with you, but let it be none of your penitential ones.”
Thus passed the day. Towards evening visitors began to flock in from outside to take their bottle and comfort “the distressed inhabitants” of Newgate press-yard in the only way possible, by inordinate drinking. Of the visitors some were friends and relatives, others came from sheer predilection for criminal society. Among
