by Lucy Inglis
The lottery over, the government put in the rest of the money to ensure that Westminster Bridge would become a reality. The maze of narrow slum alleys around the southern end of King Street was cleared to make way for the road to the bridge, and it finally opened on 18 November 1750. It was hailed as ‘a very great ornament to our metropolis, and will be looked on with pleasure or envy by all foreigners. The surprising echo in the arches, brings much company with French horns to entertain themselves under it in summer.’ Alcoves over each pier were designed to offer shelter in bad weather, but pessimists feared they ‘might be used by robbers and cut-throats who, if it were not for the special guard of 12 watchmen and the high balustrades, might set on unwary travellers and push their bodies into the river’.
Bodies in the river were a continual concern, and the addition of the high balustrades ‘was to prevent the suicide to which the English have so strong a propensity, particularly in the gloomy month of November’. Despite the balustrades, Westminster Bridge claimed its fair share of suicides, most of them nameless and seen only as a tumble of clothing and a brief impact with the water, then recovered later somewhere downriver. One London visitor who narrowly avoided meeting a watery end on Westminster Bridge one gloomy November night is not usually famed for his melancholy temperament.
Giacomo Casanova had arrived in London in 1763 with plans to start his own lottery and to see his illegitimate daughter, who lived in Soho Square. He took a house on Pall Mall and a mistress before he became infatuated with the young courtesan Anne Marie Charpillon. La Charpillon was most particular about her customers and determinedly had a headache whenever Casanova called. On one visit, however, he found her beneath her hairdresser and promptly smashed the place up. He returned to Pall Mall, pulled on his greatcoat, filled the pockets with a large quantity of lead shot and walked towards the river. He remembered walking slowly because of the immense weight he was carrying in his pockets. Standing on the bridge and summoning his courage, he was interrupted in his thoughts by young Welbore Ellis. Welbore was twenty-eight, and a cheerful soul. He remarked that Casanova looked glum and offered to take him for a drink and something to eat. Casanova refused and said he wanted to walk, so Welbore walked with him, in the end guiding him to a tavern where he paid a young woman to strip naked and dance the hornpipe to amuse him. Welbore’s intervention probably saved Casanova’s life; he didn’t return to Westminster Bridge. Instead, he bought a parrot and taught it to say, ‘Mademoiselle Charpillon is more of a whore even than her mother,’ before leaving it at the Royal Exchange to impart this knowledge to passersby.
WESTMINSTER HALL AND THE COURT OF THE KING’S BENCH: ‘LET JUSTICE BE DONE, THOUGH THE HEAVENS FALL’
Westminster Hall dates from the latter part of the eleventh century, and ‘was formerly made use of by the kings, &c., for feasting, and as a room to relieve the poor’. Its ‘length is two hundred and seventy feet; the breadth seventy-four’. The remarkable roof dates from the reign of Richard II and is ‘most curiously constructed, and of a fine species of gothic’. In the late fifteenth century, the Court of the King’s Bench made its home there, along with trinket shops and the bookstalls run by Westminster School. Outside was a sundial inscribed: Be Gone About Your Business. ‘It is said the dial-maker sent his lad to ask for the inscription, but an irascible old bencher ordered him away with “Be gone about your business!” Thus the lad told his master this was the desired inscription.’ Later, coffee sheds grouped around the North Door, and in a building nearby Mr Waghorn’s coffee house became a popular destination. Waghorn’s had a large balcony overlooking ‘the House of Peers’, which was packed on days of holidays and processions. In the gatehouse of Westminster Hall was a small prison, one of many secure places dotted around London where people could be confined.
The dangers and injustices of eighteenth-century prison life are apparent in the case of Mary Ferril, an inmate of the gatehouse, in 1720. She accused fellow prisoners Edward Wooldridge and John Nichols, of St Margaret’s Westminster, of raping her. In court she testified, ‘At about two a Clock in the Morning … they both forced her … one stood at the Door while the other lay with her.’ That Wooldridge and Nichols had both had sex with Mary was not disputed, since both men ‘as soon as they were up the next Morning, bragg’d that they had lain with the little Woman above Stairs’. That it had been a demeaning and possibly abusive encounter for Mary was not in question, but the court heard she was in the gatehouse for beating her mother and verbally abusing a Justice of the Peace, and that she had worked as a prostitute when she and her husband hit hard times. One witness ‘said that she was a Fool of a Woman that could not take a Stroke without telling her Husband … The Jury considering the whole Matter, Acquitted them.’
Although being violent, abusive and a part-time prostitute had not helped Mary’s case, a key failing was that the incident had taken place in her cell in the prison. Most successful rape prosecutions in London during the eighteenth century involved abduction. Unlawful detention had been a preoccupation of English identity since Magna Carta. The later evolution of habeas corpus is one of the central tenets of the legal system. John Locke continued this theme when he asserted the freedom of each man or woman to ‘own’ their own body. Infringements upon personal physical freedom were taken seriously by the law, making abduction a grave offence. In the muddled complications of many rape accusations, it was a concrete fact.
In the 1757 trial of Daniel Lackey for the rape of Christian Streeter, the fact that she went with him willingly from the Hercules Tavern near Westminster Bridge to his lodgings in Ryder Street, in St James’s, was vital to his acquittal. In 1797, when 37-year-old John Briant was tried for the rape of fourteen-year-old milkmaid Jane Bell on a summer’s evening in Green Park, the physical manner in which he stopped her crying out and forced her away from the cows into a secluded ‘hollow’ was dwelt on as much as the rape itself. They were discovered by unemployed housemaid Sarah Scott, who berated Briant for a ‘rascal’ and said that he should avail himself of a willing prostitute rather than ‘a child’. She ‘laid hold of him; I collared the man’ and it was through her intervention that Briant was brought to trial. Despite Briant’s previous good character, and the many witnesses who appeared for him in court, Scott’s evidence along with Jane Bell’s clear testimony of how she was abducted and subsequently raped were enough to secure a guilty verdict. Briant was sentenced to death.
That rape cases even came to court was a reflection of the legal system – for defendants, prosecutors and their representatives. Throughout the eighteenth century, the conviction rate in rape cases stood at about 17 per cent on average, reflecting the belief that access to the courts and legal redress for ordinary people was a basic function of eighteenth-century law.
In Westminster Hall, lawyers sat in booths and gave succinct advice to anyone who could pay them for a few minutes. These men were often depicted as grasping, but it allowed ordinary people to consult a lawyer at a fixed price. The courts sat in open view in another part of the hall, making decisions on matters both petty and great. Although England had a great legal tradition by the Middle Ages, the eighteenth century saw law and philosophy combine to create laws which recognized modern sensibilities. Dedication to a cause, stamina and debate could – and did – change society.
At the turn of the eighteenth century, there was concern about the status of slaves arriving in England from the Colonies. In 1690, John Locke stated in his Second Treatise of Government that it was a basic right ‘not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man’, reflected in the courts’ approach to rape cases. Yet Locke owned shares in the Royal African Company, which traded in slaves and wrote the 110th Statute of South Carolina: ‘Every freeman of Carolina shall have absolute power and authority over his negro slaves, of what opinion or religion soever.’ In 1729, the Yorke–Talbot legal ruling decreed that slaves did not become free on English soil. In 1772, the Somersett ruling changed e
verything.
In 1765, surgeon William Sharp treated Jonathan Strong, a slave beaten to the point of losing an eye and then abandoned in the street by his master, David Lisle. When Strong had recovered, Lisle reclaimed him as property. Granville Sharp, William’s brother, engaged in a legal battle to free Strong, and lost. Sharp became an advocate for the rights of slaves and, in 1772, masterminded the test case of James Somersett. Somersett had arrived in England as the property of Charles Stewart, a Boston customs official, and was baptized in St Andrew’s Holborn early in 1771, with three godparents standing for him. When he wished to leave Stewart’s employment, he was abducted and put on a ship for Jamaica. Sharp arranged for the case to come to court and published pamphlets which garnered public interest. The presiding figure was Lord Mansfield, a moderate and educated man. At his home, Kenwood House in Hampstead, lived his illegitimate mixed-race grand-niece, Dido Elizabeth Belle.
Mansfield was heavily criticized by the pro-slavery community for being influenced by ‘a Black [Dido] in his house which governs him and the whole family’. Thomas Hutchinson, Governor of Massachusetts, went to dinner with the family and noted in his diary that:
A Black came in after dinner and sat with the ladies and after coffee, walked with the company in the gardens, one of the young ladies having her arm within the other. She had a very high cap and her wool was much frizzled in her neck, but not enough to answer the large curls now in fashion. She is neither handsome nor genteel - pert enough … He calls her Dido, which I suppose is all the name she has. He knows he has been reproached for showing fondness for her - I dare not say criminal.
Mansfield tried to persuade Stewart to settle by selling Somersett to his godparents, but neither side was having it. Both parties were determined to see the law decided once and for all. Mansfield ruled that habeas corpus applied to anyone in England, even if they originated elsewhere. He was aware of the significance of his ruling, stating, ‘Fiat justitia ruat caelum,’ or, ‘Let justice be done, though the heavens fall.’ It was the beginning of the end of slavery, though it would take many more years for the abolitionist movement to triumph. Londoners everywhere discussed and debated the position of slavery within a ‘free society’. The Westminster Forum, one of the premier debating societies, posed the same question over many years and, increasingly, invited ‘ingenious Africans’ to speak at debates, inquiring:
Can any political or commercial advantages justify a free people in continuing the Slave Trade? A NATIVE OF AFRICA, many years a Slave in the West-Indies, will attend … and communicate to the audience a number of very remarkable circumstances respecting the treatment of the Negroe Slaves, and particularly of his being forcibly taken from his family and friends, on the coast of Africa, and sold as a Slave.
Mansfield had made slavery on English soil difficult, but not impossible. When he died, in 1793, he made sure to ‘confirm’ Dido’s freedom in his will. The trade in unpleasant racist pamphlets continued, using the Somersett case as an excuse to pontificate upon ‘the negroe cause’, but for the ordinary people in Westminster, and throughout London, integration was the new reality.
Living happily in Westminster, above his grocery, was Ignatius Sancho. He was born either on a slave ship or in Greenwich. The Duke of Montagu saw Sancho on Blackheath and brought him home to amuse his wife, Lady Mary. She died in 1751 and left him with a year’s salary and a £30 annuity. Sancho promptly fell to women and cards. However, after an ‘unsuccessful contest at cribbage with a Jew, who won his cloaths’, he appears to have given up gambling. He returned as a valet to his old employer’s son-in-law, George Brudenell, who had assumed his wife’s name for himself and their children, in 1749, to prevent it dying out. When his father-in-law died, George was created the 1st Duke of Montagu, reviving the title in ‘the second creation’. George Brudenell inherited the mantle of John Montagu in more ways than one, and he continued the latter’s charity towards the somewhat hapless Sancho. Whilst in George Montagu’s employ, Sancho married Ann Osborne, a young woman of ‘West-Indian origin’. By 1773, he was crippled by gout and could no longer work for the Duke, who set him up with a freehold in Westminster and a small grocery.
He was a prolific letter writer and one written to Laurence Sterne, in 1766, gives a neat picture of his life: ‘I am one of those people who the vulgar and illiberal call “Negurs”.’ Also in 1776, he wrote of the slave trade ‘it is a subject that sours my blood’. Sancho loved music and published three collections in his lifetime, making him Britain’s first native black composer. After his death, a collection of his letters was published, full of the trivia of eighteenth-century life and also one of its landmarks: in the summer of 1779, he hoped that the family dog, Nutts, would not catch fleas in the heat; and in September of 1780, he wrote to his friend Mrs Cocksedge that he had cast his ‘free vote’ in the election of that year in favour of Charles James Fox. Ignatius Sancho was the first recorded black voter in Britain.
When he died, in December of that year, The Gentleman’s Magazine featured the first known British obituary of a black individual, recording simply: ‘In Charles-str. Westminster, Mister Ignatius Sancho, grocer and oilman; a character immortalized by the epistolary correspondence of Sterne.’ There was no mention of his race. It was Joseph Jekyll who, in 1782, published a biography of Sancho along with an edition of his letters, and coined the phrase which would immortalize the Westminster butler and grocer as ‘the Extraordinary Negro’.
THE HOUSES OF PARLIAMENT: ‘A MAN CAN NEVER BE GREAT THAT IS NOT POPULAR, ESPECIALLY IN ENGLAND’
The British government operated from the old palace of Westminster in a series of cramped and dilapidated rooms, as outdated as the system which filled them with MPs. Busy debating societies advertised in the papers, calling politically minded citizens to taverns and coffee houses to pick apart foreign policies and domestic matters. ‘Sedition’ became an ever greater preoccupation as the government, if not King George III, began to realize their powers over the ordinary people had limits. The right to vote, so long the preserve of a few freeholders, was, as a result of the property boom, becoming the right of many independent Londoners. Parliament would evolve rapidly during the eighteenth century to cope with changes in society and the wider world as Britain established an Empire. Within Westminster, three events would act as catalysts for change in the old system: the John Wilkes affair, the Gordon Riots and the election of 1784.
Political corruption was endemic for most of the eighteenth century. Even those who entered Parliament with the most altruistic of motives often utilized the ancient system of rotten or pocket boroughs to secure their seat. These boroughs were constituencies in which the vote could be influenced. In many rural areas this was tolerated, where social ties or allegiances to local landowners held sway, but London was a city of independent traders. Men voted as they saw fit, and were proud of it; few had a landlord looking over their shoulder as they cast their vote. By the middle of the eighteenth century, many realized that the political system as it stood was unsatisfactory and did not reflect the way the city and the nation was growing and changing. One man, John Wilkes, would highlight many of the deficiencies of the British government.
Born in Clerkenwell in 1725, Wilkes was the son of a distiller. Physically he was unappealing, cross-eyed and with a severe underbite. This did not dissuade him from making the pursuit of women one of his foremost concerns. After a short-lived and unsuccessful marriage, he settled in London with his daughter, Polly, and a year later had bribed himself into a seat in the House of Commons, as Member of Parliament for Aylesbury.
While Wilkes’ disadvantages in the looks department did not hamper his success with women, they did hamper his success as a speaker in the House. In 1762, he turned to the written word to express his political opinions. On 5 June, he began to publish the anti-Scottish magazine The North Briton anonymously. The following year, he used issue 45 to attack the King’s speech for the opening of Parliament. It had been written by Lord But
e, a Scottish minister popularly associated with Jacobitism. Even the number 45 was symbolic, evoking the Jacobite Rebellion of 1745. The attack on the King was too thinly veiled. On 26 April, the government put out a warrant to find and arrest the anonymous author of The North Briton. Four days later, John Wilkes was arrested and taken to the Tower of London. His house was searched and his papers confiscated.
The government had made a huge mistake. Wilkes, despite his sly appearance and financial incontinence, was popular. He was also canny. He argued that his arrest was unlawful and that as an MP he could not be arrested for libel. When he was taken from the Tower to Westminster Hall to plead his case, he was accompanied by cheering crowds yelling the rallying cry which was to become a London legend: ‘Wilkes and Liberty!’
It was clear that a gulf was opening up between the courts of Westminster and the government. Wilkes was released on 6 May, and won £1,000 in damages against the government for trespass. This could not, however, plug the holes in his finances.
John Wilkes was not only in financial trouble but also incapable of keeping himself out of mischief. As soon as he was free, he began to print The North Briton as a collected volume, seeing it as a useful way to bring in some money. He also printed a small number of copies of a poem he had written, for limited circulation amongst his friends. This poem was a spoof of Alexander Pope’s Essay on Man, entitled Essay on Woman, and began with the line, ‘Awake, my Fanny!’ It goes downhill from there.
The poem was read out in the Lords. In the Commons, Samuel Martin called Wilkes a coward, and the two fought a duel in Hyde Park the next morning. Wilkes took a shot to the groin and for some time was dangerously ill. Realizing the game was up, he escaped to Paris on Christmas Eve 1763.