Olde London Punishments

by David Brandon

  The Tower

  The final prison to be considered is the Tower of London. This is arguably the most famous castle in the world and has a long and extremely complex history. Here only the briefest of accounts of its role as a prison from early times until the early nineteenth century will be attempted. Leaving aside debates as to whether the site was fortified in Roman times, it is to William the Conqueror that the Tower owes its origin. He built it as an eloquent expression of his power and to impress upon the people of London the fact that Norman rule was there to stay. While William was busily establishing his domination it is likely that he would have imprisoned rebellious elements in the Tower, but the first record of a specific prisoner is that of Ranulf Flambard, Bishop of Durham, who fell foul of the Conqueror’s successor, William II. The conditions of his imprisonment do not seem to have been particularly rigorous and he took advantage of this when he got his guards drunk and made his escape by means of a rope that had been smuggled in to him. He performed this daring exploit on 2 February 1106. It was made all the more remarkable in that he is supposed to have insisted on taking his crosier with him as he escaped.

  Traitors Gate, Tower of London.

  The execution of Guy Fawkes at Westminster.

  Dominating the site is that uncompromising, even brutal piece of military architecture known as the White Tower, the building of which started about 1078. In the 1240s, the English King of the time, Henry III, was engaged on one of the apparently endless wars with the Welsh. Prisoners had been taken and housed in the White Tower, one of whom, named Gruffydd, tried to escape in 1244 by the time-honoured means of knotting sheets together to make a rope. The improvised rope broke and Gruffydd fell to his death. Later in the same century, during a wave of anti-Semitism, the entire Jewish community of the Cheapside area (which was within in the liberty of the Tower and therefore under the jurisdiction of the Constable of the Tower) had to be taken inside for its own safety. Unfortunately, the Jews were an easily identified minority who also suffered gross persecution under the reign of Edward I. Edward incarcerated 600 Jews, mostly in the White Tower, on trumped-up charges of coin-clipping. Many simply starved to death in the stinking dungeons. In 1303 it is likely that the sub-prior of Westminster Abbey and several of his monks were confined while helping the authorities with their inquiries into an audacious robbery of the royal treasury. At the very end of the century, John Balliol, King of Scotland, (1249-1313), was lodged in the White Tower after his ignominious defeat by Edward I at the Battle of Stracathro in 1296; he enjoyed the relative luxury of leaving the Tower and being handed over to the custody of the Pope. Housed under far better conditions of confinement was King John II of France. He had been captured at the Battle of Poitiers in 1356 and spent three years of pampered luxury in the White Tower surrounded by servants and enjoying all the good things of life (except liberty) while the necessary money was raised to secure his release. In 1415 Prince Charles of Orleans, father of King Louis XII of France, was captured at the Battle of Agincourt and he languished in the White Tower for twelve years while an enormous ransom for his release was accumulated. He spent much of his time composing poetry.

  In 1554 Sir Thomas Wyatt, leader of an abortive Protestant uprising against Mary, was housed briefly in the White Tower with some of his followers before being executed. Guy Fawkes was housed in the dungeons in 1605 while he staunchly withstood the attentions of his torturers and inquisitors and fed them a stream of false information. He was placed on the rack which eventually broke his will and he made a confession; however, he did not provide much of the information his tormentors really wanted. In 1671 Colonel Blood was imprisoned in the White Tower for the audacious crime of stealing the Crown Jewels. Amazingly, he was eventually rewarded for his enterprise with a lucrative government post in Ireland. Talk about cronyism!

  The Tower of London is an extraordinarily complex set of buildings that have accumulated over time with additions, alterations and demolitions being made according to the needs of the era. Most of its towers have contained prisoners in the past. Two that are still in existence take their names from the family names of their best-known inmates: the Beauchamp and Devereux Towers. The Tower was widely regarded as virtually impregnable and therefore other, less fortified parts of the complex were used to house prisoners from time to time. An example is the Lieutenant’s House close to the Bell Tower in the south-west part of the Tower. Here that tragic footnote to Tudor history, the cats-paw of manipulative and ambitious schemers, Lady Jane Grey, was lodged in 1554. She watched her husband Lord Guildford Dudley being taken away for execution at Tower Hill and saw his body brought back in a cart for burial shortly afterwards. Before he had made this short trip, he had whiled away the dismal hours by carving Jane’s name in his cell. The carving can be seen to this day. Lady Jane made the same journey herself a few days later. An extremely illustrious prisoner a month or two later was the future Queen Elizabeth. Her half-sister Queen Mary (1553-1558) saw plots everywhere. She was no mean plotter herself. She had Elizabeth confined in the Bell Tower for a few months while under suspicion of plotting against her but the conditions under which she was kept were a good deal less onerous than those of many of the other poor wretches who were housed elsewhere in the Tower’s precincts.

  Henry VIII was the last monarch to use the Tower as a royal residence and once the facilities he used when staying there were redundant, additional space became available for its ongoing role as a prison. This space was to be particularly well-used while the Tudor and Stuart monarchs were on the throne. Politics and religion came together at this time in an insidious and internecine symbiosis. Large numbers of prelates of both Protestant and Roman Catholic faiths – as well as laymen not prepared to abjure their religious beliefs – found themselves housed in the Tower for treason. Many were tortured. Those who were Catholics were frequently hanged, drawn and quartered, while Protestant martyrs were usually burned at the stake. The story of these turbulent years has often been told: suffice to say that at one time or other celebrities such as Thomas More, John Fisher, Thomas Cranmer, Nicholas Ridley, Hugh Latimer and William Laud were housed in the Bloody Tower, and that many Jesuits reluctantly made the acquaintance of the Salt Tower in the south-eastern corner of the precincts. Doubtless many other martyrs whose names have long been forgotten were also imprisoned in the Tower and died there for their faith.

  John Fisher, a Catholic martyr executed by Henry VIII. Fisher’s head was displayed on London Bridge.

  Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618) was a long-term resident of the Tower. His life bears eloquent witness to the capriciousness of royal favour. In legend he is supposed to have gallantly taken off his cloak and placed it over a puddle so that Queen Elizabeth could keep her feet and long dress and undergarments dry. This courteous gesture, it is alleged, greatly flattered the Queen, but it seems to have cut little ice with her some years later when she had Raleigh placed in the Tower, admittedly under fairly lax conditions, for seducing one Bessy Throckmorton, one of the her maids of honour. Eventually, breathing a sigh of relief, he was released – only to find himself back in the Tower in 1603, charged with plotting against King James I, the result of the machinations of the many enemies he had made over the years. He was condemned to death but then reprieved and placed under what was effectively house-arrest. This respite lasted for fourteen years, during which he wrote his History of the World. He then managed to obtain his release on the basis of leading an expedition in search of gold in South America; the freedom he obtained as a result of this mission proved short-lived, however, because the venture was conspicuously unsuccessful. On his return he was placed back in the Tower, and shortly afterwards taken to Westminster where he was executed.

  Judge George Jeffrey, the ‘Hanging Judge’.

  The Tower continued to house prisoners for a further 300 years. A few of the most notable only will be mentioned. Escape from the Tower’s brooding precincts was uncommon, but one who managed it was Sir William Seymour,
who had been imprisoned by James I for his marriage to Arabella Stuart, a pretender to the English throne. In 1611 he succeeded in getting away from the Tower dressed in a carter’s smock, with a wig on his head and sitting on a wagonload of faggots. Arabella, however, died in the Tower after several years of imprisonment. Other prisoners included John Felton, who assassinated the Duke of Buckingham to huge public acclaim in 1628, and Edward Somerset, the Royalist Marquis of Worcester. It is said that one day, having nothing much to do, he took to watching a kettle boil and in a sudden flash of intuitive genius became the first person to realise the expansive force of steam and its potential as a source of power.

  The wretched Duke of Monmouth resided very briefly in the Bell Tower before being executed on Tower Hill in 1685. With ironic justice, Judge Jeffreys followed Monmouth into confinement in the Tower where he died in 1688. In 1760 the egregious Earl Ferrers briefly resided in the Middle Tower before being executed for murdering one of his servants. Internment in the Tower was by no means always the prelude to execution. For example, in 1794 two radicals, John Thirlwall and Thomas Hardy, members of the London Corresponding Society, spent four months in the Tower; they stayed in quarters which Thirlwall described as ‘large, airy and pleasant’. Presumably it all depended on what one was used to. Most of those who made the acquaintance of the cells and dungeons of the Tower would have used less complementary words to describe their surroundings.

  Compters

  Finally, brief mention should also be made of the Compters. These were under the control of London’s sheriffs and were used to house petty offenders and debtors whose conditions of accommodation and the facilities they enjoyed varied, as did those of the inmates of the prisons, dependent on the depth of their pockets. These compters were not purpose-built and involved the adaptation of existing buildings. The gateway to the Poultry Compter, for example, was through a row of shops and houses. Other compters in the City of London included those in Bread Street, Wood Street and Giltspur Street.

  3

  The Hulks

  The idea of sending undesirables to another country can be traced back to Elizabethan times when, in 1598, it was enacted that ‘incorrigible rogues’ who refused to live within the law might be banished to distant parts. Throughout the seventeenth-century Britain sent prisoners to America, notably to Virginia and Maryland, and many English, Scottish and Irish political and religious prisoners were sent to Barbados and Jamaica in the West Indies. Official sanction came with the Transportation Act of 1718, a measure prompted by the familiar public concern of a perceived growth in crime. Between 1718 and 1775, more than 30,000 convicts were transported across the Atlantic. However, this ceased when the American War of Independence started in the mid-1770s.

  Britain needed to find an alternative system or destination urgently as prisons were already overcrowded and their condition a scandal. In something of a knee-jerk reaction, it was decided to house prisoners in old revamped fighting ships. The Hulks Act represented a fundamental break with the past and also contributed to the creation of a convict system very different to that of North America. These ‘hulks’ were moored on the River Thames at Woolwich and Deptford, as well as in other places such as Chatham, Plymouth and Portsmouth. The hulks were often unsanitary and overcrowded. When the first hulks were moored on the Thames at Woolwich it was intended to be a short-term measure. They continued for a further eighty years (1776-1857); the decision to send convicts to Australia came in 1786 and continued until 1868, and over 160,000 convicts were despatched ‘Down Under’.

  With regard to the hulks, the government from the start exercised a general supervision but their everyday operation was in the hands of contractors who tendered for the job, intending it to be a profitable business. It was soon discovered that far from being a cheap expedient, convict labour in the hulks was an expensive one because issues of security meant that the prisoners actually worked shorter hours than free labourers and, as is inevitable with forced labour, they did as little as they could possibly get away with. With the hulks being moored close to land and the work carried out by convicts ashore there was always a possibility that they would make a break for freedom. Effective security was expensive. In Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations, his famous character Abel Magwich escapes from a hulk in the River Medway, in north Kent.

  Illustration of an old hulk at Deptfford.

  Some of the hulks were based close to each other on the south bank of the River Thames at Woolwich and Deptford, downstream from London. They housed only male prisoners, many of whom suffered from hernias owing to the physically demanding nature of the work they had to do. John Howard, the prison reformer, reported that of 632 prisoners admitted to one of them, Justitia, between August 1776 and March 1778, 176 (or 28 per cent) of them had died!

  The hulks became full to bursting point and were notorious for their living conditions. Of all the places of confinement used in Britain, they were the probably the most demoralising. They were filthy, insanitary and overcrowded for much of the time. For example, records for the hulk Surprize, moored at Cove, near Cork, in 1834 show that there were 747 bowel infections; 1240 cases of ’the itch’; 392 of ‘the cough’; 560 of ‘feverish cold’ and 284 ‘herpetic eruptions’.

  Hardened criminals lived cheek-by-jowl with bemused and terrified first-time offenders – among whom were children, some not yet in their teens. Bullying, violence and abuse were rife. In 1847 it was revealed that an elderly man had been given thirty-six lashes of the cat o’ nine tails for being just five minutes late for the early morning muster.

  In the nineteenth century, those sentenced to transportation almost always found themselves temporarily housed in a hulk while awaiting a convict ship. A few weeks in a hulk were not an effective preparation for the hazards of a journey of several months to Australia, let alone for what might be awaiting the convicts when they got there. In some cases, prisoners supposedly awaiting transportation were ‘temporarily’ accommodated in hulks but remained in them until the expiry of their sentences.

  The hulks were grim places for all concerned, and understandably those with the opportunity to do so tried to find a little light relief. In 1854 an official enquiry into incidents aboard the hulk Victoria at Portsmouth culminated in the court-martial of Lieutenant Charles Knight of the Royal Marines. It was alleged that on the night of the 17 September he brought two ‘improper’ women on board and proceeded to act ‘improperly’, plying both with large quantities of alcohol and possibly taking sexual liberties.

  There were other disciplinary problems associated with the hulks. A letter from John Henry Capper, Superintendent of Hulks, dated 17 July 1832, raises the perennial issue of how to prevent the presence of hardened criminals ‘polluting’ other novice offenders. Capper writes:

  The great influx of youthful offenders matured in crime, who are daily received on board the Hulks from the several Gaols in Great Britain, make it advisable that a considerable number of Convicts should be sent to the Australian or other settlements during the present year; as it appears, judging from the report of their characters that, if discharged from any place of confinement in this country at the expiration of their sentences, there is but little hope of their pursuing an honest course of life.

  The hulks were to remain in use as prisons and as temporary accommodation for those awaiting transportation for many more years. With squalor, disease, overcrowding, corruption and immorality in the prisons and in the hulks, it is not surprising that the authorities were forced at an early stage to look elsewhere for places to put convicts.

  In 1846 The Illustrated London News described the inside of the hulks:

  The cells throughout the hulk are numbered consecutively, beginning from the lower deck upwards; and prisoners of the worst character, during their period of punishment, are classed in the lower deck, and rise upwards as they progress in character, from the lower to the middle, and from the middle to the upper deck; so that the highest number, containing the men
of best character, is on the upper deck.

  The Woolwich Warren was a maze of workshops and warehouses where the convicts were put to work. Here the prisoners were employed in shipbuilding and painting, carrying timber for this purpose, removing chain-moorings, cleansing the river banks and in keeping the vessels clean, preparing the food of the convicts generally, and making and repairing their clothes. HMS Warrior was a hulk moored at Woolwich. It was built of English oak and served as a seventy-four-gun man of war, taking part in the Battle of Copenhagen. She was also involved in events leading up to the Battle of Trafalgar. In 1818 she became a receiving ship until being purchased by the prison authorities in 1840, after which she was used as a convict ship. The standards of hygiene on board the hulks were so poor that disease spread quickly. Gaol fever (a form of typhus spread by vermin) spread among them and dysentery was also widespread. Hundreds, probably thousands, of convicts died aboard the hulks at Woolwich and their corpses were unceremoniously dumped in the arsenal’s marshground. Added to this macabre image was the fact that on warm days the smell of the prisoners, dead and alive, would pollute the river from bank to bank.

  In 1851 a mutiny broke out on board the Warrior, although this was put down by a detachment of Royal Marines and the prisoners were sent to Millbank Prison.

  James Hardy Vaux was a prisoner on the Retribution at Woolwich during the early 1800s and gave an account of life on the hulk.

  I had now a new scene of misery to contemplate. There were confined in this floating dungeon nearly six hundred men, most of them double-ironed... On arriving on board, we were all immediately stripped, and washed in large tubs of water, then, after putting on each a suit of coarse slop-clothing, we were ironed, and sent below, our own clothes being taken from us... On descending the hatch-way, no conception can be formed of the scene which presented itself.