X. BARON FISCO AT HOME. By W. W. Story,. Blackwood's Magazine, From Beginning, 2 BARON FISCO AT HOME, : 62 2 PUBLISHED EVERY SATURDAY BY LITTELL & CO., BOSTON. TERMS OF SUBSCRIPTION. For EIGHT DOLLARS, remitted directly to the Publishers, the LIVING AGE will be punctually forwarded for a year, free of postage. Kemittances should be made by bank draft or check, or by post-office money-order, if possible. If neither of these can be procured, the money should be sent in a registered letter. All postmasters are obliged to register letters when requested to do so. Drafts, checks and money-orders should be made payable to the order of LITTELL & Co. Single Numbers of THE LIVING AGE, 18 cents. Noon, and the sky is a blinding glare: DE IMITATIONE. WHERE is the Church that once made brave the world With rainbow sails and flying dignities? What of the Fathers, fierce-browed captains, is The flowers have fainted while we have Left for a solace now? With sails unfurled strayed; We wandered too far to tend them there, Ah well! Evening shall right the mistake we made. Evening; 'tis chilly in meadow and glade, Our wandering is but a long unrest: We will home to the fireside. Home is best. On safer seas the Church her commerce plies An easy north-west passage to the skies. The stories of their victories and wrecks From The Fortnightly Review. life. Light scarcely penetrated their dark and loathsome dungeons; no breath of In antiquity and varied interest New fresh air sweetened the fetid atmosphere gate prison yields to no place of durance they breathed; that they enjoyed the luxin the world. A gaol has stood on this ury of water was due to the munificence same site for almost a thousand years. of a pious ecclesiastic. As for their daily The first prison was nearly as old as the subsistence it was most precarious. Food, Tower of London, and much older than clothing, fuel were doled out in limited the Bastille. Hundreds of thousands of quantities by prosperous citizens as chari"felons and trespassers "have from first table gifts, while some bequeathed small to last been incarcerated within; and to legacies to be expended in the same artimany it must have been an abode of sorcles of supply. These bare prison allow row, suffering, and unspeakable woe, a ances were further eked out by the chance kind of terrestrial inferno, to enter which seizures in the markets; by bread forwas to abandon every hope. Imprison. feited as inferior or of light weight, and ment was often lightly and capriciously meat unfit to be publicly sold. All classes inflicted in days before our liberties were and categories of prisoners were herded fully won, and innumerable victims of indiscriminately together: men and womtyranny and oppression have been lodged en, tried and untried, upright but misin Newgate. Political troubles also sent guided zealots with hardened habitual their quota; the gaol was the halfway- offenders. The only principle of classifihouse to the scaffold or the gallows for cation was a prisoner's ability or otherturbulent or short-sighted persons who wise to pay certain fees; money could espoused the losing side; it was the start- purchase the squalid comfort of the masing-place for that painful pilgrimage to ter's side, but no immunity from the balethe pillory or whipping-post which was too ful companionship of felons equally well frequently the punishment for rashly ut- furnished with funds and no less anxious tered libels and philippics against consti- to escape the awful horrors of the comtuted power. Newgate, again, was on the mon side of the gaol. The weight of the highroad to Smithfield; in times of intol- chains again, which innocent and guilty erance and fierce religious dissensions all alike wore, depended upon the price numbers of devoted martyrs went thence a prisoner could pay for "easement of to suffer for conscience' sake at the stake. irons," and it was a common practice to For centuries a large section of the per- overload a new comer with enormous fetmanent population of Newgate, as of all ters and so terrify him into lavish disgaols, consisted of offenders against com-bursements. The gaol at all times was mercial laws; fraudulent bankrupts were so hideously overcrowded that plague and hanged, others more unfortunate than pestilence perpetually ravaged it, and the criminal were clapped into gaol to linger deadly infection often spread into the out their lives without the chance of earn- neighboring courts of law. ing the funds by which alone freedom The foregoing is an imperfect but by could be recovered. Debtors of all de- no means overcolored picture of Newgate grees were equally condemned to languish as it existed for hundreds of years, from for years in prison often for the most pal- the twelfth century, indeed, to the ninetry sums-innocent persons also; gaol- teenth. The description is supported by deliveries were rare, and the boon of historical records somewhat meagre at arraignment and fair trial was strangely first perhaps, but becoming more and and unjustly withheld, while even those acquitted in open court were often haled back to prison because they were unable to discharge the gaoler's illegal fees. The condition of the prisoners was long most deplorable. They were but scantily supplied with the commonest necessaries of more ample and better substantiated as the period grows less remote. We have but scant information as to the first gatehouse gaol. Being part and parcel of the city fortifications, it was intended mainly for defence, and the prison accommodation which the gate afforded with its to dungeons beneath, and must have been of the scription. More pains taken to keep the exterior strong and safe against attack, than to render the interior habitable, and we may conclude that the moneys willed by Whittington for the reedification of Newgate were principally expended on the restoration and improve ments of the prison. "Whit's palace," as rebuilt by Whittington's executors, lasted for a couple of centuries, and was the principal gaol for the metropolis. Reference is constantly made to it in the history of the times. It was the natural receptacle for rogues, roysterers, and With occasional, but not always suffi masterless men. It is described as a hot- cient, repairs, but without structural albed of vice, a nursery of crime. Drunk- terations, Whittington's Newgate conenness, gaming, profligacy of the vilest tinued to serve down to the seventeenth sort, went forward in the prison without century. About 1629 it was in a state of let or hindrance. Contemporary petitions, utter ruin, and such extensive works were preserved in the State papers, penned by undertaken to re-edify it that the security inmates of Newgate pining for liberty, of the gaol was said to be endangered, call their prison house a foul and noisome and it was thought better to pardon most den. The gaoler for the time being was of the prisoners before they set themcertain to be a brutal partisan of the selves free. Lupton, in his “London Carparty in power, especially bitter to reli- bonadoed," speaks of Newgate as "newgious or political opponents who fell into fronted and new-faced" in 1638. Its his hands. Such an one was Alexander | accommodation must have been sorely Andrew, the keeper in Mary's reign. So tried in the troublous years which fol. violent was his hatred of Protestants, lowed. It seems to have been in the Foxe tells us, that he would go to Bonner crying, "Rid my prison, I am too much pestered with heretics." Overflowing with zeal, he brought all his powers of persuasion, fair words and promises of kind treatment, to induce his prisoners to recant. He had so little compassion that he forbade good old Master Rogers, the proto-martyr of the Maryan persecutions, to share his meals with his starving fellow prisoners. Alexander, on the other hand, was lenient enough to prisoners of the right way of thinking. In the narrative of Underhill, the Hot Gospeller, committed to Newgate in 1553, Alexander Andrew and his wife, who shared his duties, are described as feasting and carousing interior, both plan and appropriation, has the great central hall of Newgate with prisoners who were clever enough to keep their religious views in the background, and ready to pay for their gaoler's entertainment. Underhill gives us a curious glimpse of the inside of the prison. Hav garrets above, | ing duly treated Andrew to liquor unlimmost limited de-ited, he was constituted "white son were no doubt the governor and governess of Newgate, and was given the best room in the prison, with all admissible indulgences. The best room was very draughty, unquiet, and full of evil savors, and Underhill, falling into an ague, was moved into the gaoler's own parlor, far from the noise of the prison. But his new chamber was near the kitchen, and the smell of meat was more than he could bear, whereupon Mistress Andrew put him away in her store-closet, "amidst her best plate, crockery, and clothes." time of the Commonwealth when "our churches were made into prisons," and demands for space had greatly multiplied, that Newgate was increased by the addition of the buildings belonging to the Phoenix Inn in Newgate Street. The great fire of 1666 gutted, if not completely destroyed, Newgate, and its reconstruc tion became imperative. Some say Wren was the architect of the new prison, but the fact is not fully substantiated. Authentic and detailed information has, however, been preserved concerning it; it is figured in a familiar woodcut which may be seen in every modern history of Lon. don, while a full description of the in been left by an anonymous writer, who was himself an inmate of the gaol. The prison was still subordinated to the gate, which was an ornate structure, with great architectural pretensions. Tuscan pilas. ters with statues in the intervening niches decorated both fronts; the western had a ed, that the place has the exact aspect of figure of Liberty with Whittington's cat hell itself." To the common felons this at her feet; on the eastern were figures of must have been their only enjoyment, for Justice, Mercy, and Truth. But as a their condition was truly awful, and the writer in the Gentleman's Magazine well side they occupied is fitly described as put it about a century ago, The sump-"a most terrible, wicked, and dreadful tuousness of the outside but aggravated place." There were five wards in it; the the misery of the wretches within." A stone hold, an underground dungeon, fair conception of the horrors of the in- dark and dismal, into which no daylight terior will best be obtained from a brief ever penetrated, and which was reserved account of its various parts. Some effort for such as could not pay their entrance was made to classify, and the Newgate of fees; alongside was the lower ward, also that day contained five principal divisions an underground den; above it was the or sides: there was the master's side, for middle ward, for felons who could just debtors and felons respectively; the com- meet the simplest demands for fees. mon side, for those same two classes of These were for males; female felons prisoners; and lastly the press yard, for were lodged in "waterman's hall," a very prisoners of note. The master debtors' dark and stinking place, and having as side consisted of three wards or rooms near neighbors the "press room," used which were furnished at high rates, with for the infliction of peine forte et dure, the flock beds, tables, and chairs; in the mas- "bilbows," another refractory cell, and ter felons' side were a couple of wards the women's condemned cell, a dismal, above and communicating with the "gig- cheerless dungeon. The female felons ger," an interviewing chamber where fel- had another ward, at the top of the prison, ons, on payment, saw their friends, while a foul place lighted by one small window, below the gigger was an underground tap- where the women "suffered themselves room, or drinking-vault, to which the fel- to live far worse than swine, and, to speak ons on the master's side had access at all the truth, the Augean stable could bear hours, and where they might drink as no comparison to it, for they are almost deep as they pleased. The right to oc- poisoned by their own filth, and their concupy the master's side was a luxury dearly versation is nothing but one continued purchased, but the accommodation ob- course of swearing, cursing, and debauchtained, albeit indifferent, was palatial to ery, insomuch that it passes all description that provided for the impecunious on the and belief." common side. Penniless debtors were cast into the "stone hall," close to which was the "partner's room," a species of punishment cell for the refractory; into "Tangier," a larger room, but "dark and stinking," and aptly named; or into a debtors' hall, a third room upon the top story, well provided with light but with unglazed windows, and having as its immediate neighbor "Jack Ketch's kitchen," where that "honest fellow, the hangman," boiled the quarters of those executed and dismembered for high treason. The poor debtors were not denied the indulgence of liquor, if they could only pay for it. In one corner of the stone hall above mentioned was a "tap-house," which felons on this side were secretly permitted to enter, to drink with the debtors, " by which means such wretchedness abound The only inmates of the Newgate prison I am now describing comparatively well off, were those admitted to the press yard; a division composed of "large and spacious rooms" on all the three floors of the prison, and deemed by a legal fiction to be part of the governor's house. That functionary made these, his involuntary lodgers, pay just what he chose. His rates were proportionate to a prisoner's means, and might be anything between twenty and a hundred pounds as a premium, with a high weekly rental, and exorbitant charges for extras besides. But the gentlemen of the press yard, whether State prisoner, aristocratic or opulent criminal, could buy what was denied to their poorer fellows upon the other side: abundant light and air, decent beds, clean and sufficient bedding, and the attendance of servants. |