CHAPTER VII.ESCAPES.

“Without prayer-book or psalm.”

But very probably this indifference to the ordinary and his ghostly counsels arose from a suspicion that he was not very earnest in what he said. The Newgate ordinary, although a sound protestant, was a father confessor to all criminals. Not the least profitable part of his emoluments came from the sale of his account of the execution of convicts, a species of gaol calendar which he compiled from information the condemned men themselves supplied. That the ordinary attached great value to this production is clear from the petition made by one of them, the Reverend Paul Lorraine, to the House of Commons, that his pamphlet might be exempted from the taxlevied upon paper. Several of these accounts have been preserved, and I have referred to them in my chapter, “The gaol calendar.” But it is easy to understand that the ordinary might have been better employed than in compiling these accounts, however interesting they may be, as illustrating the crime of the last century. It is also pretty certain that, although, doubtless, blameless and exemplary men, Newgate chaplains were not always over-zealous in the discharge of their sacred office in regard to the condemned. There were many grim jokes among the prisoners themselves as to the value of the parson’s preaching. Thus in the Reverend Mr. Cotton’s time as ordinary, convicts were said to go out of the world with their ears stuffed full of cotton; and his interpretation of any particular passage in Scripture was said to go in at one ear and out at the other.[126]Hence the intrusion, which must have seemed to them unwarrantable, of dissenting and other amateur preachers, of well-meaning enthusiasts, who devoted themselves with unremitting vigour to the spiritual consolation of all prisoners who would listen to them. It is impossible to speak otherwise than most approvingly of the single-minded, self-sacrificing devotion of such men as Silas Told, the forerunner of Howard, Mrs. Fry, the Gurneys, and other estimable philanthropists. Nevertheless unseemly polemical wrangles appearedto have been the result of this interference, which was better meant than appreciated by the authorized clerical officer. Dr. Doran, referring to the execution of James Sheppard (Jacobite Sheppard, not Jack), gives an account of a conflict of this kind. “Sheppard’s dignity,” he says, “was not even ruffled by the renewed combat in the cart of the Newgate chaplain and the nonjuror. Each sought to comfort and confound the culprit according to his way of thinking. Once more the messengers of peace got to fisticuffs, but as they neared Tyburn the nonjuror kicked Paul[127](the ordinary) out of the cart, and kept by the side of Sheppard till the rope was adjusted. There he boldly, as those Jacobite nonjurors were wont, gave the passive lad absolution for the crime for which he was about to pay the penalty; after which he jumped down to have a better view of the sorry spectacle from the foremost ranks of spectators.”

It was no doubt on account of the insufficiency of the spiritual consolations offered to the condemned that led old Richard Dove, or Dow, to make his endowment for tolling the prisoner’s bell. He bequeathed fifty pounds a year for ever, so Stowe tells us, with this philanthropic purpose. When condemned prisoners were being “drawn to their executions at Tyburn,” a man with a bell stood in the churchyard by St. Sepulchre’s, by the wall next the street, “and so to put them in mind of their death approaching.” Later on these verses took the form of exhortation, of which the following is the substance—

“You prisoners that are within,Who for wickedness and sin,

after many mercies shown you, you are now appointed to die to-morrow in the forenoon: give ear and understand that to-morrow morning the greatest bell of St. Sepulchre’s shall toll for you, in form and manner of a passing bell, as used to be tolled for those who are at the point of death, to the end that all godly people hearing that bell, and knowing it is for you going to your death, may be stirred up heartily to pray to God to bestow His grace and mercy upon you whilst you live. I beseech you, for Jesus Christ his sake, to keep this night in watching and prayer for the salvation of your own souls, whilst there is yet time and place for mercy: as knowing to-morrow you must appear before the judgment-seat of your Creator, there to give an account of all things done in this life, and to suffer eternal torments for your sins, committed against Him, unless upon your hearty and unfeigned repentance you find mercy, through the merits, death, and passion of your only Mediator and Advocate, Jesus Christ, who now sits at the right hand of God, to make intercession for as many of you as penitently return to Him.” In addition to the foregoing there was an admonition pronounced to the condemned criminals as they passed St. Sepulchre’schurch wall on their way to execution, which was to the following effect:—

“All good people pray heartily unto God for those poor sinners who are now going to their death, for whom this great bell doth toll.

“You that are condemned to die, repent with lamentable tears; ask mercy of the Lord for the salvation of your own souls, through the merits, death, and passion of Jesus Christ, who now sits at the right hand of God, to make intercession for as many of you as penitently return unto Him.

“Lord have mercy upon you,Christ have mercy upon you.Lord have mercy upon you,Christ have mercy upon you.”

In times when scaffold and gallows were perpetually crowded, the executioner was a prominent if not exactly a distinguished personage. The office might not be honourable, but it was not without its uses, and the man who filled it was an object of both interest and dread. In some countries the dismal paraphernalia—axe, gibbet, or rack—have been carried by aristocratic families on their arms:[128]in France the post of executioner was long hereditary, regularly transmitted from father to son, for many generations, andenjoyed eventually something of the credit vouchsafed to all hereditary offices. With us the law’s finisher has never been held in great esteem. He was on a par rather with the Romancarnifex, an odious official, who was not suffered to live within the precincts of the city. The only man who would condescend to the work was usually a condemned criminal, pardoned for the very purpose. Derrick, one of the first names mentioned, was sentenced to death, but pardoned by Lord Essex, whom he afterwards executed. Next to him I find that one Bull acted as executioner about 1593. Then came Gregory Brandon, the man who is generally supposed to have decapitated Charles I., and who was commonly addressed by his Christian name only. Through an error Brandon was advanced to the dignity of a squire by Garter, king at arms, and succeeding executioners were generally honoured with the same title. Brandon was followed by his son; young Brandon by Squire Dun, who gave place in his turn to John Ketch, the godfather of all modern hangmen.[129]Jack Ketch did not give entire satisfaction. It is recorded in Luttrell that Ketch was dispossessed in favour of Pascha Roose, a butcher, who served only a few months, when Ketch was restored. After Ketch, John Price was the man, a pardoned malefactor, who could not resist temptation, and was himself executed for murder by some one else. Dennis, the hangman at the Lord George Gordonriots, had also been sentenced to death for complicity, but obtained forgiveness on condition that he should string up his former associates.

They did their work roughly, these early practitioners. Sometimes the rope slipped, or the drop was insufficient, and the hangman had to add his weight, assisted by that of zealous spectators, to the sufferer’s legs to effect strangulation. Now and again the rope broke, and the convict had to be tied up a second time. This happened with Captain Kidd, the notorious pirate, who was perfectly conscious during the time which elapsed before he was again tied up. The friends of another pirate, John Gow, were anxious to put him out of his pain, and pulled his legs so hard, that the rope broke before he was dead, necessitating the repetition of the whole ceremony. Even when the operation had been successfully performed, the hanged man sometimes cheated the gallows. There are several well-authenticated cases of resuscitation after hanging, due doubtless to the rude and clumsy plan of killing. To slide off a ladder or drop from a cart might and generally did produce asphyxia, but there was no instantaneous fracture of the vertebral column as in most executions of modern times. The earliest case on record is that of Tiretta de Balsham, whom Henry III. pardoned in 1264 because she had survived hanging. As she is said to have been suspended from one morning till sunrise the following day, it is difficult to believe the story, which was probably one of many mediævalimpostures. Females, however, appear to have had more such escapes than males. Dr. Plot[130]gives several instances, one that of Anne Green, who in 1650 came to when in the hands of the doctors for dissection; another of Mrs. Cope, hanged at Oxford in 1658, who was suspended for an unusually long period, and afterwards let fall violently, yet she recovered, only to be more effectually hanged next day. A third substantiated case was that of half-hanged Maggie Dickson, who was hanged at Edinburgh in 1728, and whom the jolting of the cart in which her body was removed from the gallows recovered. The jolting was considered so infallible a recipe for bringing to, that it was generally practised by an executed man’s friends in Ireland, where also the friends were in the habit of holding up the convict by his waistband after he had dropped, “so that the rope should not press upon his throat,” the sheriff philanthropically pretending not to see.

Sir William Petty, the eminent surgeon in Queen Anne’s time, owed his scientific fame to his having resuscitated a woman who had been hanged. The body had been begged, as was the custom, for the anatomical lecture; Petty finding symptoms of life, bled her, put her to bed with another woman, and gave her spirits and other restoratives. She recovered, whereupon the students subscribed to endow her with a small portion, and she soon after married and lived for fifteen years. The case of half-hanged Smith was about the date 1705.He was reprieved, but the reprieve arrived after he had been strung up; he was taken down, bled, and brought to. Smith afterwards described his sensations minutely. The weight of his body when he first dropped caused him great pain; his “spirits” forced their way up to his head and seemed to go out at his eyes with a great blaze of light, and then all pain left him. But on his resuscitation the blood and “spirits” forcing themselves into their proper channels gave him such intolerable suffering “that he could have wished those hanged who cut him down.” William Duell, hanged in 1740, was carried to Surgeon’s Hall, to be anatomized; but as his body was being laid out, one of the servants who was washing him perceived that he was still alive. A surgeon bled him, and in two hours he was able to sit up in his chair. Later in the evening he was sent back to Newgate, and his sentence changed to transportation. In 1767, a man who had hanged for 28 minutes was operated on by a surgeon, who made an incision into the wind-pipe. In less than six hours the hanged man revived. It became a constant practice for a condemned man’s friends to carry off the body directly it was cut down to the nearest surgeon’s, who at once operated on it by bleeding, and so forth. The plan was occasionally but rarely successful. It was tried with Dr. Dodd, who was promptly carried to an undertaker’s in Tottenham Court Road and placed in a hot bath; but he had been too well handed for recovery. A report was long current that Fauntleroy the banker, who wasexecuted for forgery, had been resuscitated, but it was quite without foundation.

The Tyburn procession survived till towards the end of the eighteenth century. It had many supporters, Dr. Johnson among the number. “Sir,” he told Boswell, when Tyburn had been discontinued, “executions are intended to draw spectators. If they do not draw spectators they do not answer their purpose. The old method was most satisfactory to all parties: the public was gratified by a procession, the criminal is supported by it. Why is all this to be swept away?” The reason is given by the sheriffs for the year 1784, and is convincing. In a pamphlet published that year it is set forth that the procession to Tyburn was a hideous mockery on the law; the final scene had lost its terrors; it taught no lesson of morality to the beholders, but tended to the encouragement of vice. The day of execution was deemed a public holiday, to which thousands thronged, many to gratify an unaccountable curiosity, more to seize an opportunity for committing fresh crimes. “If we take a view of the supposed solemnity from the time at which the criminal leaves the prison to the last moment of his existence, it will be found to be a period full of the most shocking and disgraceful circumstances. If the only defect were the want of ceremony the minds of the spectators might be supposed to be left in a state of indifference; but when they view the meanness of the apparatus, the dirty cart and ragged harness, surrounded by a sordid

The New Gallows in the Old Bailey.The New Gallows in the Old Bailey.

assemblage of the lowest among the vulgar, their sentiments are inclined more to ridicule than pity. The whole progress is attended with the same effect. Numbers soon thicken into a crowd of followers, and then an indecent levity is heard.” The crowd gathered as it went, the levity increased, “till on reaching the fatal tree it became a riotous mob, and their wantonness of speech broke forth in profane jokes, swearing, and blasphemy.” The officers of the law were powerless to check the tumult; no attention was paid to the convict’s dying speech—“an exhortation to shun a vicious life, addressed to thieves actually engaged in picking pockets.” The culprit’s prayers were interrupted, his demeanour if resigned was sneered at, and only applauded when he went with brazen effrontery to his death. “Thus,” says the pamphlet, “are all the ends of public justice defeated; all the effects of example, the terrors of death, the shame of punishment, are all lost.”

The evils it was hoped might be obviated “were public executions conducted with becoming form and solemnity, if order were preserved and every tendency to disturb it suppressed.” Hence the place of execution was changed in 1784 from “Tyburn to the great area that has lately been opened before Newgate.” The sheriffs were doubtful of their power to make alterations, and consulted the judges, who gave it as their opinion that it was within the sheriffs competence. “With this sanction, therefore,” the sheriffs go on to say, “we have proceeded, and instead ofcarting the criminals through the streets to Tyburn, the sentence of death is executed in the front of Newgate, where upwards of five thousand persons may easily assemble; here a temporary scaffold hung with black is erected, and no other persons are permitted to ascend it than the necessary officers of justice, the clergyman, and the criminal, and the crowd is kept at a proper distance. During the whole time of the execution a funeral bell is tolled in Newgate, and the prisoners are kept in the strictest order.

“We hope this alteration will produce many good effects to the public, to the criminal, and to the prisoners in the gaol. The crowd of spectators will probably be more orderly, because less numerous, and more subject to control by being more confined; and also it will be free from the accession of stragglers, whom a Tyburn procession usually gathers on its passage, and who make the most wanton part of it. Add to this the sentiments which the sight must naturally raise in the breast of every man when exhibited with due solemnity; when the mind is allowed to fix its whole attention upon this scene of awful ceremony, it will feel with becoming dread the pain of disobedience and the terror of example. Nor will the effect of this change be lost upon the criminal: his spirits will be composed by the decorum of the place, and he may prepare his soul for its dissolution by calm meditation, which he could not have exercised under the former noise and disorder;the fearful may gather strength and the hardened yield to remorse from the awe and reverence with which they view their fate. To those in confinement, who feel the heavy hand of justice so near the walls, it must necessarily become a useful lesson of duty and obedience, and a strong admonition to repentance. Example ought from its very nature to be directed principally to the wicked, that they who have most offended may feel most sensibly the certain consequence of offending; in the present instance the application of it is conformable to its original design and to the first principles of justice. It will be administered so as to amend the lives of those prisoners who may escape the fate of their lost companion, and to make those fitter for it who are doomed to suffer.”

I shall return to the subject of executions in the second volume, and shall have to show that the horrors of executions were but little diminished by the substitution of the Old Bailey as the scene. Seventy-four years were to elapse before the wisdom of legislators and the good sense of the public insisted that the extreme penalty of the law should be carried out in strictest privacy within the walls of the gaol.

Escapes from Newgate mostly commonplace—Causes of escapes—Mediæval prison breaking—Scheme of escape in a coffin—Other methods—Changing clothes—Setting fire to prison—Connivance of keepers—Ordinary devices—Quarrying walls, taking up floors, cutting their fetters, &c.—Jack Sheppard—His escapes from Newgate—His capture—Special instructions from Secretary of State for his speedy trial and execution—Burnworth’s attempt—Joshua Dean—Daniel Malden’s two escapes—His personal narrative and account of his recapture—Stratagem and disguise—Female clothing—Mr. Barlow the Jacobite detected in a woman’s dress and taken to the Old Bailey—General Forster’s escape—Mr. Pitt the governor suspended and suspected of complicity—Brigadier Macintosh and fifteen other Jacobites escape—Some retaken—Mr. Ratcliffe gets away—Again in trouble in the ’45 and executed.

ESCAPESfrom Newgate have been numerous enough, but except in a few cases not particularly remarkable. They miss the extraordinary features of celebrated evasions, such as those of Casanova Von Trenck and Latude. The heroes of Newgate, too, were mostly commonplace criminals. There was but little romance about their misdeeds, and they scarcely excite the sympathy which we cannot deny to victims of tyrannical immured under the Piombi or in the Bastille.They lacked aptitude, moreover, or perhaps opportunity, to weave their stories into thrilling narratives, such as have been preserved from the pens of more scholarly prisoners. Hence the chronicle of Newgate is somewhat bald and uninteresting as regards escapes. It rings the changes upon conventional stratagems and schemes. All more or less bear testimony to the cunning and adroitness of the prisoners, but all equally prove the keepers’ carelessness or cupidity. An escape from prison argues always a want of precaution. This may come of mere neglectfulness, or it may be bought at a price. Against bribery there can be no protection, but long experience has established the watchful supervision, which to-day avails more than bolts and bars and blocks of stone. A prisoner can sooner win through a massive wall than elude a keen-eyed warder’s care. Hence in all modern prison construction the old idea of mere solidity has been abandoned, and reliance is placed rather upon the upright intelligence of that which we may term the prison police. The minute inspection of cells and other parts occupied by prisoners, the examination of the prisoners themselves at uncertain times; above all, the intimate acquaintance which those in authority should have of the movements and doings of their charges at all seasons—these are the best safeguards against escapes.

In early days attempts to break prison were generally rude and imperfect. Now and again a rescue was accomplished by force, at risk, however, of alevée of the citizens in vindication of the law. This was the case in 1439, when Phillip Malpas and Robert Marshall, the sheriffs of London, recovered a prisoner who had been snatched from their officers’ hands.[131]Sometimes the escape followed a riotous upheaval of the inmates of Newgate, as when two of the Percies and Lord Egremond were committed to Newgate for an affray in the North Country between them and Lord Salisbury’s sons. Soon after their committal these turbulent aristocrats “broke out of prison and went to the king; the other prisoners took to the leads of the gate, and defended it a long while against the sheriffs and all their officers,” till eventually the aid of the citizens had to be called in. In 1520 a prisoner who was so weak and ill that he had to be let down out of Newgate in a basket broke through the people in the Sessions Hall, and took sanctuary in Grey Friars Church. The rest of the story, as told by Holinshed, states that after staying six or seven days in the church, before the sheriffs could speak with him, “because he would not abjure (the country) and ask a crowner, with violence they took him hence, and cast him again into prison, but the law served not to hang him.”

In the ‘Calendar of State Papers,’ under date 1593, there is a reference to a more ingenious method of compassing the enlargement of a prisoner. The scheme was to convey a living body out of Newgate in a coffin, instead of the dead one for whichit had been prepared. The prisoner was a member of a congregation or secret conventicle, and the coffin had been made by subscription of the whole society, at a cost of four-and-eightpence. The State Papers give the examination of one Christopher Bowman, a goldsmith, on the subject, but unfortunately gives few details as to the meditated escape. The idea was to write a wrong name on the coffin-lid, and no doubt to trust to a corrupt officer within the prison for the substitution of the bodies. I find another curious but brief reference to escapes in the State Papers about this date. It is the endorsement of “the examination of Robert Bellamy, of the manner of his escape from Newgate, from thence to Scotland, and then over to Hamburgh. His arrest in the Palsgrave’s country, and his conveyance to Duke Casimir.”

As time passed the records become fuller, and there is more variety in the operations of the prisoners in their efforts towards freedom. In 1663 a man escaped by his wife changing clothes with him, and got into a hole between two walls in Thomas Court; “but though he had a rug and food, yet the night being wet he wanted beer, and peeping out, he was taken, is brought back prisoner, and will, it is thought, be hanged.” Sometimes the prisoners rose against their keepers, and tried to set the prison on fire, hoping to get out during the confusion. This was repeatedly tried. In 1615, for instance, and again in 1692, when the prison was actually alight; but the fire was discovered just as certain of the prisoners were in theact of breaking open the prison gates. Sometimes no violence was used, but the prisoner walked off with the connivance of his keeper. This was what occurred with Sir Nicholas Poyntz, who escaped between Newgate and the King’s Bench, on the road to the latter prison, to which he was being transferred. The references to this case throw some light upon the interior of Newgate at the time (1623). Poyntz had been arrested for killing a man in a street brawl. He had been committed first to the King’s Bench, whence on pretence of his having excited a mutiny in that prison, he was transferred to Newgate, and lodged in a dungeon without bed or light, and compelled to lie in a coffin. All this he sets forth in a petition to the high and mighty prince, George Duke of Buckingham, for whose use he paid the sum of £500 to Sir Edward Villiers, and prays that he may have leave to sue out his Habeas Corpus, or have back his money. No notice having been taken of this appeal, he made shift for himself in the manner described. He was soon afterwards retaken, as appears from other petitions from the under-sheriffs, against whom actions had been commenced for allowing the escape.

Another somewhat similar case is reported in 1635, where the deputy-keeper of Newgate, Edward James by name, was attached and committed to the Fleet for allowing Edward Lunsford, a prisoner in his custody, to go at large. Lunsford was concerned with Lewis and others in a foul attempt to kill SirThomas Pelham on a Sunday going to church, and committed under an order of the Star Chamber to Newgate, where he lay for a year. His imprisonment was from time to time relaxed by James: first that he might prosecute his suit to a gentlewoman worth £10,000; and afterwards on account of the prosecutions against him in the Star Chamber; ultimately on account of his lameness and sickness James gave him liberty for the recovery of his health, and he was allowed to lodge out of prison, his father being his surety, and promising that he should be produced when required. But he abused this kindness, and instead of showing himself at regular periods to the keeper, made off altogether. All this is stated in a petition from James, who prays for enlargement on bail that he may pursue and recapture Lunsford. “Lunsford is so lame that he can only go in a coach, and though it is reported that he has been at Gravelines and Cologne, yet he has been seen in town within ten days.” This petition, which is in the State Papers, is underwritten that the Attorney-General be directed to prosecute the petitioner in the Star Chamber, and upon it are Secretary Windebank’s notes; to the effect that James had received a bribe of £14 to allow Lunsford and his companions to go abroad without a warrant, and one of them to escape. Various sentences were proposed. Lord Cottington suggested that James should pay a fine of £1000 to the king, imprisonment during pleasure, to be bound to good behaviour when he comes out, andacknowledgments. Secretary Windebank added that he should be put from his place; the Earl Marshall suggested standing with a paper in Westminster Hall, and prosecution of the principal keeper; Archbishop Laud concluded with whipping, and that the chief keeper should be sent for to the Council Board.

The ordinary methods of attempting escape were common enough in Newgate. Quarrying into the walls, breaking up floors, sawing through bars, and picking locks were frequent devices to gain release. In 1679 several prisoners picked out the stones of the prison walls, and seven who had been committed to Newgate for burglary escaped. No part of the prison was safe from attack, provided only the prisoners had leisure and were unobserved, both of which were almost a matter of course. Now it is a hole through the back of a chimney in a room occupied by the prisoner, now a hole through a wall into a house adjoining the prison. Extraordinary perseverance is displayed in dealing with uncompromising material. The meanest and seemingly most insufficient weapons served. Bars are sawn through like butter;[132]prisoners rid themselves of their irons as though they were old rags; one man takes a bar out of the chapel window and gets away over the house-tops; a gang working in associationsaw through eight bars, “each as thick as a man’s wrist, leaving enough iron to keep the bars together, and fitting up the notches with dirt and iron-rust to prevent discovery;” but they are detected in time, and for proper security are all chained to the floor. Another lot are discovered “working with large iron crows,” meaning to get through the floor. On this occasion “a great lot of saws, files, pins, and other tools” were found among the prisoners, plainly revealing the almost inconceivable license and carelessness prevailing. Again, two men under sentence of death found means to break out of Newgate “through walls six feet in thickness.” They were brothers, and one of them being ill, he was out of humanity removed from his cell to an upper room, where the other was suffered to attend him. As they were both bricklayers by trade, they easily worked through the wall in a night and so escaped. They were, however, retaken and hanged. The ease with which irons are slipped is shown repeatedly. One man having attempted to escape was as usual chained to the floor, yet he managed to get himself loose from an iron collar in which his neck was fastened and his hands extended. This man, when he got himself disengaged from the floor, had the resolution to wring the collar from his neck by fixing it between two of the bars of the gaol window, and thus by main strength he broke it in two. Others cut through their handcuffs and shackles two or three times running with the ease of the Davenport brothers freeing themselves from bonds.

Jack Sheppard’s escapes from Newgate are historical, although much embellished by the novelist’s art. Sheppard’s success was really marvellous, but it may be explained to some extent by his indomitable pluck, his ingenuity, and his personal activity. As he was still quite a lad when he was hanged, he could have been barely twenty-two at the time of his escapes.[133]He is described as of a lithe, spare figure and of great strength. From his early apprenticeship to a carpenter he had much skill and knowledge in the handling of tools. He first became celebrated as a prison-breaker by his escapes from the St. Giles’ Round House and from the New Prison. His first escape, from the condemned hold of Newgate, where he lay under sentence of death, was more a proof of ingenuity than of prowess. The usual neglect of proper precautions allowed two female visitors to have access to him and to supply him with tools, probably a file and saw. With these he partly divided a spike on the top of the hatch which led from the condemned hold. Upon a second visit from his fair friends he broke off the spike, squeezed his head and shoulders through the opening, the women then pulling him through. How he got past the lodge where theturnkeys were carousing is not recorded, but it was probably in female disguise. His second escape following his recapture, and a second sentence of death, was much more remarkable. It was, however, only rendered possible by the negligence of his keepers. They visited him at dinner-time, and after a careful examination of his irons, having satisfied themselves that he was quite secure, left him for the day. Released thus from all surveillance, time was all that Sheppard needed to effect his escape.

He had been chained to the floor by heavy irons, which were rivetted into a staple fixed in the ground. Various fancy sketches exist of the means of restraint employed, but none can be relied upon as accurate or authentic. Some irons still in existence at Newgate may be akin to those by which Sheppard was secured, but they are hardly the identical fetters. Sheppard was also handcuffed. These he is said to have rid himself of by holding the connecting chain firmly between his teeth, squeezing his fingers as small as possible, and drawing the manacles off. “He next twisted the gyves,[134]the heavy gyves, round and round, and partly by main strength, partly by a dexterous, well-applied jerk, snapped asunder the central link by which they were attached to the padlock.” He was now free to move about, but thebasils still confined his ancles, and he dragged at every step the long connecting chain. He drew up the basils on his calf, and removing his stockings used them to tie up the chains to his legs. He first attempted to climb up the chimney, but his upward progress was impeded by an iron bar that crossed the aperture. He descended, therefore, and from the outside with a piece of his broken chain set to work to pick out the stones and bricks so as to release the bar. This he accomplished and thus obtained an implement about an inch square and nearly a yard long, which was of the utmost service to him in his further operations. The room in which he had been confined was a part of the so-called “castle”; above it was the “Red-room,” and into this he effected an entrance by climbing the chimney and making a fresh hole on the level of the floor above. In the “Red-room” he found a rusty nail, with which he tried to pick the lock, but failing in this, he wrenched off the plate that covered the bolt and forced the bolt back with his fingers. This red-room door opened on to a dark passage leading to the chapel. There was a door in it which he opened by making a hole in the wall and pushing the bolt back, and so reached the chapel. Thence he got into an entry between the chapel and the lower leads. “The door of this entry was very strong,[135]and fastened with a great lock. What was worse, the night had now overtaken him,and he was forced to work in the dark. However, in half an hour, by the help of the great nail, the chapel spike, and the iron bar, he forced off the box of the lock and opened the door, which led him to another yet more difficult, for it was not only locked, but barred and bolted. When he had tried in vain to make this lock and box give way he wrenched the fillet from the main post of the door and the box and staples came off with it.... There was yet another door betwixt him and the lower leads; but it being bolted within side he opened it easily, and mounting to the top of it he got over the wall and so to the upper leads.” All that remained for him to do was to descend. There was a house adjoining, that of Mr. Bird, a turner, on to which he might drop, but he deemed the leap too dangerous, and coolly resolved to retrace his steps to the prison chamber, from whence he had so laboriously issued, and secure his blanket. Having accomplished this risky service, he returned to the leads, made fast his blanket, slid down it, entered the turner’s house by a garret window, and eventually, after some delay and no little danger of detection, got away down into the street.

Mr. Austin, the Newgate turnkey, who was specially in charge of Sheppard, and who, on unbolting the castle strong room next morning found that his prisoner was gone, was amazed beyond measure. The whole of the prison warders ran up, and at sight of the cartloads of rubbish and débris “stood like men deprived of their senses.” After their first surprisethey got their keys to open the neighbouring strong rooms, hoping that he might not have got clean and entirely away. It was not difficult to follow his track. Six great doors, one of which it was said had not been opened for seven years, had been forced, and their massive locks, screws, and bolts lay broken in pieces and scattered about the gaol. Last of all they came to the blanket hanging pendant from the leads, and it was plain that Sheppard was already far beyond pursuit.

It may be interesting to mention here that he was recaptured, mainly through his own negligence and drunkenness, within a fortnight of his escape. In the interval, after ridding himself of his irons, he had committed several fresh robberies, the most successful being a burglary at a pawnbroker’s, where he furnished himself with the fine suit, sword, and snuff-box he possessed at the time of his arrest. “When he was brought back to the jail,” says a contemporary account, “he was very drunk, carry’d himself insolently, defy’d the keepers to hold him with all their irons, art, and skill.” He was by this time quite a notorious personage. “Nothing contributes so much to the entertainment of the town at present,” says another journal of the time, “as the adventures of the house-breaker and gaol-breaker, John Sheppard. ’Tis thought the keepers of Newgate have got above £200 already by the crowds who daily flock to see him.” “On Wednesday several noblemen visited him.” He sat for his portrait to Sir James Thornhill, the eminentpainter,[136]and the likeness was reproduced in a mezzotint which had a large circulation. Seven different histories or narratives of his adventures were published and illustrated with numerous engravings. His importance was further increased by the special instructions issued to the Attorney-General to bring him to immediate trial. A letter from the Duke of Newcastle, then Secretary of State, is preserved in the Hardwicke MSS., wherein that great official condescends to convey the king’s commands to Sir Philip Yorke that Sheppard, having made two very extraordinary escapes, and being a very dangerous person, should be forthwith brought to trial, “to the end that execution may without delay be awarded against him.” This letter is dated the 6th November; he was arraigned on the 10th, found guilty, and sentenced the same day. His execution took place on the 16th November, just one month after his escape. He exhibited greatcoolness and effrontery during his trial. He told the Court that if they would let his handcuffs be put on he by his art would take them off before their faces. The most numerous crowds ever seen in London paid testimony to his notoriety as he passed through the streets; and Westminster Hall had not been so densely thronged in the memory of man as at the time of his trial. No pains were spared to ensure his safe custody in Newgate. He was chained to the floor in the condemned hold, and constantly watched night and day by two guards. But up to the last Sheppard entertained schemes for eluding justice. He had obtained a pen-knife by some means or other, and he had intended to cut his cords while actually in the cart going to Tyburn, throw himself in amongst the crowd at a place called Little Turnstile, and run for his life through the narrow passage along which the mounted officers could not follow him. But this plan was nullified by the discovery of the knife on his person just before he left Newgate. It is said that he had also hopes of resuscitation, and that friends had agreed to cut him down promptly, and to apply the usual restoratives. This scheme, if it had ever existed, was probably rendered abortive by the proceedings of the mob after the execution.[137]

Sheppard had many imitators, but few equals. Possibly the ease with which he broke prison led to an increase in precautions, and I can find no other cases of evasion in Jack Sheppard’s manner. Thereare several instances of attempted escapes by the reverse process, not over the walls, but through them or along the sewers. Burnworth, while in Newgate in 1726,[138]projected a plan of escape. He got an iron crow, and assisted by certain prisoners, pulled stones out of the walls, while others sung psalms to put the turnkeys off their guard. Next day the officers came to remove five convicts awaiting execution, but found the room so full of stones and rubbish that some hours elapsed before the prisoners could be got out. Burnworth made another but equally ineffective attempt next day. Joshua Dean, capitally convicted in 1731 for counterfeiting stamps, formed a design with seven other prisoners awaiting transportations to the plantations to break gaol. They found means to get down into the common sewer no doubt by taking up the floor. Thence four of them reached a vault under a house in Fleet Lane, and so into the shop through which three got off, but the fourth was secured and carried back to Newgate. The fate of two at least of the remaining three was not known till long afterwards. In 1736, a certain Daniel Malden, who had already escaped once, again got out of Newgate by sawing his chains near the staple, by which they were fastened to the wall of the condemned hold, and getting through the brickwork, dropped into the common sewer. “Several persons were employed to search after him, but to no purpose, though the chains about him weighed nearly a hundred pounds.” Malden was not discovered, but the searchers came upon “the bodies of two persons who had been smothered in trying to escape.” These were no doubt two of those mentioned above. This method of evasion continued to be practised till long afterwards. In 1785 two convicts cut a hole in the floor of their cell, and got into the common sewer to make their escape. “But wading till they were almost suffocated, they at length reached the gully-hole, and calling for help, were taken out alive, but too weak to walk, and carried to their former quarters.”

Daniel Malden, who twice, in 1735 and 1736, escaped from the condemned hold in Newgate in a manner little less surprising, although less notorious than Jack Sheppard, had been a man-of-war’s-man, and served in several of her Majesty’s ships. After his discharge he took to burglary and street-robberies, for which he was presently arrested and sentenced to suffer death. While lying in the condemned hold, on the very morning of his execution he effected his escape. A previous occupant of the same cell in the condemned hold had told him that a certain plank was loose in the floor, which he found to be true. Accordingly, between ten and eleven on the night of October 21st, 1736, before execution, he began to work, and raised up the plank with the foot of a stool that was in the cell. He soon made a hole through the arch under the floor big enough for his body to pass through, and so dropped into a cell below from which another convict had previously escaped. The window-bar ofthis cell remained cut just as it had been left after this last escape, and Malden easily climbed through with all his irons still on him into the press-yard. When there he waited a bit, till, seeing “all things quiet,” he pulled off his shoes and went softly up into the chapel, where he observed a small breach in the wall. He enlarged it and so got into the penthouse. Making his way through the penthouse he passed on to the roof. At last, using his own words, “I got upon the top of the cells by the ordinary’s house, having made my way from the top of the chapel upon the roofs of the houses, and all round the chimneys of the cells over the ordinary’s house”; from this he climbed along the roofs to that of an empty house, and finding one of the garret windows open, entered it and passed down three pairs of stairs into the kitchen, where he put on his shoes again, “which I had made shift to carry in my hand all the way I came, and with rags and pieces of my jacket wrapped my irons close to my legs as if I had been gouty or lame; then I got out at the kitchen window, up one pair of stairs into Phœnix Court, and from thence through the streets to my home in Nightingale Lane.”

Here he lay till six a.m., then sent for a smith who knocked off his irons, “and took them away with him for his pains.” Then he sent for his wife, who came to him; but while they were at breakfast, hearing a noise in the yard he made off, and took refuge at Mrs. Newman’s, “the sign of the Blackboy, Millbank; there I was kept private and locked up four daysalone and no soul by myself.” Venturing out on the fifth day he heard they were in pursuit of him, and again took refuge, this time in the house of a Mrs. Franklin. From thence he despatched a shoemaker with a message to his wife, and letters to two gentlemen in the city. But the messenger betrayed him to the Newgate officers, and in about an hour “the house was beset. I hid myself,” says Malden,[139]“behind the shutters in the yard, and my wife was drinking tea in the house. The keepers seeing her, cried, ‘Your humble servant, madam; where is your spouse?’ I heard them, and knowing I was not safe, endeavoured to get over a wall, when some of them espyed me, crying, ‘Here he is!’ upon which they immediately laid hold of me, carried me back to Newgate, put me into the old condemned hold as the strongest place, and stapled me down to the floor.”

Nothing daunted by this first failure he resolved to attempt a second escape. A fellow-prisoner conveyed a knife to him, and on the night of June 6th, 1737, he began to saw the staple to which he was fastened in two. His own story is worth quoting.

“I worked through it with much difficulty, and with one of my irons wrenched it open and got it loose. Then I took down, with the assistance of my knife, a stone in front of the seat in the corner of the condemned hold: when I had got the stone down, I found there was a row of strong iron bars under the seat through which I could not get, so Iwas obliged to work under these bars and open a passage below them. To do this I had no tool but my old knife, and in doing the work my nails were torn off the ends of my fingers, and my hands were in a dreadful, miserable condition. At last I opened a hole just big enough for me to squeeze through, and in I went head foremost, but one of my legs, my irons being on, stuck very fast in the hole, and by this leg I hung in the inside of the vault with my head downward for half an hour or more. I thought I should be stifled in this sad position, and was just going to call out for help when, turning myself up, I happened to reach the bars. I took fast hold of them by one hand, and with the other disengaged my leg to get it out of the hole.”

When clear he had still a drop of some thirty feet, and to break his fall he fastened a piece of blanket he had about him to one of the bars, hoping to lower himself down; but it broke, and he fell with much violence into a hole under the vault, “my fetters causing me to fall very heavy, and here I stuck for a considerable time.” This hole proved to be a funnel, “very narrow and straight; I had torn my flesh in a terrible manner by the fall, but was forced to tear myself much worse in squeezing through.” He stuck fast and could not stir either backward or forward for more than half an hour. “But at last, what with squeezing my body, tearing my flesh off my bones, and the weight of my irons, which helped me a little here, I worked myself through.”

The funnel communicated with the main sewer, in which, as well as he could, he cleaned himself. “My shirt and breeches were torn in pieces, but I washed them in the muddy water, and walked through the sewer as far as I could, my irons being very heavy on me and incommoding me much.” Now a new danger overtook him: his escape had been discovered and its direction. Several of the Newgate runners had therefore been let into the sewer to look for him. “And here,” he says, “I had been taken again had I not found a hollow place in the side of the brick-work into which I crowded myself, and they passed by me twice while I stood in that nook.” He remained forty-eight hours in the sewer, but eventually got out in a yard “against the pump in Town Ditch, behind Christ’s Hospital.” Once more he narrowly escaped detection, for a woman in the yard saw and suspected him to be after no good. However, he was suffered to go free, and got as far as Little Britain, where he came across a friend who gave him a pot of beer and procured a smith to knock off his fetters.

Malden’s adventures after this were very varied. He got first to Enfield, when some friends subscribed forty-five shillings to buy him a suit of clothes at Rag Fair. Thence he passed over to Flushing, where he was nearly persuaded to take foreign service, but he refused and returned to England in search of his wife. Finding her, the two wandered about the country taking what work they could find. While at Canterbury, employed in the hop-fields, he was

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