London's Bastille E-Book

Stephen Haddelsey

• Herausgeber: The History Press
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 458

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

'London's Bastille is both fascinating and thoroughly enjoyable.' - Fiona Rule, author of The Worst Street in London In 1794, Britain's newest and much-heralded prison opened its gates in Clerkenwell, north London. Built on the principles laid down by John Howard, the most vocal and committed prison reformer of the eighteenth century, the new Coldbath Fields House of Correction was intended to be a flagship for the humane improvements that Howard championed. And yet, within just a few years, it had become notorious for its cruelty and injustice. The burgeoning of British radicalism following the French Revolution, the repressive measures introduced in response by Prime Minister William Pitt, and the appointment of the barbaric Thomas Aris as prison governor all coincided to ensure that this 'state-of-the-art' facility would become not merely the foremost political prison of its age, but also the most infamous because of the abuses practised within its walls – abuses to which the government and the magistracy systematically turned a blind eye. In London's Bastille, Stephen Haddelsey expertly explores the history of the prison and the stories of its inmates, from thieves and prostitutes to political reformers and naval mutineers, to provide an extraordinary new insight into the forces of radical change that shook Britain to its core in the final years of the eighteenth century.

Leseprobe

The only contemporary representation of a cell in Coldbath Fields, this etching from 1818 depicts Thomas Ranson (1784–1828), who had been arrested for forgery. His cell was probably one of those usually allocated to state prisoners. (Heritage Image Partnership Ltd/Alamy Stock Photo)

Out of the way we went, and then we foundWhat ’twas to tread upon forbidden ground:And let them that come after have a care,Lest heedlesness makes them, as we, to fare:Lest they, for trespassing, his prisoners are,Whose Castle’s Doubting, and whose name’s Despair.

John Bunyan, The Pilgrim’s Progress (1678)

Persons obnoxious to a minister or a magistrate, may be committed to such a prison, and never be heard of more. Like the prisoners of the late Bastille of France, they may disappear from among their friends, and be forgotten.

Sir Richard Phillips, A Letter to the Livery of London (1808)

First published 2025

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© Stephen Haddelsey, 2025

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Contents

Foreword by Lord Ken Macdonald, KC

Prologue

1 ‘The Cries of the Miserable’: Howard’s Call to Reform

2 ‘Some Alteration Should Be Made’: Design and Build

3 ‘Diversified in Disposition and Pursuits’: The Governor and His Wards

4 ‘Our Jacks Will Grumble’: Naval Mutinies at Spithead and the Nore

5 ‘Disaffected Persons’: The Advocates of Radical Reform

6 ‘The Heaviest Penalty’: Radicals in the House of Correction

7 ‘Everybody Knows the Bastille’: Burdett’s Campaign

8 ‘Disgraceful to Humanity’: Debates and Inquiries

9 ‘An Improper Place of Confinement’: The Royal Commission

10 ‘The Ambition of an Honest Man’: The Middlesex Elections

11 ‘He Never Did Feel Shame’: The Fall of Thomas Aris

12 After Aris

Notes

Bibliography

Acknowledgements

Foreword

After decades in which the UK’s main political parties have shamelessly weaponised criminal justice for electoral gain, our prisons are full to bursting once more. Successive governments have created new offences, raised sentences, reduced remission and increased tariffs. Meanwhile, ministers, cowering before a full-throated media, use inflammatory language to pressure judges and the parole board – and always in one direction: heavier terms of imprisonment, and longer sentences to be served.

The result has been an epic failure of public policy. We have the largest prison population in Western Europe, combined with the worst recidivism rates. Emergency release schemes, which are regularly forced upon the government by prison overcrowding, surely put the public at risk as inmates who have received no rehabilitation or training are unceremoniously dumped back into the community, frequently to reoffend.

Conditions inside our gaols, too, are a dehumanising disgrace, and successive inspection reports, detailing the filth and squalor of much of the British prison estate, should be a source of national shame. Rather, as though they were operating a brewery without manufacturing any bottles, Labour and Conservative governments have drunkenly raised the flow of inmates without creating any new spaces to house them. Frightening the public for political gain is one thing, refusing to spend public money to meet the consequences of your fearmongering is quite another.

But we should not be surprised that building new prisons is low on any government’s wish list. It is shockingly expensive, with each new cell in a newly created gaol requiring around £630,000 of capital expenditure. And for legions of prisoners, those who are not dangerous, those who are addicts, mentally ill or just a nuisance, this huge cost is largely wasted. Studies show that 25 per cent of adult prisoners go on to reoffend after release. For young offenders the figure is closer to 30 per cent. And for adults released from sentences of less than two years, no less than 50 per cent reoffend.

On the other hand, those committing similar offences who are put on community sentences outside prison have lower recidivism rates than their gaoled counterparts. Why should this be surprising? As a notably right-wing Conservative home secretary said many years ago ‘prison is an expensive way of making bad people worse’.

In this remarkable book, Stephen Haddelsey reminds us that none of this is new. Just as we clash bitterly over social policy in the twenty-first century, so the years of ‘London’s Bastille’ raged with debate between those disgusted by the appalling conditions which inmates suffered in that terrible place, and those inclined through self-interest, venality or political convenience to condone or to conceal the barbarism within its walls. Then, too, Parliament rang with arguments about diet, violence, dirt and overcrowding.

But this illuminating work is about more than a single prison in nineteenth-century London. Rather, through the lens of a contested penal policy, Dr Haddelsey paints a wonderfully compelling portrait of the great, centuries-long struggle in British public life between reformers and reactionaries, between the desire for social progress and a concomitant drive to protect the present. The cast of characters could not be more vivid: the repulsive warden of the gaol, Thomas Aris, the great reformers John Howard and Francis Burdett who fought for years to mitigate its brutality, the incurious and complicit magistracy of Middlesex, the callous and imperious High Court judges who consistently beat back improvements in the lives of the inmates, and the politicians more invested in stability and the maintenance of social hierarchy than in justice for the poor.

It is to be hoped that this timely reminder that penal reform has a long and stony history will not deter reformers of the future from emulating the great radical heroes, surely now vindicated, of this colourful, and frequently cruel, past.

Lord Ken Macdonald, KCPresident, The Howard League for Penal ReformLondon, March 2025

Prologue

On the morning of Wednesday 28 November 1798, two gentlemen might have been observed mounting the steps of a richly accoutred four-in-hand standing before the fashionable frontage of No. 76 Welbeck Street, Westminster. Once they were safely aboard and rugs placed across their knees by an attentive footman, the liveried coachman whipped up the horses and expertly guided the equipage into the busy streets of the capital.1

Although his destination lay some 2 miles to the north-east, keen to avoid scratching the coach’s paintwork or becoming hopelessly entangled among the wagons, handcarts and pedestrians in the narrower thoroughfares, he headed south, following the course of the old River Tyburn (its murky waters now safely culverted), down Mary Le Bone Lane to turn east along Oxford Street, with its gleaming shopfronts and wide pavements, and then Camden High Street. Passing St Giles’s church on the right, the coachman and his passengers would have been uncomfortably aware that for all the grandeur of Henry Flitcroft’s Palladian-style edifice they were venturing dangerously close to the noisome alleys and lanes of the St Giles rookery, known, according to one contemporary commentator, as the haunt of ‘the lowest of rogues, the lowest of harlots, and, in a word, the worst of mankind’,2 and where murder, prostitution, thievery and grinding poverty were rife.

Fortunately, no footpads or highwaymen barred their way – deterred perhaps by the biting cold – and the coach very quickly entered Broad Street and then climbed High Holborn, passing Lincoln’s Inn and Chancery Lane on the right. At the Holborn Bars – two substantial wooden posts set upright beside the road to mark the western boundary of the City of London – they turned left to head due north up the famously dirty Gray’s Inn Lane, skirting the ancient walls of Gray’s Inn and its rather more salubrious gardens so beloved of Sir Francis Bacon, who had planted many of its elm trees during his period of residence. Speeding past the few remaining dwellings dating from the reign of Elizabeth I, ‘looking like houses built of cards, one storey projecting over another’,3 the coach finally turned right along narrow Elm Lane before crossing Mount Pleasant to reach Coldbath Square, where the coachman reined in his horses.

He had drawn up in front of an intimidating stone gateway, its reinforced wooden gates painted green and embellished by a pair of door-knockers ‘large as pantomime masks’, a letter box and a grated Judas hole, no bigger than a domestic gridiron. The stone quoins on either side of the gate displayed great sculpted fetters, impressive enough, according to one observer, ‘to frighten any sinful passer-by back into the paths of rectitude’,4 and overhead, like the sword of Damocles, hung the three seaxes of the County of Middlesex. On either side stretched tall brick walls, high enough to prevent all possibility of seeing what lay behind them, and topped by a vicious-looking chevaux de frize resembling ‘some giant hundred-bladed penknife’. Having arrived at this gloomy spot, the footman clambered down from his perch beside the coachman and announced to the passengers within that they had arrived at Clerkenwell, a down-at-heel neighbourhood known for its poor housing – much of it inhabited by men and women scratching a living manufacturing components for the City’s booming watchmaking industry5 – for the now-redundant smallpox hospital and for the Coldbath Fields House of Correction, at whose entrance they had stopped.

Ordering the footman to summon the prison’s porter and to show him an admission pass obtained from the Middlesex magistrates, the coach’s occupants descended to the street, where they shook hands with a third well-wrapped gentleman who had been awaiting their arrival, stamping his feet and clapping his gloved hands in a vain attempt to keep warm. Gentlemen of rank, leading lights in Georgian society, two possessed of immense wealth, and two of them sitting MPs, these men could expect that their guide around the prison would be no less a person than its governor, Thomas Aris. What they would find within its walls – neglect, starvation, vicious beatings and sexual exploitation – would horrify them, and their attempts to publicise and remedy the injustices and crimes not only countenanced but actively defended by the government itself would become the cause célèbre of the last years of the eighteenth century, and make Coldbath Fields notorious for its cruelty and injustice. Little wonder, then, that the prison had already come to be known locally as ‘the Bastille’, after the infamous Parisian fortress, or, in the prisoners’ parlance, ‘the Steel’.

1

‘The Cries of the Miserable’:HOWARD’S CALL TO REFORM

Unlike England’s other infamous prisons, such as the Marshalsea and Newgate, or the original Bastille in Paris, London’s Bastille was not an ancient structure, its origins lost in the mists of time, and some, at least, of its flaws the product of long years of neglect and decay; in fact, at the time of its greatest notoriety, it had been standing for less than a decade. Moreover, its design did not proceed from the ‘heat oppress’d brain’ of a latter-day Torquemada, but came into being as a direct result of the work of one of the most enlightened and dedicated campaigners for prison reform in English history, John Howard.

Born in Enfield in 1726, Howard was the son of a wealthy upholsterer and warehouseman. The elder Howard intended that his son and namesake should follow him into business and apprenticed him to a grocer in Watling Street; but the young Howard had other ideas, and on his father’s death in 1742 he immediately bought up his indentures and thereby freed himself from what he saw as a lifetime of drudgery. While he may have disagreed with his father’s plans for his future, he had, however, inherited his unbending Calvinist faith and despite being a wealthy man at sixteen, and free from strict parental oversight, he showed no inclination to live a wild, dissolute life; instead he spent two years on the Grand Tour and then settled down to a life of quiet reflection and study in an attempt to fill the gaps in an education rendered wholly inadequate by his father’s insistence on tutors more remarkable for their faith than for their learning or abilities as teachers.

In January 1756, Howard decided to visit Portugal and the seeds of his interest in prison reform are perhaps to be found in his first-hand experience of a French gaol which he obtained when a French privateer overhauled the Lisbon packet in which he had sailed from England. Transferred to the French ship at the point of a cutlass, the packet’s passengers and crew reached Brest two days later, where they spent a week in a filthy dungeon of the Château de Brest, sleeping on vermin-ridden straw and surviving on a meagre allowance of water and on a joint of mutton which they gnawed in turns as their captors refused to permit them the use of a knife.

As a wealthy man clearly able to pay a ransom, Howard’s situation improved when his captors moved him to lodgings in Carhaix, some 30 miles inland, and allowed him out on parole, but it was not until March that he returned to England, having been exchanged for a French officer. Home at last, his first act was to visit the Commissioners for Sick and Wounded Seamen to whom he reported all that he had seen and endured while a prisoner in France. The commissioners promptly despatched a strongly worded protest to the French court and Howard’s fellow captives were swiftly released. With this success, Howard probably believed that his association with prisons had come to an end, and for the next sixteen years he dedicated himself to improving his estate in the Bedfordshire village of Cardington, to marriage and fatherhood, to charitable works and to travelling both at home and abroad. Then, in the autumn of 1772, he was appointed to the post of High Sheriff of Bedfordshire – and his life’s work could begin at last.

A part of Howard’s duties as High Sheriff was to greet and entertain the peripatetic judges of the courts of assize on their entry into the county town of Bedford, 4 miles from his home in Cardington. But, not satisfied with merely wining and dining the judges, he chose also to attend their hearings in the stone Sessions House on the south side of St Paul’s Square, and here he first became aware of the injustice being meted out on a routine basis. In particular, and according to his own account, ‘the circumstance which excited me to activity’ was:

the seeing some, who by the verdict of juries were declared not guilty; some, on whom the grand jury did not find such an appearance of guilt as subjected them to trial; and some, whose prosecutors did not appear against them; after having been confined for months, dragged back to gaol, and locked up again till they should pay sundry fees to the gaoler, the clerk of assize, &c.1

In other words, what most shocked him was that individuals who had been found guilty of no crime or misdemeanour were routinely confined until they paid off debts they had incurred while being held in prison awaiting their trials: debts made up solely of the charges levied by gaolers for providing the very necessaries of life, including rent for rooms and bedding, the provision of cleaning materials, and the sale of food and alcohol. In Bedfordshire, at the very least each prisoner would be required to pay 15s 4d to the gaoler, and a further 2s to the turnkey in order to obtain their liberty, no matter what the result of their trial.

To Howard it seemed obvious that the most effective method to end such a travesty was to pay gaolers and turnkeys a suitable salary, thereby eradicating their reliance for a substantial portion of their income upon commercial transactions conducted within the prison. He wrote to the county’s Justices of the Peace suggesting this approach, only to be told that while the bench ‘were properly affected with the grievance, and willing to grant the relief desired’,2 they must first be satisfied that a precedent existed for making ratepayers liable for such costs. At this juncture, Howard might have written to the magistrates of other counties to obtain the required information but he chose, instead, to embark upon a fact-finding tour, his interest no doubt spurred by the knowledge that in the eyes of the law as High Sheriff he was ultimately responsible for the conduct of the county’s gaolers, who were deemed to be his servants.3

During the course of the following months, he travelled far and wide and entirely at his own expense, touring the prisons of Great Britain and no doubt causing great consternation to many a gaoler as he poked his great beak of a nose into every murky corner of their hitherto sacrosanct fiefdoms. Because, inevitably, his researches quickly expanded far beyond the establishment of a precedent for the salarying of gaolers, Howard himself admitted that ‘the work grew upon me insensibly’4 until it swelled to cover every aspect of prison life: from fees to food, from security to sewerage and from punishments to prayer times. ‘Hearing the cries of the miserable,’ he later wrote, ‘I devoted my time to their relief. In order to procure it, I made it my business to collect materials, the authenticity of which could not be disputed.’5

Of course, Howard was not alone in advocating prison reform and during his year as High Sheriff of Bedfordshire, MPs laid a Bill before the House of Commons which sought to provide ‘Clergymen to officiate in the Gaols and Places of Confinement for Debt, within that Part of Great Britain called England’; the Bill passed both houses of Parliament and received royal assent in June 1773.6 But what differentiated Howard from other reformers was his conviction that his work was ‘God-given’: that it would be criminal for him to enjoy his ‘ease and leisure in the neglect of an opportunity offered me by Providence’.7 This belief led him, despite a history of physical weakness and ill health, to travel thousands of miles, mostly in a post-chaise but often on horseback, criss-crossing the country from Newgate to Newcastle, Penzance to Preston, Canterbury to Cardiff, Bristol to Berwick, inspecting every Bridewell, county gaol and debtors’ prison, from large, if antiquated, complexes like the Marshalsea, to castle dungeons and to squalid single rooms such as the Bridewell at Horsham in Sussex, where multiple prisoners spent all day and all night locked in a space just 10ft by 6½ft by 6¼ft.

Howard admitted that it was not ‘without some apprehensions of danger’ that he undertook his crusade,8 and he had very good cause to be anxious. Chief among the risks he faced was epidemic typhus – known as ‘gaol-fever’ or ‘gaol distemper’ – which had been endemic in Britain’s prisons for centuries. The first reported outbreak was that of 1414 which claimed, according to John Stowe, ‘the Gaylers of Newgate and Ludgate … and prisoners in Newgate to the number of 64’.9 Writing in 1548, the chronicler Edward Hall describes another eruption at the assizes held in Cambridge in 1522 that spread like wildfire through the packed court so that not only prisoners, but justices, lawyers, bailiffs and witnesses ‘toke such an infeccion, whether it wer of the sauor of the prisoners, or of the filthe of the house, that many gentlemen … and many other honest yomen thereof died, and all most all whiche were there present, were sore sicke and narrowly escaped with their liues’.10

But this death toll was as nothing when compared with that at Oxford’s ‘Black Assizes’ of 1577. In The Haven of Health, the physician Thomas Cogan tells us that between 6 July and 12 August over 500 died, including two judges, the Lord Chief Baron, a sergeant-at-law, the High Sheriff, five justices, four councillors-at-law, an attorney, plus 300 townsmen and upwards of 200 people in the country around: all infected, according to Cogan, ‘in a manner at one instant, by reason of a dampe or mist which arose among the people within the Castle yard and court house’.11 For his part, the antiquarian John Hooker inserted into Raphael Holinshed’s chronicle a description of the serious outbreak at Exeter assizes in 1586 – an account made particularly interesting because it is clearly based upon first-hand observation and offers perhaps the best early attempt to analyse the disease’s pathology. The fever, Hooker writes:

was contagious and infectious, but not so violent as commonlie the pestilence [plague] is; neither dooth there appeare anie outward vlcer or sore.

The origen and cause thereof diuerse men are of diuerse iudgements. Some did impute it, and were of the mind, that it proceeded from the contagion of the gaole, which by reason of the close aire, and filthie stinke, the prisoners newlie come out of a fresh aire into the same, are in short time for the most part infected therewith.12

Of equal importance is the fact that this outbreak among the prisoners ‘mooued manie a mans hart’ and caused the Lord Chief Justice not only to demand an improvement in conditions within the gaol, but also to introduce more frequent trials in order to reduce the prison population.

It was not just the gaols that the more forward-thinking sought to remedy. When the Old Bailey was rebuilt in 1673 to replace the medieval courthouse destroyed in the Great Fire, the architect left one side of the courtroom open to the elements in order to increase the flow of air and thereby reduce the risk of contagion. The good sense of this measure was amply demonstrated in 1750 when, after the building had again been remodelled and the draughty courtroom fully enclosed, fever ripped through the Court killing sixty people, including the Lord Mayor and two judges. Though this event did not result in the wall’s demolition, other measures were introduced, such as fumigating the Court several times a day by means of plunging a hot iron into a bucket filled with vinegar and sweet-smelling herbs in an attempt to keep the air fresh – a practice maintained, with some modifications, until well into the twentieth century.13

Howard’s investigations convinced him that gaol-fever remained as prevalent in the second half of the eighteenth century as at any previous time, and his outrage that any prisoner should die in such circumstances drove him to remind his countrymen in impassioned prose that:

Gaol is not designed for the final punishment … but for the safe custody of the accused to the time of trial; and of convicts till a legal sentence be executed upon them. The laws of England do not suffer private executions. No condemned malefactor may be secretly put to death; nor murdered in a prison directly or indirectly: much less ought those to be destroyed whose sentence does not affect their life.14

As to the number of fatalities caused by infection, he felt convinced that ‘many more were destroyed by it, than were put to death by all the public executions in the kingdom’15 – a startling claim given that he wrote at the height of the ‘Bloody Code’, with some 35,000 individuals being condemned to death in England and Wales between 1770 and 1830, with roughly 7,000 being executed.16

Although eighteenth-century physicians recognised that squalor and overcrowding were the conditions most likely to give rise to typhus, they remained ignorant of the exact mechanisms by which it incubated and spread, with the miasma theory first propounded by the fifth-century Greek physician Hippocrates being the commonly accepted explanation for all contagious disease. Sir John Pringle, the ‘father of military medicine’, who wrote extensively on the subject in the middle years of the century, observed, for instance, that the disease should be expected when ‘the air is confined, especially in hot weather’ and that it ‘is incident to every place ill-aired and kept dirty, that is filled with animal steams from foul or diseased bodies’.17 Dr William Grant, meanwhile, in his 1775 Essay on the Pestilential Fever of Sydenham, Commonly Called the Gaol, Hospital, Ship, and Camp-Fever, noted that:

If a number of people are long confined … in any close place, not properly ventilated, so as to inspire, and swallow with their spittle, the vapours of each other, they must soon feel the bad effects, particularly if any of them should be sickly … warm weather, bad provisions, nastiness, and gloomy thoughts will add to their misery, and soon breed the seminium [seed] of a pestilential fever, dangerous not only to themselves, but also to every person who visits them.18

To intelligent observers such as these, the record of outbreaks proved beyond a shadow of a doubt that insanitary living conditions contributed to the spread of the disease, but they did not appreciate that the primary medium of transmission was not foul air but the excreta of lice infected with the bacteria Rickettsia prowazekii, which prisoners, when scratching themselves, unknowingly rubbed into their irritated skin. Where conditions encouraged the breeding and spread of lice, epidemic typhus would surely follow – as would again be proved in the First World War, when the disease acquired a new name: trench fever.

Of suggested treatments there was, of course, no shortage, with emphasis being placed, as always, on a combination of bleeding, vomiting, purging and sweating, though most reputable physicians accepted that none of these offered a miracle cure and mortality rates would remain obstinately high. As to means of prevention, beyond cleanliness and a free flow of fresh air, these were limited to a reliance upon vinegar, which might be sprinkled in rooms, applied to handkerchiefs and even used for cleaning teeth and gums. In fact, vinegar would prove an effective means by which to kill lice, and would be employed to delouse troops on the Western Front,19 but the limited application upon which Howard and others relied – the ‘smelling to vinegar’20 as a means by which to shield oneself against noxious miasma – offered no meaningful protection. Of course, other preventatives had their champions. In one parliamentary discussion on the subject an MP who delighted in the nickname of ‘Little Cocking’ George Onslow, suggested that plugging one’s nostrils with tobacco might be effective, though he was put somewhat out of countenance when the eminent physician John Fothergill tersely pointed out that ‘unless you could likewise stop your mouth and ears, it would be of no service’.21

Though the conditions which gave rise to typhus were well understood, it might perhaps be argued that ignorance regarding the disease’s pathology offered some kind of excuse for its prevalence. The same could not be said for another common characteristic of prison life: hunger. ‘There are several Bridewells,’ wrote Howard, ‘in which prisoners have no allowance of FOOD at all’:

The same complaint, want of food, is to be found in many COUNTY-GAOLS. In about half these, debtors have no bread; although it is granted to the highwayman, the house-breaker, and the murderer … I have often seen those prisoners eating their water-soup (bread boiled in mere water) and heard them say, ‘We are locked up and almost starved to death.’22

Various reasons could be found for this want: the insistence by some authorities that prisoners should work for their bread – but without the tools or even the space for work being made available; the peculation of gaolers intent on supplementing their often derisory incomes; and, in other cases, the statutes of particular gaols not being updated, so that the stipulated allowance for the provision of bread and meat to a certain value had not been adjusted to keep pace with inflation, meaning that prisoners sometimes found themselves expected to live on half the quantities consumed by their predecessors. The result, Howard noted, was that many who entered a gaol in a state of rude health ‘come out almost famished, scarce able to move, and for weeks incapable of any labour’.23 Water, too, was often in shockingly poor supply – sometimes because prisons had been built, or expanded in a piecemeal fashion, without due consideration being given to this most basic of requirements, and sometimes because a lack of space or poor security made it necessary to keep prisoners confined indoors, rendering the outdoor pumps inaccessible and leaving them wholly dependent upon the attentiveness of the turnkeys.

Drainage and sewerage were all too often altogether absent or, if present, neglected to such a degree that the air became tainted and ‘offensive beyond description’.24 So all-pervading did the stench become that it impregnated not only Howard’s clothes, but also the pages of the notebook in which he recorded his observations, often obliging him to ride on horseback rather than be confined within a post-chaise and to air his book by a fire before consulting it between inspections. Many prisons possessed subterranean cells, and in these the floors were often damp, or even submerged, meaning that the prisoners’ bedding – which often consisted of nothing but straw – quickly rotted. Even if their cells remained dry, the gaolers changed the straw so infrequently that it turned to dust before being replaced, their excuse being that the authorities made no provision for straw, so either the prisoners or the gaolers must pay for it: the former being unable, and the latter unwilling, to do so.

If Howard felt appalled by the physical neglect of inmates, he was no less horrified by the effect of the prevailing conditions upon prisoners’ morals. Broadly speaking, under English law prisoners were divided into three categories: firstly, debtors; secondly, vagrants, rogues, vagabonds and misdemeanants – meaning those imprisoned for terms of from seven days to two years for relatively minor offences such as prostitution and petty theft – who were incarcerated in houses of correction, or ‘Bridewells’;* and, thirdly, felons – those whose crimes warranted sentences of penal servitude or transportation – who were committed to the convict prisons or, worse still, to rotting hulks on the Thames. In addition, there were those held prior to trial, who might eventually be sentenced or set free depending upon the decision of the Court.

Crucially, the administrative and physical boundaries separating these different types of inmate were all too often porous, with debtors, in particular, often living cheek by jowl with misdemeanants despite a law enacted during the reign of Charles II which dictated that the two types of prisoner should be ‘put, kept, and lodged separate and apart from one another, in distinct rooms’.25 Instead, whether as a result of the inadequacies of the prisons, of the gaolers who ran them or of the authorities who inspected them, all too often hardened criminals and petty offenders, the incorrigible and the redeemable, mixed together – with the corruption of the latter being the inevitable result. Most depressing of all, Howard thought, was to see ‘boys of twelve or fourteen eagerly listening to the stories told by practised and experienced criminals, of their adventures, successes, stratagems, and escapes’.26 ‘What is this,’ he asked, ‘but devoting them to destruction?’27

In many prisons, at least during the daytime, male and female prisoners of all ages mingled together, making both debauchery and sexual exploitation all too common. And then there was the plight of the insane. According to the medical historian Roy Porter, during the whole of the eighteenth century Parliament passed only two Acts that dealt specifically – though not exclusively – with the policing of the mad.28 The Vagrancy Act of 1714 authorised two or more magistrates to arrest any person considered to be ‘furiously Mad and dangerous’, and to confine him ‘locked up or chained … for and during such time only as such Lunacy or Madness shall continue’.29 The provisions of the new Vagrancy Act of 1744, thirty years later, developed the definition of the furiously mad to include ‘those who by Lunacy or otherwise are so far disordered in their Senses that they may be dangerous to be permitted to go Abroad’.30 By the terms of the 1714 Act the destitute insane were placed in the same category as vagrants, vagabonds, rogues, beggars, gypsies, mountebanks and players, with one important exception: though liable to arrest, and subject to being chained, the insane were not to be whipped. With the country possessing only a tiny number of asylums for pauper lunatics, the fate of the majority was to be immured in prisons, houses of correction or workhouses, none of which possessed either the staff or the facilities to care for them properly and where, according to Howard, they not only served as ‘sport’ for the idle, but also disturbed and terrified other prisoners. ‘No care is taken of them,’ he complained, ‘although it is probable that by medicines, and proper regimen, some of them might be restored to their senses, and to usefulness in life.’31 Another slightly later reformer put it even more strongly: the incarcerated insane, Charles Williams-Wynn, the MP for Montgomeryshire, told the Commons, ‘were precluded from all possible chance of recovery … [and] doomed to irremediable misery’.32

In 1774 Howard at last had an opportunity to share publicly at least some of his discoveries. Following the passing of the legislation relating to the provision of clergymen to officiate in gaols the previous year, in February the House of Commons ordered that leave be given to bring in a Bill that sought to address two issues: firstly, the relief of prisoners ‘charged with Felony, or other Crimes, who shall be acquitted or discharged by Proclamation, respecting the Payment of Fees to Gaolers’, and secondly, the establishment of means ‘for more effectually securing the Health of Prisoners in Gaol, during their Confinement’.33 One of the sponsors of this Bill was Howard’s friend, the wealthy brewer and MP for Bedford, Samuel Whitbread, and it seems certain that the two had discussed their shared interest in prison reform and that Whitbread had encouraged Howard in his crusade. It might even be the case that Whitbread had helped to secure the post of High Sheriff for Howard who, as a dissenter, would not normally have been eligible. In order to discuss the Bill, the House formed a special committee of enquiry, and Howard met with its members between 10 and 17 February, then, on 4 March, he was asked to share his findings with the whole House.

Although his attendance was widely reported in the newspapers, Howard felt that some of the published accounts contained inaccuracies; he therefore wrote to the editor of the London Chronicle to set the matter straight and, no doubt, to keep the issue before the public gaze:

I informed the House that I had travelled and seen 38 out of the 42 gaols in the Lent circuit, besides others, as Bristol, Ely, Litchfield, &c … That I released a person out of Norwich city gaol who had been confined five weeks for the Gaoler’s fee of 13s. 4d. That at Launceston the Keeper, Deputy Keeper, and ten out of eleven prisoners were ill; at Oxford eleven died last year of the small-pox … That the gaols were generally close and confined, the felons’ wards nasty, dirty, confined, and unhealthy: That even York Castle, which to a superficial viewer might be thought a very fine gaol, I thought quite otherwise; with regard to felons their wards were dark, dirty, and small, no way proportioned to the number of unhappy persons confined there. Many others are the same; as Gloucester, Warwick, Hereford, Sussex, &c. The latter had not for felons, or even for debtors, at their county gaol at Horsham, the least outlet, but the poor unhappy creatures were ever confined within doors without the least breath of fresh air.

I was asked my reasons for visiting the gaols? I answered I had seen and heard the distress of gaols, and had an earnest desire to relieve it in my own district as well as others.34

Having listened to this testimony, delivered calmly, eloquently and with absolute conviction, the House asked Howard to return to the bar so that he might be publicly thanked for his humanity and zeal. No matter how gratified he might have felt at this highly unusual acknowledgement, he was no doubt even more delighted when the House subsequently passed not one, but two pieces of wide-reaching legislation: the ‘Discharged Prisoners Act’, which abolished fees for acquitted prisoners, and an ‘Act for Preserving the Health of Prisoners in Gaol, and Preventing the Gaol Distemper’, the former on 31 March, the latter on 2 June.

Howard published his research and recommendations in The State of the Prisons in England and Wales three years later. Continuing his campaign to improve both the physical conditions and the moral wellbeing of prisoners, he now advocated a systematic programme of refurbishment and replacement. Prisons, he argued, must not be located in the middle of towns or cities, but ‘should be built on a spot that is airy, and if possible near a river, or brook’35 to ensure a fresh supply of water for drinking and washing and to improve sewerage. Proximity to a river would also discourage the construction of dank subterraneous dungeons, which the physician and reformer John Roberton believed to ‘have been destructive to thousands’.36 By placing prisoners’ wards in free-standing buildings and on top of arcades, a triple benefit would be obtained: air would circulate more freely, a dry walkway would be created for use in inclement weather and security improved, as inmates would not be able to tunnel their way to liberty. Male and female prisoners should be segregated at all times and, on the basis that ‘Solitude and silence are favourable to reflection; and may possibly lead them to repentance’,37 each individual should have a separate cell. Given the high levels of sickness in the dilapidated old prisons, each must have an infirmary, a bath and an oven, since ‘nothing so effectually destroys vermin in cloaths [sic] and bedding, nor purifies them so thoroughly when tainted with infection, as being a few hours in an oven moderately heated’.38 These, Howard contended, were basic requirements, not luxuries. Glass in cell windows, on the other hand, he deemed an unjustifiable extravagance for any but the ill or pregnant – an opinion that would prove highly contentious in the years to come.

Howard was equally clear on the critical importance of differentiating between convict prisons and the houses of correction: while the former were designed for the long-term incarceration of those found guilty of serious crimes and were directly controlled by the government, the latter were intended to house only misdemeanants sentenced to short terms and were under the management of the local magistracy. Though housed separately, convicts sentenced to penal servitude and misdemeanants must both be made to undertake hard labour, the labour often taking the form of dredging or canal construction for convicts, with misdemeanants expected to beat hemp for the manufacture of rope, the prisoners ‘twisting, rolling, rubbing, until their soft, thievish fingers grow red and sore, and afterwards hard by their contact with those stiff chunks of tarry hemp’.39 Like many reformers before and after, Howard believed that such labour would have a salutary effect, convincing the prisoners of the error of their ways, and thereby encouraging them to turn from future wrongdoing.40

In terms of the regulations that should govern conduct within the prisons, some of Howard’s recommendations now seem truly extraordinary – not because they are in any way absurd, but because he found it necessary to articulate what, today, seems blindingly obvious. That he had to make such suggestions serves to highlight the kind of abuses that were rife in the prison system of the late eighteenth century. A gaoler, he argued, should be sober; moreover, he and his turnkeys should not ‘be suffered to hold the Tap; or to have any connexion, concern, or interest whatever in the sale of liquors of any kind’.41 Gaolers should be fit and healthy and be expected to conduct personally daily inspections of the prison. Each gaol should have its own chaplain, surgeon and apothecary – and, crucially, each of these should be ‘a man of repute in his profession’. No fighting, abusive language or gaming – ‘the frequent occasion of them’ – should be tolerated. Finally, Howard believed, to ‘every prison there should be an Inspector appointed; either by his colleagues in the magistracy, or by Parliament’.42

In January 1777, nearly three years after he presented his evidence to the House of Commons, Howard visited for the first time the old Clerkenwell Bridewell, which stood just to the north of Clerkenwell Green.* Built during the reign of James I (1603–25), by the time of Howard’s inspection it exhibited many, though not all, of the shortcomings that had first provoked his ire:

The Prison is much out of repair. It has not been so much as white-washed for years … one person sick; a woman who lay on the floor. No straw. No Infirmary.

Of the one hundred and eight in January last, above thirty were Fines, that is, Criminals committed for a term of years, five or six. Some of these, and of the others, were sick. They complained to me of sore feet, which the Turnkey said were quite black.43

One of the male prisoners’ dormitories he found ‘so crowded, that some Prisoners spent the nights in hammocks hung to the ceiling’, while the women slept in ‘dark unwholesome night-rooms’.44 In addition to the mixing of prisoner types, the prison’s poor state of repair and its high levels of sickness, the gaoler’s salary was little more than a pittance, making him reliant upon the money that he could extort from the inmates, his income being supplemented, according to one inmate, ‘By letting Men and Women lie together in his Beds’.45 Overall then, few would disagree with the contention that the condition of Clerkenwell Bridewell offered a perfect opportunity to apply the principles of construction and management that lay at the heart of Howard’s proposed new model.

_____________________

* The term ‘Bridewell’ was derived from the first such institution having been established in Henry VIII’s old home of Bridewell Palace in the City of London.

* Carrington Bowles’s ‘New pocket plan of the cities of London & Westminster with the borough of Southwark; comprehending the new buildings and other alterations to the year 1783’ shows the Bridewell to have been located in the crook of the elbow formed by the junction of Clerkenwell Green and St John’s Street, between Rosoman’s Row to the north and New Prison Walk to the south. The old Bridewell was demolished in 1804.

2

‘Some Alteration Should Be Made’:DESIGN AND BUILD

Surprisingly, perhaps, so far as the inadequacies of the Clerkenwell Bridewell were concerned, Howard, the champion of reform, and the Middlesex magistrates, those responsible for its maintenance and for the security and health of its inmates, found themselves in complete agreement. The only real difference lay in their sense of urgency when it came to remedying the prison’s flaws.

As early as 1757 one inmate had addressed an account of the prison to the sheriffs and magistrates of the county, describing it as ‘one of the greatest, the most notorious … and most horrid Sinks of Debauchery, Fornication, Licentiousness and Drunkenness, and also of the most horrible Distress, Poverty and Oppression to be found in the World’,1 but it was not until the beginning of 1783 – six years after Howard’s first visit – that the magistrates ordered a detailed inspection. The resulting report was read to them in April at a meeting in their imposing new classical Sessions House on Clerkenwell Green. The buildings of the seventeenth-century prison were, the inspectors noted, ‘in a deplorable state … being very inconvenient and much decayed’.2 That part of the prison set apart for male prisoners they considered ‘very much crowded … whereby the health of the prisoners was endangered’.3 Security was risible, with no fewer than thirty-one prisoners having recently escaped in a single day,4 and the male prisoners were not, as the law required, engaged in hard labour.5 Finally, neither the Bridewell, the nearby felons’ prison, nor – most embarrassing of all – the Sessions House, which had been completed only the year before at a cost of £13,000, were ‘well supplied with water’.6 All in all, the report concluded with masterly understatement, ‘it is necessary some alteration should be made’.7

The key problem of overcrowding, from which many of the other issues stemmed, was certainly not unique to Clerkenwell. With the American War of Independence causing an interruption to convict transportation that would last until the settling of New South Wales from 1788, overcrowding had become commonplace throughout Britain’s prisons. The Penitentiary Act of 1779 had been designed in part to address this problem, its provisions including the erection of two centrally funded houses of hard labour somewhere in Middlesex, Surrey, Kent or Essex, one to hold 600 men and the other 300 women. But these aspirations would not be realised for decades and, as one historian of the Act has observed, ‘No government-funded “penitentiary” of a scale commensurate with the scheme of 1779 came into being until Millbank was opened in 1816’.8 In the meantime, with the demands for reform becoming irresistible, the ratepayers of Middlesex would become some of the first to foot the bill for improved prisoner accommodation at a local rather than the planned national level.

Initially, the Middlesex magistrates hoped that the existing Bridewell on the south side of Corporation Row might be expanded and improved: a proposal that appeared viable, so long as they were able to acquire the garden belonging to the adjacent Quaker’s workhouse, the garden and the workhouse itself being on a long lease ‘from His Majesty’s Justices of the Peace for this County’.9 Upon further consideration, however, the magistrates decided that it would be more sensible to future-proof their plans by acquiring not just the garden but the whole site, thereby facilitating substantial alterations. They therefore pursued negotiations with the Society of Friends, while at the same time keeping their options open by placing in the local press advertisements for any alternative and suitable tract of ground in the vicinity. By June the Quakers had obtained professional advice which suggested that £1,600 might be deemed a reasonable sum for the surrender of the remaining thirty-five years of their lease – that sum having been generously discounted against commercial rates on the basis that the magistrates’ proposals were ‘for a publick good and not for any private Benefit’.10 They stipulated just one condition: that they should be given a term of no less than two years in which to find alternative accommodation, making it unlikely that ground would be broken before the middle of 1785, at the earliest.

In reality, like so many projects both before and since, the plan to construct a new house of correction would be plagued by changes to the scope of the works to be completed. Over time, the magistrates’ vision for the new prison grew ever more ambitious, primarily because they came to recognise that they could now embrace an opportunity not merely to remedy the worst defects of the old Bridewell, but to create a new model institution that would place Middlesex at the forefront of prison reform and include the features so vocally championed by John Howard, whose opinion they obtained.

In February 1784, the committee appointed to manage the project outlined what they deemed to be the minimum requirements for the new prison. It must be able to accommodate up to 500 prisoners, with male and female inmates separated at all times, and felons, debtors and misdemeanants ‘in the night lodged separately and kept in the day as distinctly as the nature of their several employments will admit’.11 There should be punishment cells for solitary confinement, a dedicated chapel and two infirmaries: one for the men and another for the women, each capable of accommodating twelve patients – a hospital capacity of less than 5 per cent of the prison population underscoring the belief that improved facilities would massively reduce sickness. The governor’s house should be located close to the prison’s main entrance, and the turnkeys’ lodges at its centre, so that all areas would be equally accessible to them. Finally, the whole institution should be encompassed by a suitably high free-standing wall, with none of the buildings abutting against it. Unfortunately, as the building committee informed their fellow magistrates, while these features would ensure that the new prison met the exacting expectations of the reformers, it would be quite impossible to squeeze them all into the combined footprint of the old Bridewell, the Quakers’ workhouse and its garden. A new site must be found.

Meanwhile, the publicity arising from the magistrates’ decision to advertise for suitable plots had naturally attracted the interest of entrepreneurial architects, and in July 1784 Robert Brettingham and James Burton both submitted unsolicited proposals for the new prison, the latter modestly noting that, should his plan meet with their approval, ‘I shall be extremely happy in having filled up some vacant hours to a good purpose’.12 Ultimately, neither man would receive the sought-for commission, but their interest did prompt the magistrates to launch a public competition inviting ‘any person or persons desirous to offer a Plan or Plans for such a Building, with all necessary apartments and conveniences’13 to submit an application by 9 December.

The advertisements went on to note that ‘a premium of thirty guineas will be given for that plan which shall be adjudged to be the best; twenty guineas for that which shall be adjudged to be the second in merit; and ten guineas for that which shall be adjudged to be the third in merit’.14 The eventual winner was a young and little-known architect named Aaron Henry Hurst, who would shortly go on to design the Palladian chapel of St James on nearby Pentonville Road. But following his victory, Hurst would play no further part in the construction of the new prison, with the role of supervising architect being awarded instead to Jacob Leroux, himself a magistrate for the county and an experienced property developer in his own right. This award Leroux might well have considered his by right since he had submitted plans for the redevelopment of the now abandoned workhouse site long before the idea of a competition had been mooted.

Leroux was not the only architect to base his plans on the workhouse site – so, too, had Hurst and the other competitors. Inevitably, this meant that the newly appointed supervising architect would be obliged to adapt the approved plans to fit onto a new plot of ground. And by the time the competition had been decided that plot had at last been identified. Known as Gardiner’s Field, it lay just a few hundred yards from the old Bridewell, at Coldbath Fields, a point roughly midway between the Quakers’ workhouse in the east and the Foundling Hospital in the west, and on the east bank of the River Fleet. The name of the locality was derived from a privately run hydropathic establishment opened in 1697 by an entrepreneurial lawyer named Walter Baynes, who claimed, with the support of Dr Edward Baynard, a leading advocate of hot and cold bathing, that the local salt- and mineral-impregnated waters could ease a vast array of illnesses, including ‘Dissiness, Drowsiness, and heavyness of the head, Lethargies, Palsies, Convulsions, all Hectical creeping Fevers, heats and flushings … disorders of the spleen and womb, also stiffness of the limbs and Rheumatick pains, also shortness of breath, weakness of the joints, as Rickets, etc’.15

Originally on the periphery of the City, during the eighteenth century the fields surrounding Baynes’s marble bath had been lost to rapid urban growth, with low-grade housing followed by a distillery in the 1730s and, in 1752, by the conversion of a property once owned by the Lollard leader Sir John Oldcastle into a smallpox hospital – a charitable institution much opposed by the local population who feared the spread of the disease. To the north lay the once fashionable spa of Bagnigge Wells, established on the site of Nell Gwynne’s home, Bagnigge House,16 while to the south the parish workhouse for all non-Quakers stood in Hockley-in-the-Hole, a notorious neighbourhood known as the haunt of thieves and highwaymen and celebrated as a local Mecca for the aficionados of blood sports, including cockfighting and bull- and bear-baiting. Not that the bears always had the worst of it: the historian of Clerkenwell, William J. Pinks, tells us that in 1709 ‘a most tragical occurrence took place’ when Christopher Preston, proprietor of the Bear Garden, was attacked by one of his own animals ‘and almost devoured before his friends were aware of his danger’.17 To the modern reader’s eye, surely a case of just desserts.*

Gardiner’s Field stood immediately adjacent to Mount Pleasant, once a muddy slope running down to the River Fleet, which gained its ironic name and its physical elevation from its historic use as a laystall – a dumping ground for human waste which, contrary to popular belief, was not simply thrown into the street and onto the heads of unwary passers-by but collected in cesspits, which were emptied, usually on an annual basis, by nocturnal ‘gong farmers’, despised but well-paid labourers who carted the contents to designated sites outside the City’s boundary. In Tudor times, the largest of these sites had been Mount Pleasant which, over the years it was in use, probably achieved an elevation of some 20ft to 30ft above the Fleet, which at this point flowed south-eastwards before disappearing beneath Fleet Market. By the eighteenth century, the river had become little more than an open sewer, with Alexander Pope writing of its ‘large tribute of dead dogs’,18 and in the nineteenth century the journalist James Ewing Ritchie would observe that, ‘On a dull, dreary morning, it is anything but pleasant, that Mount, in spite of its name’.19