seven others, had some time before set a bad
example, by attempting to break out through
an oven. For this offence Bliss had been thrust
for three weeks into the Strong Room, a damp,
unwholesome, uncovered place, where a man
named Mullinshead was lying in the heaviest
fetters.

The dismal Strong Room was the Black Hole
of the Marshalsea, dreaded by even the most
dauntless highwaymen, and bearable only to
toads and rats. Bliss and his abettors were
thrown on the ground in this prison-cellar in
company with a poor wretch who had an iron
collar round his neck.

After a time, Bliss made a second attempt to
escape, was caught, dragged by the legs over
the stones, and horribly beaten with ox
sinews. Then the dreadful iron cap was forced
on his head—a cap originally made in King
William's time for steadying felons while they
were being burnt in the cheek. It had been
left behind at the Marshalsea as a mere relic
when the other irons had been removed to the
county jail. Bliss was otherwise tortured
until he confessed who brought him the
rope he had used for his second escape.
When he was released from the Strong Room,
the prisoner's legs swelled, the irons ate into
them and became buried in the flesh. There
were holes near his ankle, and Acton's
men were at last compelled to remove the
fetters, which had bitten into the legs as clogs
do into a horse's fetlocks. Bliss was kept
without any covering but a blanket.

Bliss, being released after several months,
went to Southgate to work as a carpenter,
but fell ill, complained of inward bruises, and
soon after died. Acton was tried for the murder
of Bliss at the Kingston assizes on July 6,
1729, but was acquitted.

Other indictments against the prisoner,
although they also terminated in acquittal,
served to show in a striking way the utter want
of any proper management in prisons at this
period, and the habitual cruelty and tyranny of the
turnkeys and deputies of the too often absentee
governors. In all these cases Acton escaped,
not because he was not guilty, but because it
was difficult to decide how far the cruelty had
been Acton's, and how far it had arisen from
the exaggeration of his orders by the turnkeys.
Bliss's case is quoted as a sample of the rest.

It seems almost incredible that, at this very
time, the government should have permitted the
Marshalsea to be farmed out. The patent rights
were purchased from the Earl of Radnor for five
thousand pounds, and there were sixteen
shareholders in the concern, all interested in squeezing
out fees, starving prisoners, and concealing all
acts of cruelty. In the King's Bench, in cases
of riot, soldiers were often called in to beat
and puncture the turbulent inmates. In Newgate,
if a highwayman or murderer had only
his pocket full of guineas, he could toss off his
brandy, and revel, and brawl till the hour came
to press him to death, or to cart him off to
the green fields of Tyburn.

But upon Thomas Bambridge, warden of
the Fleet, public hatred fell very heavily.
A wretch named Huggins had bought the
patent of the wardenship of a nobleman, and
he sold it to Bambridge. By letters patent,
Bambridge was appointed keeper of his
Majesty's Old and New Palaces of Westminster,
as also warden of his Majesty's prison of the Fleet
for life. In 1728, Bambridge was taken into
custody, and soon after confined under irons in
Newgate; and whilst he was under this
confinement, an act of parliament was made,
reciting "that his Majesty had been pleased to
order his Attorney-General to prosecute at law
the said Thomas Bambridge for wilfully permitting
several debtors, as well to his Majesty
as to divers of his subjects, to escape, and for
being guilty of the most notorious breaches of
his trust, and the highest crimes and
misdemeanours in the execution of his said office;
and having, arbitrarily and unlawfully, loaded
with irons and put into dungeons and destroyed
prisoners put under his charge." Bambridge
was deprived of his letters patent.

This Bambridge, who appears to have been
a low cheating attorney, was acquitted on his
first trial, without even producing witnesses.
He continued, however, in close confinement
(what a state of law!) for nine months; then
admitted to bail; but kept in custody
nevertheless till the June following.

The inquiry of the parliamentary committee
disclosed the most iniquitous enormities. The
prison, in fact, had been merely a shop, and
the prisoners had been squeezed for money like
apples in a cider-press. Rich malefactors had
been allowed their temporary liberty and the
power of renewing their crimes. Smugglers
were permitted to run their cargoes, and then to
quietly return to their wards. A man who
owed the government ten thousand pounds was
allowed to escape. A certain Dumoy had been
several times to France—perhaps for Jacobite
purposes—while nominally a prisoner.
These sort of pseudo-prisoners were known
to the turnkeys under the playful name of
"pigeons," and they had bill transactions with
the warden. To the poorer and more unprofitable
prisoners Bambridge was very cruel; beating
them, loading them with irons that made
life a misery, and immuring them in more than
usually loathsome dungeons. A poor, broken-
down baronet, named Sir William Rich, who
refused to pay a baronet's entrance-fee of five
pounds, was loaded with the largest fetters
and thrown into one of the most miserable
caves of the prison, Bambridge occasionally
threatening him with a red-hot poker, or
the loaded guns and ponderous rusty halberds
of his body-guard; but there was no burning
or beating the money out of the noble baronet,
and that was the exasperating part of the business.
The cruel lawyer also, on one occasion,
threatened to make his men fire on a certain
Captain Mackpheadris (we picture the captain,
a gaunt, obdurate man in threadbare uniform
laced with copper). The captain becoming