The petition, of course, proved fruitless, and
he eventually destroyed himself.

But it was not only arbitrary cruelties and
greedy exactions that made the prisons so
infamous and so unworthy of English law and
English justice. The freedom permitted by
the jailers to all prisoners who had money,
was even still more demoralising. However
innocent a man was when he entered
a prison, he was sure to leave it full of desperate
resolutions, callous, heartless, and bloodthirsty.
As a person of experience once said,
an acquitted highwayman generally returned to
the world to find his old captain hung, and
himself ready to take his place. An episode of
Jack Sheppard's story, as told in the records
of the jail chaplain, is a good example of the
disgraceful discipline of our old prisons.
Sheppard, the son of a Spitalfields carpenter, was
in August, 1724, lying under sentence of
death in Newgate. In the old prison-house,
burnt during the Lord George Gordon riots,
there was, inside the lodge, a hatch with large
iron spikes. This hatch opened into a dark
passage, which led by several stone steps down
into the condemned hold. Here prisoners were
allowed to show their shaven heads and
villanous faces to their often equally ill-favoured
friends. It was through this hatch some women
of Sheppard's acquaintance passed a file, with
which lie cut almost through one of the spikes.
On the evening Jack's death-warrant arrived,
the women came for a pretended last interview,
broke off the spike, and dragged the slim thief
through the aperture, although the keepers
were drinking at the very time at the other end
of the lodge. When Jack was caught in Claremarket,
and a few months after condemned to
death, he became the show of the town,
noblemen visiting him to hear his adventures
and his entreaties for the royal pardon. Sir
James Thornhill published a portrait of him,
and he was the lion of the month. Even on
the very day of execution, money, sympathy,
or friends had procured the incorrigible young
rogue favours from the turnkeys; for when
searched in the press-room, before ascending
the cart, an officer found in his pocket a
penknife, with which he had intended to have cut
the cords that bound his arms, and to have
flung himself from the cart, to escape down
Little Turnstile, where the sheriff's mounted
officers could not have followed him.

Dangerous mutinies also were not uncommon
in the old London prisons. There was a very
formidable one in Newgate in 1726. The leader
was a blacksmith, named William Gates, alias
Vulcan, a deer-stealer, of Edmonton, who had
shot two deer in Enfield-chase, killed a keeper,
and fired at two others. The man had never been
tried for the offence, but had been sentenced to
death by the cruel Black Act, 9th of George the
First, because he had not surrendered, within
forty days, to an order of council read, according
to the act, on two consecutive market days in
two market towns. He was helped by four of
his companions, also under sentence. "These
desperate men took it into their foolish heads,"
says the astonished ordinary in his piquant account,
which seems to have been quaintly
interlined by a somewhat sarcastic Old Bailey
reporter, "that they would not be hanged.
The day on which they were executed, when
I came to Newgate to give them their last
exhortations and prayers, they would not allow
any person to come near them, having got an
iron crow into the prison, with which they had
forced out stones of a prodigious bigness, and
had made the breach two feet deep in the wall.
They had built up the stones at the back of the
door of the condemned hold, so that nobody
could get at them. The keepers spoke to them
through the door, but they were inflexible, and
would by no entreaties yield. I spoke to them
also, representing to them how that such
foolish and impracticable projects interrupted
their repentance, and the special care they
should have taken in improving those few
moments to the best advantage; but they seemed
inexorable. I said that I hoped they had no
quarrel with me. They answered, 'No, sir,
God bless you; for you have been very careful
of us.' Bailey said, that they would not surrender
till they either killed or were killed. It
was twelve at night before they began this
enterprise; and, to conceal their purpose from
the keepers, while part of them were working,
the rest sung psalms, that the noise might not be
heard. Sir Jeremiah Morden, one of the present
sheriffs of London and Middlesex, came with
proper attendance, and, desiring them to open
the door, they refused it; upon which they [not
the prisoners, but the sheriff and his men] were
obliged to go up to the room over the hold,
where there is a little place that opens, which is
made in case of such disturbances. This shutter
they opened, but the prisoners continuing
obstinate, they [the sheriff's assistants] fired
fifteen pistols with small shot among them, not
to kill, but to wound and disable them. They
retired to the remotest part of the room where
the shot could not reach them, yet Barton and
Gates, the deer-stealer, were slightly wounded
in the arm. At last Sir Jeremiah Morden
spoke seriously to them through the little hole
above, desiring them to surrender. Barton
asked, 'Who are you?' Sir Jeremiah answered,
'I am one of the principal sheriffs.' 'Show me
your chain,' says Barton. Sir Jeremiah was so
good as to show him his gold chain through the
little hole, upon which they consulted, and
agreed to surrender. After this they removed
the stones for the back [of the] door, and, the
keepers entering, Barton snapped a steel tobacco–
box in the face of one of them, which made a
little noise like the snapping of a pocket-pistol,
and then gave him the box."

Imagine prisoners, condemned to death, gaining
possession of a crowbar and working down
two feet of a massive wall before they were
observed by the keepers; and do not fail to observe
the small shutter in the ceiling, expressly made
for such contingencies!

That excellent man, John Howard, who wrote