1749 The legal control of brothels was a matter of some contention for London magistrates, such as Henry Fielding (the novelist). A particularly contentious case arose during Fielding’s period on the bench. As Dan Cruikshank records, in The Secret History of Georgian London:
Bosavern Penlez was executed on October 18, 1749, for having been involved in an assault on, and theft from, a building in the Strand during a period of rioting caused by the mistreatment of sailors at a bawdy house. Three sailors had been robbed of their watches and over £50 in cash and, when they demanded their possessions back were ejected from the house by the bawd’s gang of bullies.
The Newgate Calendar offered some colourful details as to what happened next:
[W]hereupon they went away, denouncing vengeance; and, having collected a number of their companions in the neighbourhood of Wapping, they returned at night, broke open the house, turned the women almost naked into the streets, ripped up the beds, threw the feathers out of the window, broke the furniture in pieces, and made a bonfire of it.
Having proceeded to behave in a similar manner at another house of ill fame, a party of the guards was sent for, and the mob for the present dispersed.
As Cruikshank records, this ‘bold attack against private property … sent a chill through the London middle classes’. Henry Fielding shared the shock. On the evidence of the brothel-keeper, he committed to Newgate a peruke-maker, Bosavern Penlez, on charges of rioting – a crime that carried capital punishment. The luckless Penlez was duly hanged.
It seems certain that Penlez was nothing more than an innocent bystander who lived and worked in the area, and happened to be drunk that night. But, the sailors having absconded, an example was required so that London houses – even houses of ill-repute – should not be at risk of violence. Fielding was attacked by newspapers as a paid protector of bawdy houses. He responded with a self-serving treatise, A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez.
The Newgate Calendar is more sympathetic in its account of Penlez’s unhappy fate:
When the day of execution arrived he prepared to meet his fate with the consciousness of an innocent man, and the courage of a Christian. The late Sir Stephen Theodore Janssen, Chamberlain of London, was at that time sheriff; and a number of soldiers being placed at Holborn Bars, to conduct Penlez to Tyburn (as a rescue was apprehended), the sheriff politely dismissed them, asserting that the civil power was sufficient to carry the edicts of the law into effectual execution.
This unhappy youth was executed at Tyburn on the 18th of October, 1749.
The worthy inhabitants of St Clement Danes, who had been among the foremost in soliciting a pardon for Penlez, finding all their efforts ineffectual, did all possible honour to his memory, by burying him in a distinguished manner in a churchyard of their parish, on the evening after his unfortunate exit, which happened in the twenty-third year of his age.