XVIII

THICK CLOUDS OF SMOKE and soot hung over the great sprawling metropolis of London in the spring of 1792, and a pall of dinginess seemed to overspread everything, from the newly laid-out squares and freshly turned earth of market gardens to the north to the twisting alleys off the Strand to the proud new wings added to the Bank of England where the old church of St. Christopher-le-Stocks formerly stood. All was mud, murk and grey dullness, or so it seemed to a French visitor; unlike airy, buoyant, free-spirited Paris, London seemed to the Frenchman to stagger under a load of coal dust and grit, the outscourings of a thousand active building sites and ten thousand chimneys.

There was congestion everywhere, from the narrow streets crowded with pedestrians and wagons, carriages and flocks of sheep to the dim and crooked passageways of Alsatia, where thieves and murderers, pickpockets and prostitutes found refuge, to the prosperous lanes of the commercial City and the noisy open-air markets whose stalls held cod and herring, sides of beef and mounds of cucumbers and tomatoes, apples and pears. Shouting, jostling carters muscled their way along, footmen and messengers bullied and elbowed past slower-moving traffic and in Covent Garden, alluring half-naked courtesans, their long hair loose and tumbled about their shoulders, called from the windows of the bathhouses to prospective customers in the street below.

The dirt, the noise and crowds, above all the rapid, ravenous growth of the capital as open fields and marshlands filled with new streets and squares gave London a savage impersonality. People, houses, entire neighborhoods were crushed and swept away in the relentless turmoil of expansion. The old, the weak, the powerless were ground under, left behind, forgotten. And while there were foundling homes for abandoned children and hospitals for the infirm, institutions for reformed streetwalkers and open-air Methodist revivals where tens of thousands were welcomed to abjure “the folly and madness of this sensible world,” still most of London’s lower classes were left to fend for themselves. Emigrants from the countryside, unable to find steady work in the city, huddled in doorways and cellars, homeless and dispirited; many were arrested and sent to Bridewell Prison as vagrants, the most hapless were found dead and carted off by the night watchmen, to be laid nameless in common graves.

The city’s East End, with its ragged slums and reeking breweries and wharves, was worlds away from the grand squares and waterside mansions, the pleasure gardens and elegant shops of the fashionable West End. Here the chief concerns, among the conspicuously well-dressed and well-coiffed members of the privileged classes, were social and financial: the issuing and receiving of invitations to dinners and balls, the cultivation of powerful contacts, the making of advantageous marriages. In the small, tight-knit world of the West End, where the grinding clatter of carriage wheels on cobblestones marked the hours of visiting, shopping, appointments with tailors and dressmakers and dining out, money and property were of all-absorbing interest—and along with money and property, the social and political stability that assured their safety.

But in the spring of 1792, that stability was under assault. Rioters aggrieved over low wages and high food prices were kept under control with great difficulty by constables and watchmen and, under extreme conditions, by soldiers. Political agitators stirred angry passions and aroused inchoate but dangerous resentments. In the worst of the assaults, violent crowds broke windows and overturned fences, looted shops—especially London’s ubiquitous gin shops—and vented their rage, as they had for centuries, by plundering the mansions of the well-to-do.

There was much talk, in that uneasy spring of 1792, of what was seen as the true source of all the trouble: the ever more radical revolution in France.

Since 1789 the French, especially the Parisians, had been dismantling their society and overturning the time-honored social order. The king, Louis XVI, was still on his throne but had been reduced to presiding over a constitutional monarchy, as a puppet of elected legislative bodies whose politics were moving farther and farther to the left. Class distinctions, hereditary titles and feudal rights had evaporated; all men were, in revolutionary theory, equal, and the motto “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity” was carved into monuments and printed on pamphlets and in newspapers until it became synonymous with the aims and ideals of the new constitutional government. By fiat all men were declared to be of equal rank, and in 1792 there was much talk of carrying this ideal of equality one step further, to include women.

In the salons of London’s West End, A Vindication of the Rights of Women, Mary Wollstonecraft’s feminist manifesto, was being widely read and discussed. Wollstonecraft herself was for the moment the most famous and most controversial woman in Europe (though she would soon be eclipsed by Charlotte Corday, the murderer of Jean-Paul Marat), and her claim that women should be given equal political rights with men was one inflammatory idea among many in what was being called “the woman question.”

There was no end, it seemed, to the dangerously corrupting notions incubating in France and infecting the English populace. The French had abolished the church and worshipped Reason, removing the sanction of religion as a buttress to the peaceful ordering of society. They were discussing abolishing the monarchy (as the English had done in 1649, restoring it eleven years later). Traditional sexual morality was being abandoned, couples choosing to live together in loose unions rather than to marry, divorce being made easy for those who were already married, adultery and sexual experimentation of all sorts being redefined as progressive and advanced rather than immoral.

And with such extreme ideas entering mainstream thought, it was only a short step to arrive at the point of view that the notion of private property was wrong, that all the world’s wealth should be shared in common. In this utopian vision there would no longer be distinctions between rich and poor, powerful and powerless, high class and low class. All would have enough—but none would have more than enough, and having more than enough, indeed having flamboyantly more than enough, was the principal goal of the capital’s well-to-do.

It was all very alarming, this ferment of thought; doctors noticed an increase in their patients’ attacks of asthma and stomach pain, hives and headaches—all symptoms of severe stress. A nightmarish vision arose to haunt many a sleepless night, a vision of the disenfranchised of England rising up en masse to slaughter the rich, just as the French peasants had risen up during the Great Fear of 1789 to burn the châteaux of their feudal overlords and massacre all those inside. Londoners became suspicious of their servants, of laborers working in their gardens or homes or passing in the street. Were they infected with the virus of equality from France? Would they try to bring revolution to England?

Most of all, property owners were uneasy about crime, and the ever-growing population of criminals. In recent years the number of crimes seemed to increase alarmingly, until the jails and prisons were overflowing with inmates. The large and formidable Newgate Prison, built during the 1770s, with its graceful Palladian façade, high thick walls and solid masonry, was a bastion of security in insecure times, a symbol, to Londoners, that the authority of the state was more potent than the advancing tide of criminality. In its outer courtyard malefactors were hanged, one after another, sometimes twenty or more in a single afternoon. Spectators by the thousands came to watch these “Hanging Matches,” sitting in the capacious wooden grandstands that offered an unobstructed view of the platform and gallows, or looking on from the windows of their carriages, or standing in noisy clusters behind the guardsmen and mounted soldiers who ringed the place of execution.

To this grim place, Newgate Prison, Mary Bryant was brought in the last week of June, 1792, with her four companions from Port Jackson, and on July 7 she was formally ordered “to remain on her former sentence, until she should be discharged by due course of law.”¹ Mary’s “former sentence” was death. That the sentence would be carried out “in due course of law” she surely had no doubt. The only uncertainty was when.

The immensity of London, its din and grime, noise and energy must have seemed overwhelming to Mary, accustomed to the villages and small market towns of Cornwall and the town-size penal colony of Sydney Cove. When she and James Martin, Nate Lilley, Will Allen and John Butcher were brought before the magistrate Nicholas Bond to be examined at the Sessions House in the Old Bailey, it must have seemed as if much of London’s energy and din were brought into the courtroom, for a very large and noisy crowd was waiting to see the prisoners.

If Mary was at all abashed by the sight of so many staring spectators, gawking and pointing at her and her companions, the better-dressed among the onlookers peering quizzically at her through lorgnettes, the gentlemen holding the scented tips of their canes to their noses to counteract the stench of jail fever that permeated the room, she did not betray any nervousness. Her demeanor outwardly calm, perhaps with a hint of defiance, she stood before the magistrate in plain prison garb—the first clean, whole garments she had worn in several years—her brown hair washed and brushed, her face and hands scrubbed with coarse soap and laved with water drawn from the river. She was twenty-seven years old, but must have looked older. Her voice, when she spoke, was clear, her answers to Nicholas Bond’s questions intelligent—or at any rate, more intelligent than the magistrate expected the answers of a woman condemned for highway robbery to be.

All of the convicts were questioned, each in turn giving an account of his or her experiences in the penal colony, the circumstances leading up to the escape from Sydney Cove, the long voyage in the open boat, the clashes with the aboriginal tribes, the events in Kupang and Timor and finally the long voyage back to London. It was an epic tale, an undeniably heroic tale, told from five different points of view. The spectators grew quiet when hearing of starvation in the colony, of the malarial plague in Timor, of the deaths of Will Morton and Sam Bird and the disappearance of James Cox and in particular of the deaths of Will Bryant and Mary’s two children.

It was Mary’s testimony that kept the large and unruly audience exceptionally quiet. The “woman question” was so much at issue just then, the political and social emancipation of women such a topic of heated debate. And here, in the flesh, was a woman to be reckoned with. A condemned criminal, hardened and guilty of serious wrongdoing and deserving of execution, and yet a woman of such grit, steel and courage that she had been able to endure hunger and illness and great danger and terrible loss—when Mary described the deaths of Charlotte and Emanuel many in the courtroom must have wept openly—and had not succumbed. Surely it would be difficult to find a more stalwart woman in all England, or one more deserving of the leniency of the court. For had she not, in her suffering and her heroism, paid for her crimes? Was she not deserving of a second chance, and her companions with her? And had she not said, in response to Nicholas Bond’s questions, that she was sorry for having robbed Agnes Lakeman on the Exeter road six years earlier?

A collection was taken for Mary and her fellow prisoners, the clink of coins audible in the room as the magistrate brought the proceedings to a close. Cash was vital in prison; with it a prisoner could pay the fees the jailers demanded and could buy the right to wear lighter chains, to have blankets, to have food sent in from outside to supplement the small chunk of bread that was the standard daily ration. These five prisoners would find their incarceration much easier with the funds the onlookers supplied.

All eyes were on Nicholas Bond as he announced his decision to the crowded courtroom. The prisoners were not to be committed for trial on the charge of escaping from captivity in New Holland. They were to remain in Newgate, awaiting “discharge by due course of law.” They were all under sentence of death. But they had all plead their case, and won over the crowd. In the courtroom that day, for the space of a few hours, they had seemed, not criminals, but admired celebrities, Mary most of all.