XIX

IN THE COURTROOM on that warm July day in 1792 was a bright-eyed, round-faced, double-chinned Scots gentleman in a grey bag wig who followed the proceedings with avidity. He was fifty-two years old and a barrister himself, moderately successful at the Scottish bar, though largely idle since being called to the English bar six years earlier. And he was a celebrity in the literary world of London: his recently published biography of Samuel Johnson was a best-seller and was receiving wide and generous praise.

He was the well-known, well-liked, vivacious and entertaining James Boswell, lord of Auchinleck, friend of King George (who had been told by Edmund Burke that Boswell’s Life of Johnson was the most interesting book he had ever read) and favorite guest at fashionable dinner parties. Sitting in the magistrate’s court, keenly attentive to the compelling demeanor and riveting testimony of Mary Bryant and her fellow convicts, all Boswell’s natural gifts and talents were brought into sharpened focus: his penetrating eye, his boundless curiosity about the lives of others, his deep warmth of feeling, his strong sense of the pathetic.

He was entranced, especially by the clear-voiced Cornishwoman who showed such sturdy self-possession under the magistrate’s questioning, even though aware that she stood under sentence of death. What an ordeal she had been through! What mental strain she must be under! Boswell’s imagination was fully engaged; he could see in his mind’s eye the unfolding drama of Mary’s life, as she described it. The bleak impoverished childhood in Fowey, the days of outlaw daring and thievery, the wretchedness of imprisonment, the months at sea—every episode began to play itself out in his mental vision, as in a theatrical spectacle or a vivid novel. And here was the heroine of the novel, still a youngish woman, a woman triply bereaved yet able to face what remained of her life with composure.

Not only was Boswell impressed, he was drawn out of himself. Seized with Mary’s story, taken with her plight, he forgot, for the moment, the darker threads of his own life, his recent deep depression (“perpetually gnawed by a kind of mental fever,” as he put it), his all but desperate financial situation, his own bereavement—his wife Margaret had died three years earlier—his restlessness and nagging sense of personal dissatisfaction. Setting aside these preoccupations, he began to take action on Mary’s behalf.

First, he collected seventeen guineas—a substantial amount—for her support while in prison. He would probably have offered to serve as her barrister if there had been a trial. But no trial was set; instead the government, in a quandary about how to treat the five increasingly celebrated escapees from New Holland, chose to simply delay and do nothing. To execute the five, in accordance with their original sentences, or to try them for escaping from transportation and sentence them to death, was impractical, for they had aroused so much admiration and sympathy that the public was solidly behind them. To execute them would bring unending criticism. Yet to pardon the five would be tantamount to condoning escape, which the court could not appear to do.¹

Boswell’s only recourse was to try to obtain a pardon for Mary, using his influence and his many government connections.

By good fortune Boswell was a very old acquaintance of the Secretary of State for the Home Department, Henry Dundas. As boys Boswell and Dundas had gone to college together (Boswell enrolled at the University of Edinburgh at thirteen), as barristers they had fought legal battles against one another in court, and Boswell had watched, in some amazement, as the hardheaded, blunt-spoken Dundas rose higher and higher in government service until he reached his present eminence. All was not harmonious between them; at school Boswell had been contemptuous of the intellectually plodding Dundas, and in later years Dundas was condescending and slighting to Boswell. Still, Boswell was prepared to overlook any risk of further insult to himself in the interest of helping Mary, and so he wrote to Dundas requesting a meeting. A time was agreed on, and Boswell presented himself on the appointed day—only to be left waiting. The great Dundas, perhaps genuinely overbooked, perhaps delivering a deliberate slight, did not appear.

“Dear Sir,” Boswell wrote on the following morning,

I stayed in town a day longer, on purpose to wait on you at your office yesterday about one o’clock, as your letter to me appointed; and I was there a few minutes before one, but you were not to be seen.

The only solatium [consolation] you can give me for this unpleasant disappointment, is to favor me with two lines directed Penrhyn Cornwall^a assuring me that nothing harsh shall be done to the unfortunate adventurers from New South Wales, for whom I interest myself, and whose very extraordinary case surely will not found a precedent.

A negative promise from a Secretary of State I hope will not be withheld, especially when you are the secretary, and the request is for compassion.

I always am, dear Sir, very faithfully yours,

James Boswell²

Boswell’s efforts did not stop with Dundas. He also wrote to the Under-Secretary of State Evan Nepean, whose direct involvement with the planning and establishing of the colony at Sydney Cove was well known, and to the Chief Clerk in Dundas’s office, William Pollock, who could be counted on to read any letter to Dundas that Dundas chose to ignore, and to give a response.

A response came: Mr. Henry Dundas agreed to “duly consider” Mr. Boswell’s letter on behalf of the “Botany Bay prisoners.” It was a cold reply—but at least it was a reply. For the moment, Mary was safe from further prosecution.

Mary was safe: in fact, Mary was vastly contented. To be sure, she might be executed, some time in the future. But for the present, she was comfortable, even luxuriant. According to one of the journalists who interviewed the five convicts from New Holland they declared Newgate to be a “paradise” compared to the conditions under which they had been living for many years past.

And indeed it was a paradise of sorts. Even though crowded (in some small cells upwards of twenty men were living cheek by jowl), the prison in summer was warm and dry and, because it was relatively new, there was none of the pungent reek of centuries of decay and human neglect. Drink flowed freely—the prison keeper operated a tavern—and thanks to the public subscription taken up on her behalf, Mary was able to afford beer and probably gin as well.³

Debtors, of whom there were many imprisoned in Newgate, held banquets and soirées and even dances several times a week in their cells. Colorful prisoners gathered an audience of fellow convicts and recounted their exploits, or told of earlier inhabitants of London prisons who had led romantic lives. In her long, idle days in the summer of 1792, as she waited for further word from the magistrate or from her well-wisher Mr. Boswell, Mary must have heard stories of the highwayman James Maclean, “the Ladies’ Hero,” who had posed as an Irish squire with expensive lodgings in St. James’s and who robbed coaches and carriages “with the greatest good breeding” until caught and hanged. And of murderous madmen who killed their servants or close relatives, or who, like the notorious Elizabeth Brownrigg, hired orphans from the Foundling Hospital only to chain them up like dogs and torture them to death.

There were tales of young girls who, before their capture, joined gangs of thieves and wandered through the crowds at theaters or outdoor markets or even open-air revival meetings, stealing purses and valuables. Some of the girls, practiced at deceit, put on pairs of false arms, which they kept modestly folded in front of them while with their real arms, concealed under their cloaks, they picked pockets.

These convict tales may have had a familiar ring to Mary, who by this time had spent much of her life in the company of criminals, and who may have known many a deceitful trick herself. One line of conversation must have fascinated her, however: talk of escape.

It was possible, escape from Newgate. It had been done. One condemned murderer had even escaped twice, while awaiting execution. The first time he had used a file, smuggled in to him without the guards’ noticing, and had broken the bars on his cell window. Recaptured, he had escaped a second time by climbing a chimney and getting away over the rooftop.

If escape failed or was impracticable, there was the possibility of rescue. Only twelve years earlier rioting Londoners had broken into Newgate, set the prison on fire, and released five prisoners. It might easily happen again.

In the meantime all Mary could do was wait, with James and Will, Nate and John, all of whom were becoming more celebrated by the day. There were long articles about the five in the London Chronicle and Irish Times. James was dictating his own account of the daring escape from Sydney Cove, which he called Memorandoms and which would eventually become the only surviving firsthand record of the escapees’ experiences.⁴ Possibly others were telling their story to amanuenses or eager journalists. For a few brief months, the Botany Bay convicts, and especially Mary, the “Girl from Botany Bay,” were the objects of intense curiosity and attention.

All the while, however, their fellow prisoners were succumbing to the harsh rigors of the Newgate jailers. Every day Mary witnessed floggings, and saw recalcitrant convicts burnt with branding irons and forced to walk for hours at a time on the dreaded treadmill—an exhausting torture that required the sufferer to walk continuously uphill along a moving wheel until every muscle was painfully cramped and every step an agony. Prisoners not yet put on trial were taken into the Sessions chamber courtyard and made to lie on the ground while heavy iron weights were piled onto their stomachs and chests until they agreed to plead guilty. If they were tough enough to withstand the pain of the weights, the ultimate torture was applied: the Skull Cap. Fettered to a stone wall, the hapless prisoner had an iron band fastened so tightly around his temples that he bled from his nose and ears. The band was tightened more and more cruelly until he begged for mercy—and agreed to plead guilty.

Surrounded by such terrible reminders of where she was and under what sentence she lay, yet enjoying her daily comforts in the interim, Mary passed ten months, from July of 1792 to the end of April, 1793.

Then, on May 2, came the sudden news of her release.

A free pardon had been granted. Boswell’s appeals to Henry Dundas had borne fruit.

“Whereas Mary Bryant, otherwise Broad, now a prisoner in Newgate, stands charged with escaping from the persons having legal custody of her,” the official document read, “[and] whereas some favorable circumstances have been humbly represented to us in her behalf inducing us to extend our Grace and Mercy unto her, and to grant her our Free Pardon for her Said Crime, Our Will and Pleasure therefore is, that you cause her, the said Mary Bryant, otherwise Broad, to be forthwith discharged out of custody.”⁵

A Free Pardon. And from the king himself, whose initials, G.R. for George Rex, were at the top of the impressive document with its official-looking seal.

Mary could not read her pardon, of course. But it was read to her—perhaps by the prison keeper, perhaps by Boswell. And it meant that right then, that day, she was free to go.

The heavy cell door was opened, and then the outer door to the prison courtyard, and finally the gatehouse door through which she stepped—with what tears and smiles and sheer disbelieving rapture—into the sunlight of freedom.