ON THE MORNING of Tuesday 25 March 1729 the committee of MPs enquiring into the state of the gaols of the kingdom – the Gaols Committee – entered the Marshalsea for the first time. They visited prisoners’ wards and rooms and, John Grano recorded in his journal, in the courthouse ‘Read Petitions and Heard the Complaints of all the Unfortunate in this Direful abode’.1
In the ‘Common Side’, ‘inclosed with a strong Brick Wall’, they found over 330 prisoners confined, around seventy of whom were women. They were ‘divided into particular Rooms called Wards’ where they were locked up each winter night at 8 p.m., an hour later in the summer. Most wards ‘are excessively Crowded, Thirty, Forty, nay Fifty Persons having been locked up in some of them not Sixteen Foot Square’: we will recall the affecting cries on locking up that disturbed Grano that first night of his imprisonment some ten months earlier, and these dreadful numbers tell us why. To accommodate them half the prisoners lay in hammocks suspended above those who had to lie on the bare floor. The ‘Air is so wasted’ that prisoners had been stifled, ‘several having in the Heat of Summer perished for want of Air’. Unlocking was at 8 a.m. in winter and 5 in summer and until then the prisoners ‘cannot upon any Occasion come out, so that they are forced to ease Nature within the Rooms, the Stench of which is noisome beyond Expression’. ‘This crowding of prisoners’, the committee thought, ‘is one great Occasion of the Goal Distemper’, or gaol fever – louse-born typhus.2
Sickness was endemic and not just because of the distemper. Those prisoners who escaped or survived a fever might well succumb to an even more common complaint, for ‘once they have sold everything they have, and if they have not Relief from their Friends, Famine destroys them’. The committee assessed the food coming into the common side for those with nothing else to eat as ‘an accidental allowance of Pease given once a Week by a Gentleman, who conceals his Name, and about Thirty Pounds of Beef’ provided as a gift of the judges and officers of the Marshalsea court distributed on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. This was cut into portions of ‘about an Ounce and an half’ and served with a quarter of a penny loaf. The sick received this first, so they had something at least three times a week; the remaining portions could only reach the rest of the prisoners very infrequently, it was thought to each man once a fortnight and each woman weekly.
Once sickening from fever or starvation such that ‘he is no longer able to stand, if he can raise 3 d. to pay the Fee of the common Nurse of the Prison, he obtains the Liberty of being carried into the Sick Ward, and lingers on for about a Month or two, by the assistance of the abovementioned Prison Portion of Provision, and then dies’. In the women’s sick ward were seven ‘miserable Objects lying without Beds on the Floor, perishing with extream Want’. In the men’s sick ward they found eleven ‘miserable Men’, living skeletons as they must have been, in a terrible condition: three or four lay between the legs of trestles on the floor; three or four lay over them on boards resting on the trestles; and over them lay three or four more in hammocks. ‘On the giving Food to these poor Wretches (tho’ it was done with the utmost Caution, they being only allowed at first the smallest Quantities, and that of liquid Nourishment) one died.’ ‘Those who were not so far gone, on proper Nourishment given them recovered, so that not above Nine have died since the 25th of March last’, so in about seven weeks. The committee understood that before this, ‘a Day seldom passed without a Death, and upon the advancing of the Spring, not less than Eight or Ten usually died every 24 Hours’. The newspapers reported that the committee members were so moved by what they saw ‘that they made a very bountiful Contribution, out of their own Pockets’ to support the sick, ordering the attendance of an apothecary and nurses.3
How was it possible to make a profit from people as destitute as this? Or, ‘how to skin a flint, or to get a shirt off a naked man, as the saying is’? That was the task that fell to William Acton, deputy keeper of the Marshalsea. And in fulfilling it, in the Gaols Committee’s clear view, Acton had made the prisoners’ plight immeasurably – murderously – worse.4
Little is known of ‘William Acton Butcher’, as he is described in the Gaols Committee’s report, before his sudden notoriety from May 1729. How long butchering had been his trade is unclear, but he had for four years been journeyman to a Hackney master-butcher called Haysey at some point before becoming chief turnkey at the Marshalsea. This he was in 1725, having taken over from one Burleigh; the extent of his previous connections with the prison are unknown. Then or later he also became the clerk of the gaol, responsible for its official records of those brought into the prison and discharged. From May 1727, as we know, he farmed the Marshalsea from John Darby, the deputy marshal. He undertook to pay Darby £140 each year for the lease of the gaol, in return for which Acton received the fees due by law to the gaoler once prisoners were discharged from his custody. He paid Darby a further £260 a year for the right to rent out rooms on the master’s side, including the rent of the tap, run by his wife; it seems likely that her late father had been the former tapster, possibly having himself been a prisoner. Acton married Mary Wilson at St Martin-in-the-Fields, Westminster, Mary’s home parish, in July 1723; their son Henry was born in November 1724 and baptised at that prestigious church a month later. Acton’s age is unknown, though he must have been a youngish man in the full vigour of life. He was literate and sharp-witted, educated or self-taught to an attainment above his journeyman status. He was brought up to a trade needing great strength and nerve in which he was inured to cruelty – butchers then their own slaughtermen. And his talents, supplemented perhaps by a fortunate marriage or family resources, had endowed him with financial means far in excess of anything that could be amassed from a journeyman’s customary 15s 6d a week. Acton was, in many respects, a formidable man.5
We have seen Acton the genial host to visitors and to select prisoners such as Grano; we have seen his fondness for the acquaintance of grand personages and popular figures; we have seen Acton the family man at home with his wife and boy, maintaining close relations with his wife’s mother, keeping family occasions like birthdays and Christmas with fond extravagance. He was a churchgoer, occasionally at least, and kept his Bible on public display in his living quarters. But he also revealed even to Grano a sullenness and an unpredictability of temper that made this favourite prisoner wary of crossing him. Between bouts of accommodation and generosity there were inexplicable changes of mood. Asking permission to step out to the Crown tavern one night in December 1728, a favour generally granted with ease, Grano ‘found Him very cool and quite different from his usual way of Treating me’ and ‘reply’d very cooly Wills shall go with you by and by’. A similar occasion recurred after Christmas, so vexing that Grano vowed privately ‘at revenging the affrontive denyal’, but only when ‘I was out of the Lyon’s Mouth’; on reflexion he then resolved to make his peace ‘with the Person who exerted so much Tyrany’. A few days later in the lodge, ‘as Mr Acton came down I was a going to Salute him but he Took no Notice of me’; even more galling, he received similar treatment from Mrs Acton, the former prisoner’s daughter as he took her to be. And on the night of the queen’s birthday, when Grano had been slow to put candles in his windows, ‘I was very credibly inform’d Mr Acton was pleas’d to say that He would not have his Bed Cloaths Spoyl’d for any Son of a Bitch of them All which in my humble Opinion was not only calling me a Son of a Bitch but all ye Company I have the Honour to be admitted in . . .’6
Getting money out of his sons of bitches was Acton’s preoccupation. If he failed to get Darby his £400 a year, if he defaulted on the prison’s poor rates of £4 11s a year or on his brewer’s bill, then he risked arrest and imprisonment in his own gaol. Fees on discharge had been set in 1675 and totalled a minimum of 6s 2d for each prisoner, with the possibility of a further 5s if the discharge involved a second action or more, as many did. But as we have seen, some prisoners free of their debts remained imprisoned for their fees; and if they lay on the common side there was no profit for Acton. How profitable the fees were for Acton is unclear, though in a good year with large numbers imprisoned they were likely to be highly so – Acton would have scrutinised the prison’s balance sheets before committing to his investment. Certainly the rents were potentially very profitable indeed, the rent roll in 1729 totalling £596 14s, of which £555 2s was from the eighty prisoners then lying on the master’s side, including the few commercial lettings. After paying Darby his £260 for farming the rents, Acton netted some £309, less the rates and running repairs, or ‘Bed Cloaths Spoyl’d’ and no doubt much of the same.7
Here again, though, a rent roll was one thing, rent pocketed was something else. Acton’s Saturday nights were largely spent presiding over the prison’s metaphorical genuflexion to the ‘Black Book’. This was a Marshalsea tradition pre-dating Acton – it is mentioned in Hell in Epitome (1718), as ‘a Book as black as that will be/ At Judgment Day’:
Unless the Respites and Reprieves they pay,
They’re forc’d to Dungeons, ne’er to see the Day.8
One Saturday in November 1728 Acton had escorted Grano to St James’s and returned by coach over London Bridge. When they reached the Marshalsea ‘’twas just about Black Book Time’: ‘while we were in the Lodge my Governor call’d for my half Crown for my Black Book which I gave him and said he might expect another by Hanah from me not doubting that my Chum would have paid it’. But Hannah came back empty-handed and Grano paid Elder’s half-crown too so ‘that Mr Acton should not be baulk’d’.9
The Black Book probably did more than account for rent owed. Acton occasionally loaned Grano a crown and that was presumably noted against his name. So no doubt were other little extras that were attached to favours given and not yet made good, like being escorted past the gate on debtors’ business, in part for the gaoler’s gain. But it was rent that weighed heaviest in the Black Book, and not just for Acton. The terrors of the alternative, the dread common side or sick wards, were unbearable to contemplate and gave every incentive for master’s-side debtors to meet their obligations. The Gaols Committee reported on two sick prisoners on the master’s side, laying their sad plight at Acton’s door. The reality was probably more complex. Mary Trapp shared a bed with two other women, each paying her half-crown, when she took ill with some putrid or ulcerative condition. For the last three weeks of her life she grew ‘so Offensive that the others were hardly able to bear the Room’ and even the turnkeys couldn’t stand to enter it. Her bedfellows pressed repeatedly for Mrs Trapp to be removed, but she still paid her rent and Acton had every reason still to collect it. And among the men lay a prisoner with a fistula leaking bowel contents, also sharing a bed with two others, all having to pay their 2s 6d to Acton; but again, and despite his chums’ protests, what man would change his bed for the horrors of the common-side sick ward?10
The most terrible accusation against Acton, however, was that he withheld money due to common-side prisoners from charitable endowments and other sources that might have kept them alive: that he deliberately pocketed the money and left men and women to starve to death. No crime could be more heinous. And a crime here made more heinous still by being carried out among all the gluttonous excesses of Acton’s groaning table a hundred or so feet away from the common side.
The charities intended for the Marshalsea’s poor prisoners were legion, even in 1727 – more would be added in the years that followed. Nearly all bequests were small, many half-forgotten, most difficult to collect. Sir John Peche’s Gift of 1533 promised 5s annually; John Marsh’s Gift of 1557 and Roper’s Gift of 1628 each gave 20s; Peter Symonds’s Charities of 1586 sent forty-eight penny white loaves; Garratt’s Gift of 1582 sent 6s 8d; Craythorne’s Gift of 1586 sent 15s; Margaret Simcott’s Charity of 1633 sent 390 penny loaves; and so on. There were perhaps a score and more of these old legacies donating money or victuals to the common side, on parchment at least. There was only one cash endowment of any value, easy to look out for: the Mercers Company sent £10 each year to the prison as part of Sir Thomas Gresham’s famous will of 1575. In addition to all these, every county in England was required to send £1 each year by the Poor Law of Elizabeth I, the so-called ‘county money’ or ‘exhibition money’.11
Before Acton’s time the charities received in the Marshalsea were managed by the ‘steward’ chosen by the common side, either from inside or outside the gaol, perhaps from among respected former prisoners. The steward held the ‘Common Seal’, and he and the six ward constables would sign and seal in wax a receipt for the monies or victuals coming into their wards; these receipts would then be passed to the executors who had forwarded annual donations to the gaol. In 1722, one Matthew Pugh was chosen steward and proved particularly active, discovering ‘several Charities which had been before concealed’, which shows either that Acton’s defalcations were nothing new or that some legacies had been maladministered by the various executors of the old gifts. Pugh alleged the former, specifically that John Darby ‘and his Servants in the Lodge’ had copied the common seal and were using it to give donors false receipts for gifts that had never been passed to the wards. Whether those servants included Acton is unclear, but the timing is such that they might have done. Accordingly Pugh and the poor-side prisoners commissioned a new common seal stamped ‘MARSHALSEA PRISON 1725’. It was kept in a ‘Chest’ fixed to the wall and locked with seven keys, one each for the six constables and the steward.
Soon after, John Darby moved against Pugh, who, he claimed, had ‘behaved himself very turbulently’ in both gaol and courtroom, and in July 1725 the Marshalsea judges banished him from both prison and court, requiring the common side to choose a different steward. According to the Gaols Committee, the new steward was chosen ‘by those in the Keeper’s Interest’ and was Darby’s own clerk, John Grace. The affronted ward constables refused to relinquish their keys, so Grace and Acton as chief turnkey together broke the chest from its fixings and carried it off with the common seal inside. Around this time, mid-1725, an act for the relief of insolvent debtors freed many of those common-side prisoners acquainted with all this murky history. After that the charity money was distributed only in an irregular fashion by Grace or an official of the court. But once Acton leased the gaol in March 1727 he dispensed with any steward other than himself:
upon his Examination, he confessed, that from May 1728, to May 1729, he had received Charity Money for the poor Prisoners, amounting to above 115 l. of which he had kept no Account, and took no Notice thereof till this Committee was appointed to Enquire into the State of the Goals, not expecting to have been asked about it. He pretended he had distributed the Money among the prisoners directly, but produced no sort of Vouchers for it.12
We have independent verification of the point. On 22 March 1729, while Grano was walking in the Park, ‘there was some Charity Money Paid, which the generality of ye People say had been given them a great while a goe and would not have come to light but for fear of ye approaching inspection of ye Committy’.
Acton’s control over the charity money did not stop with the legacies and exhibition money. The traditional begging baskets (for broken victuals) and boxes (for loose change) that prisoners were licensed to take out from time to time were also misappropriated by Acton, who let the victuals in but kept the money for his own purposes. It was also said that charities directed to the release of poor prisoners had been used to ‘free’ voluntary prisoners who acted as his servants, even turnkeys; after a time away they returned to the gaol once Acton had pouched the imaginary prison fees, paid by the charities. The Gaols Committee’s conclusion that the charity money properly distributed ‘would have prevented the Starving to death many miserable Wretches’ seems unimpeachable.13
So it must have appeared to the common side too. In their desperation and fury they tried to wreak vengeance on their tormentor. Just two instances have come down to us, both from John Grano’s journal. In November 1728, Grano had been at the west end of the town with Wills, returning at night. Arriving ‘in the Lodge we heard that the people of the Common Side were rose against my Governor’. It seems to have been an ambush:
’twas a very villainous thing in the Main; being Mr Acton went only to do a piece of Justice calling in ye Ward to procure a Man his Coat again which his fellow prisoners had taken from him; instead of giving an account of the same one Anderson of ye Ward cry’d out one & all and immediately they fell upon him but thrô God’s Mercy and his own behaviour he came off with the Loss of a little Blood and a torn Shirt . . .14
A few days later Grano heard of what seems to have been an earlier incident. At the Crown tavern in the Borough, he was sitting down to pea soup and a steak when Acton arrived unexpectedly and shared some food with him. What happened next is unclear but it seems that Acton was served a summons from ‘a fellow that was a Prisoner Here some time agoe who had the audaciousness and inhumanity to endeavour to Stab my Governor in the Dark only because he was a going to send him to his Ward being very Riotous’; he was now acting ‘under pretence of his [Acton’s] Assaulting Him which gave him some uneasiness notwithstanding the Rascall’s Vouchers are a couple of common Women and that Mr Acton can bring several People of Reputation to Testifye what has been observ’d’. This was a facility that soon proved useful to Acton.15
Resistance took other forms. Some prisoners suffering ‘Hunger and extreme Want’ became ‘so desperate, that after having fasted four Days, and seeing no Hope of Relief, they attempted to break thro’ the Prison Wall, and were taken in the Attempt’. Had an escape been successful, of course, then Acton’s profits would have been dented, possibly significantly, and his standing with Darby would have been shattered. To punish the miscreants and to deter emulation, Acton resorted to those medieval instruments of torture that had survived somewhere in the Marshalsea since 1483 and almost certainly before. He was said to have used thumbscrews and laden men with heavy leg irons ‘called sheers’; employed an ‘Iron Engine, or Instrument (which appears to be an Iron Scull-Cap)’, and an ‘Iron Instrument, called a Collar, (like a pair of Tongs)’, that fixed to one victim’s neck and screwed tight made his eyes ‘ready to start out of his Head, the Blood gushed out of his Ears and Nose, he foamed at the Mouth, the Slaber run down, and he made several Motions to speak, but could not’. There was also hung up in the lodge ‘an Instrument . . . for beating the prisoners’, the very name of which ‘became a Terrour to them’. This was a bull’s pizzle, dried hard as teak, some three or four feet long with a swollen end like a knobkerrie, a favoured weapon of butchers who were slaughtermen.16
After being tortured, some refractory prisoners were kept in irons and confined in the ‘Strong Room’, a place with no windows, the ‘Common Shore’ or sewer running beneath its floorboards or nearby; sometimes with ‘Humane Carcasses’ awaiting burial. One prisoner, it was said, was locked up with ‘two dead Bodies which had lain there Four Days’; he stayed with them ‘Six Days longer, in which time the Vermin devoured the Flesh from the Faces, eat the Eyes out of the Heads of the Carcasses, which were bloated, putrifyed, and turned green . . .’17
John Grano witnessed none of this, as we know, but we do have an anonymous common-side voice that can testify to some of the conditions there. It comes from a pamphlet published in the glare of the Gaols Committee’s reports, but it nevertheless has the piercing ring of truth. It contains a narrative of a King’s Bench prisoner sent to the Marshalsea as punishment for assisting in the escape of two of his fellows, a charge he denied. He found himself in Duke’s Ward, a room he thought fourteen by eleven feet in which twenty-eight men had to bed down. He had 4s 6d garnish demanded from him by the ward constable ‘and the Elders, as they call them’; unable to pay at that moment, he had to hand over some clothes which were pawned – he redeemed them later when his friends sent money. He found the stench from the ward’s ‘open Tub’ intolerable, and noted that the wards ‘abound with Lice, Bugs, and other Vermin’, so that he was almost ‘destroyed with Vermin’ before allowed back in the King’s Bench:
the Poverty of the People is so great, that nothing upon Earth can be more miserable; great Numbers of them in Rags, and almost naked, starving for want of Bread. I had a very small Matter with which to maintain my self in this miserable unhappy Place; yet when I was eating my Morsel, so many eager Eyes were always fixed upon me, such a Number of fellow Prisoners constantly hovering about me, like so many Shadows, pale, and faint, without any the least Subsistence, and in all Appearance, perishing for want of Relief, and daily seeing the dead Bodies of others, who were famished, carried out, I could not withhold from parting with some of that which was given me, till I was almost brought to the like Condition my self.18
A central allegation of the Gaols Committee was that this whole edifice of appropriation, starvation, repression, torture and even murder rested on an illegality. When Sir Philip Meadows had appointed for life John Darby as deputy marshal and keeper of the Marshalsea in November 1720, the deed stipulated that no part of his office should be ‘let to Farm’ without Meadows’s ‘Consent in Writing’. Here, apparently, no consent had been sought, and was plainly not given. But this was a mere technicality. Meadows knew Darby was a prosperous and busy City printer who would never soil his fingers or risk his reputation by daily managing perhaps the most notorious debtors’ gaol in the kingdom, a byword for misery up and down the land. The Marshalsea had been farmed to deputy keepers in the past and there is no reason to suppose that Meadows would have withheld consent, although perhaps he preferred not to ‘know’ of the arrangement to distance himself from any ensuing scandal. Had the unlawful farming of the Marshalsea been the Gaols Committee’s main criticism, it would have been laughed from the floor of the House of Commons, many of its members no doubt receiving income from similar arrangements. But it was the morbid injustice that prisoners suffered at the hands of their gaoler that unquestionably moved and vexed the committee’s chairman, James Oglethorpe.
It had been a single act of injustice at another debtors’ prison, the Fleet, that set Oglethorpe on what would become an obsession for him. As a young man Oglethorpe had served as an officer in the armies of both the Duke of Marlborough and Prince Eugene before he was returned as MP for Haslemere in 1722. He soon became acquainted with the London debtor’s world, because in 1723 he had been a member of the committee enquiring into the Mint and the year after that he was one of the committee on the Insolvent Debtors Bill. But it was the fate of a debtor friend that moved this energetic and upright soldier-parliamentarian decisively to action. Robert Castell, a promising architect, was committed to the Fleet for debt during the rapacious regime of keeper Thomas Bambridge. Eventually he was utterly without resources, and we can only think that Oglethorpe found out about his plight when it was all too late to help. Unable to pay the gaoler’s fee to get a better berth, he was forced into quarters where ‘the Small-Pox then raged’. He had never had the disease and was in great fear of it. Despite his protests, and in an already weakened condition, Castell contracted smallpox and died in November 1728.41
Oglethorpe was a Tory and of Jacobite stock. He was, therefore, a political enemy of the ruling administration and its leader, Sir Robert Walpole. The very establishment of the Gaols Committee – for that reason alone – was of concern to the Whig camp. Even so, his allegations against Bambridge and the Fleet were so serious that the Commons found an inquiry irresistible.
The Gaols Committee’s membership exemplifies the nuanced and contingent nature of politics in these years. Politics may have been tribal on the surface but underneath they were cross-cut by friendships and family allegiances and obligations of one kind or another. Of course, the committee could be no blunt instrument of anti-government propaganda, if only because the Whig majority in Parliament had a large say in its membership. On the other hand, the committee’s Whigs couldn’t necessarily be relied on to support the government line. And the danger here was that the committee would trace abuses in the prison wards far higher than Bambridge and his ilk: for questions of place, who was in which office and why, and by what mechanisms they managed their public duties, led directly to the administration of Sir Robert Walpole, and to the ways in which power and purchase were so closely interwoven.
Some of these complexities emerge when we consider just who was elected to the Gaols Committee. Among its ninety-odd members were the Chancellor of the Exchequer and Arthur Onslow, the Speaker of the House of Commons, both figures close to government. Others had allegiances less easily fixed. Lord John Perceval, for instance, was a Whig and loyal supporter of Walpole, but he was one of Oglethorpe’s closest friends. Sir Edward Knatchbull was nominally a moderate Tory, but he was no Jacobite and was slowly turning Walpole’s way. On the other hand, Captain (later Admiral) Vernon, though elected as a Whig, was moving noisily towards the opposition. There were numerous others of interest. Two Whig members, Sir Archibald Grant and Sir Robert Sutton, would later be expelled from the House of Commons for involvement in speculations and frauds on charities – ironically, given the findings in respect of the Marshalsea: in the History of Parliament they are two of just twelve members in this period labelled ‘rogues’. Sir James Thornhill is best remembered as the greatest history painter of his day and the reluctant father-in-law of William Hogarth, but he was also a Dorset MP and a loyal supporter of government. Alderman Francis Child and Thomas Martin were two hugely rich City bankers, the first a Tory and the second a Whig. And another alderman, Humphrey Parsons, whom we have already met, was an outspoken Jacobite, one of the most notable City opponents of Walpole and all his works; or so it seemed on the surface. We get rather a different perspective from his work on the Gaols Committee. Parsons had been among the committee members surveying the Marshalsea on that first visit of 25 March 1729, for he gratifyingly called on Grano to make his presence known; two other members visited him too, possibly James Oglethorpe himself, for they certainly recognised each other at an accidental meeting some weeks later.19
The committee reported on the Fleet on 20 March 1729. Their report contained two resolutions charging the warden of the Fleet, Thomas Bambridge, and a former warden with ‘Extortions, cruelties, and other high Crimes and Misdemeanours’; the House of Commons resolved to ask the king to prosecute both men.20 When Oglethorpe’s committee visited the Marshalsea nine days later they found horrors far worse, and gathered testimony more sinister, than anything they had found in Bambridge’s gaol. Acton must have feared the worst from the outset. Unsurprisingly, he sought what help he could. On 11 April Grano called on Alderman Humphrey Parsons in the City, perhaps in pursuit of his own affairs but conceivably at Acton’s request, for the conversation turned to Grano’s ‘Governor’. Parsons
ask’d me how Mr Acton did to which I reply’d that his Heart was almost broke for want of His Honour’s Presence and that till now the Honble Committee had done nothing but hearing ye Complaints and Accusations of ye Prisoners and had not given Him leave to make any Defence not that He question’d their Equitable dispositions and Intentions – the Alderman was so kind in Answer to this, to give me leave to assure Mr Acton he would attend ye rest of the Committee ye next time they came and do Him all the Service Justice will admitt of and desir’d me to advise Him to get a few responsable Men and of good Character to appear in his behalf, and some who have been an Eye Witness to his behaviour toward ye Prisoners &c.21
The Jacobite alderman’s assistance to the committee’s main target, potentially undermining Oglethorpe’s intentions as it did, was a surprising intervention but to no avail, at this stage at least. A month later, on 14 May 1729, the committee’s report on the Marshalsea was presented to the House of Commons by James Oglethorpe. The committee resolved that William Acton, ‘Clerk of the Prison of the Marshalsea, and Farmer of the same Goal . . . hath been guilty of many High Crimes and Misdemeanours’. In particular, it alleged he ‘arbitrarily and unlawfully loaded with irons, Tortured and Destroyed, in the most Inhumane, Cruel, and Barbarous Manner, Prisoners for Debt under his Care, in high Violation and Contempt of the Laws of this Kingdom’. John Darby was arraigned for unlawfully farming the gaol to Acton and for neglect of duty. Both men were implicated in the mis-appropriation of charity monies intended for the prisoners. Oglethorpe moved ‘That an humble Address be presented to his Majesty, that he will be graciously pleased to direct his Attorney-general forthwith to prosecute, in the most effectual Manner, the said William Acton and John Darby, for their said Crimes and Misdemeanours.’ The House resolved accordingly.22
The published reports on the Fleet and Marshalsea caused a great stir. Hogarth famously painted the examination of Thomas Bambridge, hunted and at bay in the Fleet, where the painter’s own father had been prisoner for a time, and a pamphleteering war broke out involving Bambridge himself, his detractors and his supporters. The pamphlets that followed the Marshalsea report, however, tended all one way. Acton seems to have found no defenders in print. The lurid tales of torture by ancient ‘engines’ fascinated many. Within a month of the report a broadsheet was published illustrating the irons, collar and skullcap, and showing the sick ward. Further illustrations in crude woodcut appeared around the same time in a pamphlet popularising the committee’s findings on the Fleet and Marshalsea.23
It was a difficult time for the deputy keeper of the Marshalsea. Matters came to a head on 9 June, when the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State, received from Queen Caroline her command to the Attorney General ‘for the prosecution of William Acton, Clerk of the Prison of the Marshalsea and John Darby Keeper of the said Prison’, the proceedings to be conducted at ‘His Majty’s Expence’. Acton was arrested that day. Darby, that prominent Whig printer so loyal to the crown, seems not to have been proceeded against: if he was, then he never stood his trial. That Monday 9 June, Grano recorded that ‘soon after Dinner I was Surpris’d and very much afflicted with the News of My Governor Mr Acton’s being taken into Custody and carried to the new Goal assoon as which I dress’d and went to Him . . .’ The new gaol was the rebuilt or renovated White Lyon, next to St George the Martyr’s churchyard, so Acton did not have far to walk. Grano found him ‘in ye Kitching’ with several visitors, some Borough tradesmen among them. He made a point of visiting ‘the distress’d Mr Acton’ frequently in the next few days and it is clear that Acton was still carrying out his clerkly duties for the Marshalsea, signing and administering prisoners’ paperwork. Lively on Acton’s behalf, on 19 June Grano went to the Swan tavern near the Royal Exchange to perform for Alderman Parsons, who was giving an entertainment for the City’s Grand Jury: ‘the Conversation was extream good, and I mention’d my poor Governor in his Affliction, with as much Art as I was Master of and found I mov’d the Company to Compassionate His Misfortunes and to beleive He was very much wrong’d and they all hop’d he would surmount his Difficulties with Honour.’ This was not Grano’s only acquaintance during the summer with members of the Gaols Committee. He saw Parsons a few times more, even staying overnight at his country house in Reigate. And he ‘Met Mr Oglethorpe and Mr [Rogers] Holland [Whig barrister and MP for Chippenham] in a Chariot behind Holdbourn: they Stop’d and Spoke to me and ask’d me several Questions in relation to our Castle ye Which I answer’d as a well as I could’. He presumably kept his feelings about his Governor to himself.24
After investigations lasting some weeks, the Attorney General brought charges against William Acton on four separate counts of murder. Every victim had been a debtor prisoner in his care: they were Thomas Bliss, John Bromfield, Robert Newton and James Thompson. Acton was set to stand trial at the Kingston Assizes on 31 July. Grano called on him a few days before. Acton ‘made me promise to meet Him at Kingston next Thursday &c.’ and Grano went down by coach, arriving at the Lyon and Lamb in Kingston around 11 in the morning. That afternoon Grano heard Acton charged with murder. Acton pleaded not guilty to all the charges and was told the first trial would begin next morning, Friday 1 August 1729. The evening before, in Kingston’s marketplace, Grano found ‘a great many of my Acquaintances’ from the Borough, including Justice Maltys Ryall and other Southwark worthies.25
The trial of William Acton for the murder of Thomas Bliss was heard before Mr Baron (Justice) Carter. It took up the whole of 1 August, a long time in the eighteenth-century court of justice. The case of Bliss, a carpenter by trade, had been recounted as especially vicious in the report of the Gaols Committee. Starved, as were so many on the common side, he had attempted to escape but was taken, beaten, put in irons, tortured and kept in ‘the Strong Room’, ‘a dangerous, damp, noisome, filthy and unwholesome Place’. Weak and near death’s door, Bliss had been released by Acton but never recovered, dying in St Thomas’s Hospital, half a mile or so from the Marshalsea, where he had suffered so much. Such was the charge. These events took place in 1726, so three years before.26
The trial began at 9 a.m. in front of a crowded court. There was, a contemporary account reported, ‘a very great and extraordinary Audience present’, including peers, the Speaker of the Commons, Arthur Onslow, other committee members, such as Oglethorpe and Charles Selwyn, ‘and many other Gentlemen of distinction, and a Crowd of Ladies’. The prosecution called many witnesses, several of whom painted a picture of the common-side regime under Acton. An exchange with John Wilson, a prisoner since 1726, bringing out the two sides of Acton’s character, was recorded thus by the shorthand writers:
Mr. Acton. Please to ask, my Lord, if he saw my Behaviour to the Prisoners in general.
Mr. Baron Carter. What say you to that?
Mr. Wilson. I have seen People beat, and put in Irons.
Mr. Ward [prosecuting counsel]. By whose Directions?
Mr. Wil. I believe by Acton’s.
Mr. Ward. Have you seen Acton strike Prisoners?
Mr. Wil. I have seen him strike prisoners with his Fist.
Mr. Ward. Did you see Bliss with an Iron Instrument on?
Mr. Wil. No.
Mr. Baron Carter. What behaviour did Acton use towards his Prisoners?
Mr. Wil. He behaved very well to some, and used others ill.27
Bliss had been involved with six or seven others in an attempt to escape by breaking through the prison walls into a baker’s adjoining in Ax and Bottle Yard. They were all caught and Bliss, who seems not to have been a main instigator, was confined in the strong room and fettered, staying there for some weeks before being sent back to the common side. Two or three months later he made a second escape attempt: ‘The Man was almost perished for want,’ Mary Gillis swore, ‘and with a Rope had attempted to escape, being tied round his Middle; but being discovered, the Rope was cut . . .’ Ruth Butler swore she ‘saw him going over the House, and he fell off’, hurting his ankle; he ‘was taken on the other side, and brought in again; and was put in the Strong Room by Acton, Thomas Nichols, Rogers and Page.’ According to Mrs Butler, ‘Acton beat him with a Bull’s-pizzle there, and stamped upon his Body several Times’, ‘Betwixt his Belly and his Stomach’.28
Next day Mrs Bliss came to visit Thomas, as she did, she said, every morning and night. When she got there:
Nichols said, there is the Bitch his Wife, and Acton ordered me to be called into the Lodge; and said, Damn you, Madam, I will have you before Justice Ladd, for bringing the Rope to your Husband: Damn you, I will confine you, and he put me into the Place where they put the irons in, adjoining to the Lodge, and kept me there an Hour.
She heard Acton order Bliss into the lodge and instruct the turnkeys to ‘put on the Scull-cap, Collar, Thumb-Screws, and Fetters’, Acton wanting Bliss to confess how he came by the rope. After a time he was moved to the strong room, where through the hole used to deliver food and drink Mrs Bliss saw him with the skullcap, irons and collar still on; she saw too the marks on his body of a beating from ‘the Bull’s-pizzle Acton kept’, as his clothes had to be cut off him to ease his swellings. She saw him bleeding from the mouth, he said from the skullcap, and from under his thumbnails. These instruments of torture were removed the next day or possibly later.
Bliss seems to have been put in the strong room two or three times, once for over a month. While there he was seen by other prisoners. Susannah Dodds swore to carrying him some victuals in the strong room while he still had on thumbscrews, leg irons including the sheers, and the skullcap – all were produced in court. Bliss asked her ‘to chew his Victuals, for his Mouth was sore; and I pulled it to Pieces, and fed him’. Other prisoners swore to Bliss’s being beaten and ironed, and to his weakened and sickly state while he remained in the Marshalsea. He was finally put in the men’s sick ward, where ‘he had no Stockings, no Shirt, only a Blanket.’
Brutal mistreatment – though contradicted by Acton’s witnesses, among whom were also former prisoners, as well as turnkeys and others dependent on the gaoler’s good opinion – was, from the shorthand record at least, convincingly evidenced. Much time was taken up over the condition of the strong room, a place of punishment for many years before Acton, as Hell in Epitome recorded. Even the prosecution witnesses disagreed over whether it was damp or not, and various opinions were voiced about how close to the common sewer, and how noisome, it really was. But much of the defence more tellingly went to the critical weakness of the prosecution’s case. The charge was of murder. But Bliss had been discharged months before he died in St Thomas’s – the timings of his imprisonment and death were, by modern standards, left surprisingly vague – and all agreed that in falling during his escape he had bruised himself and damaged his leg. Evidence about his physical condition at the time of his discharge was wildly at odds, some affirming his near-death-like condition, others that he was sprightly and in good heart. As to the cause of death, Mrs Jane Lapworth, nurse at St Thomas’s Hospital, swore that Bliss died of a fever: ‘I heard him say no more, than that he had been in the Country, and caught an Ague and an intermitting Fever.’ Acton also lined up an impressive list of witnesses who swore to his character as a ‘very humane Man’: Sir John Darnell, judge of the Marshalsea court; Edmund Halsey, brewer and MP for Southwark, provider of beer to the Marshalsea prison and himself at death’s door whether he knew it or not (he would be dead within three weeks); Justice Maltys Ryall of the Surrey bench, one of Grano’s patrons; and numerous wealthy tradesmen of the Borough.
There was an especially controversial moment during the trial. One of Acton’s witnesses as to facts was Hester Long, married to Mrs Bliss’s brother. She had seen Bliss after his discharge and swore he told her that his freedom ‘was owing to Mr. Acton; and said, God Bless him, he got me out. I asked him, If he was arrested again, what would he do? he said, Acton would stand by him.’ Long said that Mrs Bliss had told her that her husband ‘was as well as ever in his Life’. As if this were not astonishing enough, prompted by Acton she said that Mrs Bliss had lodged with her after her husband’s death and that ‘a Messenger came, and said, there was Money for Mrs. Bliss in Southwark’. This would be available for Mrs Bliss if she swore against Acton and that she had already received ‘two Guineas given her by one of the Gentlemen of the Committee’. At this point James Oglethorpe rose from his seat and asked for permission to speak. Mr Baron Carter, doubtless taken aback but aware of the MP’s special position, replied, ‘Sir, you may.’ Oglethorpe asked that Mrs Bliss be recalled to confront her sister-in-law. By contrast, Mrs Bliss said that Long had offered to go to Acton on her behalf ‘and make it up, and he would give me something’. The two guineas had been a present from her master, with whom she had been in service but had left because ‘There were so many came flocking, up and down after me, that I could not live with him. There came two Gentlemen last Sunday.’ Counsel asked who sent them and she replied, ‘They said they came from Acton.’ At which point Mr Baron Carter pointed out, ‘What they said is no Evidence’, which was true enough. Oglethorpe rose again:
My Lord, I must with all humble Submission beg leave to speak. Reputation is a very valuable Thing; and here is an Aspersion thrown out at random against a Member of a Committee, which may affect the Characters of several Gentlemen who are not here present.
Mr. Baron Carter. There are many Committees, and I should have taken notice if any thing had been said of any Committee of the House of Commons.29
In the end, Mrs Long was unable to identify which member, indeed which committee, she reported Mrs Bliss as mentioning. A telling note from a press report of the trials plainly referred to Hester Long and what many regarded as her suborned evidence: ‘We are inform’d, that an Indictment for Perjury was drawn, in order to be preferr’d against some of the Evidences who swore in the Behalf of Mr Acton, on his Trial for the Murder of Bliss; but before Council could peruse it, the Grand Jury was discharg’d.’30
There was then a long summing-up of the evidence by Mr Baron Carter, who picked out, as one trial report had it, ‘The Consistency and Inconsistency, the Credibility and Incredility, and the many and various Contrarieties and Contradictions that occurr’d in this long Tryal’ involving ‘Fifty odd Witnesses’.31 After retiring, the jury found William Acton not guilty of the murder of Thomas Bliss. John Grano had heard much of the evidence but didn’t stay for the verdict, being invited to dine nearby with Borough acquaintances ‘on a Hanch of venison a Salmon a Ham and chicken &c.’ Later he added a note to his journal entry for 1 August 1729: ‘NB. This Day a Tryal came on between His Majesty and William Acton before Baron Carter, for the Murther of Thomas Bliss, and after a full hearing of about 8 Hours He was acquited with General Satisfaction; the whole appearing to be a Malicious Prosecution.’
Next day the court heard the further three charges of murder. Baron Carter once more presided. To the horror of the prosecution the same jury that had heard the case in respect of Bliss was sworn in for the further trials too. The ‘Sollicitor for the Crown, three several Times insisted upon a new Pannel’, but Carter saw no cause to change the jury after being told by Acton’s counsel that ‘The other Pannel cannot write; these are Men of Ability and Experience.’ The prosecution was merely able to challenge one juror, who was replaced.32
The first trial of the day, Acton’s second indictment for murder, concerned the death of Captain John Bromfield, who died in the Marshalsea in June 1725. He had stabbed a turnkey with a penknife after a dispute. Evidence was given that he was ironed and put in a place called the Hole, ‘under the Stairs; a little bigger than a large Coffin in Width and Length’, where he could not stand upright and where the earthen floor was wet. There he stayed three or four days. Released, he was kept in irons on the common side, in George’s Ward. The irons were in place some weeks until shortly before he died. Acton’s defence was that Darby, as keeper, ordered Bromfield to be ironed because of his violent assault on a turnkey, that he was only in the hole a few hours and that he died of jaundice, unaffected by his treatment in prison.
Acton’s third trial was for the murder of Robert Newton, another failed escapee, who also died in 1725. Captain Tudman, Mr Smith and others gave evidence for the crown as to Newton’s subsequent treatment: that he was kept ironed in the strong room for about two weeks, lying on the bare floor, and then transferred to the sick ward, where he died. ‘He had no Illness before he was put in Irons; he was a hale, strong, young Man.’ More evidence was given about the strong room, timber-built against the side of a wall, the common sewer and ‘the Soil that comes from the Necessary-house’ nearby, and ‘Abundance of rats creep into it’. Dead bodies were kept there and seen eaten by rats. Acton’s defence was again that Darby had ordered Newton ironed, that he had a bed in the strong room, a healthy place which some prisoners preferred to the common-side wards, and that he died of the ‘Gaol-Distemper’. Acton also produced witnesses to swear that a prosecution evidence had ‘said he would swear against Mr. Acton, right or wrong, in order to make an Example of him’.
Acton’s fourth trial was for the murder of Captain James Thompson, who died in the strong room in 1726 and was found with his face ‘disfigured with the Rats’. The prosecution brought evidence to say he was already a sick man and in the strong room had no bed to lie on. William Jennings, at that time ‘one of Acton’s Watchmen’, complained of Thompson’s miserable condition during his confinement ‘and I desired Acton to have him removed, and Acton said, What Business have you to meddle with it? Let him die like a Son of a Bitch, and be damned.’ Acton’s defence had it that Thompson ‘had the Diabetes, and his Ward-mates said he stunk’ when he made water at night; they ‘fined him, and took his Coat from him, and carried it away, and the Man had not Money to redeem it’. He pressed Acton to move him from the ward so he might get some peace; he said he would get none in the sick ward either, but would be fined again. In the strong room he did have a bed – ‘A Pillow and a Blanket’, a prison bed as it became known during the trial – and one of Acton’s witnesses swore Thompson told him, ‘God bless Mr. Acton, for he had saved his Life by putting him in the Strong Room . . .’
Acton was acquitted of all these charges without the jury leaving their box. Both Acton and his counsel then asked that he be discharged. For reasons that are unclear – perhaps because of the leading role the House of Commons had taken in the prosecution and the prominence of its members watching in the courtroom – Baron Carter demurred. At this moment Acton’s counsel turned to Oglethorpe and asked him for his ‘Opinion’ as to whether Acton could now go free. Oglethorpe rose and replied:
Were I Prosecutor, I should desire the Prisoner might be released; not that I think him innocent, but that every Englishman, be him never so unjustly acquitted, hath, by the Habeas Corpus Act, on his Acquittal, a Right to be discharged; nor can any Subornation of Perjury, or any Management of a Jury, prevent it, for they are cognizable at another Time. (There being then a great Noise in the Court, interrupted his speaking for some Time, and as soon as it ceased, he went on again.) As I said before, I am not the Prosecutor; if I were, I know what I should have done. The Attorney General was ordered to prosecute by the Crown . . . I have not had anything to do in conducting the Prosecution here, which has appeared evidently . . .33
That Saturday afternoon, John Grano was invited to entertain the Surrey Grand Jury at the Sun tavern, Kingston, where the Lord Chancellor, Sir Robert Walpole ‘and other Grandee’s’ were also dining, keen no doubt to know the outcome of the Gaols Committee’s prosecutions. Afterwards Grano returned to the court, where he found that Acton had been acquitted. The two went to another inn, where John Darby met them for supper and the three of them drank ‘’Rack Punch’ till past two in the morning. On Sunday, Grano returned to the Marshalsea at Acton’s expense, sharing a coach with the gaoler’s aunt and mother-in-law, Acton presumably travelling back separately with Mary.34
Acton returned as deputy keeper of the Marshalsea. But the questions of subornation, perjury and the malign influence of the judicial bench on the Gaols Committee’s activities – for Bambridge was acquitted of all charges too – muttered on into 1730. The most active of the committee members were deeply embarrassed by the prosecutions’ failure, ‘vilified in the world for proceeding so zealous’, as Oglethorpe put it to Lord John Perceval. Perceval, loyal to both Oglethorpe his friend and Walpole his leader, was torn in two ways. He well ‘knew the ill will the Administration bore [the Gaols Committee], and the weight of the judges and Court would be against us’ should the committee be revived in the new parliamentary session of February 1730. The administration was also said to be undermining the committee, with Walpole’s personal role emphasised in the pamphlets: ‘it is commonly thought that Somebody’ – plainly referring to ‘Sir R.W.’ – ‘used all his Arts and Cunning to mislead’ the committee, ‘and even to wound the Reputation of those particular Gentlemen who appeared most active’. The judges in particular, ‘who had behaved strangely, and used us contemptuously’, were especially mistrusted by Oglethorpe and those closest to him. For of course the committee had trespassed on the province of the Marshalsea court and had, by implication, accused its judges of turning their backs on the most monstrous injustice. The judges were thought to be hand in glove with Bambridge in the Fleet and Darby and Acton in the Marshalsea. And as Perceval confided to his diary, any attempt ‘to call the judges to account . . . will draw upon our backs the power of the Ministry, who will certainly protect them’.35
Nevertheless, friendship outweighed prudence and Perceval voted for the revival of the committee. Oglethorpe had his way and the committee, with an altered membership, began work on the King’s Bench and other prisons in February 1730. The investigations of these other gaols revealed none of the flagrant abuses of the Marshalsea or Fleet. But the defeats of the previous summer continued to rankle. Oglethorpe and Perceval both thought ‘it could be proved public money was given to support the gaolers we prosecuted’. In March 1730 the committee heard how Acton had allegedly arranged for a key witness against him to be committed to Newgate on a false charge; it was said he was released after Acton’s acquittals. But nothing more was heard of the matter.36
At that point, though, it seemed as if justice might still be done to William Acton. For in September 1729 he had been arrested on a fifth murder charge in respect of a Whitechapel baker dying after a spell ironed in the strong room. This time Acton found it harder to mobilise influential friends in his cause. Unable to obtain bail, he spent the winter behind bars. His trial was fixed for 18 March 1730 at the Guildford Assizes. But the Surrey Grand Jury, whom Grano had entertained some seven months before, threw out the bill against him and he was a free man once more.37
Acton did not, this time, return to the Marshalsea. He moved temporarily in 1730 to a house in Faulcon Court, ‘very handsomely built with a Free-stone Pavement and well-inhabited’, on the west side of Borough High Street nearly opposite the King’s Bench prison, and then seems to have moved out of the parish of St George the Martyr. But he was back in 1737, publican of the Greyhound inn, just across the road from the prison that had made his name notorious throughout the land. William Acton died there in 1748. He left his copyhold and personal estate to Mary and a separate legacy of £100 to Henry. In February 1732 John Darby farmed the gaol to William Taylor, a Borough undertaker, a useful Marshalsea trade.38
What can we make of Acton’s trials? The evidence against him of torture and brutality was so circumstantial and attested to by so many as to appear both overwhelming and incontrovertible. But in no case could the prosecution prove that Acton’s maltreatment, usually exacted as punishment or revenge for serious infractions of gaol discipline, had led to any of the deaths with which he was charged. Sickness was so rife, in and out of the Marshalsea, that some other cause of death was readily plausible. To make the jury’s job even more difficult, perjured or prejudiced evidence on his behalf seems to have been given by a raft of witnesses, often his dependants in the gaol of one kind or another – turnkeys, paid helpers, prisoners who needed his favours or who would sell their word for a shilling or two. Certainly one of his ‘evidences’, Elizabeth Clayton, called ‘an old Bawd’ by a fellow prisoner whose testimony she had refuted, tried to sell concocted ‘secret’ information about Catholics and Jacobites (Grano’s fears about a charge of treason were not that far-fetched) to the authorities while she was a prisoner in late 1728 and again in 1732, for instance.39
On the more general findings of the Gaols Committee, of starvation deliberately engineered by Acton’s siphoning the charity money into his own purse, again the case seems fully made out. So was the neglect of the sick and dying, though this must be weighed against contemporary standards in workhouse sick wards, on shipboard or in most prisons anywhere. It is impossible to know, however, just how many deaths were caused by Acton’s harsh regime. The Marshalsea had always been a deadly place. We might recall the hundred dying there in three months reported to the House of Commons in 1719, almost certainly caused by an epidemic of gaol fever. But evidence of more normal times is hard to come by. Coroners’ inquests had not sat on Marshalsea bodies, it was said in the committee’s report and at Acton’s trials, for many years and that seems to have been true as far as debtors were concerned. But one piece of evidence has survived about Marshalsea deaths, for inquests were held on ‘felons’ detained there while it was the local Surrey county gaol, the White Lyon then being under reconstruction. From October 1720 John Darby had to pay for these inquests from his own profits. Before that the costs had been borne from rent paid to him by a coach-maker, perhaps in a part of the prison or premises adjoining in Ax and Bottle Yard, but this had now ‘gone from him’. He consequently asked the Surrey magistrates to reimburse him for these county expenses totalling £1 3s an inquest, made up of 10s to the coroner, 2s to the jury, 1s to the jury summoner, and 10s in all to the searchers (body-washers), coffin-maker, bearers and burial fees. The list ended in February 1724. Darby sought £41 for thirty-six inquests in forty-one months. Deaths were markedly seasonal, especially prevalent from October to April and probably due to typhus in the main, with men and women equally affected. In 1723, the worst year, there were thirteen inquests. These were on county prisoners only, we must remember, who had allowances of bread from the justices and who can merely have represented a small portion of the Marshalsea’s population.40
The Acton years can though be put into a broader context. The local churchyard of St George the Martyr buried many prisoners from the Marshalsea over the years. Families and friends who were in a position to do so no doubt removed most bodies to other parts of London to which the dead ‘belonged’; and prisoners known to be staunch dissenters or Roman Catholics would generally also have been buried elsewhere. Those bodies with no friends to claim them were taken to lie in St George’s churchyard nearby. Burials there from the Marshalsea fluctuated year on year, so that in 1698 we find twelve (including two children), in 1708 twenty-seven and in 1718, the year of Hell in Epitome, thirty-two. But in 1728, the year under Acton directly preceding the Gaols Committee’s investigation, fifty-three bodies were buried from the Marshalsea in St George’s, including one child and seven women prisoners. It is plain from the registers that bodies were held back in the gaol until someone else died and were buried in pairs so that the costs could be minimised. Mortality in London generally was high in the 1720s and St George’s was no exception, but in that context 1728 does not stand out; yet in that year Marshalsea burials accounted for one in every eleven interments in the parish churchyard. Whatever view we take of the Gaols Committee’s reported numbers of deaths from the prison, this was an exceptional mortality in a population at any one time of around 400 souls. And these deaths can only stand proxy for many more.42
Acton’s misappropriation of charity money seems likely to have caused some at least of this excess mortality. Yet charity money had probably never come easily to the common side and difficulties certainly persisted after Acton’s departure. In August 1735 the six ward constables petitioned the Surrey justices to assist in ‘getting in all the Arrears of the Legacys which the severall Donors have Respectively bequeathed to us, And also the Exhibition or High Barr money’ from the county treasurers. The petition was endorsed by Charles Thornton, clerk of the prison and prothonotary or chief clerk of the Marshalsea court: he thought the nine legacies listed by the prisoners were ‘in Arrear about 5 Years’, the ‘Exhibition money about two Years’. Four years later and the county money had become an urgent grievance, the common side producing an elaborate memorial to the justices and ‘to all people of Distinction’. It claimed that the receiver for the past ten years, Henry Masterman, ‘by his Negligence or Wilfullness’, had failed to distribute some £500 to the prisoners in ‘Exobition Mony’. On petition to the Lord Chief Justice and Sir Philip Meadows sometime before, Masterman had been replaced. The prisoners had requested that ‘their Agent’, John Adams, should be appointed receiver. But instead Meadows had installed ‘one Abraham Odall’, whom the prisoners considered ‘one of Mr Masterman’s Creatures, a Dealer in Harps an Established Jury-man of ye Marshalsea Court, and a Mercinary Tool of ye Goalers, that concerns himself so much with ye Charitys that belongs to ye poor prisoners, which causes them to call out Aloud for Justice, against <those> that endeavours to Starve to Death His Majestys poor Subjects . . .’ The common-side prayed for a new receiver to be put in Odall’s place. We don’t know if that plea was answered. Similar complaints would dog the Marshalsea throughout its history.43
How much, then, did the Oglethorpe committee improve matters for prisoners of the Marshalsea? There were some immediate effects, all welcome. A brutal gaoler had been removed. The medieval torture instruments, kept in the gaol for centuries, were taken away, never to return. Lives were saved as money came into the common side to tend the sick and rescue the starving. Hundreds were released from prison and helped to reorder their debts by the Insolvent Debtors Acts directly sponsored by the committee, though such acts had been passed before and would be again. And the gaol fees and rents were revised, with charges for bedding and bed hire reduced, especially for those sharing a bed: they had previously paid 2s 6d a week each, they would now pay 1s 2d.44
Among wider public opinion the immediate verdict was high in praise. In part that was because the committee’s exposures were a stick with which to beat Walpole and his administration. But Oglethorpe and his committee entered into the conscience of the times and even made a mark on its literature: the Scottish poet James Thomson, then living in London, memorably added new lines to the 1730 text of ‘Winter’ in The Seasons, praising the committee as that ‘generous band’ and condemning the ‘little tyrants’ who ‘Snatch’d the lean morsel from the starving mouth’.45
Oglethorpe went on to lead a long, eventful and useful life, most notably helping to found the state of Georgia in 1732, first envisaged as a sanctuary, almost a Utopia, for London debtors released from prison by the 1729 acts. The idea of transplanting failed tradesmen from the Borough and congested City suburbs to the virgin wilds of a new territory, among an indigenous population not always friendly to white settlers, seems to have given Oglethorpe, Perceval and other philanthropists little uneasiness of mind. A hundred willing debtors were sought, a charter for the new territory engrossed, a petition to the king for a grant of lands duly drawn up and eventually conceded. It all took two years to plan and implement. In the event some forty able-bodied unemployed with their families, perhaps an insolvent debtor or two among them, arrived in Charleston harbour in January 1733. But any debtors in Georgia would quickly be outnumbered by Protestant refugees and sturdy Highlanders, the two main emigrant groups eventually proving most robust and useful in the new world. Nevertheless the committee members’ continuing efforts on behalf of the imprisoned debtors were laudable and impressive for the time, duly remembered and etched in stone for posterity on the monument erected to Oglethorpe in his burial place at Cranham, Essex, soon after his death in 1785.46
Oglethorpe and the Gaols Committee are often connected with the work of the prison reformer John Howard in the 1770s and 1780s. But some fifty years separated them and in truth the Gaols Committee, while undoubtedly provoking a momentary spasm of shame and horror at the abuses it uncovered, created no momentum for reform of the way the gaols were run. For the Marshalsea continued to be farmed for profit. It was not invested in by crown or Parliament or its profit-rakers until its ruinous condition made it unfit to be considered a reliable place of custody at all. The ripples made by the Gaols Committee in 1729 were quickly stilled. The Marshalsea would very much go on in the way it always had for some generations to come.