Mansions of Misery

There follows an able exposé of the oppressions of the Palace and Marshalsea courts, their intrinsic bias in favour of creditors and attorneys, and the counterproductive burdens on society when respectable and industrious debtors such as A.B. are imprisoned and can no longer support their families. And Eye-Witness rages with biblical fervour against the iniquities of the Marshalsea prison and its moral dangers for honest traders and female virtue, tempted beyond endurance by crushing poverty and the need for ready money inside the gaol:

Look on this picture, ye who would make us religious by Act of Parliament! Ye advocates of Negro Emancipation! Ye who condemn the Factory System! Ye Bible Societies! Ye dispensers of Religious Tracts! Ye Societies for promoting Christian Knowledge! and for the Suppression of Vice! I call on ye in the name of Religion! I call on ye in the name of Morality! I call on ye in the name of all that is dear to the character of a Christian! to unite in the good cause of obtaining abolition of imprisonment for debt. View the Metropolitan Debtors’ Prisons – visit the prisions of the King’s Bench, the Fleet, and, though last, not least in iniquity, the ‘Palace or Marshalsea!’ Here you will find imprisonment for debt has been, and is productive of more vice, than almost any other cause! Here, then, you will find employ worthy a Christian Legislator.¹²

Poole had at least one Christian Legislator in mind. On 8 July 1833 he wrote from temporary lodgings at 3 Union Row, New Kent Road, enclosing a copy of his Expose to Joseph Hume, the radical MP for Middlesex, recently one of the successful parliamentary movers of the Great Reform Act and an advocate of prison reform among many other progressive causes. Poole made clear in his letter that ‘Eye-Witness’ was rather more than a disinterested observer of the misfortunes of others: ‘I take the liberty of enclosing a Pamphlet, which I have published, as the only means of obtaining Bread, for a sick wife & a large Family who have been reduced to beggary by my imprisonment for debt.’¹³

We know little of John Ewer Poole, not when he was born or when he married, though the large family was attested to in 1825 when he claimed ‘a family of eight dependants on him’. He did, though, leave an eloquent paper trail in court and prison records of one kind or another. Far from the honest and industrious and respectable A.B., whose exertions would have satisfied every creditor had he been left free to do so, John Ewer Poole was a serial insolvent, constantly shifting his address to avoid creditors, in and out of debtors’ gaols across London, prosecuted and imprisoned for unlawfully pawning goods that did not belong to him; and, as his Marshalsea pamphlet eloquently testifies, an arch-hypocrite and dissembler. On the other hand, for such there usually was in the debtor’s world, he was intelligent, imaginative, venturesome, irrepressible and humorous.¹⁴

John Ewer Poole’s first appearance in the London courts was not as a defendant but a witness, indeed a prosecutor. In 1814 he was a tobacconist, the Post Office Directory that year noting him at 203 Strand, a respectable address indeed. Five years later he had moved home and shop to prestigious 74 New Bond Street, for in January 1819 a seventeen-year-old boy, John Johnson, was prosecuted by Poole for stealing a brass moulding he had broken away from the tobacconist’s shop window – Johnson received six months in prison and a whipping.¹⁵

Poole’s upward rise in the tobacco trade did not continue long. By the end of 1820 he had moved again, to 2 Jermyn Street, St James’s, another wealthy shopping street, where he was trading as ‘Auctioneer and Appraiser’; but now he was laden with debt and must have had his first taste of a debtor’s prison, for he was declaring himself insolvent as a way of satisfying his creditors. He can’t have been free long, for in February 1821 he was imprisoned in the Fleet by order of the Insolvent Debtors’ Court at the suit of four men, perhaps more of those ‘small claimants’ that it was so easy to neglect in an insolvency schedule. By September 1825 he had moved to a newly built but quickly disreputable suburb of north-west Marylebone at 53 Lisson Grove, continuing the trade of auctioneer. It was from here that he unlawfully pawned goods entrusted to him to sell for an undischarged bankrupt who never got his money for them. He was given three months’ hard labour in Coldbath Fields House of Correction at Clerkenwell. Despite a petition from sixteen people whom Poole had enlisted to give him a character reference, and despite a verbose plea to Sir Robert Peel, Home Secretary, detailing how he had informed on a publisher of blasphemous books and how his honourable motives had been misunderstood, he appears to have served his full sentence at ‘The Steel’.¹⁶

Between 1826 and 1833, when he was imprisoned in the Marshalsea, Poole racked up a great number of addresses, both business and residential. He had a preference for the West End but was frequently pushed back to the margins, sometimes the suburbs, always a moving target: from Mount Street (Mayfair) to Lower Sloane Street (Chelsea) while carrying on business as auctioneer and other things for part of the time at Park Street (Grosvenor Square); then living in Praed Street (Paddington) while in business at Fitzroy Square and at Old Jewry in the City; then living in Harrow Road (Paddington), Castle Street (Leicester Square), Hart Street (Bloomsbury) and Collumpton Place (Kentish Town) while carrying on business at Mortimer Street (Fitzroy Square); when he was arrested in 1833 he was living at low-class Robert Street (Hampstead Road). In all, this was twelve addresses for home or business in six or seven years, one more instance of the debtor’s necessarily itchy feet. His trade proved as flexible as his lodgings. While he was in the Marshalsea he was described as ‘Appraiser, House-Agent, and Accountant, and for a short-time Plasterer, Painter, and Paper-Hanger’, testimony to the speculative attractions of the London property market in these years of seemingly endless suburban expansion.¹⁷

For the next five years Poole’s movements are not known, but he was back in the Marshalsea again in September 1838 for a debt of just under £10 that he was able to discharge and so free himself within a week or two. From there and for the next four years or so new debts seem steadily to have accumulated alongside his peripatetic adventures round all points of the London compass, now including the Surrey side of the river: back to the Strand, No. 337, where he added ‘Licensed Victualler’s Agent, and proprietor of the Hall of Information’ to his professional portfolio; and living at Beresford Street (Walworth), Half Moon Street (Islington), West Square (Lambeth, where Edward Oxford was a near neighbour if the dates coincided, either at West Street or Bethlem Hospital), Cherry Tree Cottage (St John’s Wood), Bridge Street (Westminster), Hercules Buildings (Lambeth, where William Blake had once lived) and finally Princes Road (Kennington); he also had offices in Gerrard Street (Soho) and Basinghall Street (City). In between times he had spent ‘a few days a prisoner for Debt in the County Gaol of Surrey, Horsemonger-lane’ and another ‘few days’ in the Debtors’ Prison for London and Middlesex at Whitecross Street in the City, new-built in 1815.¹⁸

On 12 August 1842, once again in front of the Insolvent Debtors’ Court, where he had been an inveterate, refractory and slippery petitioner for over twenty years, John Ewer Poole was discharged for what seems to have been the last time, having satisfied the chief commissioner that he had taken what steps he could to meet his creditors’ just demands. Here was a man who would never succumb to a knock-out blow:

The insolvent, who had previously been discharged, had been an auctioneer, &c. He kept a ‘Hall of Information,’ in the Strand, and could have supplied a good deal of information if he had communicated one half of his troubles.

The Chief Commissioner asked when he begun to instruct the rising generation?

The insolvent said in 1834. He had brought up a family of 14 children.

The Court ordered him to be discharged.¹⁹

And the Hall of Information? In fact it seems to have been Poole’s salvation. Whether it was his idea or not is unclear, but it might well have been because it was founded just two years before he was described as its ‘Proprietor’. It was an information exchange, offering a poste restante to hold ‘letters for persons from the country who had no town address, and people advertising in the newspapers, who did not wish their ordinary address to appear’. By 1844 it was advertising its services as a City employment exchange for ‘Commercial Assistants, male and female’, so clerks and shop assistants in general. Anyone wanting an engagement paid to have their names and employment details registered so that employers could find suitable candidates. The assistants paid ‘1s to 2s 6d’ to join the register in 1844, though by 1849 it was firmly 2s 6d. Employers inspected the lists free of charge. Assistants contacted by employers through the agency were charged a further 1s. By 1844 the Hall of Information had moved to 8 Fore Street, Moorgate, where it was still trading in 1849 and probably after. Poole was still the proprietor in 1848, and perhaps throughout, for that February he complained to the City magistrate of a swindler using the office to receive articles for which he had no intention of paying. He was thanked by the sitting alderman for the warning, which would be widely communicated to the City’s traders: ‘Mr. Poole considered he had only done his duty towards the public, and, having thanked Alderman Salomons for his attention to his application, retired.’ The case no doubt raised an eyebrow or two among his acquaintances.²⁰

Perhaps the Hall of Information kept Poole’s many creditors if not satisfied at least at bay. From 1845 the Post Office Directory had him, still auctioneer and accountant, living at 9 Spital Square, a respectable address on the eastern edge of the City, and his peripatetic days were gratifyingly over. For it was there that he died on 18 March 1854. Probate was granted to his widow, Elizabeth Theodora Poole, but it took four years for her husband’s complicated affairs to be settled, by which time she had moved to Sidney Street in eminently respectable Brompton; she would receive effects valued in all at less than £20.²¹

Oddly, Giles Hemens also described himself as auctioneer and appraiser, although he did not share Poole’s wandering ways and nor did he achieve much public profile outside the Marshalsea itself. Indeed, he operated on a far humbler scale. He was born probably in 1764 and was first married in 1789 to Sarah Holwell at St Dunstan in the West, Fleet Street. Sarah died in 1814 and six weeks later Hemens was married again to Elizabeth (often called Eliza) Clark at St George the Martyr, Southwark, near neighbour to the Marshalsea prison, whose gate he must have glimpsed on his wedding day. Giles and Eliza already had two children together and Eliza had adopted the surname Hemens by 1809.²²

Giles Hemens had been in business as an auctioneer, appraiser and undertaker at Frith Street, Soho, and then in Stacey Street, St Giles, a mixed parish though one notorious for the slum ‘Holy Land’ or ‘Rookery’ in the west; Hemens would spend most of the rest of his life in the better-off parts of St Giles. Here he dissolved his partnership with one Low Westwood to trade on his own account, for a time at least. Hemens believed in advertising, and we have glimpses of his business accordingly. He took out a notice in The Times in January 1802 to herald a forthcoming auction he was holding of china, Staffordshire ware and glass. Around 1811, now trading at Portugal Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, he had a card printed promising ‘Most Money for Household Furniture’, which he adopted as a slogan, and showing a dapper Hemens with blond wavy hair, gavel in hand, gentlemen customers in ranks beneath him. And in August 1814, now at 5 Denmark Street, St Giles, he advertised his business with tickets entitling the bearer to a free pint of beer at the Hand and Hammer drinking booth in the premature peace celebrations at ‘Hyde Park Fair’ in August 1814.²³

Advertising proved a costly business. Hemens was arrested and imprisoned in November 1812 in the King’s Bench for a debt of nearly £72, while confessing to owing £489 3s 1d to all his creditors. These were large sums and Hemens petitioned to take advantage of the Insolvent Debtors Acts of 1813 and 1814 to settle with his creditors. This action he abandoned, possibly because he took on a new partner, Charles Robertson, who brought capital into the business. They traded for a time as Hemens and Co., but partners seem not to have sat easily with Giles and the firm was dissolved, Hemens buying out Robertson’s share in December 1816. Hemens’s creditors may have been placated for a time but not for long. By 1818 and perhaps before, he was taking in lodgers to swell his business earnings at 5 Denmark Street and probably doing everything else he could to keep out of trouble – he seems in all to have been an honest man. But in early 1820 he was arrested again and this time brought into custody at the Marshalsea on 18 February.²⁴

Hemens would have a terrible time there. He refused to suffer in silence. His case exposes the dark side of debtor democracy and the undercurrent of violence flowing beneath that neat copperplate script of the ‘College Regulations’. And his exposé had serious consequences for those nominally in charge of the gaol.²⁵

When Hemens was committed to the Marshalsea he was on his beam ends, as the contemporary phrase had it. He told the Palace court’s deputy prothonotary that ‘he was very poor & could barely procure what was necessary for him, his friends assisted him with trifling sums . . .’ Soon after he arrived he sent out to a particular friend, a Mr Bacon in New Compton Street, Soho, and asked Bacon to visit him, ‘but having a debtor here of the name of Dolman he was Afraid to come’. Hemens had a tendency to involve himself in the affairs of others. It was a quality that had a positive side: he appeared as a witness in an Old Bailey trial in 1816 where he had found an eight-year-old girl crying in the street, rightly suspected she had been robbed, saw a man running away and promptly pursued him. But in the Marshalsea, with its myriad secret sensitivities, inquisitiveness could be a dangerous virtue.²⁶

Hemens met Dolman, accidentally he said, ‘on the parade of this place’. Hemens presumably mentioned that they shared a common acquaintance, Mr Bacon, Dolman’s creditor. Hemens understood Dolman to say that Bacon’s attorney was at fault for not distinguishing the debt from costs: were they to be separated, then Dolman might settle the debt and so release himself from the Marshalsea. Hemens promptly wrote to Bacon to tell him so, thinking that if Dolman were out of the gaol, then Bacon would be free to visit his friend. Sometime later Dolman asked Hemens if he had written to anyone about his affairs, ‘to which I replyed I had he said I am very much oblidge to you Sir for your candour. will you call round to my room as there is a person there who will speak to you on the subject’. Hemens shortly did so, finding Dolman and his friend, who accused him of interfering in a way that had in fact prevented Dolman settling with his plaintiff. There was a row, Dolman called Hemens ‘a d—d raskle took his stick with intent to strike me, but I left the room’.

There things seemed to stand. But indignation was hardening into a plot to exact revenge, and four or five weeks later it was ready to hatch. According to Hemens’s sworn statement, he was with some visitors in the snuggery when a prisoner whose name he took to be McMoles publicly abused him for being ‘the ruin of M^r Dolman’. Later, in the yard, Hemens remonstrated with McMoles but quickly found himself ‘surrounded by a number of the Lower order of Prisoners’. Disentangling himself, he went to return to his room but on the staircase McMoles caught him by the leg and dragged him to the door. Hemens, who was in his mid-fifties by this time, was seized by several men, a filthy sack used as a doormat was flung over his head and he was dragged about thirty yards to the pump, where he was methodically soaked: his clothes were torn and he lost his hat and one shoe, perhaps ‘stoln’.

Next morning ‘two of the prisoners called Constables here with Constables Staves in their hands’ ordered Hemens to report to the college committee. There he was charged with interfering in the affairs of Dolman to his serious detriment; he defended himself by explaining why he had written to Bacon, but was found guilty and sent to Coventry for a month. On his way out of the ale room he discerned that some prisoners were getting ready to exact further punishment. He implored the committee to protect him, but they broke up and scuttled out before him. Leaving the ale room, he sought help from the lodge, where a turnkey told him to say nothing and the prisoners would leave him alone. But on the way to his staircase he was assailed with pails of ‘slush’ from upper windows and in the passage and on the stairs to his room. Once there he gained some relief and wrote to John Cruchley, the deputy marshal and keeper, to say his life was in danger; a turnkey brought him answer that he could be locked up in the Admiralty block, where he would have his own yard and no one could get to him. But Hemens would have been utterly alone there and instead he decided to keep to his room for the period of the college’s sentence.

Hemens did so for about three weeks, visited only by Eliza, it seems, and perhaps some friends from outside. Then on Wednesday 7 June, after 11 at night, there was a loud banging at his door. It was broken open and a number of men, apparently in disguise or masked, rushed in and in the darkness seized him by his arms and legs and dragged him from his room and down the stairs. When he cried out ‘Murder’ they stopped his mouth as best they could with their hands. At the bottom of two pairs of stairs there was talk of putting him down the privy, but instead they beat him where he lay about the head and body. After, Hemens called for the watch and was taken to the Admiralty prison and locked in for his own protection.

Either Hemens or Eliza or both made urgent representations to the authorities about these abuses in the Marshalsea prison. Eliza summoned Dr Phillips at his local surgery on 8 June when she discovered her husband’s plight, but he did not see Hemens till the next day, when he bled him and examined the bruises, which he declared were not dangerous. But on that 9 June it seems that Hemens’s complaint had reached the Palace court at Great Scotland Yard, where Cruchley was confronted about the matter ‘in open Court’. He sought to cover his back with Sir Bland Burges, the Knight Marshal from whom he had received his appointment, but had to confess that he had spent some nights away from the gaol, contrary to his contract – he said because his house at the prison was under repair and uninhabitable. He blamed Hemens’s bad treatment on a malevolent debtor prisoner, Mortimer Madden, ‘a dreadfull bad Character’ and a violent man, and had him removed by habeas corpus to the Surrey county gaol to await trial for the assault.

But Hemens’s complaint was received with the utmost seriousness. In different circumstances it might have been treated more lightly, but one gets the impression that here was an opportunity to be rid of an unsatisfactory agent in John Cruchley. Even the Knight Marshal, who made a public virtue of never interfering in the running of the gaol, was moved to visit Hemens with J. C. Hewlitt, the deputy prothonotary, on 12 June. They found much to complain about. Hemens was lying in a cell nine feet by six, with no fireplace and empty apart from his prison bed laid on the floor; he still had several bruises, ‘particularly a very large one on the left side of his body’, was thought to have hearing problems from being beaten about the head and to be urinating blood. In three places on walls about the gaol in letters over a foot high was chalked ‘Hemmins sent to Coventry’ or something like it, which the Knight Marshal publicly reprimanded Cruchley for tolerating and ordered their immediate removal. The Hemens affair had drastic consequences for John Cruchley. He was dismissed on 28 June and a more trustworthy replacement, Joseph Rutland, was installed next day.²⁷

Giles Hemens remained in the Marshalsea until 23 June 1820, when he was discharged under the Insolvent Debtors Acts. He didn’t trouble the Marshalsea again. Although he seems to have suffered no long-term problems from his ill-treatment, he failed to prosper. His old age must have been racked by poverty, for he died in St Giles workhouse, Short’s Gardens, just a step from Denmark Street, aged seventy-three, on 27 June 1837.²⁸

Giles Hemens’s case is known to us because he had the courage to make a fuss and because of its weighty sequel. Though hardly learned or well connected, he was an articulate and enterprising man of some education who was keen to foster a public presence and could use his voice to effect. Most Marshalsea debtors made no such mark in the public record, were often of no learning at all, and remain silent to us. But one strange case of a debtor who had no desire to be heard by the authorities – indeed, quite the contrary – but whose voice nonetheless survived for a moment arose during Hemens’s confinement, when they were fellow prisoners, for a time at least.

For London 1820 was a troubled year in the midst of troubled times. The end of the Napoleonic Wars five years earlier led to unemployment, high food prices, ultra-radical agitation and riots. A small group of metropolitan ultras, desiring the overthrow of government by violent means and its replacement by a democratic parliament and equal distribution of land and property, sought to revive causes actively stifled by years of wartime repression. Their agitation was penetrated, indeed partly fostered, by a network of spies working directly to the Home Office, often through the chief metropolitan magistrate at Bow Street, Sir Richard Birnie. He was aided by the small squad of plain-clothes police officers or runners distributed at magistrates’ offices across the capital, including the one at Union Hall, just across the road from the Marshalsea.

The coming of peace encouraged the extreme radicals to try to foment a more popular opposition to the government. Great meetings of radicals and their supporters at Spa Fields, Clerkenwell, were held in November and December 1816. The latter ended in a half-drunken raid on gunsmiths’ shops and an armed attack on the Tower of London. The assault was led by Arthur Thistlewood, bred to the Lincolnshire gentry and an army officer for a time, who had been active in metropolitan radicalism for many years. Further great though peaceful demonstrations took place in London in 1817 and 1818. The mood shifted with the Peterloo Massacre in Manchester in August 1819, when unarmed workers were cut down by militia cavalry formed from the local gentry; this provoked fury among radicals and many working people in London and breathed new life into conspiracies to bring down the government with exemplary violence.

In late February 1820 one desperate plot was thought ready to hatch. Once more Arthur Thistlewood was leader and chief planner. With a motley band of supporters he planned to assassinate simultaneously members of the Cabinet at their homes late at night. The very night had been chosen when it was learned from the newspapers that a Cabinet dinner was to be held at Grosvenor Square that same evening, Wednesday 23 February 1820. Now it could all be done in a single massacre. The heads of Viscounts Sidmouth (Home Secretary) and Castlereagh (the government’s leader in the House of Commons) ‘were to be brought away in a bag’ to encourage others to revolt.

One of Thistlewood’s fellow conspirators was ‘Edwards’, a government spy, and the plot’s every twist was in the hands of ministers. As Thistlewood and nearly thirty others gathered over a stable at Cato Street, Marylebone, just east of the Edgware Road, the place was raided by Bow Street runners and a party of Coldstream Guards. The police officers were first in the room, where ‘cutlasses, bayonets, pistols, sword-belts, pistol-balls in great quantities, ball-cartridges, &c’ lay on tables. In the melee, Thistlewood, ‘armed with a cut-and-thrust sword of unusual length’, stabbed a runner named Richard Smithers through the heart: ‘“Oh God! I am –”’ were Smithers’s last words. In the confusion most conspirators got away from Cato Street. Nine were arrested that night, Thistlewood and a few others were apprehended over the next day or two, and some escaped scot free. Besides Thistlewood the ringleaders included James Ings, a butcher, Richard Tidd and John Brunt, both shoemakers, and ‘a man of colour’, William Davidson, a cabinetmaker and son of the attorney general in Kingston, Jamaica.

On 1 May 1820 all five were hanged outside Newgate. An enormous crowd, held well back from the scaffold because of fear of a rescue, greeted the men with cheers. There were cries of ‘“God bless you, Thistlewood!”’ After the hangings a medical man in a black mask cut off their heads and the executioner held up each in turn to the crowd: ‘“This is the head of Arthur Thistlewood, the traitor!”’ The decapitations were greeted with ‘exclamations of horror and of reproach’, with ‘hissings and hootings’.²⁹

The thought prevailed in government that there were many other traitors implicated in the Cato Street events who had not yet been brought to book. These were frantically anxious times for those in power and it was in the interests of the network of spies that such anxieties were kept alive. At this fevered moment it was not surprising that agitators of former times – survivors of the London Corresponding Society (LCS) of the 1790s, old English Jacobins sympathetic to revolutionary France, followers of Thomas Spence the land reformer, frequenters of out-of-the-way ale houses where radicals clustered, congregations of back-street chapels espoused by strange sectlets with millenarian ideas – should all be tracked down to discover whether they were active in any current seditious movement.

One of these was Robert Moggridge. He was a tailor and had lived for many years in Bloomsbury. In 1794–5 he had been active in the LCS, a member of its general committee, even chairing it from time to time, and founder with others of a ‘Division’ that met in a house or pub ‘at the corner of Francis & Thornhaugh Street’, close to what would soon become Russell Square. He was a committed believer in the land equalisation policy of Thomas Spence and had played a part in hiding and then smuggling to America James Watson the younger, implicated in the violent Spa Fields riot of December 1816. Thereafter, Moggridge became a follower of the more moderate Spencian Thomas Evans, eschewing thoughts of revolutionary conspiracy and believing that popular radical upheaval would come from the North of England and not from the fractious radical movements of the metropolis. Among those who met at the Archer Street dissenting chapel in the seedy north-east corner of St James’s, established by Evans in 1818, were Robert Moggridge and William Carr, a house painter.³⁰

We know little about Robert Moggridge’s public life, necessarily secretive as it was, and even less of his person and family. His first wife died and he was married again, in 1817, to Sarah Whittington. He had a number of children by his first wife, at least four – John and Mary Ann, both baptised in 1804, Eliza baptised in 1808 and Ann Julia born in 1814. Robert signed Ann Julia’s marriage certificate in 1833, when she was just nineteen. We do not know when Robert was born or when he died, but he continued a radical for some years after Cato Street: he was active in the agitation in favour of Queen Caroline, in that unhappy monarch’s struggle to share the crown of George IV, in late 1820 to early 1821, and he was a member of a radical debating club meeting in Long Acre at the end of the 1820s.³¹

Moggridge also struggled with debt over many years. He was imprisoned in the King’s Bench for debt in 1809, from where he was discharged after obtaining the benefit of an Insolvent Debtors Act, but insolvency could not keep him permanently out of trouble. On 19 December 1819 he was brought into custody in the Marshalsea at the suit of William Crosse for a debt of £13 18s 4d. The Marshalsea was certainly a cast-iron alibi – had he needed one – for the Cato Street conspiracy, for he was still there when the drama of 23 February 1820 was played out at Marylebone. At that time Moggridge was contemplating insolvency again and was working on his schedule for the court proceedings. An old radical friend, William Carr, was also a debtor, very similarly circumstanced in the Debtors’ Prison for London and Middlesex at Whitecross Street. Indeed, they seem to have owed each other money, though whom the balance favoured is unknown. Either Carr or Moggridge was being watched by the authorities, for when the latter wrote from ‘Marshalsea Prison/N^o 3 in 2’ on 24 February, his letter was intercepted at Whitecross Street next day and taken directly to the Home Office.

From Citizzen Moggridge in the Marshalsea prison to Citizen Carr in White Cross Street Prison

has wee have been Politically engaged together it will not appear Radical to schedule each other, I therefore request of you note to send me a Notice, has I shall not schedule you, I suppose you are frequently Visited by your Radical Friends, while you are in Durance Vile, I can assure you on my part it will be an easy thing for me to return the Compliment to my Old friends, neither the wants of my family nor their being forced from the home they have Occupied for Ten Years, has made any Impression on their flinty Hearts, but an honest heart, Patiense, and a good Conscience, is a sure remedy, for as M^r Hunt has justly Observed, save a Man from the Gallows he will turn round and Cut your throat, and from the treatment I have received the Observation is verified, you will hardly Credit it, excepting M^r Hall has been with me twice I have seen nor heard from any of them, nor my family, for they could not offend, but we must expect to be scourged and to receive evil for good

with my best wishes for you and your familys health and welfare

I remain yours truly

Citizen Moggridge³²

If Mr Hall was Abel Hall, Moggridge’s fellow tailor, who was active in the Cato Street conspiracy but evaded arrest, then it might explain how Moggridge’s letter came into Home Office hands; in later years he was known to be a government spy, but perhaps his informing had begun earlier. In any event, such was the state of the official mind in these hectic days that the Home Office instructed John Cruchley, then still deputy marshal, to search the Marshalsea for arms. On 29 February Cruchley could report that ‘I have searched every room in the prison for the purpose of detecting Arms of any description And have every reason to believe that there are no Arms in possession of the prisoners in this Prison.’ Robert Moggridge seems to have been spied on no more in gaol. He was discharged from the Marshalsea on 8 June 1820 under the Insolvent Debtors Act. No doubt other debtor radicals moved in and out of its lodge over the years, but no other case has so far come down to us.³³

Certain it is, though, that all sorts and conditions of Londoner were to be found in the Marshalsea prison. Some were public characters, and we might recall James Spiller the actor, Mrs Pilkington the poetaster and Grano the trumpeter, with others along the way, in the old Marshalsea. So too they cropped up in the new gaol. There was, for instance, that ‘prisoner of sporting notoriety’ for whom George Eades had risked his own liberty with a friendly nip of gin in May 1832. But probably the most celebrated of all the sporting characters gracing the Marshalsea at this period was Bishop Sharpe the bare-knuckle fighter, known as the Bold Smuggler by the ‘fancy’ but most commonly as just ‘The Bishop’.

Bishop Sharpe was born in 1796 at Woolwich and all his life was spent in the riverside towns on the south-east of the metropolis. He served in the Royal Navy, though his fighting sobriquet indicated he had other interests on sea and shore. They could not have lasted long, though, for by 1817 he had become a prizefighter of ‘the third-rate’, too light to be a ‘Champion of England’ for he stood some five feet seven with a fighting weight around eleven stone. Nevertheless he won fame, many fights and heavy purses against the Deptford Carrier, Gypsy Jack Cooper, Young Dutch Sam and others at prize rings all over south-east London from Blackheath to Plumstead, at Epping Forest by the Fairlop Oak, at No Man’s Land in Hertfordshire and elsewhere, from 1817 till his retirement in 1828 or 1830. On the strength of his success he became a family man, marrying Ann Cowen at St Paul’s, Deptford, in 1821; they had a daughter, Hannah, in 1824 and a son, the third generation of Bishops, in 1824. Sadly the boy died when he was just three.³⁴

A sporting career was generally short, and sure enough the Bishop met his nemesis in Alec Reid, the Chelsea Snob. Sharpe beat Reid at No Man’s Land over twenty rounds for a purse of £100 in 1826, but two years later Reid had his revenge at the same venue, over a gruelling ninety-one rounds that lasted near an hour and a half. It was thought by seasoned scribes of the fancy to be ‘one of the hardest contested battles we have ever witnessed’. When it was over poor Sharpe

remained stretched on a heap of straw in the ring, quite insensible; and on being bled, was carried off to his quarters, where he remained last night in a dangerous state. His punishment both on the body and on the head was dreadful, and nothing but the most determined game and unshrinking courage could have enabled him so long to stand against its appalling effects.³⁵

This defeat marked the end of Bishop Sharpe’s fleeting prosperity. His earnings had been large but chancy, and the temptations to high living had no doubt proved irresistible. But on retirement he was now fitted only for this irregular world and unsuited to anything more prosaic or mundane. He earned a little by sparring in benefit matches and acting as a second to the ring’s coming generation; and he was generally recognised and no doubt applauded at the ringside of big fights for some years to come. But he lived mainly as a ‘boothkeeper’, selling beer from a tent or van at fights and fairs, trading on his fading celebrity. It didn’t pay. In 1831 he was arrested for a debt of £100 and on 13 July found himself a prisoner for the first time in the Marshalsea. Unable to pay such a large sum, he quickly headed for the Insolvent Debtors’ Court, where his petition was heard on 15 September and he was discharged from prison. In court he blamed his indebtedness in part on the high cost of his training ‘in 1830’, perhaps for a comeback; or perhaps he was just confused over dates for when the court asked, ‘Pray, did not some persons pay those expenses or a part of them?’ ‘The Bishop looked crestfallen, and sorrowfully replied, “No, Sir, I got LICKED by Alic Reid, the Chelsea Snob.” This reply caused a roar of laughter, in which the Learned Commissioner heartily joined.’ Let’s hope that Sharpe saw the funny side too.³⁶

On his release Bishop Sharpe persisted with his booth, landing a £15 fine when an informer prosecuted him for selling ‘exciseable liquors’ at Greenwich Fair in May 1834; he was one of several traders in court for the same offence that day. Three years later, in November 1837, he was back in the Marshalsea, on a suit of John Merryweather for a debt of £50. Sharpe petitioned for insolvency a second time, giving the hacks of the metropolis the chance of laboured amusement at his expense.

Bishop Sharpe, the far-famed ex-pugilist, applied on his petition to be discharged, and was unopposed. It appeared that poor Sharpe had been twice on the floor of the court as an insolvent debtor, and each time had been awarded to be entitled to the benefit of the Act. He took his last benefit on the stage of the Insolvent Court in September, 1831, and since then he had retired from the glory of the prize ring, putting up with the humble cognomen of the keeper of a booth at races and fairs; finding, however, that this wandering sort of life was stale and unprofitable, he assumed several names, for the purpose of keeping body and soul together, but all would not do; he was floored for the second time, and, horrid to relate, was again in durance vile, at the suit of a brother pall of his own wandering tribe, yclept a booth keeper, who rejoiced in the happy cognomen of Merryweather. Since he had taken proceedings against poor Sharpe some compunction had smote the heart of the conscientious Merryweather, and he determined not to come to the scratch to oppose one with whom he had spent so many hours on the turf, and at fairs and wakes.

The Court ordered the insolvent to be discharged, and thereby again enabled him to pursue his worthy calling.³⁷

There would be a third time in the Marshalsea for Sharpe. In May 1842 he joined Joshua Reeve Lowe and others in the gaol, this time for a debt of over £55. Again he took the insolvency route to compound with his creditors and free himself and was discharged on 1 August. He was then still living in Greenwich and still doggedly attached to his booth. He was in Greenwich too in 1851, sharing a house at a place called Cold Bath with Ann and with Hannah and her husband. Bishop Sharpe died sometime in the first quarter of 1861.³⁸

Not all the Marshalsea’s public figures followed callings so haphazard or disreputable as Bishop Sharpe’s. Musicians, for instance, continued to turn up in the prison as they had in John Baptist Grano’s time. Their careers inevitably involved much that was freelance, peripatetic between orchestral stage and theatre pit, and though there were growing opportunities for professional musicians in these years times were often hard. Most professionals supplemented their earnings with teaching, generally unrewarding in both senses of the word. It was a fortunate or highly skilled and ambitious performer who could put something away for a comfortable old age – indeed, retirement perforce preceded much ripeness of years as bodily and mental strains took their toll on a performer’s abilities.

We might cite William Parke, born in Westminster in 1761. His much older brother was a musician too and William, after experimenting with several instruments, finally settled on the oboe. He was in the Vauxhall Gardens orchestra as second oboe from 1777, so aged only sixteen, and then from 1783 a principal in the theatre orchestra at Covent Garden – all theatrical evenings involving music of one sort or another. He was to hold that post for forty years and was one of the most celebrated wind soloists in London; composers wrote works for him and, like Grano, he played his own compositions. Parke had two sons by his mistress, a professional singer who died in 1807, and in 1822 he married for the first time, at St James, Clerkenwell; he was sixty-one and about to retire from the Covent Garden orchestra. A son was born to the couple just over a year later, and it is possible that his wife had children from a previous marriage.

Perhaps these two events, marriage and retirement, conspired against him financially. He had sought to bolster his old age by joining in 1783 the Society for Decay’d Musicians and their Families, from 1790 the Royal Society of Musicians. Less than eighteen months after his marriage he was in dire money trouble and it was to the society he turned. His tale will be familiar to us, but pitiable nonetheless. His letter was addressed from the ‘Marshalsea Prison, Decr 6^th 1823’:

Gentlemen. Having been arrested and brought to this place on Tuesday the 25^th of last month with only one pound in my pocket (seven shillings and sixpence of which was immediately paid for fees) I have had no other means of subsisting myself, my Wife, and five young children but the remains of that and the County allowance, three and sixpence per week. I have not receiv’d a shilling from the theatre although two nights pay are due to me. I therefore am depriv’d of the common comforts of life, proper food, fire and candle, added to which, I am now labouring under a bilious attack, and am totally without the means of procuring either medicine or medical assistance. I therefore am compell’d to sollicit of you such temporary relief as shall be in your liberal feelings appear to be necessary, and I at the same time take the liberty to sollicit that if you should determine to commiserate my case, that it may be kindly convey’d to me as soon as possible, as I have not otherwise, the means of recovering my health, or of obtaining a meal. I must remain here five or six weeks in order to take the benefit of the Insolvent Act, and as I trust that I have been ‘more sinn’d against, than having sinn’d’ I feel no doubt of an honourable acquital. I remain Gentlemen y^r most sincere, & very Obe^t Ser^t.

W. T. Parke.

The society granted him £7, which must have been a relief to him. He was discharged from the Marshalsea under an Insolvent Debtors Act on 31 January 1824, so a month or so before John Dickens was brought in. Parke’s finances then just kept him afloat, it seems, although another child was born in 1826, the lively pensioner then sixty-five years old and still apparently strong in wind. He was also moving house frequently, perhaps to keep costs low or to hoodwink his landlords, with known addresses in a court off Ossulston Street in lowly Somers Town, in Popham Street, Islington, at three houses in a plebeian street, and finally at 38 Bridport Place, Hoxton. He received a quarterly allowance from the society, though his illegitimate children seem to have been an impediment to the additional aid he occasionally sought. His income was significantly boosted in 1829 with a respectable £30 advance on his autobiography, Musical Memories, a sum repeated in 1830 when his publisher persuaded Parke to write a second volume. Some years later he was also being supported by allowances from his grown-up children. He died in 1847 at the good age of eighty-six; his widow and a married son, also now in debt, sought the society’s aid into the 1860s.³⁹

That William Parke was not alone among contemporary musicians in paying the Marshalsea an obligatory visit we know from the case of Charles James Griesbach, one of a well-known musical family with some links to royal patronage. Griesbach was a music master teaching violin and piano, an overstocked trade, in the smarter parts of Chelsea and elsewhere in comfortably situated districts of London. He was forty-four when he was arrested for a debt of just £17 or so and brought into the Marshalsea in April 1841; he was discharged inside a fortnight, securing bail under the Judgments Act of 1838, which made it easier for debtors to give security for their freedom after being imprisoned as well as before.⁴⁰

Indeed the debt laws were constantly shifting in this period. Debt was a tricky business, plagued by law and lawyers, who could have a field day and frequently did. But they too could smash and we might recall the debtor lawyer Mr Brown, who gave Grano advice in the Marshalsea, or Mr Richardson, who helped the collegians modernise their rules in 1814. Not every lawyer could get his costs or pay his creditors and one such was Jabez Pelham, an attorney of Old Gravel Lane, Ratcliffe, close to the East End riverside. That was hardly the epicentre of legal London, but he was the solicitor chosen to manage the defence of Edward Oxford, the failed regicide, in July 1840 on the charge of high treason. Within six months of that success Pelham was arrested and imprisoned in the Queen’s Bench, petitioning for relief from his creditors in the Insolvent Debtors’ Court. He owed £738 but claimed he was owed in turn £2,414 10s 3d; of the debts owing to him £247 ‘were good’ and £385 ‘doubtful’, which left a hefty whack worth nothing at all. Among those owing him money was Hannah Oxford, Edward’s mother, who had not paid her son’s costs of £510; the sum was entered as a bad debt.⁴¹

Jabez Pelham avoided the Marshalsea, but one attorney who surprisingly did not was John de la Mare, brother of James de la Mare, whose son Walter, born in 1873, would become the famous poet and storyteller. John was the eldest of the family, some eighteen years older than James, and was born around 1794 into an eminently respectable Essex household with Huguenot merchant roots. He was inducted into the legal profession and articled to an attorney living in Romford near the Delamares (as the name was then most frequently written) but with a practice in Westminster. John was sixteen when articled and a fully fledged attorney from 1817. That year he married Mary Churchill in Barking and over the next six years the couple had four children surviving infancy, the first three born in Essex and the last, Eliza, probably in Clapham, the family moving there by 1823. There they kept ‘a large establishment, two carriages and horses’. Besides his City practice John came into a sizeable private income from his marriage settlement.⁴²

By this time, however, things had gone badly wrong for John de la Mare. He struck up what would be a fateful acquaintance with another Mary, the wife of Captain Benjamin Laing, a wealthy trader with South America who both owned and sailed his own valuable vessel. Mr and Mrs Laing lived in Charles Street, Northumberland Avenue, in the heart of Westminster, and had between them seven children, of whom five survived. Mrs Laing and de la Mare had apparently met through her brother, a friend of John’s. An affair developed while a lengthy voyage was being undertaken by Captain Laing. Mrs Laing ‘was a woman of great personal beauty’ and ‘still . . . of that age to excite the desires of a man’. John de la Mare proved not only excitable but indiscreet. By the summer of 1823 the affair was discovered and Mrs Laing left her children and the family home and moved ‘under the protection of Mr. Delamare’. His family at Clapham were said to be ‘in a state of unspeakable distress’.⁴³

That autumn de la Mare and Mrs Laing moved precipitately to France. John’s business affairs were left in the hands of John Delamare the elder, his father, but despite a pursuit to Paris the errant attorney’s whereabouts remained hidden. In his absence he was sued by Captain Laing for ‘criminal conversation’ and damages of £10,000 were awarded against him. These were subsequently reduced to £2,000 at a hearing at which he was represented but did not appear. The proceedings were extensively reported in the London papers and repeated in many in the provinces, including in Essex. From this time it seems the Delamares of Romford obliterated John from the family record. He seems not to have been spoken about or acknowledged, and to Walter and the other numerous nephews and nieces it was as though their eldest uncle had never existed. Contact, though, was dutifully maintained with Mary and the children, especially by John’s younger brothers Abraham, rector of St Thomas, Woolwich, born about 1804, and Walter’s father, James, born in 1811. It has been accepted by Walter’s biographer that the one ‘unsteady Huguenot Delamare’ was Abraham’s twin brother, Henry, who fathered an illegitimate child. Now we know there was another.⁴⁴

John de la Mare stayed on the Continent, it seems, for much of the next six years. His wanderings were sketched, as far as they were known, in the London Gazette during the autumn of 1829:

De La Mare, John, the younger, heretofore of Frederick’s Place, Old Jewry, London, and of Clapham-Common, Surry, Attorney at Law, since of Calais, and then of Paris, both in France, afterwards of Brussells, and then of Ostend, both in the Kingdom of the Netherlands, afterwards of Havre de Grace, in France, since residing at the Four Swans Inn, Bishopsgate-Street, London, then at No. 6, Haberdasher’s-Place East, Hoxton, Middlesex, and lastly residing at the York Hotel, Bridge-Street, Blackfriars, London, in no profession or business, (sued and committed, and commonly known, as John Delamare).⁴⁵

At the York Hotel or nearby he was arrested for debt and imprisoned in the King’s Bench. There he sought to take advantage of the Insolvent Debtors Act to accommodate his creditors and free himself from gaol. His application was opposed from a predictable quarter. Captain Laing’s costs in the various hearings had been over £150 and he had received not a penny of his damages, though he had offered to settle for £500 down and to accept security for £500 more. But de la Mare’s problems had multiplied and effectively he was now a man of straw. He owed debts of £3,856, his wife had separated from him and had sued him in Chancery for steps he had taken to secure her property to himself; he had lost the case and was now in contempt of court. The Commissioner of Insolvency, rather than consign him to an unlimited time in gaol because of Laing’s opposition to his discharge, prolonged de la Mare’s stay in the King’s Bench by a further six months.⁴⁶

That would have taken him to the end of May 1830. Once out he accrued new debts. He was arrested on mesne process and on 14 October 1831 he was brought into custody at the lodge of the Marshalsea prison for a debt of just £22. He seems to have stayed there, improbable as it sounds, until June 1836, when he was released at the suit of John Bartholomew, the arresting creditor; perhaps he had been a ‘voluntary prisoner’, keeping out of further harm’s (and Captain Laing’s) way. His troubles were not over, though, and perhaps never would be. He and ‘Mary de la Mare’, formerly Laing, were living in Child’s Place, Fleet Street, in 1841, but in September 1844 he was in gaol again, at the Debtors’ Prison for London and Middlesex; that was followed or accompanied by bankruptcy proceedings and he was there still in August 1845. It is unclear when he freed himself. By the time of the 1851 census there had been some move up in the world, for John and Mary were lodging at Royal Avenue Terrace, south Chelsea; even so they lived without servants in a mixed street of multi-occupied houses. In 1861 John was alone, a widower, lodging over a coffee shop at 65 Princes Street, Soho. John de la Mare died at the very end of 1867 or early in the new year, aged seventy-three: he had been living in Pimlico, but the good Abraham arranged to bury his elder brother at St Thomas, Woolwich, on 6 January 1868.⁴⁷

Lawyers, musicians, artisans, tradesmen, all had bulked out the Marshalsea’s population over many generations; but one other category had also been especially prominent – those in his majesty’s service in either the navy or, more commonly, the army. The Marshalsea records are littered with military ranks, though only rarely above the ubiquitous captain, from Captain Tudman, such a nuisance to John Grano, to the young Dickens’s orotund Captain Porter a century later, with forgotten regiments of others in between.

They crop up in unlikely and unpropitious circumstances. Take Lieutenant Frederick Cox, for example, nabbed by bailiffs for debt in January 1830 and swiftly lodged in the Marshalsea. It was a most unlucky arrest, for without it Cox must surely have been making his way to France: earlier that day he had been a fellow officer’s second at a duel with pistols in Battersea Fields in which Oliver Clayton, a publisher, was shot dead. Cox was charged with wilful murder, brought up from the Marshalsea and committed to the Surrey county gaol. Cox and Lieutenant Lambrecht, whose second he had been, were acquitted of murder at Kingston Assizes on 2 April and discharged. The next day he settled his debts, perhaps with the help of his friends, and was freed from the Marshalsea too.⁴⁸

Cox’s case was unusual in its details, but few army officers in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries could avoid the expensive temptations of the officers’ mess, of the gaming house and the brothel. For many, a commission was probably a surer means of losing a fortune than of gaining one. Such was the case of Lieutenant Mathew Arnot Stewart. He was born into a landowning family in Ayrshire, among their assets a fine large house, Lochrigg, property of his mother, and with significant holdings in land on his own account. Stewart’s downfall was gambling. A weighty inheritance near Lockwood, Edinburgh, was intact when he joined the army in 1822. Three years later Stewart ‘began mortgaging it very heavily’. His debts were staggering and were recounted to the Insolvent Debtors’ Court in April 1829: they ‘amounted to upwards of 78,000l., and his general and special expenses, including his losses at gaming, on the Turf, (and from 1822 to 1828 he had lost about 15,000l.) amounted to about 10,000l. a year’. Although his officer’s pay was irrelevant to such encumbrances, his position cannot have been helped when he was put ‘on the unattached half-pay list’ in April 1826. On 1 February 1827 he was arrested for debt and, unable to free himself, confined in the King’s Bench prison. In April 1829 he was living in the rules of the Bench and his addresses chart the geography of failure from ‘Lochridge, in the County of Ayr, Scotland, then of Dorchester, Dorsetshire, afterwards of Long’s Hotel, Bond-Street’, known for its fast living among smart-set gamblers; but then south of the river at Temple-Place, Blackfriars Road, and Portland Place, Borough Road. While a prisoner his portable property drained away – his ‘four valuable horses’, his phaeton, his sword and his gun, all sold for the ready. Whether connected or not to her son’s desperate position, his mother sold Lochrigg in 1830. That year Stewart, presumably now free from prison, was able to buy a full commission and remove himself from the half-pay list.⁴⁹

It was merely a temporary respite. In April 1831 he was arrested and on the 22nd brought into the Marshalsea prison; not taking to his lodgings, he was there just a month until he transferred to the Fleet on a writ of habeas corpus. Four months later he traded down to the half-pay list, exchanging his commission for cash. Finally his luck seems to have turned. Well connected still, he was reported to have been posted to the West Indies as a stipendiary magistrate – his experience of law-court procedure, though mainly in Portugal Street, no doubt standing him in good stead. He is said to have died unmarried, though when or where that was we do not know.⁵⁰

Mathew Arnot Stewart was not, of course, the only gambling man to have found his way into the Marshalsea. A celebrated case arose a few years before Stewart entered the lodge. In October 1822 Thomas Erskine Grant brought an unusual suit into the court of King’s Bench. Grant was a young man ‘bred in military life in India’, who had arrived in London shortly before he came of age. He had inherited ‘a considerable property’, but had been unluckily introduced to a notorious gaming house in Bennett (now Bennet) Street, off St James’s Street, where he lost money very heavily, playing at the ‘Rouge et Noir table three nights in the week’ from October 1819. ‘Sunk in the vortex of dissipation’, as his counsel put it, ‘he lost every shilling he possessed in the world’. Grant was duly arrested for debt and on 10 December 1819 brought into the Marshalsea owing the imprisoning creditor £60. Once there he applied to the two gaming-house keepers for financial help, ‘reminding them that he had been ruined by the practices allowed in their house’. They refused him, claiming not to have known him during the period of his ‘downfall’.⁵¹

His plight became known ‘to his friends’, who agreed to settle his debts on the condition that he sued the proprietors of 9 Bennett Street for bringing about his ruin – he was duly released after settling with his arresting creditor on 7 April 1820, where he had shared the prison with Giles Hemens and Robert Moggridge, among others. His lawyers presented his case as one fought in the public interest; success in his action, the court was told, ‘could not fail of benefiting society’. The defence alleged on the contrary that the case was brought ‘merely for the purpose of extorting money’; indeed, one of the defendants had given Grant £50 to settle the case, which he had then used to fund the prosecution. Both proprietors were found guilty, but further cross-petitions and trials followed and it is unclear how much Grant actually netted from it, if anything. He also successfully prosecuted a second gaming house in St James’s, likely to have been 71 Pall Mall, in May 1823, probably for the informer’s reward. A month later Grant married Elizabeth Hunt Howell at St Clement Danes, Westminster; Elizabeth was pregnant at the time but their son William Henry, and another son born in 1829, unluckily did not survive infancy. Elizabeth herself died in 1833 and at that time they had a daughter living, Emma Louisa, born probably in 1825. Thomas Erskine Grant was married again, to Harriet Hurst, also at St Clement Danes, in March 1846, but there were no children from the marriage.⁵²

Grant’s later career is lost in obscurity, perhaps gratefully, for when he next appeared in a court of law it was in September 1849 to answer a charge of indecent exposure, showing himself to ‘two little girls’ in the dark arches under the Adelphi. Grant claimed he had gone there to relieve himself. Described as ‘a well-dressed middle-aged man’, married ‘and passionately attached to his wife – a lady much younger than himself’, Grant was convicted on the confident evidence of a lighterman and sentenced at Bow Street to three months’ hard labour. He wriggled out of it, appealing on a technicality that the offence was not committed in a place of ‘public resort’, and the conviction was quashed. Grant died of phthisis in Whitecross Street in 1851.⁵³

If we were to catalogue some of the errors and flaws of the lives in this brief prosopography of the Marshalsea debtors’ world in the twenty years or so before the gaol closed, then what would they amount to? Over-optimism or recklessness in business, dissembling and economy with the truth when it came to taking on debt without the ability to pay, a weakness for high living, gaming tables and other men’s wives, all were sins to which many of their metropolitan contemporaries might plead guilty but which would not, in luckier circumstances, take them through the lodge of the Marshalsea prison.

Some, though, were of a different mark. We have glimpsed instances of a darker seam among the debtors, desperate thieves, violent men who would stop at nothing, confidence tricksters and swindlers who traded on appearance not just to mislead but to rob. These too were present in the new Marshalsea and we might conclude our portrait gallery with one case of some contemporary notoriety. It was an extraordinary tale.⁵⁴

On Saturday 27 December 1828, James Stamp Sutton Cooke ‘Died by the Visitation of God’ in the Marshalsea prison. A few days later the fact was noted in brief paragraphs in many newspapers, not just in the metropolis. For Cooke had been known by reputation throughout England. He had long ‘“lived on his wits”’, as a newspaper reported at the time, ‘or, more correctly speaking, by duping the credulous part of the community’. It was a career he had shared in part with his second wife, Sophia, though at the beginning it seems that she too was one of his dupes. To be fair to Sophia, Cooke’s victims were legion, for the ‘credulous part of the community’ included at times even the royal household itself.⁵⁵

James Stamp Sutton Cooke was born in April 1780 in Clerkenwell. He came from a Gloucestershire family of the middling sort or above and around 1799 was ‘a military man’, he said in the Royal South Gloucestershire Militia. In that year, not yet nineteen but swearing before the clerk in Doctors’ Commons that he was over twenty-one, he married at St James’s, Piccadilly, Jane Browning, a farmer’s daughter from Kent. Cooke described himself as ‘gentleman’. Jane was also a minor but her father consented to the union and provided the couple with their first home at the farm in Kent, keeping Cooke in funds. But Cooke proved a feckless husband, and after a few disappearances finally deserted Jane, leaving her penniless, even pawning her spare clothes, after some three years of fractious marriage.⁵⁶

In September 1808 Cooke met Sophia Sanders. She was a young woman ‘of colour’, her father ‘a man of property in the West Indies’, in fact Jamaica. In October they married at St Luke’s, Old Street, at which time Sophia was a minor, just under nineteen. They had two children, only one of whom was living in 1812. By that time there had been a falling-out and the couple were no longer living together. Sophia was staying with her mother, who supported her daughter and baby. Things were tense between Cooke and his mother-in-law, so tense that she prosecuted him for assault and around 1811 he spent time in Clerkenwell Bridewell as a result. Sophia, perhaps at her mother’s prompting, now brought a charge of bigamy against Cooke, who was prosecuted at the Old Bailey in April 1812, convicted and sentenced to seven years’ transportation. That sentence was never carried out for ‘the Royal Clemency was extended to him by proving that his first marriage was null and void’, probably on the grounds that his father had opposed the marriage and that Cooke had lied about his age.⁵⁷

At some point after the Old Bailey proceedings, conceivably before, James Stamp Sutton Cooke adopted the full-time career of swindler. His enterprises were various and imaginative. Sometimes they made money and sometimes they lost money, but it was all one because Cooke never paid anyone what he owed. It was a high-wire balancing act that had him in and out of the country’s law courts and prisons, so much so that he was fortunate to escape a lifetime banishment. Sophia, soon reconciled to him after the Old Bailey drama – they had a son together in 1814 – and generally going under the name of Mrs Cooke, pursued a similar career but would not be so lucky.

Many of Cooke’s early ventures centred on the metropolis. They remain obscure but involved what later generations would know as a long-firm fraud – opening up a shop, trading apparently prosperously for a time, then disappearing after disposing of the goods while owing suppliers large sums of money. Certainly he traded in the unlikely guise of a cheesemonger – the Gloucestershire connection perhaps – in Golden Lane in the City, but we hear of him running a hosiery shop in Oxford Street, a hatter’s in High Holborn and a billiard saloon in Fleet Street. His addresses, where he lived the high life, were said to include Orchard Street and Manchester Square in Marylebone, Brick Court in the Temple, Upper Berkeley Street, Mayfair, and Duke Street, St James’s, and for a time he lived in France, no doubt keeping out of harm’s way. Sophia worked alongside him and independently, reportedly passing herself off to hoteliers as the Countess of Ogilby.⁵⁸

Cooke was investigated at police offices across London but no charge of fraud could be made to stick. He was less lucky with bailiffs. In 1816 he was arrested for a debt of £50 and brought into custody in the Marshalsea on 30 August; dissatisfied with the accommodation, he transferred by habeas corpus to the Fleet the next day. In 1818 he was bankrupted as that City cheesemonger but satisfied the commissioners he could be discharged. Despite that he was back in the Fleet for a time in the summer of 1820.⁵⁹

Through all his inventive trickery, in which sharp wits, cool nerve and bottomless bravado must all have had a hand, Cooke never lost sight of the bigger prize. Early on in his career, perhaps from birth and education, he learned to move effortlessly among men and women of the highest rank. His pretensions were inexhaustible, his audacity breathtaking.

By the time Cooke was being bankrupted as a cheesemonger in Golden Lane he had hatched the greatest plan of his extraordinary career. His late mother had been, before her marriage to John Cooke in 1768, Catherine Stafford of Marlwood Park, Thornbury, Gloucestershire. She was descended from Sir William Stafford, a Tudor courtier, who had married into the family of the first Baron Stafford while never being entitled to the barony itself, which descended to the Jerningham family. The barony was unjustly forfeited in 1680 during the aftermath of the Titus Oates plot, but in the early 1820s Sir George Jerningham, then seventh baronet and in possession of the ruinous Stafford Castle and its prosperous estates, petitioned the House of Lords to have the 1680 attainder (or forfeiture) reversed. It was while these proceedings were afoot that Cooke developed a scheme to steal the putative barony from under Sir George’s very nose. He determined to claim the restored barony for his older brother, Richard, reportedly an insolvent second-hand furniture dealer at Wisbech in Cambridgeshire. In all of the subsequent dealings Richard seems to have been a dumb cipher for his younger, but far more enterprising, brother James.⁶⁰

The ground was painstakingly laid by Cooke. Early in 1818 he had set out ‘the proofs of his descent’ in ‘a Book called the “Stafford Peerage”’. Somehow he procured a presentation at the Prince Regent’s levee at Carlton House in June 1818, when George ‘was most graciously pleased to accept’ the ‘Book’ from the importunate Cooke. After extricating himself from the Fleet, Cooke was then presented to the new king in March 1821, again at Carlton House, when the Cabinet and all officers of state were in attendance. He petitioned for an invitation to George’s coronation in July 1821 as being ‘lawfully descended in the Protestant Line from the Royal House of Plantagenet’ and although we do not know the outcome he was presented at Buckingham Palace to the king on his official birthday on St George’s Day 1822. One further step in gilding the Cooke lily was taken by James that same year: he had his and Sophia’s son, now eight years old, baptised at Old St Pancras Church as George Plantagenet Stafford Cooke.⁶¹

Jerningham would eventually secure his reversal of attainder in 1824. But by then Cooke had already moved on the ground to implement Richard’s claim. From James’s lodgings in deeply unfashionable Clarendon Street, Somers Town, ‘a conspiracy to defraud’ the Jerninghams was evolved in late 1822. On 30 December a party of visitors was being shown around the ancient castle and the new restoration works then under way. Among them were Cooke, his brother and a local sheriff’s officer they had managed to get on their side. At the end of the visit these three refused to leave the castle and asserted that Richard was the new owner of the Stafford estates; they had to be ejected by force. Undeterred, Cooke issued notices to all the Jerningham tenants, explaining that the estate had passed into Richard Cooke’s possession, and ordering that all rents should be paid to James as his agent; they had timber felled on the estates and sold it, pocketing the proceeds; they sought to evict Sir George’s agent and solicitor from his offices, though without success. Soon after this excitement, the Morning Post announced in its society pages the arrival in town at the Blenheim Hotel, Bond Street, of ‘the Hon. James Stamp Sutton Cooke, from Stafford Castle, the lately acquired seat belonging to (his brother, Stafford Cooke) Lord Stafford, pursuant to the Act of the 1^st of King Edward the Sixth, that Nobleman being the lawful heir of Henry the restored Baron, son of Edward Duke of Buckingham’.⁶²

The farce ran and ran, playing to packed audiences in law courts up and down the country: in Derby in July 1823, when Cooke brought a libel case against a local paper that had exposed his London swindles and where he won a farthing damages as not every claim could be substantiated (perhaps about his bigamous marriage); at Gloucester in April 1824, when Cooke was convicted of conspiracy to obtain money under false pretences from Sir George Jerningham; at the court of King’s Bench in July 1824, when Cooke sued again for libel, this time against the author of a pamphlet, The Stafford Peerage; or, The Imposture Unmasked, winning a further farthing; and at the same court, where, after desperate delaying tactics by Cooke, he was sentenced in May 1826 to nine months in Coldbath Fields prison for the Stafford conspiracy and required to give sureties for his good behaviour for the following three years. Even this did not still the irrepressible Cooke: in spring 1827 he served notices to quit once more on over 150 of Jerningham’s tenants, who provokingly refused to pay their rents to the true baron’s agent, James Stamp Sutton Cooke. His reluctant tenantry once more left him ‘down on his uppers’: in September 1828 he was reported to be an imprisoned debtor again, living in the rules of the Fleet.⁶³

By this time ‘the notorious Mrs. Cooke’, alias Stamp, alias Saunders, alias Sanders, alias Sutton, had seized the limelight from her fading star of a husband. She had inevitably experienced her own entanglements with bailiffs and debtors’ prisons. In December 1824 the marshal of the King’s Bench was successfully sued for £110 damages when the slippery Sophia vanished from the rules; she had apparently shared her humble lodgings in what had been St George’s Fields, now a great cluster of cheap housing, with a town house in Bayswater, where she kept a carriage, useful for plundering West End tradesmen.⁶⁴

Her final clash with the criminal law began at Bow Street in September 1828. She appeared in the dock, heavily pregnant. There seems to have been some confusion in the court reporter’s mind over the paternity of the child who accompanied her, or perhaps Sophia varnished the tale for sympathy’s sake:

She had with her a very beautiful girl, about four years of age, and a servant maid. The child has for her reputed father a Noble Baron, whose ancestor’s blood was attainted. Mrs. Cooke was dressed in a black bombazine gown, with black bonnet and veil. She, though evidently an accomplished woman, and lady-like in her manners, was but meanly attired. Her child was dressed very elegantly. The servant girl wept incessantly.⁶⁵

After a long search, Sophia had finally been arrested and brought up on a charge of defrauding Messrs Rathnacker of Soho Square of a pianoforte. While on remand at Newgate she gave birth ‘to a thumping boy’. At the Old Bailey she was convicted with her accomplice William Barrett, alias Godfrey: both were sentenced to be transported for seven years. Poor Sophia died on board the Lucy Davidson on the journey to Australia, it was said of a burst blood vessel, in October 1829. She was about thirty-eight years old.⁶⁶

By then, her husband, James Stamp Sutton Cooke, was ten months dead. He had been brought into the Marshalsea a second and final time on 24 November 1828 for a debt of £50 – ‘a small sum’ he was ‘unable to pay’, as the papers had it; ‘but a short time ago’, it was reported that he ‘was living at No. 5 Euston-place, Euston-square, where he kept his carriage and two livery servants’, but perhaps that was before he moved into the rules of the Fleet. Now Cooke could not afford a transfer to ‘the Farringdon Hotel’ and had to bed down in the Marshalsea. A month later he was dead, aged forty-eight. He was buried, like numerous prisoners dying there, in the adjacent graveyard of St George the Martyr. The flamboyant career of one of the most sensational swindlers of the late Georgian period had come to a shabby and sordid end.⁶⁷

James Stamp Sutton Cooke was a shooting star of what would be the last generation of Marshalsea debtors. The injustices and overall ineffectiveness of the laws of imprisonment for debt had long been apparent and had led directly to the formation of the Thatched House Society half a century earlier. Even before the old enemy abroad was finally laid to rest at Waterloo, there was a growing appetite to identify and deal with the enemies that had long been left to suppurate at home: irreligion, ignorance, the savageries of the penal justice system and the prison house, the ever-rising cost of the poor, the corruption and iniquity of parliamentary administration. Much of the nation’s public life needed reform and modernisation and in a large agenda the medieval monstrosity (as many saw it) of imprisonment for debt was not neglected. The inquiries into conditions in the Marshalsea and other debtors’ prisons in London from 1815 to 1818 were part of this awakening. So were the increasing hurdles put in the way of arresting under mesne process in 1811 and 1827. And so were the modernised arrangements for managing the Marshalsea in place for the new prison in 1812. Not all of this spirit of reform was on the side of the debtor; the protection of the honest creditor from fraudulent exploitation was uppermost in the minds of numerous pamphleteers and of parliamentary committees looking into the operation of the debt laws in 1819 and 1823, for instance. But everything tended to scrutiny in which the fitness for purpose of the existing legal framework came in for close attention.⁶⁸

Movements for social improvements of all kinds gathered pace after the new reformed parliament was chosen at the general election of 1832. Calls for the abolition of all arrests on mesne process had been in the air for some time before – they had been voiced, for instance, in 1827 by Joseph Hume, the MP to whom John Ewer Poole had sent his Expose, and slightly after by Henry Brougham, MP for Winchester, a Scottish barrister and famous law and education reformer. Bills for this purpose were introduced and driven forward by Hume, Brougham and others in every parliamentary session from 1834. One bill eventually became law in 1838 (Lord Cottenham’s Act). It removed the ability to proceed against the person of the debtor without proving the debt and obtaining an order of the court, at the same time making it easier to take action against the debtor’s property.⁶⁹

The effect of the new law on the Marshalsea and the other debtors’ prisons of London was dramatic. At Christmas 1838 it was reported that ‘the new act has diminished the business of the Insolvent Debtors’ Court beyond what was anticipated, and at the present period the various prisons are comparatively deserted’. There were fifty-five prisoners in the Marshalsea, ‘which is considered a very small amount’, but the reductions in the other gaols were more drastic still. In midsummer 1839 the number had fallen to thirty-four, including three Admiralty prisoners, while the cost of running the prison, according to a radical paper, the Charter, was £3,000 per annum. A year later, in June 1840, the number of prisoners was just twenty-two, ‘being the lowest number ever known to have been confined within the walls’; it was also noted in explanation that the abolition of arrest on mesne process had now led, ‘by some beneficial working of the system’, to fewer arrests on execution too. Later that year it was noted that one of the Marshalsea debtors was said to have been confined ‘about four years’, though able to release himself through the Insolvent Debtors’ Court had he chosen to do so – one more argument for abolishing imprisonment for debtors who could exploit the system to hide from their creditors.⁷⁰

In fact, once more, an analysis of the Marshalsea day books shows a fluid number within the walls. During the course of 1841, 242 debtors were brought into custody, just nine of them women, all arrested on execution in furtherance of an order of the Palace court. The highest number in the prison on any one day was around sixty and the lowest thirty-two; we do not know how many of these were accompanied by family members but presumably some were for that had always been the case. The Marshalsea, then, still had its uses. But the costs of keeping it open were increasingly disproportionate; and gains were to be had for the public purse if the gaol could be sold on the private market, ever buoyant in respect of land in central London.⁷¹

In the meantime, as far as we know, things went on in the college pretty much as they always had. Queen Victoria’s marriage in February 1840 brought a familiar bounty, the debtors ‘regaled . . . with good old English fare’ in honour of the occasion. Christmas was more than ever a feast-time of plenty as the number of mouths to feed reduced: in 1841 the Marshalsea debtors were said each to have received ‘5 lbs. of beef, the same quantity of bread, a plentiful supply of malt liquor, and in addition 1s. and 6d. in cash’.⁷²

Yet the closure of the Marshalsea was palpably not far off. A rationalisation of prison space was overdue with prisoner numbers falling everywhere. The closure of the Fleet and Marshalsea was mooted in the papers in the summer of 1839, when it was said that the prisons’ marshals had been put on notice that all prisoners were to be concentrated in the Queen’s Bench. But official wheels turned slowly and it was not till March 1842 that Parliament resolved to close both gaols and consolidate the London debtors’ prisons outside the City in the Queen’s Bench, to be renamed the Queen’s prison. It was said in the newspapers that the Marshalsea was to be pulled down, perhaps the origin of later confusion in the public mind over just what did happen to the prison after it was closed. The confusion would persist for many years.⁷³

From 1 January 1842 a further 107 debtors were brought into custody. The last, James Edward Yates, entered the lodge on 24 May. Over the next few months almost all the debtors were discharged through the normal avenues, most commonly under the Insolvent Debtors Acts. When the prison closed, on 9 November 1842, there were just three prisoners remaining. All were taken that day to the Queen’s prison, a short walk away across Borough High Street, or Blackman Street as it had become. They included Judith Avery, the only woman among them, who was a widow from Marylebone, already in the Marshalsea for fifteen months for a debt of £36. She would eventually be released from the Queen’s prison four months later in March 1843 but would die after just two years of freedom, aged sixty-five.⁷⁴

By then the prison’s remains had been sold at auction. The Marshalsea would have some sort of afterlife on the ground, as we shall see. But it would have an afterlife too, more vivid and memorable by far, in the minds of subsequent generations. For the Marshalsea achieved worldwide immortality as a most powerful muse for the London novelist’s pen.

7

BRIEF LIVES: MARSHALSEA DEBTORS, 1820–42