Chronicles of Newgate, Vol. 1 From the twelfth to the eighteenth century

None ever survived it
longer.

The _oubliettes_ of the Conciergerie, recently revealed by excavations
below the level of the Seine, vividly confirm the story of Masers
de Latude, long confined in a similar one in Bicêtre. He says: "I
had neither fire nor artificial light and prison rags were my only
clothing. To quench my thirst, I sucked morsels of ice broken off
from the open window; I was nearly choked by the effluvium from the
cellars. Insects stung me in the eyes. I had nearly always a bad taste
in my mouth, and my lungs were horribly oppressed. I endured unceasing
pangs of hunger, cold and damp; I was attacked by scurvy; in ten days
my legs and thighs were swollen to twice their ordinary size; my body
turned black; my teeth loosened in their sockets so that I could not
masticate; I could not speak and was thought to be dead."

Perhaps the refinement of torture, however, had been reached under
the cowardly and superstitious Louis XI, whose iron cages were of such
shape and size that the prisoners could languish in them for years
unable either to stand upright or to stretch full length upon the
floor. One feels the grim humour of fate that condemned the Bishop of
Verdun, their inventor, to be the first to suffer in them.

Life-long confinement under such conditions was the so-called
"clemency" of rulers desiring to be thought merciful. Supported
first by hope, then deadened by despair, men endured life in these
prisons for years only to leave them bereft of health or reason. The
famous names of those who languished in them is legion. Fouquet, the
defaulting minister of Louis XIV, whose magnificence had rivalled that
of the king himself, was punished by such captivity for twenty years.
The "Man with the Iron Mask," whose identity, lost for three centuries,
has been proved beyond a doubt after careful comparison of all
theories,—pined his life away in one of them, accused, like Dreyfus,
of having sold a secret of state.

Records of like cruelty and indifference to human suffering blackened
the pages of English history until the merciful ministrations of John
Howard and of Elizabeth Frye aroused the slumbering pity of Great
Britain, and alleviated the conditions of prisoners all over the world.

In all lands, in all ages, in all stages of civilization, man has
left grim records of vengeful passion. No race has escaped the stigma,
perhaps no creed. It would almost seem that nations had vied with each
other in the subtlety of their ingenuity for producing suffering. The
stoical Indian, the inscrutable Chinese, the cruel Turk, the brutal
Slav, the philosophic Greek, the suave and artistic Italian, the
stolid German, the logical and pleasure-loving French, the aggressive
English,—all have left their individual seal on these records of
"man's inhumanity to man."

From the gloom of these old prisons have sprung many of the most
fascinating stories of the world,—stories so dramatic, so thrilling,
so pathetic that even the magic fiction of Dickens or Dumas pales
beside the dread realities of the Tower, the Bastile, the Spielberg,
the "leads" of the Palace of the Doges, the mines of Siberia, or the
Black Hole of Calcutta.

What heroic visions history conjures for us! Columbus languishing in
chains in Spain; Savonarola and Jean d'Arc passing from torture to the
stake; Sir William Wallace, Sidney, Raleigh, Lady Jane Grey, Sir Thomas
More, irradiating the dim cells of London's Tower; Madame Roland,
Charlotte Corday, Marie Antoinette, beautifying the foul recesses of
the Conciergerie; gentle Madame Elizabeth soothing the sorrows of the
Temple; Silvio Pellico in the Spielberg; Settembrini and the Patriots
of the Risorgimento in the prisons of Italy; the myriad martyrs of
Russia in the dungeons of the Czar or the wilds of Siberia—all pass
before us in those magic pages, uttering in many tongues but in one
accord their righteous and eternal protest against the blind vengeance
of man.




INTRODUCTION


In antiquity and varied interest old Newgate prison, now passed away
before the ceaseless movement of London change, yields to no place
of durance in the world. A gaol stood on this same site for almost a
thousand years. The first prison was nearly as old as the Tower of
London, and much older than the Bastile. Hundreds of thousands of
"felons and trespassers" have from first to last been incarcerated
within. To many it must have been an abode of sorrow, suffering,
and unspeakable woe, a kind of terrestrial inferno, to enter which
was to abandon every hope. Imprisonment was often lightly and
capriciously inflicted in days before British liberties were fully
won, and innumerable victims of tyranny and oppression have been
lodged in Newgate. Political troubles also sent their quota. The gaol
was the half-way house to the scaffold or the gallows for turbulent
or short-sighted persons who espoused the losing side; it was the
starting-place for that painful pilgrimage to the pillory or whipping
post which was too frequently the punishment for rashly uttered
libels and philippics against constituted power.