It is difficult to exaggerate the horrors of Newgate, the mismanagement, tyranny, and lax discipline which prevailed at that time. Its unsanitary condition was chronic, which at times, but only for influential inmates, was pleaded as an excuse for release. Luttrell tells us Lord Montgomery, a prisoner there in 1697, was brought out of Newgate to the King's Bench Court, there to be bailed, upon two affidavits, which showed that there was an infectious fever in Newgate, of which several were sick and some dead. He was accordingly admitted to bail himself in £10,000, and four sureties—the Duke of Norfolk, the Earl of Yarmouth, Lord Carrington, and Lord Jeffereys—in £5,000 each. An effort to secure release was made less successfully some years later in regard to Jacobite prisoners of note, although the grounds alleged were the same and equally valid. Some effort was made to classify the prisoners: there was the master's side, for debtors and felons respectively; the common side, for the same two classes; and the press-yard, for prisoners of note. If a prisoner was hopelessly despondent, he could generally compass the means of committing suicide. A Mr. Norton, natural son of Sir George Norton, condemned for killing a dancing-master, because the latter would not suffer him to take his wife away from him in the street, poisoned himself the night before his reprieve expired. The drug was conveyed to him by his aunt without difficulty, "who participated in the same dose, but she is likely to recover." Nor were prisoners driven to this last desperate extremity to escape from durance. Pepys tells us in 1667, August 1, that the gates of the city were shut, "and at Newgate we find them in trouble, some thieves having this night broken open prison."