Old Portraits and Modern Sketches: Part 1 from Volume VI of The Works of John Greenleaf WhittierWhittier, John Greenleaf
History
Old Portraits and Modern Sketches: Part 1 from Volume VI of The Works of John Greenleaf Whittier
Whittier, John Greenleaf
Biography
pikes of the soldiery closing about them in a circle of bristling steel!
Brave and true ones! Not in vain did ye thus oppose God's silence to the
Devil's uproar; Christian endurance and calm persistence in the exercise
of your rights as Englishmen and men to the hot fury of impatient
tyranny! From your day down to this, the world has been the better for
your faithfulness.
Ellwood and some thirty of his friends were marched off to prison in Old
Bridewell, which, as well as nearly all the other prisons, was already
crowded with Quaker prisoners. One of the rooms of the prison was used
as a torture chamber. "I was almost affrighted," says Ellwood, "by the
dismalness of the place; for, besides that the walls were all laid over
with black, from top to bottom, there stood in the middle a great
whipping-post.
"The manner of whipping there is, to strip the party to the skin, from
the waist upward, and, having fastened him to the whipping-post, (so that
he can neither resist nor shun the strokes,) to lash his naked body with
long, slender twigs of holly, which will bend almost like thongs around
the body; and these, having little knots upon them, tear the skin and
flesh, and give extreme pain."
To this terrible punishment aged men and delicately nurtured young
females were often subjected, during this season of hot persecution.
From the Bridewell, Ellwood was at length removed to Newgate, and thrust
in, with other "Friends," amidst the common felons. He speaks of this
prison, with its thieves, murderers, and prostitutes, its over-crowded
apartments and loathsome cells, as "a hell upon earth." In a closet,
adjoining the room where he was lodged, lay for several days the
quartered bodies of Phillips, Tongue, and Gibbs, the leaders of the Fifth
Monarchy rising, frightful and loathsome, as they came from the bloody
hands of the executioners! These ghastly remains were at length obtained
by the friends of the dead, and buried. The heads were ordered to be
prepared for setting up in different parts of the city. Read this grim
passage of description:--
"I saw the heads when they were brought to be boiled. The hangman
fetched them in a dirty basket, out of some by-place, and, setting them
down among the felons, he and they made sport of them. They took them by
the hair, flouting, jeering, and laughing at them; and then giving them
some ill names, boxed them on their ears and cheeks; which done, the
hangman put them into his kettle, and parboiled them with bay-salt and
cummin-seed: that to keep them from putrefaction, and this to keep off
the fowls from seizing upon them. The whole sight, as well that of the
bloody quarters first as this of the heads afterwards, was both frightful
and loathsome, and begat an abhorrence in my nature."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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