The Chronicles of Newgate, vol. 2/2Griffiths, Arthur
History
The Chronicles of Newgate, vol. 2/2
Griffiths, Arthur
Criminals -- Great Britain; Newgate (Prison : London, England); Prisons -- England; Punishment -- Great Britain
As time passed, the early martyrs to freedom of speech, such men as
Prynne Bastwick and Daniel Defoe, were followed by many victims to
similar oppression. One of the first to suffer after Defoe was the
nonjuring clergyman Lawrence Howell, who died in Newgate. He was
prosecuted about 1720 for writing a pamphlet in which he denounced
George I. as a usurper. He was tried at the Old Bailey, convicted, and
sentenced to pay a fine of £500 to the king, to find sureties for an
additional sum, to be imprisoned in Newgate for three years, and during
that term to be twice whipped. He was also to be degraded and stripped
of his gown by the common executioner. Howell asked indignantly of his
judges, "Who will whip a clergyman?" "We pay no deference to your
cloth," replied the court, "because you are a disgrace to it, and have
no right to wear it." The validity of his ordination was also denied by
the court, and as Howell continued to protest, the hangman was ordered
to tear off his gown as he stood there at the bar. The public whipping
was not inflicted, but Howell died soon afterwards in Newgate.
Next came Nathaniel Mist, who was sentenced in 1721 to stand in the
pillory, to pay a fine, and suffer imprisonment for reflecting upon the
action of George I. as regards the Protestants in the Palatinate. His
paper, the 'Weekly Journal' or 'Saturday's Post,' was notoriously
Jacobite in its views. Soon afterwards he came under the displeasure of
the House of Commons for instituting comparisons between the times of
the '15 rebellion and those which followed, and was committed to Newgate
for uttering a "false, malicious, and scandalous libel." This
interference by the House with Mist's publications in a matter which did
not concern its privileges is characterized by Hallam as an
extraordinary assumption of parliamentary power. Tom Paine, whose
rationalist writings gained him much obloquy later on, was one of the
next in point of time to feel the arm of the law. In 1724 he was
convicted of three libels on the Government, fined £100, and imprisoned
for a year. A clergyman, William Rowland, was put in the pillory in
1729 for commenting too freely in print on two magistrates who had
failed to convict and punish prisoners charged with unnatural crimes.
Mr. Rowland was pilloried in his canonical habit, and preached all the
time to the multitude, complaining of the injustice of his sentence,
"whereupon the people, and amongst them were several women, made a
collection for him."
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