Bidwell's Travels, from Wall Street to London Prison Part 27

"Among the pa.s.sengers who landed at Plymouth yesterday morning from the royal mail steamer Moselle was Bidwell, otherwise F. A. Warren, in charge of Detective Sergeant Michael Hayden and William Green, accompanied by Capt. John Curtin and Walter Perry of Mr.

Pinkerton's staff. They were joined by Inspector Wallace and Detective Sergeant William Moss of the city police, who had come down from London the previous night to meet the steamer.

[Ill.u.s.tration: CHATHAM--CONVICTS AT LABOR.]

"It being known that Bidwell was expected from Havana in the Moselle, an enormous crowd a.s.sembled in Milbay pier to await the return of the steam tender with the mail, in order to get a sight of the prisoner, and so great was the crowd that it was with some difficulty that Bidwell and his escort managed to reach cabs, and were driven to the Duke of Cornwall Hotel adjoining the railway station. They left by the 12.45 train for London. A crowd of 20,000 persons were present to see them off, and cheered Bidwell heartily.

"Bidwell will be taken before the Lord Mayor in the justice room at the Mansion House this morning."

Accompanied by my escort of six, I arrived in London one bright Spring morning, just as the mighty ma.s.ses of that great Babylon were thronging in their thousands toward Epsom Downs, where on that day the Derby, that pivotal event in the English year, was to be run. All London was astir, and had put on holiday attire, while I, now a poor weed drifting to rot on Lethe's wharf, was on my way to Newgate.

Newgate! Then it had come to this! The Primrose Way wherein I had walked and lived delicately at the expense of honor, ended here!

"Whatsoever a man soweth, that shall he also reap," was written by one Paul. The wisdom of many was here and condensed in the wit of one, and one with the shrewdest insight into things and a practical knowledge of human history.

I was a prisoner in Newgate. Newgate! The very name casts a chill; so, too, does a sight of that granite fortress rising there in the heart of mighty London. Amid all the throbbing life of that great Babylon it stands--chill and grim--and has stood a prison fortress for 500 years.

Through all those linked centuries how many thousands of the miserable and heartbroken of every generation have been garnered within its cold embrace! What sights and sounds those old walls have seen and heard! As I paced its gloomy corridors that first night, pictures of its past rose before me so grim and terrible that I turned shuddering from them, only to remember that I, too, had joined the long unending procession ever flowing through its gates, which had heaped its walls to the top with one inky sea of misery.

In the cruel days of old many a savage sentence had fallen from the lips of merciless judges, but none more terrible than the one which was to fall on us from the lips of their ferocious imitator, Justice Archibald.

I found my three friends already prisoners there, and a sad party we were. When we said good-bye that night on the wharf at Calais, where we sat star-gazing and philosophizing, we little antic.i.p.ated this reunion.

What a rude surprise it was to find how things were conducted in this same Newgate. I took it for granted--since the law regarded us as innocent until we were tried and convicted--that we could have any reasonable favor granted us there which was consistent with our safe keeping. But no. The system of the convict prison was enforced here, and with the same iron rigor. Strict silence was the rule along with the absolute exclusion of newspapers and all news of the outside world. The rules forbid any delicacy or books being furnished by one's friends from the outside. This iron system is as cruel as unphilosophical, for, pending trial, the inmates are more or less living in a perfect agony of mind, which drives many into insanity or to the verge of insanity, as it did me. How can one, then, when the past is remorse--and the present and future despair--find oblivion or raze out the written troubles of the brain save in absorption in books.

When Claudo is doomed to die and go "he knew not where," peering into the abyss, the fear strikes him that in the unknown he may be "prisoned in the viewless winds" and blown with restless violence round about this pendant world. A terrible figure! It filled at this time some corner of my brain and would not out. It went with me up and down in all my walks in Newgate.

[Ill.u.s.tration: PRINc.i.p.aL WARDERS, WOKING PRISON. No. 1 Scott, No. 2.

Metherell.]

[Ill.u.s.tration: a.s.sISTANT WARDERS, DARTMOOR PRISON.]

If I had the pen of Victor Hugo, what a picture I would draw of a mind consciously going down into the fearful abyss of insanity, making mighty struggles against it, yet looking on the cold walls shutting one in and weighing down the spirit, feeling that the struggle is ineffectual, the fight all in vain, for the dead, blank walls are staring coldly on you, without giving one reflex message, bearing on their gray surface no thought, no response of mind. For they have been looked over with anxious care to discover if any other mind had recorded there some thought which would awake thought in one's own, and help to shake off the fearful burden pressing one to earth. As a fact, a man so situated does--aye, must--make an effort to leave some visible impress of his mind as a message to his kind. It is a natural law, and the instinct is part of one's being. It is a pa.s.sion of the mind--a longing to be united to the spiritual ma.s.s of minds from which the isolated soul is suffering an unnatural divorce of hideous material walls.

It is this law which makes the savage place his totem on the rocks, and it is, thanks to the same instinct, that this very day our savants are finding beneath the foundations of the temples and palaces which once decked the Phoenician plain, the baked tablets which tell us the family histories, no less than the story of the empires of those days. When the impress was made on the soft clay to be fire-hardened, each writer felt or hoped in the long ages in the far-off unknown,

"When time is old and hath forgot itself, When water drops have worn the streets of Troy And blind oblivion swallowed cities up, And mighty States, characterless, are grated To dusty nothing"----

then some thought, some message from their minds, there impressed on the senseless clay, would be communicated to some other mind, and wake a response there.

Many a time, with a brain reeling in agony, did I turn and stare blankly at those walls, and, in a sort of dumb stupor, search them over in hope to find some word, some message impressed there, some scratch of pen or finger nail. It might be a message of misery, some outcry from a wounded spirit, some expression of despair.

Had there been one such--had there been! Every one of my predecessors had left a message on that smooth-painted wall, but the red-tape official rogues--the stultified images sans reason, sans all imagination--had, after the departure of each one, carefully painted over all such legacies.

The hideous cruelty of it all! My blood, boils even now, when I think of it. Even in the days of Elizabeth the keepers of the Tower of London had enough human feeling to leave untouched the inscriptions made by Raleigh and others, and there they are to-day, and to-day wake a response in the heart of every visitor that looks on them.

[Ill.u.s.tration: A GANG IN BLOUSES MARCHING OUT.]

CHAPTER x.x.xV.

RUNNING THE GAUNTLET.

My life at Newgate was an ordeal such as I hope no reader of this will ever undergo. Day by day I saw the world slipping from under my feet, and the net drawing its deadly folds closer around me. Soon we all were forced to realize there was no escape for any of us.

Of course, we were all guilty and deserved punishment--I need not say we did not think so then--but the evidence was most weak, and had our trial taken place in America under the too liberal construction of our laws, undoubtedly we all would have escaped. But in England there is no court of criminal appeal, as with us, and when once the jury gives a verdict, that ends the matter. The result is that if judges are prejudiced, or want a man convicted, as in our case, he never escapes. The jury is always selected from the shopkeeping cla.s.s, and they are horribly subservient to the aristocratic cla.s.ses. They don't care for evidence--they simply watch the judge. If he smiles, the prisoner is innocent. If he frowns, then, of course, guilty.

With us when a man is charged with an offense against the laws he engages a lawyer--one is sufficient and quite costly enough. In England they are divided into three cla.s.ses, viz.: solicitors, barristers and Queen's Counsels.

The solicitor takes the case and transacts all the business connected with it. A barrister is the lawyer who is employed by the solicitor to conduct the case in court and make the pleadings. He never comes in contact with the client, but takes the brief and all instructions from the solicitor. The Queen's Counsel is a lawyer of a higher rank, and whenever his serene lords.h.i.+p takes a brief he must, to keep up his dignity, "be supported" by a barrister. So my reader will perhaps understand the raison d'etre of the proverb, "The lawyers own England."

As no solicitor can plead in court, so no Queen's Counsel will come in direct contact with a client, and must be "supported" by a barrister.

Ergo, any unfortunate having a case in court must fee two, if not three legal sharks to represent him, if represented at all.

We employed as solicitor a Mr. David Howell of 105 Cheapside, and a thoroughgoing, unprincipled rascal he proved to be. He was a small, spare, undersized man, with little beady eyes, light complexion, red hair, and stubby beard, and when he spoke it was with a thin reedy voice. From first to last he managed our case in exactly the way the prosecution would have desired. He bled us freely, and altogether we paid him nearly $10,000, and our defense by our eight lawyers--four Queen's Counsels and four barristers--was about the lamest and most idiotic possible.

We early came to the unanimous conclusion that in our country Howell would have had to face a jury for robbing us, and that but one of our eight lawyers had ability enough to appear in a police court here to conduct a hearing before an ordinary magistrate.

I do not propose to enter into the details of our preliminary hearings before the Lord Mayor at the Mansion House, or of the trial. Both the hearings and trial were sensational in the highest degree, and attracted universal attention all over the English-speaking world. Full-page pictures of the trial appeared in all the ill.u.s.trated journals of Europe and America, and our portraits were on sale everywhere.

After many hearings before Sir Sidney Waterlaw, we were finally committed for trial.

Editorial from the London Times of Aug. 13, 1873:

THE BANK FORGERIES.

"Monday next has been fixed for the trial, and the depositions taken before the Lord Mayor at the Justice Room of the Mansion House by Mr. Oke, the chief clerk, have been printed for the convenience of the presiding judge and of the counsel on both sides. They extend over 242 folio pages, including the oral and doc.u.mentary evidence, and make of themselves a thick volume, together with an elaborate index for ready reference. Within living memory there has been no such case for length and importance heard before any Lord Mayor of London in its preliminary stage, nor one which excited a greater amount of public interest from first to last. The Overend Gurney prosecution is the only one in late years which at all approaches it in those respects, but in that the printed depositions only extended over 164 folio pages, or much less than those in the Bank case, in which as many as 108 witnesses gave evidence before the Lord Mayor, and the preliminary examinations--twenty-three in number from first to last--lasted from the first of March until the 2d of July, exclusive of the time spent in remands."

From the London Times, Aug. 10, 1873:

"On the opening of the August sessions of the Old Bailey Central Criminal Court. The court and streets were much crowded from the beginning, and continued so throughout the day. Alderman Sir Robert Carden, representing the Lord Mayor; Mr. Alderman Finis, Mr.

Alderman Besley, Mr. Alderman Lawrence, M.P., Mr. Alderman Whetham and Mr. Alderman Ellis, as commissioners of the Court, occupied seats upon the bench, as did also Alderman Sheriff White.

"Sheriff Sir Frederick Perkins, Mr. Under-Sheriff Hewitt and Mr.

Under-Sheriff Crosley, Mr. R. B. Green, Mr. R. W. Crawford, M.P., Governor of the Bank. Mr. Lyall, Deputy Governor, and Mr. Alfred de Rothschild were present. The members of the bar mustered in force, and the reserved seats were chiefly occupied by ladies. Mr.

Hardinge Gifford, Q.C. (now Lord Chancellor of the British Empire), and Mr. Watkin Williams, Q.C. (instructed by Messrs. Freshfield, the solicitors of the bank), appeared as counsel for the prosecution."

For eight mortal days the final trial dragged on, and there we were pilloried in that horrible dock--a spectacle for the staring throngs that flocked to see the young Americans who had found a pregnable spot in the impregnable Bank of England.

The misery of those eight days! No language can describe it, nor would I undergo it again for the wealth of the world.

The court was filled with fas.h.i.+onables, ladies as well, who flocked to stare at misery, while the corridors of the Old Bailey and the street itself were packed with thousands eager to catch a glimpse of us. The Judge, in scarlet, sat in solemn state, with members of the n.o.bility or gouty Aldermen in gold chains and robes on the bench beside him. The body of the court was filled with bewigged lawyers--a tippling lot of sharks and rogues, always after lunch half tipsy with the punch or dry sherry which English lawyers drink, jesting and cracking jokes, unmindful of the fate of their clients. Capt. Curtin and a score of detectives were present.

No fewer than 213 witnesses were called by the prosecution. Of these about fifty were from America, and by them they traced our lives for many years before. As the forged bills were all sent by mail it was necessary to convict us by circ.u.mstantial evidence. The evidence was all very weak, save only in that remarkable matter of the blotting paper.

Our conviction was a foregone conclusion.

The jury retired to consider their verdict shortly after 7 o'clock, and on returning into court after the lapse of about a quarter of an hour they gave in a verdict of guilty against all of the four prisoners.