Rebels and traitors

Chapter Fifty-Two — St Katharine's and Newgate: 1648-50

The boom of the great guns had an unexpected benefit in the depot that housed the young people who had been 'spirited'. As soon as the cannonade began, all the keepers rushed to see what was going on. Most of their charges were too subdued or too youthful to take advantage. But for one troubled soul, the great funeral at Wapping provided an escape.

Her name was temporarily Alice Smith. She chose it to sound respectable on the indentures they had given her. Six months after she was taken from Covent Garden, she ended up in a holding-house, or depot, in St Katharine's-by-the-Tower, moved there from St Giles-in-the-Fields as the day for shipment to Virginia or the Indies grew closer. The second civil war, with the navy revolt and blockades downstream in the Thames estuary, had delayed transportation and given her a respite, but towards the end of the year the young people were told their boat would come soon.

During her captivity — though it was never openly called that — she had come to regret her agreement to emigrate. She was by nature more suspicious than the other kidnapped young people. She kept her ears open. Soon, the situation began to worry her. She overheard a pair of desperate parents begging to have their stolen child returned. She noted how the staff spoke among themselves of their kidnapped charges' fates. Always ready to believe she had been lied to for the gain of others, Alice Smith began to fear that once she reached her destination she would find that the 'service' she had signed up for was not mild housework with respectable colonists but hard manual labour out of doors on plantations, in conditions close to slavery. Once she arrived overseas, it would be too late. She asked as many questions about conditions as she dared. When this was discouraged, she soon disbelieved all the glowing promises.

She stayed at the depot, because it was an easy life — so far. She had shelter and food. Even the meagre daily diet was better than she had been used to; her health and with it her inbuilt truculence began to revive. She kept alert for news of their ship, and was keyed up to abscond. When the matron and staff ran out to watch Rainborough's funeral procession, she decided to waste no more time. So she calmly filled an apron with whatever she could carry, then she slipped out of an unguarded door and made off.

St Katharine's was a forbidding area. It lay beyond the Tower, outside the city walls. Less than a hundred years before, this had been an empty quarter used only for drowning pirates on the foreshore; convicted pirates were by tradition chained to ramps until three tides had passed over them — a story that had been told to the spirited youngsters in the process of subduing them. Alice was not afraid of long-dead pirates — though she turned instinctively away from the river.

The main feature of this parish was a charitable foundation for the poor, the Royal Hospital or Free Chapel. Founded and supported by various queens of England, it had been a Catholic institution but was spared by Henry the Eighth during his dissolution of monastic orders, because it had belonged to his mother. The hospital was regarded with suspicion because, even when nominally Protestant, it was run by lay brethren and sisters. Like so many religious properties, it had attracted the poor and helpless until it became the centre of a rat's nest of lanes and mean streets, containing perhaps a thousand houses where stick-thin, dull-eyed paupers struggled against starvation and disease. As with all the liberties beyond London's walls, the area became a haven for illegal trades and the outsiders who practised them. The small, stinking cottages and dilapidated tenements housed a lawless English underclass and foreigners who were no better. The alleys had suggestive names: Dark Entry, Cat's Hole, Shovel Alley, Eagle and Child Alley, Axe Yard and Naked Boy Court. This grim district was a natural place to position the depot for stolen children: rough, unfriendly, secret and rarely visited by anyone respectable.

In some ways it was no worse an area than Southwark, across the river, where 'Eliza' and Jem Starling had holed up the previous year. There were just as many seamen on this side, with watermen of all types, especially the drunken, unemployed variety. Among the wrongdoers who had emerged like fleas at the funeral commotion were prostitutes looking for clients and vagabonds planning to pick pockets as the great procession of mourners wended up Wapping High Street. Astute ones had adorned their dishevelled coats with sea-green ribbons so they would blend in.

Alice' picked her way through the tangle of unpaved lanes and alleys, stepping over piles of litter and runnels of nightsoil, while keeping an eye out for people throwing slops from the teetering tenements above. Nobody seemed to observe her. The dark, filthy courtyards seemed deserted, though she knew better than to feel secure here. Any unguarded moment could have pitched her into worse trouble than she had left behind. She pulled in her skirts and scurried past East Smithfield, where some of the most degraded brothels in London huddled, although the neat lines of little houses had once been pleasant dwellings occupied by hardworking hatters and shoemakers. Now the clothes they once made, so worn they barely held together by threads, were sold second, third or fourth hand in Rosemary Lane. That was where the public executioner lived, the man who had lopped off the heads of Strafford and Laud, or so turnkeys were wont to tell the children at the depot. And he will come for you too, if you give us any trouble!' It was a fetid little street crammed with sour taverns and totters' stalls, where Alice' managed to sell for a penny what she had stolen from the depot. Before leaving the lane, she carried out a swift piece of stall-robbery and fled with a tattered hood that would help to disguise her.

She went west. So she entered the City, by chance reversing the processional route which Thomas Rainborough's cortege had taken earlier that day. The streets remained subdued. Unsure where to turn, she began a long walk that would bring her back towards the Strand and Covent Garden where she had worked her way in misery before. This time she turned off, reluctant to be spotted again by the man who had lured her. Instead, she slipped into the disreputable alleys around Giltspur Street, north of the Old Bailey.

She survived there for six months. Time had no meaning for her, days, weeks and months slipping by as once again she deteriorated. She heard they beheaded the King, but the tentative start of the Commonwealth meant little at gutter level. Then, since the life of the dirt poor stayed unchanged by the absence of monarchy, one day she walked into a house where a maid had left a door open; she stole a silver charger, which was a felony. When she tried to fence the plate, a thief-taker informed on her; she was brought, spitting protests, before a particularly dyspeptic magistrate. It was her first mistake, so she hoped to get off with a fine and a whipping. Transportation to the colonies was a possibility that made her smile grimly, since she had escaped it once when she was spirited. But her manner was so defiant, she was despatched to Newgate Prison under sentence to be hanged.

She knew what to do; she 'pleaded her belly'. Examined physically by a jury of matrons', to check her story, she was pronounced genuinely pregnant. She was as surprised as they were. This would save her life until she came to term; she had no idea how long that would be, having no sure way to tell which of the casual couplings with lawyers' clerks and muffin boys that she had engaged in when particularly desperate for money had resulted in a baby.

It was born. It died. Still in prison, she disposed of the evidence secretly and for a while longer pretended she was still pregnant, mocking up a convincing bump as she had done in her short career of highway robbery. So she clung on in Newgate, a desperate jail where every staple of life, even a place near the fire, had to be paid for either with money or some base favour to the jailors. Prisoners were denuded of an entry fee on first arriving, then fees for food, for bedding, for clothes, even a release fee if they were pardoned or transported. Also, the longer she stayed, the greater the risk she would catch fatal jail fever.

Eventually she could no longer delay fate, but had to face her penalty. She made no attempt to bribe the jailor or his turnkeys, nor even to petition for the pardon that many obtained. Now friendless, she had nobody to bring in food or arrange an escape. Gone were the days when she could have sent for the proceeds of past robberies to pay her way out of trouble. She had no money to hire a 'knight of the post' to give false evidence and save her with an alibi. She sank into dreary acceptance that she was going the gallows. It was as if she no longer cared.

Then, at the last moment, she met Priscilla Fotheringham. Known in those days as a 'cat-eyed gipsy', Priss was a pockmarked, beaten-up Scot from the lowest seam of deprivation, already an experienced prostitute, who was about to become a bawd, keeping her own notorious house. 'Alice' overheard her cackling with two other whores who were inconvenienced by a spell in jail for robbery. They were laying plans to enliven the new Commonwealth with efficient and lucrative new pleasure-palaces. In years to come it would be said that Priss, and these two equally famous madams called Damaris Page and Elizabeth Cresswell, had shared a cell and plotted a Venetian-style courtesans' guild, with subscriptions. They planned to hire resident doctors to prescribe contraception, perform abortions, restore virginities and cure venereal disease. They would have scriveners to write letters and draft bonds, which were a bawd's main means of controlling her girls, since they imposed enforceable penalties for debt. As well as the normal battery of pimps and doorkeepers, or hectors, there would be specialist barbers to shave the girls' pubic commodities in the exotic Spanish style. A painter would draw erotic art to inspire patrons. And it was alleged that this prison council of working women also decided to link Priss Fotheringham's house to another legendary establishment: the Last and Lyon at Smithfield, otherwise known as Hammond's Prick Office, where the whores indulged clients with oral sex — another foreign innovation that raised eyebrows and therefore cost a great deal of money — each girl having first demonstrated her skills on Hammond's own readily available jockum.

Little of this heady future was apparent in those early days in Newgate. But even as a depressed prisoner in that hellish jail, Priss Fotheringham had manoeuvred access to the few comforts available. Despite her woeful appearance, she maintained links to the outside and could access funds. The usual grubby mystery attached to her background. She was listed as a spinster, though married perhaps twice, not bothering to wait until the first syphilitic husband died before taking a second. When one husband beat her up, she ran away with a halberdier from the Artillery Ground, until he spent all her money and abandoned her. She had been trained in her mother-in-law's brothel in Cowcross Street, a filthy area of Finsbury, where she became a hard-working exponent of the normal horizontal trade — though due to become famous for much more curious gymnastic skills.

She for her part immediately saw in Alice' a likely wench who was in need of kindly mentoring. Recruiting girls to the trade was a basic brothel skill. She fed the downcast mite a bowl of gruel, strengthened it with a slug of sack and quickly extracted her entire history. Discovering — with a dramatic cry of joy — that during her service in Tinker Fox's garrison this girl had been taught brewing, Priss Fotheringham revealed that her own release was imminent, expected any day; Priss had made arrangements of a traditional kind with the jailor. Upon regaining her freedom, she intended to open a refurbished alehouse called the Six Windmills by Finsbury Fields; it was previously known as Jack o' Newbury's, when according to her it had had a bad reputation that she intended to redeem. It was very well placed, alongside the Artillery Ground where the Trained Bands drilled.

'They work up a thirst?' asked the snivelling wench.

'Well, let's say they get up something…'

In no time Priss recruited 'Alice' to be sprung from prison for a new life — doing honest work with malt and hops in the brewhouse of an allegedly respectable travellers' rest.

It was in fact the unique retail establishment that would be known to history as Mother Fotheringham's Half Crown Chuck Office.