was thrown into the Fleet. French prisoners of war taken in the capture of Harfleur, in 1423, were brought to the Fleet. When Sir Geoffrey Poole of Hampshire fell out with a neighbour, the Lord Privy Seal summoned him to appear before him and committed him to the Fleet until the King’s (Henry VIII) further pleasure should be known. Lady Poole won her husband’s pardon this time, but Sir Geoffrey was again in trouble the very next year for assaulting the parson of Pacton in the county of Sussex.

In these troublous times various offenders found themselves in the Fleet. It was a place of penitence for young gentlemen who misbehaved, such as the son and heir of Sir Mathew Browne of Surrey who, with his servants, was guilty of arson in a wood; a printer who sold seditious books was committed to it in 1541; the riotous servants of a gentleman of the Privy Chamber were laid by the heels in the Fleet. Smugglers and all who infringed the Customs’ laws were committed to the prison as debtors to the King. A ship master of Southampton who was “privately conveying five packets of wool to Flanders without a license” was arrested and sent to the Fleet, the wool being seized and the captain fined half the value of his ship. It was made a place for the detention of state prisoners, for when Cowley, the Master of the Rolls in Ireland, was under examination in 1541 he was lodged in the Fleet until the King himself should come to London. This was the fate of the illustrious knight, Sir John Falstaff, when he bearded the Lord Chief Justice, as Shakespeare tells us in “Henry IV”:—

Poets, dramatists and pamphleteers were from time to time cast into the Fleet, and it was christened by Pope the “Haunt of the Muses.” Among the first was Lord Surrey and among the latter Nash, author of the satirical play “The Isle of Dogs.” Wycherley, the wit and dramatist, who married the Countess of Drogheda, languished for seven years as a debtor in the Fleet, and Sir Richard Baker, author of the famous “Chronicles,” wrote them as a means of subsistence when an impecunious debtor there, where he died. Francis Sandford, author of the “Genealogical History,” also died in the prison in 1693. James Howell, who wrote the delightful “Familiar Letters” during the troublous times of the Civil War, was a tenant of the Fleet prison in the years 1643 to 1647. In one of his letters dated from the Fleet in 1643, he describes his arrest one morning betimes, by five men armed with “swords, pistols and bills,” who took him to gaol where, as he says, “as far as I can tell I must lie at dead anchor a long time unless some gentle gale blow thence to launch me out.” He consoles himself, however, with the thought that all Englishmen being islanders, are, in effect, prisoners.

The Fleet was arbitrarily used by Sir Richard Empson in the reign of Henry VII, when that overbearing law officer was indicted for committing to it, without process, persons accused of murder and high crimes. Cardinal Wolsey was charged with a like invasion of the liberty of the subject, “by his power and might contrary to right,” in the case of a Sir John Stanley who had taken possession of a farm illegally. This man would not yield but preferred to turn monk in Westminster monastery, where he died.

Other prisoners were committed to the Fleet for political misdemeanours and severely dealt with by the ruling powers. It was an offence to marry the sister of Lady Jane Grey and for this imprisonment was adjudged to Edward Seymour, Earl of Hertford. Dr. Donne, who married Sir George More’s daughter without his knowledge, was laid by the heels; the penalty of durance overtook Sir Robert Killigrew for entering into conversation with Sir Thomas Overbury, when returning from a visit to Sir Walter Raleigh, then a prisoner in the Tower. James I, when overmuch importuned by the Countess of Dorset, who broke into the Privy Council Chamber, sent her to the Fleet, and Lucius Carey, Lord Falkland, was imprisoned for sending a challenge.

Many painful memories hang about the old Fleet prison in connection with the religious and political persecutions of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. It was crowded with the martyrs to intolerance in the reign of the bigoted Queen Mary and the victims Elizabeth sacrificed in the way of reprisals when she came to the throne. The Protestant party had been in the ascendant under Edward VI and the old religion had been sharply attacked, so that many eminent Catholic bishops burned at the stake,—Cranmer, Latimer, Ridley, and the pious Hooper, whose chief offence was that being a priest, he had married a wife. He was now Bishop of Worcester but he had been in the Fleet before, imprisoned by his own friends for refusing to wear vestments on the occasion of his consecration. He was soon set free but came again to the Fleet on his way to the stake.

His own account of this second confinement is to be found in Fox’s Book of Martyrs. “On the first of September, 1553, I was committed unto the Fleet from Richmond, to have the liberty of the prison, and within five days after I had paid for my liberty five pounds sterling to the warden for fees, who immediately upon the payment thereof complained unto Stephen Gardiner, Bishop of Winchester, and so I was committed to close prison one quarter of a year in the lower chamber of the Fleet and used very extremely. Then by the means of a good gentleman, I had liberty to come down to dinner and supper; not suffered to speak to any of my friends, but as soon as dinner and supper were done to repair to my chamber again. Notwithstanding ... the warden and his wife picked quarrels with me and complained untruly of me to their great friend the Bishop of Winchester.

“After one quarter of a year and somewhat more, Babington, the warden, and his wife fell out with me for the wicked mass; and thereupon the warden resorted to the bishop and obtained to put me in the ward, where I have continued a long time, having nothing appointed to me for my bed but a little pad of straw and a rotten covering with a tick and a few feathers to lie on, the chamber being vile and stinking, until by God’s means good people sent me bedding. On one side of the prison is the stink and filth of the house and on the other side the town ditch (the Fleet ditch) so that the evil smells have affected me with sundry diseases. During which time I have been sick and the doors, bars, hasps and chains being all closed and made fast upon me, I have mourned, called and cried for help, but the warden when he hath known me many times ready to die, and when the poor men of the ward have called to help me, hath commanded the doors to be kept fast and charged that none of his men should come at me saying, ‘Let him alone, it were a good riddance of him.’ ”

Yet the sums extorted from the poor bishop were as high as for a peer of the realm. A lord, spiritual or temporal, paid the sum of five pounds as “fyne” for liberty of the house and irons on first coming in. It was a graduated scale, each item according to rank ranging from ten pounds for an archbishop, duke or duchess, to twenty-five shillings for an esquire. The rates were proportionate and laid upon everything: fees for dismission, for entering the obligation and to everyone concerned in the administration, porter, “jayler,” chamberlain, charge for commons or board and for “coyne.” When these fees were not promptly paid the wretched prisoner was “left to lye in the common prison without ‘bedd’ or ‘dyete,’ subject to the discomfort of low companions and the dangers of distemper.”

Bishop Hooper sums up his griefs thus: “I have suffered imprisonment almost eighteen months. My goods, living, friends and