Barnaby Rudge: A Tale of the Riots of 'Eighty
seen sporting and toying with the door, now clinging to its obdurate
surface, now gliding off with fierce inconstancy and soaring high into
the sky, anon returning to fold it in its burning grasp and lure it to
its ruin--when it shone and gleamed so brightly that the church clock of
St Sepulchre’s so often pointing to the hour of death, was legible as in
broad day, and the vane upon its steeple-top glittered in the unwonted
light like something richly jewelled--when blackened stone and sombre
brick grew ruddy in the deep reflection, and windows shone like
burnished gold, dotting the longest distance in the fiery vista
with their specks of brightness--when wall and tower, and roof and
chimney-stack, seemed drunk, and in the flickering glare appeared to
reel and stagger--when scores of objects, never seen before, burst out
upon the view, and things the most familiar put on some new aspect--then
the mob began to join the whirl, and with loud yells, and shouts, and
clamour, such as happily is seldom heard, bestirred themselves to feed
the fire, and keep it at its height.
Although the heat was so intense that the paint on the houses over
against the prison, parched and crackled up, and swelling into boils,
as it were from excess of torture, broke and crumbled away; although the
glass fell from the window-sashes, and the lead and iron on the roofs
blistered the incautious hand that touched them, and the sparrows in the
eaves took wing, and rendered giddy by the smoke, fell fluttering down
upon the blazing pile; still the fire was tended unceasingly by busy
hands, and round it, men were going always. They never slackened in
their zeal, or kept aloof, but pressed upon the flames so hard, that
those in front had much ado to save themselves from being thrust in; if
one man swooned or dropped, a dozen struggled for his place, and that
although they knew the pain, and thirst, and pressure to be unendurable.
Those who fell down in fainting-fits, and were not crushed or burnt,
were carried to an inn-yard close at hand, and dashed with water from a
pump; of which buckets full were passed from man to man among the crowd;
but such was the strong desire of all to drink, and such the fighting to
be first, that, for the most part, the whole contents were spilled upon
the ground, without the lips of one man being moistened.
Meanwhile, and in the midst of all the roar and outcry, those who were
nearest to the pile, heaped up again the burning fragments that came
toppling down, and raked the fire about the door, which, although a
sheet of flame, was still a door fast locked and barred, and kept
them out. Great pieces of blazing wood were passed, besides, above the
people’s heads to such as stood about the ladders, and some of these,
climbing up to the topmost stave, and holding on with one hand by the
prison wall, exerted all their skill and force to cast these fire-brands
on the roof, or down into the yards within. In many instances their
efforts were successful; which occasioned a new and appalling addition
to the horrors of the scene: for the prisoners within, seeing from
between their bars that the fire caught in many places and thrived
fiercely, and being all locked up in strong cells for the night, began
to know that they were in danger of being burnt alive. This terrible
fear, spreading from cell to cell and from yard to yard, vented itself
in such dismal cries and wailings, and in such dreadful shrieks for
help, that the whole jail resounded with the noise; which was loudly
heard even above the shouting of the mob and roaring of the flames, and
was so full of agony and despair, that it made the boldest tremble.
It was remarkable that these cries began in that quarter of the jail
which fronted Newgate Street, where, it was well known, the men who were
to suffer death on Thursday were confined. And not only were these four
who had so short a time to live, the first to whom the dread of being
burnt occurred, but they were, throughout, the most importunate of all:
for they could be plainly heard, notwithstanding the great thickness of
the walls, crying that the wind set that way, and that the flames would
shortly reach them; and calling to the officers of the jail to come
and quench the fire from a cistern which was in their yard, and full
of water. Judging from what the crowd outside the walls could hear from
time to time, these four doomed wretches never ceased to call for
help; and that with as much distraction, and in as great a frenzy of
attachment to existence, as though each had an honoured, happy life
before him, instead of eight-and-forty hours of miserable imprisonment,
and then a violent and shameful death.
But the anguish and suffering of the two sons of one of these men, when
they heard, or fancied that they heard, their father’s voice, is past
description. After wringing their hands and rushing to and fro as if
they were stark mad, one mounted on the shoulders of his brother, and
tried to clamber up the face of the high wall, guarded at the top with
spikes and points of iron. And when he fell among the crowd, he was not
deterred by his bruises, but mounted up again, and fell again, and, when
he found the feat impossible, began to beat the stones and tear them
with his hands, as if he could that way make a breach in the strong
building, and force a passage in. At last, they cleft their way among
the mob about the door, though many men, a dozen times their match, had
tried in vain to do so, and were seen, in--yes, in--the fire, striving
to prize it down, with crowbars.
Nor were they alone affected by the outcry from within the prison. The
women who were looking on, shrieked loudly, beat their hands together,
stopped their ears; and many fainted: the men who were not near the
walls and active in the siege, rather than do nothing, tore up the
pavement of the street, and did so with a haste and fury they could
not have surpassed if that had been the jail, and they were near their
object. Not one living creature in the throng was for an instant still.
The whole great mass were mad.
A shout! Another! Another yet, though few knew why, or what it meant.
But those around the gate had seen it slowly yield, and drop from its
topmost hinge. It hung on that side by but one, but it was upright
still, because of the bar, and its having sunk, of its own weight, into
the heap of ashes at its foot. There was now a gap at the top of the
doorway, through which could be descried a gloomy passage, cavernous and
dark. Pile up the fire!
It burnt fiercely. The door was red-hot, and the gap wider. They vainly
tried to shield their faces with their hands, and standing as if in
readiness for a spring, watched the place. Dark figures, some crawling
on their hands and knees, some carried in the arms of others, were seen
to pass along the roof. It was plain the jail could hold out no longer.
The keeper, and his officers, and their wives and children, were
escaping. Pile up the fire!
The door sank down again: it settled deeper in the
cinders--tottered--yielded--was down!
As they shouted again, they fell back, for a moment, and left a clear
space about the fire that lay between them and the jail entry. Hugh
leapt upon the blazing heap, and scattering a train of sparks into the
air, and making the dark lobby glitter with those that hung upon his
dress, dashed into the jail.
The hangman followed. And then so many rushed upon their track, that the
fire got trodden down and thinly strewn about the street; but there was
no need of it now, for, inside and out, the prison was in flames.
Chapter 65
During the whole course of the terrible scene which was now at its
height, one man in the jail suffered a degree of fear and mental torment
which had no parallel in the endurance, even of those who lay under
sentence of death.
When the rioters first assembled before the building, the murderer
was roused from sleep--if such slumbers as his may have that blessed
name--by the roar of voices, and the struggling of a great crowd. He
started up as these sounds met his ear, and, sitting on his bedstead,
listened.
After a short interval of silence the noise burst out again. Still
listening attentively, he made out, in course of time, that the jail was
besieged by a furious multitude. His guilty conscience instantly arrayed
these men against himself, and brought the fear upon him that he would
be singled out, and torn to pieces.
Once impressed with the terror of this conceit, everything tended to
confirm and strengthen it. His double crime, the circumstances under
which it had been committed, the length of time that had elapsed, and
its discovery in spite of all, made him, as it were, the visible object
of the Almighty’s wrath. In all the crime and vice and moral gloom of
the great pest-house of the capital, he stood alone, marked and singled
out by his great guilt, a Lucifer among the devils. The other prisoners
were a host, hiding and sheltering each other--a crowd like that without
the walls. He was one man against the whole united concourse; a single,
solitary, lonely man, from whom the very captives in the jail fell off
and shrunk appalled.
It might be that the intelligence of his capture having been bruited
abroad, they had come there purposely to drag him out and kill him in
the street; or it might be that they were the rioters, and, in pursuance
of an old design, had come to sack the prison. But in either case he had
no belief or hope that they would spare him. Every shout they raised,
and every sound they made, was a blow upon his heart. As the attack went
on, he grew more wild and frantic in his terror: tried to pull away the
bars that guarded the chimney and prevented him from climbing up: called
loudly on the turnkeys to cluster round the cell and save him from the
fury of the rabble; or put him in some dungeon underground, no matter
of what depth, how dark it was, or loathsome, or beset with rats and
creeping things, so that it hid him and was hard to find.
But no one came, or answered him. Fearful, even while he cried to them,
of attracting attention, he was silent. By and bye, he saw, as he looked
from his grated window, a strange glimmering on the stone walls and
pavement of the yard. It was feeble at first, and came and went, as
though some officers with torches were passing to and fro upon the roof
of the prison. Soon it reddened, and lighted brands came whirling down,
spattering the ground with fire, and burning sullenly in corners. One
rolled beneath a wooden bench, and set it in a blaze; another caught a
water-spout, and so went climbing up the wall, leaving a long straight
track of fire behind it. After a time, a slow thick shower of burning
fragments, from some upper portion of the prison which was blazing nigh,
began to fall before his door. Remembering that it opened outwards, he
knew that every spark which fell upon the heap, and in the act lost
its bright life, and died an ugly speck of dust and rubbish, helped
to entomb him in a living grave. Still, though the jail resounded with
shrieks and cries for help,--though the fire bounded up as if each
separate flame had had a tiger’s life, and roared as though, in every
one, there were a hungry voice--though the heat began to grow intense,
and the air suffocating, and the clamour without increased, and the
danger of his situation even from one merciless element was every moment
more extreme,--still he was afraid to raise his voice again, lest
the crowd should break in, and should, of their own ears or from the
information given them by the other prisoners, get the clue to his place
of confinement. Thus fearful alike, of those within the prison and
of those without; of noise and silence; light and darkness; of being