Millionaire - Janet Gleeson [15]
John Law was arrested and taken to Newgate prison to await his trial. Prison life in the late seventeenth century was redolent of menace. “The mixtures of scents that arose from tobacco, dirty sheets, stinking breaths, and uncleanly carcasses, poisoned our nostrils far worse than a Southwark ditch, a tanner’s yard or a tallow chandler’s melting room. The ill-looking vermin with long rusty beards . . . came hovering round us, like so many cannibals, with such devouring countenances as if a man had been but a morsel,” one eyewitness recalled of a terrifying night spent in a typical London jail. Newgate, its cells crowded with prisoners awaiting execution or sentence for capital offenses, was the most fearsome of all London’s jails. Later Daniel Defoe was incarcerated there on charges of seditious libel, and an inkling of the horrors to which inmates were subjected may be gleaned from his novel Moll Flanders: “’Tis impossible to describe the terror of my mind, when I was first brought in . . . the hellish noise, the roaring, swearing and clamour, the stench and nastiness, and all the dreadful crowd of afflicting things that I saw there, joined to make the place seem an emblem of hell itself,” Moll recalled.
Law was almost certainly spared Newgate’s worst extremes, because he had at his disposal two potent weapons that Moll did not: money and friends in high places. Though far less famous than his victim, he moved by now in elevated circles, and when word of his arrest spread, wealthy friends rallied to his support, offering guidance, and, more important, money to make his stay in prison more bearable. For a considerable fee he could enjoy the relative luxury of rooms in the king’s block, away from the misery and corruption of life “commonside.” But though gratefully availing himself of the benefits of wealth and influence, Law failed to grasp their more fundamental advantages. In seamy seventeenth-century London, they offered not only a comfortable cell but also a buffer against the corrupt wheels of justice. Against his friends’ advice, Law never attempted to deny his part in Wilson’s death. His story never changed: Wilson had drawn his sword first, Law had acted in self-defense. He was not guilty of murder, he claimed repeatedly, but of manslaughter.
Yet in the eyes of seventeenth-century justice the case was not so clear cut. The question of who initiated the fight was irrelevant. What counted was whether the fight had been premeditated, and whether Law had with malice aforethought planned to kill Wilson. There was plenty of evidence to support this hypothesis, Wilson’s relatives claimed. Wightman testified that earlier in the day the two men had quarreled bitterly. Then Wilson’s manservant revealed their long-standing rivalry over Mrs. Lawrence, and letters were found among the dead man’s belongings that proved a lengthy and acrimonious disagreement had existed. Thus, after several days in Newgate, Law was informed that he would be charged not with manslaughter but with the capital offense of murder.
The case came to court at the routine sitting of the King and Queen’s Commissions at the Old Bailey a few days later. A typical mixture of cases was to be heard; most were routine charges of stealing—jewelry, gold, silver, silk dresses, petticoats, tippets, scarves, and stockings (textiles feature high in lists of seventeenth-century burglars’ loot). A further five prisoners faced capital charges of counterfeiting and clipping coins. There were two alleged rapists and, strangely, a man accused of road rage, usually assumed to be a late-twentieth-century phenomenon: one Matthew Pryor was indicted for driving the near wheel of his coach against the left leg of a lady who later died of the injury. (He was acquitted: there was no proof he had driven with deliberate lack of care.)
Law must have shuddered when he learned that his case was to be heard by the aging Sir Salathiel Lovell, who prided himself on his high conviction rate, and who is remembered for his appalling memory, his questionable integrity, and the sadistic