The Tin Ticket: The Heroic Journey of Australia's Convict Women (11 page)

Quickly the group reached consensus and despair dissolved into eager anticipation of the touch and scent of clean cotton against the skin. This was the first wish for the half-dressed women in torn and filthy rags. The indignity of near nakedness tugged at them in a way that an empty stomach did not. If Mrs. Fry could do anything, their first request would be for clean clothes. A simple shift would suffice.

Mrs. Fry promised the women she would return with a dress for each of them. Anna, silent throughout the visit, spontaneously fell to her knees and began to pray. Elizabeth joined her friend in divine supplication. Several of the prisoners followed, kneeling rather awkwardly on the wet floor. In the eerie darkness, the embossed gold lettering on Fry’s Quaker Bible flashed through Newgate’s shadows. Stillness enveloped the cell in a dreamlike state of heavenly quiet. Elizabeth described it in her diary: “I heard weeping, and I thought they appeared much tendered; a very solemn quiet was observed; it was a striking scene, the poor people on their knees around us, in their deplorable condition.”
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In the early nineteenth century, Quaker views of the poor differed radically from those of other Christians. It was every Friend’s challenge to lift people up, whereas the prevailing Church of England view considered poverty a condition of sin resulting from the indigent’s own wickedness and self-damnation. Early Quakers had been persecuted vigorously throughout Europe. In England alone, fourteen thousand were imprisoned during the reign of Charles II, the “merry monarch” who ascended the throne in 1660. During that time, members of the Society of Friends were stripped naked, placed in stocks, publicly whipped, and gaoled for refusing to take an oath of allegiance to the Church of England. At the same time, its members in the American colonies were executed for practicing their religion. The most famous Quaker of all, founder George Fox, had been imprisoned at London’s Newgate Prison, as had William Penn, the Quaker who established the state of Pennsylvania.

Swept into a rising crest of evangelism that defied the traditional British view, Elizabeth and Anna felt obligated to help “the wretched” heal both body and soul. Although Mrs. Fry believed that words from her Bible brought the gaoled closer to the Lord and to redemption, she might well have recited Shakespeare and achieved a similar reaction. For most Newgate women, religion played no part in their lives. Still, they were drawn to the Quaker minister who read to them, enthralled by stories strange and new. A few dared to ask aloud, “Who is Christ?”
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Never before had they heard this name. Even so, the ragged souls found themselves inspired by Fry’s kindness. Seduced by the rhythmic cadence in her voice and the serene softness in her eyes, the female prisoners found momentary escape in the soothing beauty of her words. No sooner had the women begun to feel comfortable than the visit was over. The turnkey swung open the gate and beckoned the two do-gooders to retreat. Mrs. Fry promised the women she would return, although few believed it.

Elizabeth had much to ponder as her carriage slowed to a jolting halt. It had been a short, cold ride back to Mildred’s Court after they’d dropped off Anna. As the coachman helped her from the buggy, a liveried butler swung open the town house’s grand door to greet the mistress as she approached the steps. Before crossing the threshold, she first removed Newgate’s muck from the soles of her shoes using the wrought-iron boot scraper located just outside every upper-crust home. Elizabeth immediately requested that hot water be brought upstairs for a bath. Her house servants hurriedly set up the bathtub and prepared several steaming buckets of hot water to be carried from the kitchen stove. Mrs. Fry’s personal maid assisted her mistress in the complicated process of unhooking and unbuttoning her contaminated clothing. Like a rancid onion, every layer was permeated by Newgate’s putrid presence. Her clothes were in ruins, but her soul was on fire.

A Promise Fulfilled

For the next three days, Mrs. Fry lobbied her network of Quaker friends to assist in sewing garments. As promised, she collected and delivered clean clothing to everyone in Newgate’s congregation of the forgotten. The women she first visited left a lasting impression on Elizabeth, but after a week of prison visits, life events prevented her return to their stony tomb until four years had passed.

Mrs. Fry’s Newgate work was put on hold as she gave birth to two more children and suffered the loss of her beloved daughter Betsy at age four. The Tambora volcano eruption led to the “year without a summer” in 1816, causing the tea crop to fail and bankrupting her husband, Joseph, who was heavily invested in it. While they dealt with their financial crisis, they sent their six oldest children to live with wealthy relatives.

Although Elizabeth and Joseph were in debt, the Gurney family still owned a successful banking business. Elizabeth’s mother had died when she was twelve, so she had been responsible for helping raise the younger children, including her brother Joseph John Gurney, who was now an influential lobbyist. He was inspired by “Betsy’s” work to the point of bailing out the Fry bank and joining her mission of prison reform.

When Elizabeth turned to Newgate again, just after Christmas in 1816, it was with renewed purpose. She organized regular visits and opened a schoolroom for the children who were imprisoned with their mothers. She taught the women to sew and to read the Bible. In 1817, she founded the Association for the Improvement of Female Prisoners in Newgate. All of this activity occurred at a time when the public’s sordid interest was turning toward the plight of the poor. A female reverend was strange enough, but the image of her reading the Bible to the Newgate “beasts” was sensational. Stories and drawings of these encounters began to appear in London newspapers, which were now widely available to the general public.

In 1818, Thomas Fowell Buxton, who had married Elizabeth’s sister Hannah, was elected to Parliament and began to promote Elizabeth’s causes. Mrs. Fry had become a figurehead for a prison reform movement and was now backed by powerful allies in Parliament. Little did she know how her widely publicized visits would expose the empire’s secret plan to replace its slave labor pool with poor young Londoners, starving Irish, and other undesirables. Designed by effete Parliamentarians, the scheme hinged on a belief that outcast girls like Agnes McMillan would never be missed. These exiled citizens included the twenty-five thousand girls and women whose unfortunate fate included transport to an isolated island on the other side of the world. In the years to come, Elizabeth would meet many of these women as they passed through Newgate Prison on their way to the convict ships.

Mrs. Fry and her Association for the Improvement of Female Prisoners could not be ignored. She became one of the few advocates for treating the female inmates humanely. This plain and proper revolutionary broke nearly every rule for how a respectable lady was supposed to behave.

On the afternoon of April 28, 1818, Elizabeth prepared for her call at Mansion House, the Lord Mayor’s residence. Queen Charlotte was this day’s honored guest for a charity event at the mayor’s palace. Mrs. Fry could not possibly leave her brownstone without the layers and layers of attire required for a woman of her social standing. Fashion dictated that multiples of crinoline and lace measured pedigree. Abundant petticoats signaled affluence for a middle-class lady, although Elizabeth’s were modest and unfussy in the tradition of her Quaker upbringing. Her dark silk gown, light silk cloak, and unadorned Friends’ cotton cap stood out from the brocaded gowns and jeweled tiaras of her contemporaries.

Elizabeth was among the last to arrive at Mansion House, delayed by a bitter dispute with Britain’s home secretary, Lord Sidmouth, over a young woman’s execution outside Newgate. As she entered the Egyptian Hall, filled with princesses, lords, and bishops, “A buzz of ‘Mrs. Fry,’ Mrs. Fry,’ ran through the room.”
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While the guests strained for a closer look, their exclamations were muted ever so slightly in the thick carpet fibers and sumptuous satin curtains surrounding the hall.

At Windsor Castle, a rather miserable, cold, and distant Queen Charlotte prepared for another state function, donning in melancholy silence the sumptuous regalia demanded by her position. At public pageants, her well-practiced detachment helped perpetuate the royal mystique for those outside the inner circle. Quaker daughters in the prominent Barclay family who observed the Queen wrote: “She is vastly genteel with airs . . . truly majestic. . . . Her clothes, which were as rich as gold and silver and silk could make them, were a suit from which fell a train supported by a little page in scarlet and silver.”
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Now a well-publicized humanitarian, Elizabeth Fry was more widely admired within British society than Queen Charlotte and her mad King George. Elizabeth spent her days on the unfashionable tasks of soliciting funds for soup kitchens, setting up schools for impoverished children, and lobbying to change Britain’s tradition of punishing petty thieves with death. Her work at Newgate Prison had become a public spectacle, part of the Dickensian melodrama that ran in the daily newspapers. “The American Ambassador wrote home to say that he had now seen the two greatest sights in London—St. Paul’s Cathedral, and Mrs. Fry reading to the prisoners in Newgate.”
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It was appalling for an upper-crust lady to consider any of the Newgate women worth saving, so shocking that the warden issued tickets for admission to view the fearless missionary who read to the prisoners. Each day, the idle rich flocked to the grey fortress to watch in awe as the gentle voice of hope transformed the “wretched creatures.” A schoolmaster who visited Newgate observed that the features of prisoners were “strongly marked with animal propensities” with “an approximation to the face of a monkey.”
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Newgate had become a zoo of sorts, with the full range of human suffering on display and safely locked behind its iron bars.

On a much loftier stage, the royal family, too, was part of this theater of the absurd. At age seventy-four, Queen Charlotte often focused her attention on her husband, the mentally unstable George III. The king had recently taken to running naked through the palace as his dressers chased him, tackling him to put on his pants. He is today believed to have suffered from porphyria, a genetic disorder with symptoms that include mental disturbance. This may have been triggered by arsenic contained in a medication he was given. Queen Charlotte served as his “regency of the person,” his surrogate. In this capacity, she dispensed funds for the Queen’s Lying-In Hospital and for various orphanages. The queen’s concern for these causes, whether genuine or feigned, was an attempt to promote a favorable image for a monarchy whose political influence was in ruins.

Today, in the center of the Egyptian Hall from her platform three steps up, the aging queen had come to view the children who attended Mrs. Fry’s basement school and London’s charity orphanages. It was highly unusual for anyone save nobility to share this opulent space, but Queen Charlotte required a comfortable venue from which to inspect the little waifs, examining them like the exotic bird-of-paradise flowers she grew in her botanical gardens.

The queen watched over the banquet with cultivated regal detachment. The sound of sterling silver knives, tapping ever so lightly against the patterned bone china, pleased the queen in a way that the voices of Mrs. Fry’s young students never could. The royal family’s practiced opulence shined in full display under the Corinthian columns that lined the mayor’s palace. Jewels glittered in the candlelight. The refrains of Johann Christian Bach, formerly court musician and music teacher for the queen, wafted through the air while ushers guided distinguished guests to their seats. From her dais above the fray, Queen Charlotte overlooked the well-adorned hall, complete with the Union Jack and crests symbolizing the Crown’s expanding empire. Attendants wearing golden brocade robes, lined with beaver fur, moved in military precision and filled five hundred crystal glasses with Moët’s finest champagne. In anticipation of the royal toast, the court’s choir sang “God Save the King” from the hall’s inner balcony.

Teetering stacks of puffy white rolls surrounded silver trays luxuriously garnished with fresh fruit and dense buttery cheese. Shimmering sterling platters featured collared veal and rump steak pie smothered in thick gravies. The battalion of cooks it took to prepare the feast, the creamy custards, and cakes dripping with icing, included a chef de cuisine, two attending yeomen, and twenty-four chefs from Windsor Castle.
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Between courses, forty or fifty in all, ladies in feathered headdresses and men in shiny topcoats sipped wine or sherry. With each course, plate after plate was sent back uneaten. Even the most gluttonous lord left heaps of delicacies on his plate as he began unbuttoning his leather braces to make room for more butter and cream. By the time dessert was served, portly men with red noses and fat ankles leaned back in their chairs, unable to cross their legs, many suffering from gout—a malady that affected only the overindulgent upper class. Meanwhile, Fry’s unappetizing waifs were kept out of sight.

The bishop of Gloucester ushered Mrs. Fry to her seat alongside a bench full of bishops. When Queen Charlotte rose from her chair and walked to greet Newgate’s heroine, every pair of eyes in the room followed the diminutive queen, as the rustle of ten crinolines announced her every step. Earlier in the day, men in grand uniforms had laid down yards and yards of scarlet cloth to ensure that the Queen’s slippers would not be soiled. The starch in the translucent lace that framed her face, thick with white powder, crinkled ever so slightly as she moved down the dais to begin her audience with a few carefully selected attendees. Her Majesty’s voluminous skirts, designed for perching atop a throne, created the effect of her floating across the hall.