HOWARD, Henry, Earl of Surrey, one of the most gallant and accomplished of English nobles, and the first of our poets who composed in blank verse, was the eldest son of Thomas the third Duke of Norfolk. The exact date and place of his birth have not been ascertained, but the former is usually assigned to the year 1517. Of a family illustrious for rank, fortune, alliances, and public services, Surrey was early introduced to court, and he formed an intimacy, which soon ripened into a close and tender friendship with the king's natural son, Henry Fitzroy, Duke of Richmond. While yet a boy, we find Surrey in attendance at court as cup-bearer to the king. In 1532, along with his young friend Richmond, he accompanied the sovereign to Boulogne, and in the following year he assisted as one of the sword-bearers at the marriage of Henry with Anne Boleyn. About this period, or even earlier, Surrey was affianced to the Lady Francis Vere, daughter of the Earl
of Oxford, while Richmond was in like manner contracted to the Lady Mary Howard, Surrey's sister. The actual marriage of Surrey did not take place till 1535, and that of Richmond was prevented by his premature death, in July 1536. Previous to this time Surrey seems to have been enamoured of a certain Lady Geraldine, who has puzzled his biographers, and served as the groundwork of a series of romantic fictions. Some of the love sonnets of the noble poet may be purely fanciful imitations of Petrarch, in accordance with the taste and chivalrous gallantry of the age, but in one he gives a minute account of the lady of his affections:—
"From Tuscan came my lady's worthy race;
Fair Florence was some time her ancient seat:
The Western Isle whose pleasant shore doth face
Wild Camber's cliffs first gave her lively heat;
Fostered she was with milk of Irish breast;
Her sire an earl, her dame of prince's blood,
From tender years in Britain did she rest
With king's child, where she tasteth costly food.
Hunson did first present her to mine eye,
Bright is her hue, and Geraldine she hight.
Hampton me taught to wish her first for mine,
And Windsor, alas! doth chace me from her sight."
This array of biographical particulars indicates a real personage, and Horace Walpole set himself to prove that the lady was a daughter of Gerald Fitzgerald, Earl of Kildare, whose family is said to have been descended from one of the Dukes of Tuscany. Various circumstances concur to establish this theory, but the lady could only have been a child when Surrey wrote his sonnet, unless we suppose that his attachment had, contrary to good faith and true knighthood, taken place after his marriage. Founding upon this sonnet, Tom Nash, one of the most lively and unscrupulous satirists and miscellaneous writers of the reign of Elizabeth, put forth a singular romance, the pretended journey and adventures of Surrey in Italy on a visit to Florence, the assumed birth-place of his Geraldine. Nash's invention imposed upon Drayton, and being adopted by Anthony à Wood in his Athene (with sundry additions, and Nash's authorship concealed), was continued as a genuine narrative by Walpole, Warton, and others. According to this historical romance, Surrey travelled like an Amadis, proclaiming the charms of his mistress, and prepared to defend her beauty in the spirit of knight errantry. On his way to Florence he passed a few days at the emperor's court, and there met Cornelius Agrippa, a celebrated adept in natural magic, who, in his mirror of glass, showed him the lively image of his Geraldine, "weeping on her bed, and resolved all into devout religion for the absence of her lord." Inflamed by the spectacle, Surrey hastened to Florence, and published a defiance to all knights and lovers, whether Christian, Jew, Turk, Saracen, or cannibal, who should presume to dispute the superiority of his Geraldine's beauty. The challenge was accepted, the Grand Duke permitting the combat, and opening the lists to all nations, and Surrey, of course, proved victorious. The shield which he presented to the duke before the tournament began, being preserved by the Norfolk family, and engraved by Vertue! The whole of this story—the continental journey, magic mirror, and tournament, was the invention of Nash, and is related in his Life of Jack Wilton, published in 1594. The literary fraud remained undiscovered till 1810, when Alexander Chalmers, in his edition of the English Poets, partially separated the truth of Surrey's history from the fable that had been blended with it, and Dr Nott, in his Memoir of Surrey, completed the detection. At the time of the pretended journey, the noble poet was in England anticipating the birth of his son, who was born on the 10th of March 1536. In May, of this year, the trial of Anne Boleyn took place, and Surrey was present as Earl Marshal, in the room of his father, who presided as Lord Treas-
Howard, Henry. surer. In October he obtained the honour of knighthood from the king. At all the pageants and tournaments of the court, he was a conspicuous actor, and when war with France was threatened, we find him no less prominent in important public service. In 1540 he was joined in a commission with Lord Russell and the Earl of Southampton to visit the English Pale at Guisnes, and place the defences in proper order. He returned before Christmas. In the following year an incident is related, which, though involved, like other events in his career, in some obscurity, seems to illustrate at once his personal influence and magnanimity of character. Sir Edward Knyvet, a person high in court favour, assaulted Surrey's friend and attendant, Thomas Clere, having struck him within the precincts of the palace. The indignity would probably have been passed over as inflicted only on a subordinate, but Surrey took it up warmly, and succeeded in bringing Knyvet to trial, the result of which was, that the knight was convicted and sentenced to lose his right hand. At this point Surrey again interposed. The public trial and conviction he deemed sufficient punishment, and at his intercession the sentence was remitted. In 1542, the king conferred upon Surrey the distinction of the order of the garter. He seems, however, to have fallen into temporary disgrace the same year, in consequence of having quarrelled with, and challenged a certain John-a-Leigh of Middlesex. His conduct in this matter must have been violent and blamable, for he was committed to the Fleet, and only obtained his release after making a humble supplication to the privy council (in which he speaks of the "fury of reckless youth," and promises to "bridle in his heady will"), and by entering into recognizances to keep the peace to John-a-Leigh and his friends. A better field for his impetuosity and courage was soon opened up. War with Scotland was declared. Henry, indignant at his nephew, James V., who had failed to meet him at a conference appointed to be held at York, and who had otherwise offended the imperious monarch, ordered the Duke of Norfolk to proceed to the borders with a force of 40,000 men to chastise and lay waste the country. Surrey, attended by Thomas Clere, accompanied his father on this expedition, and the English army unresisted, ravaged the border districts, burning two towns and twenty villages on the banks of the Tweed. What part Surrey took in this affair, or what command he held, is not stated, but in his epitaph on Clere, he mentions that his follower, tracing the steps of his lord, "saw Kelsal [Kelsa] blaze." The short and destructive raid was over by the end of November 1542. On the 1st of April following, Surrey is ascertained to have been in London, the records of the privy council of that date furnishing another instance of his "heady will." It appears that with two companions, Wyatt and Pickering, he was summoned to the council on a complaint by the mayor, recorder, and aldermen, of the city, charging him with having, "in a lewd and unseemly manner," walked in the night about the streets, breaking the windows of the citizens with his stone-bow; and farther, that he had been guilty of eating flesh during the time of Lent. The first and most serious of these offences he did not attempt to deny; he acknowledged that he had "very evil doings therein;" but touching the eating of flesh, he alleged a license, "albeit he had not so secretly used the same as appertained." He was sent to the Fleet for a month; and he took revenge on the citizens, by inditing a poetical satire against them, in which he gravely alleges, that he woke the sluggards with his bow as a reproach to them for their dissolute life and sins—
"The which by words since preachers know
What hope is left for to redress,
By unknown means it liked me,
My hidden burthen to express."
This must be taken as ironical; but throughout the whole satire Surrey appears in the character of a devout and in-
dignant denouncer of the vices of "false Babylon," on which he says the martyrs' blood calls for justice, and the Lord would hear their desire! We cannot but think that there was something more in this case than mere riotous excess and youthful folly. But Surrey was soon called off by military service from any further display of his unruly piety. War had been declared against France, and Surrey joined the auxiliary army under Sir John Wallop, encamped before Landrecy. He applied himself diligently to the study of military fortifications and tactics, and one day, when visiting the trenches, he made a narrow escape from a piece of ordnance shot towards him. On the approach of winter the siege of Landrecy was raised, the army went into quarters, and Surrey returned to England. Next summer he was again in the field, holding the important post of marshal of the vanguard commanded by his father. The troops under Norfolk and Surrey besieged Montreuil, but were inadequately supported, owing chiefly, it is said, to the jealousy and enmity of the Earl of Hertford, who kept back supplies; but there was no lack of military skill or bravery. Surrey distinguished himself by daring expeditions against the enemy, and on an attempt to storm the town he effected a lodgement within the gates, but was dangerously wounded and carried off by his attendant Clere. In this service Clere himself received a hurt which ultimately proved fatal.
"At Montreuil gates, hopeless of all recourse,
Thine Earl, half dead, gave in thy hand his will,
Which cause did thee this pining death procure."
The English were compelled to raise the siege of Montreuil. The Dauphin was approaching with an army of 60,000 men, and Norfolk's vanguard, though strengthened by reinforcements, was unable to cope with such a force. A retreat was resolved upon, which was ably conducted by Surrey as marshal of the camp. Boulogne had capitulated to Henry in person, and it was necessary to guard and maintain an acquisition so dearly purchased and highly valued. In the summer of 1545 Surrey again sailed for France, as commander of a body of 5000 men raised and equipped for a new expedition. He was shortly afterwards appointed governor or king's lieutenant of Boulogne; and both in his plans of defence, and in operations in the field, he fully sustained his reputation. One great effort, however, unfortunately proved a failure. He attempted to intercept a convoy of provisions for the enemy near St Etienne, but the defence was obstinate, and one of Surrey's attacking columns of infantry fled back in a sudden panic, which threw the army into disorder, and the day was lost. This disastrous affair was seized upon by Lord Hertford to incense the king against Surrey, and within a few months he was recalled, his successful rival being appointed the king's lieutenant-general. Prudence was never one of the virtues of Surrey, and his indignation at the intrigues of Hertford was openly and fiercely manifested, accompanied by expressions importing that he would be revenged in the next king's reign. The jealousy of Henry was roused by these declarations, and Surrey was sent a prisoner to Windsor Castle. He succeeded, however, in softening if not removing the royal displeasure, and in August of the same year he is again seen in attendance at court. This glimpse of favour soon vanished never to be renewed. On the 12th of December Surrey was arrested and committed to the Tower, and on the same day his father was also consigned to the Tower, each being ignorant of the other's fate. There can be no doubt that it is to the Hertford faction that we must attribute this decisive step. The king was known to be dying, and Hertford, as uncle of the heir to the throne, aspired to be protector of the kingdom during the minority of his nephew. The family of Norfolk stood between him and his ambition. The Duke was head of the Roman Catholics, and the most opulent and powerful nobleman in the kingdom. His son, the Earl of Surrey, was likely to extend
and perpetuate these advantages. Now, therefore, while Henry yet lived was the time to stimulate the natural cruelty and suspicion of the monarch, and secure to Hertford and the Protestant interest the removal of these dangerous and formidable rivals. They were aided by parties from whom no such help could have been expected. The Duchess of Norfolk, a passionate and revenging woman, who had long been separated from her husband, and the Duchess of Richmond, Surrey's own sister, were brought forward as accusers. Their depositions only went to assert that Surrey was rash, and had spoken bitterly against Hertford; that the Duke of Norfolk had expressed dissatisfaction at the changes in the church (no such charge being preferred against his son); and that Surrey had persisted in quartering what seemed the royal arms on his escutcheon. A suspicion was thrown out that the earl also had a design upon the king's daughter, the Princess Mary, though the fact that Surrey's wife was in existence must have been known to all. In the mockery of a trial which ensued, the only legal charge brought against Surrey was that of his assumption of the royal arms. The indictment exists, and was published by Sir Francis Palgrave in 1842 in his Calendar of the Baga de Secretis, compiled from the public records. The indictment commences with a description of the royal arms before the Conquest, which description is proved to have been false and fabricated, and Surrey is then accused of having put up, painted, and joined to his own proper arms, "the said arms of the king, with the three labels silver, in order to deprive, destroy, annul, and scandalize, the title of the king to the crown of England." Surrey, it is stated, made a spirited and eloquent defence. He proved that his father had borne the same arms as himself; that their ancestor, Thomas Mowbray, had received a grant of these arms from Richard II.; that the heralds had formally decided on his right to wear them, and that he had worn them for years unchallenged even in the king's presence. Never was defence more complete or irresistible; but it was in vain. The jury pronounced him guilty, and the "flower of the English nobility" was beheaded on Tower Hill on the 21st of January 1547. Norfolk—who had meanly truckled for a pardon, and basely sought to inculpate his own son—was ordered for execution on the 28th, but the king dying the night previous, his life was spared.
The poetical works of Surrey were not printed until ten years after his death, but had been extensively circulated in manuscript. They were first published in 1557 in Tottel's Miscellany, a collection of poetical pieces, the earliest work of the kind in our language, and which was highly popular. Surrey attempted no great original composition. His poems consist of amatory verses, sonnets, elegies, and epitaphs—transcripts of his own feelings and fancies, but carefully and brilliantly polished. He paraphrased the first five chapters of the Book of Ecclesiastes, and translated the Second and Fourth Books of the Aeneid. The latter was his most elaborate performance, and being in blank verse, is remarkable as a first attempt in a new and difficult style. The versification is regular, but wants flexibility and variety of pause, which our blank verse can scarcely be said to have attained before Shakespeare. The shorter poems of Surrey show a great advance in taste and in poetical diction. Between Chaucer and Surrey there is a long and dreary waste, in which only the name of Hawes is worthy of mention; but English poetry received an impulse and refinement from Surrey which was carried forward by a succession of elegant versifiers till it attained the glory of the Elizabethan period. The fulness, breadth, humour, and tenderness of Chaucer were never reached by his noble successor. The Italian poets were Surrey's models. But when we reflect that this gallant and unfortunate nobleman was cut off at the age of thirty, and that his life was chiefly spent at the
court, or in public business—in scenes of pomp, love, war, and danger—we shall be disposed rather to wonder at the extent of his attainments as a scholar and poet, than to remark that he has left but few and slight memorials of his fine intellect and cultivated genius. (R. C.—S.)
Howard, John. John Howard, the philanthropist, belongs to the rare order of men who have won from the world special titles of distinction. Many persons have earned the title of Great, from Macedonia's madman to the Swede; but mankind has endowed only one man with the appellative Just. In Howard's case the complimentary addition of the Philanthropist is not a mere figure of speech.
Howard was born at Enfield (not at Hackney, as the monument in St Paul's asserts), where his father, a retired London merchant, had a country house. He was born on the 2d of September 1726. His father was wealthy, and was elected to serve as sheriff; but the Test-Act being then in force, he paid the fine usually paid by Dissenters to escape that honour, a policy which his son afterwards, happily for the world, refused to follow. Howard was a sickly child, and country air was found necessary to his health. He was removed to Cardington, a village in Bedfordshire, near to Woburn, where his father had a small estate. The facts of his early life are few, and are soon told. He grew in years and strength, a quiet, simple, original boy; not bright, not vigorous, not ambitious. From his two schoolmasters, the Rev. John Horsley (author of a Latin Grammar and translator of a version of the New Testament), and Mr John Eames, F.R.S., he learned but little Latin and less Greek; yet even in his early years he acquired some knowledge of living languages, and a fair acquaintance with natural science, geography, and medicine. At sixteen he was apprenticed to a grocer in the city, paying £700 as a premium. But his father now died, and he was his own master. He therefore bought off his apprenticeship, travelled into France and Italy, bought pictures, visited famous churches and cities, and, after an absence almost of two years' duration, during which he perfected himself in French, so as to speak the language like a native, he returned to England. Here he lodged at Stoke Newington, studied medicine and meteorology, put himself on a diet of bread and tea, fell seriously ill, and married his nurse, an old woman, who was also a confirmed invalid. He was twenty-five, she about fifty-three. He married her because he believed that she had saved his life, and that no other return for her motherly kindness was sufficient.
She lived three years as his wife, when her malady wore her out, and she was buried in the churchyard of St Mary's, Whitechapel. A plain tombstone marks the spot. At her death Howard broke up his house. The earthquake at Lisbon had just occurred; that earthquake, the effect of which on the minds of men Goethe has so powerfully described in his Wahrheit und Dichtung. The philanthropic impulse was stirred in Howard; he believed that he could help to alleviate the calamity, and he took a berth in the "Hanover." But the Seven Years' War was then raging. French, Austrian, and Prussian armies were fighting in various parts of Europe, and English and French cruisers swept the seas in every direction. Providence threw the "Hanover" in the way of a French privateer; she and her passengers were carried into Brest. The crew and passengers were treated with extreme cruelty, were hurried from place to place, starved, and cast into loathsome dungeons. Howard's heart almost broke with indignation at the treatment suffered by his gallant and unhappy countrymen. "I had evidence," he says, "of their being treated with such barbarity that many hundreds had perished, and that thirty-six were buried in a hole in Dinan in one day." When he obtained his release on parole he went to the government, described in powerful language the scenes he had witnessed,
Howard, and compelled the Commissioners of Sick and Wounded Seamen to take measures for securing an exchange of prisoners. A naval officer replaced himself; and in a few days he had the satisfaction to hear of the release of his fellow captives in Brittany.
Howard still retreated from public life. His scientific studies were continued, and on May 13, 1756, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society, to the Transactions of which he contributed three papers. Two years later he married again. "My second wife was Henrietta Leeds, whom a good God gave me the 2d of May." Such are his own words. They lived together in the seclusion of a country house for nine years, when their only child, a son, was born, and the mother died in the exhaustion of nature. Howard's public career began after her death. During her life his energies were chiefly confined to the village of Cardington, in which he commenced a reform, then new and startling, but which has, since his age, and greatly through his example, received a happy development. He was the first builder of model cottages.
When Howard went to reside at Cardington that village was about as filthy, wretched, and unwholesome as any spot in England. The neighbouring gentry followed the hounds, and exacted their rents. The poor were idle, dirty, immoral; the men passed their days in the ale-house, and their nights in the preserves; the women were ill-used, the children ignorant and neglected. Howard's property was small in the district compared with that of his neighbours, and before he began his plan he wisely added to his estate by two purchases, at once to increase his influence in the place and to obtain a larger field for operations. He then built a school for boys and a school for girls, procured good teachers, and invited the villagers (not merely his own tenants) to send their children, his only conditions being regularity, cleanliness, and attendance at some place of worship on the Sunday. At the same time he pulled down the wretched hovels in which his poorer tenants lived—hovels of a single room in which father, mother, and grown-up children had to eat and sleep—and erected larger and more commodious cottages to replace them. With the sure instinct of a reformer he saw that such hovels were not, never could be, happy homes—residences in which men with any sense of shame, any feeling of self-respect, could live contentedly while the ale-house offered its cheerful lights and jovial company as a change. He therefore undertook to remove them. His model cottages were occupied as fast as they were raised. They cost more money, yet he did not raise the rent; for, in spite of his commercial training, he had scruples about putting out money at interest, and looked upon wealth as a sacred and moral deposit placed in his hands for the benefit of mankind, not for his own private use and pleasure. In a few years some of his rich friends and neighbours, especially Samuel Whitbread (the famous brewer, and father of the celebrated politician Whitbread), seeing the success of his scheme, lent a hand in the good work. The schools flourished; the children grew clean and rosy; poaching became rare; the chapels and churches were filled; little patches of garden rose at the cottage doors; ale-houses lost some of their strong attractions; and Cardington began to strike the stranger's eye as a pretty, clean, and prosperous village.
After his second wife's death Howard busied himself with his books, his schools, and cottages. He travelled into Holland. He went to France, to Switzerland, to Italy; but he found no rest for the sole of his foot. He returned as far as Holland (his favourite country, next to his own), and went back thence to Rome and Naples. He admired the Apollo and the Gladiator, and he felt the usual raptures before the paintings of Titian, Guido, and Raphael. He saw the Pope and the Pretender; the first, "a worthy good man;" the second, "a mere sot, very stupid, dull, and bending double." He went up the mountain to Vesuvius,
and down the lagoon to Venice. He came home through Munich, Augsburg, and the Rhine—came home to find himself unexpectedly named sheriff of Bedford, and to begin his public career. This was in 1773. He accepted the office of sheriff, though a Dissenter, resolved not to take the usual sacraments, but to brave a bad law, and, if prosecuted, defend himself in the courts. No one prosecuted him. When the assizes opened he sat in the court, and when the trials of the day were over he descended into the jail to see in what state the prisoners were. It was the prison in which Bunyan had been thrown, and in which he wrote his immortal Pilgrim's Progress. Howard found it, like all the jails of the time, dirty and close; without decent accommodation for the women, and with scarcely any practical separation of the two sexes. The air was bad, the food worse, the water intolerable. The fees were high, and rigorously exacted; the jailer and his subordinates living on the wretched wages they could wring from the misery of the poor prisoners. What most of all astonished his humane heart, and violated his sense of right, was the fact that some of the accused who had been freed by judge and jury, and who had left the court without a stain, were kept in the horrid jail (for longer or shorter periods, according to their circumstances, but in some cases for years) until they paid the fees of jail delivery. Howard instantly brought this monstrous form of wrong before the county magistrates, and proposed that an order should be issued for the discharge of these innocent sufferers, and that a rule should be adopted in future for the instant liberation in open court of all such persons as were found not guilty. The magistrates were startled at such bold reforms; the jailer protested against the loss of his fees, which were his income, his means of life, as he had no salary from the county. The clerk of assize put in a similar protest. Howard proposed to redeem these fees by paying regular salaries to these servants of the public; but the magistrates knew of no precedent for such a course, and without a precedent they could not act. Howard undertook to find it, if such existed in any neighbouring county. He went to Cambridge, to Huntingdon, to Northampton, to Leicester, and to Nottingham, and this journey gradually extended to every town in England where there was then a prison. The object of his search eluded inquiry. He could find no precedent for charging the county with the wages of its servants; but he discovered so many abuses in the management of prisons which imagination had never conceived, and so many sufferings of which the general public knew nothing, and of which the law took no account, that he determined to devote to the examination of these wrongs, and the reform of these abuses, whatever time and money might be needful. The task cost him a fortune, and the remaining years of his life.
The inquiry now attracted public attention. At the close of his first rapid survey of our prisons, the House of Commons resolved itself into a committee, and heard his report at the bar of the House. Popham, member for Taunton, had already forced the unwilling legislature to discuss the propriety of paying fixed salaries out of the county rates; but the House had dropped the bill. Howard's revelations completed Popham's arguments. Nearly fifty years before that time the House had appointed a committee to inquire into the state of Newgate, the Marshalsea, and other London jails, when abuses came to light which caused the House to order the arrest of several governors of jails, who were tried for high misdemeanours (Reports of the Committee Appointed to Inquire into the State of the Gaols, 1729). But the public, as well as the parliament, shrank from the investigation of scenes so horrid, so that after an explosion of virtue on the part of Mr Oglethorpe, magnificently rewarded by a couplet in Pope, the subject was allowed to die out of recollection until the researches of Howard and the
zeal of Popham raised it in a more favourable age. When the House resumed, Sir Thomas Clavering, at the instance of the committee, moved "that John Howard, Esq., be called to the bar, and that Mr Speaker do acquaint him that the House are very sensible of the humanity and zeal which have led him to visit the several gaols of this kingdom, and to communicate to the House the interesting observations which he has made upon that subject." This vote put the seal of public sanction on his inquiries, so that his subsequent investigations had a sort of semi-official character, of vast use to him in dealing with morose jailers and impracticable magistrates of the very old school.
From St Stephen's, Howard went to the Marshalsea, afterwards to each of the London prisons, which he minutely examined. From London he passed to the north of England, whence he was recalled by the passing of two new bills, based on Popham's abandoned measure of the previous session and on his own communications to the House. The first bill provided for the liberation, free of all charges, of every prisoner against whom the grand jury failed to find a true bill, giving the jailer a sum from the county-rate in lieu of the abolished fees. The second bill required justices of the peace to see that the walls and ceilings of all prisons within their jurisdiction were scraped and white-washed once a year at least; that the rooms were regularly cleaned and ventilated; that infirmaries were provided for the sick, and proper care taken to get them medical advice; that the naked should be clothed; that underground dungeons should be used as little as could be; and generally that such courses should be taken as would tend to restore and preserve the health of the prisoners. That such simple provisions should have been denied in Christian England, and in the days of Addison and Johnson, is not easy to conceive, after the changes of eighty years, brought about through the exertions of one strong man. Yet the corroborative evidence of the state of prisons leaves no room for doubt. Defoe and Fielding have both left descriptions of jail life, which, though relieved by gross humour, and animated by studies of eccentric character, are not less revolting than the plain and tragic revelations of Howard. Men were callous to sufferings which seemed inevitable to misfortune, as well as to crime. Even horrible catastrophes, when they occurred, excited no more than a passing interest. The jail distemper always raged more or less in the county town, and especially during assizes. Judges and juries were sometimes swept away by the awful pest (Baker's Chronicle, 353); and yet no one cared to remove the causes of the jail distemper, until the Howard-Popham bill was carried on the 2d of June 1774.
It was one thing to have the bill carried in the House of Commons; it was another to have it carried into the jails. Most of the jailers were ignorant, rapacious fellows; and some of them were women—as a rule more ignorant and rapacious than the men. The new law struck at their interests, and cordial feeling towards it was not expected from human frailty. Howard resolved to see it executed with his own eyes; he caused the provisions of the act to be printed at his private cost, in large type, and he sent a copy to every jailer and warder in the three kingdoms, so that no one could be able to plead ignorance of the law, if detected in the flagrant violation of its provisions. He then recommenced his inspections—travelled into the west of England, into Ireland and Scotland. Beyond the special cause to which he had given up his time, he took little interest in political matters, though he entertained strong opinions about the unjust aggression of the government in America, and expressed these opinions in a way to render the possibility of his appearance in the House of Commons as an independent member extremely distasteful to ministers. When, therefore, an election took place for Bedford, and Howard's friends proposed him as a candidate, all the arts of corrup-
tion were used to keep him out. He was nevertheless elected. On the return being disputed, the election committee, which was completely under the ministers' hand allowed a number of pauper votes which had been bought up and recorded in favour of the opposition candidates, though these votes had been refused before—just enough to unseat Howard by a minority of four votes. "I was made a victim by the ministry," he writes to a friend; "most surely I should not have fallen in with their severe measures relative to the Americans; and my constant declaration that not one emolument of five shillings, were I in parliament, would I ever accept of, marked me out as an object of their aversion." It was a fortunate decision, as it left him to his own peculiar work. Set free from all other occupations, instead of embodying his observations on English prisons at once in a book, he thought it better to make a tour of France, the Austrian Netherlands, Holland, and Germany, to see the most famous and infamous prisons on the continent of Europe, collect their various laws and regulations, and compare their structure, their action, and results with those of our own. In Paris he was denied access to the prisons; but in looking over the old legislation on the subject, he found a provision in an act of 1717, that any person wishing to distribute alms to the prisoners was to be admitted to the interior, and allowed to dispense his bounty with his own hand. The law had fallen into disuse, and was unknown to the keepers. Howard appealed to higher authority, and the validity of the old act was allowed. At some expense in charities, he inspected the Bicetre, the Force l'Evêque, and other places of confinement; but neither money nor interest could open the Bastille to his inspection. He once stepped inside its gates at some personal risk. A suppressed pamphlet, describing the interior, written by a man who had suffered confinement, he obtained after much trouble, brought back to England, translated, and gave it to the world in his own book, an offence which the French government never forgot and never forgave. At Ghent he examined with deep interest the Great Reformatory Prison, a model for all Europe, combining the elements of industry and privation, which are still esteemed the most efficacious means of reformation. At Amsterdam he was struck with the slight amount of crime in the Dutch cities, contrasting as it did so fearfully with the crime in his own country. For 100 years then past the executions in Amsterdam, a city of 250,000 inhabitants, had averaged no more than one in twelve months. London, with its 750,000 inhabitants, had an average of 29½ executions a-year, or, reckoning population against population, ten in London to one in Amsterdam (Janssen's Tables, 1772). In the United Provinces he found that the industrial system penetrated the jail. In England we only thought of punishing offences; there they sought to reclaim offenders for society. We put them into dungeons; they put them into workshops. They made the criminals work their way back to freedom. Their professed maxim was—"Make them diligent and they will be honest." Howard did not forget the hint. In Germany he found little that was useful, much that was disgusting. In Hanover and Osnaburgh, under English rule, he found traces of torture. Hamburg was less revolting, as were generally the commercial cities. He returned to England with his papers, plans, and rules, a voluminous and precious collection, as original in character as it was humane in purpose; but before putting his materials in the printer's hands, he undertook another comprehensive tour through England, revising his former observations, adding new notes to the record, relieving distress, liberating poor debtors, superintending the operation of the new jail act; and when these enormous labours were completed after seven months of daily toil, the gains from this careful revision seemed so important to his mind, that he resolved to give his con-
Howard, John. timental experiences the benefit of a similar collation, and also extend his researches into some countries, the prisons of which he had not yet seen. He set out for Lyons, crossed to Geneva (where he was rejoiced as a republican to find only five persons in confinement), whence he passed on to Berne, through cantons in which there was not a single prisoner; he went on to Soleure and Basle, delighted with the cleanliness, the Christian discipline, and considerate government of all the jails of Switzerland, and struck into Germany and Holland, visiting or revisiting the most celebrated prisons. He returned to London, and published his remarkable book, The State of Prisons in England and Wales, in 1777. In collecting his materials he had spent between three and four years, travelling not less than 13,418 miles. He contrasted in its pages the condition of our own and of foreign prisons, very much to the disadvantage of the former. "The reader," he says, "will scarcely feel from my narrative the same emotion of shame and regret as the comparison excited in me on beholding the difference with my own eyes; but from the account I have given him of foreign prisons he may judge whether a design of reforming our own be merely visionary—whether idleness, debauchery, disease, and famine be the necessary attendants of a prison, or only connected with it in our ideas, for want of a more perfect knowledge and more enlarged views."
The book made a sensation. One of the first results was to give a new impulse to the question—What to do with our convicts? America refused to take them any longer; Australia had not yet offered itself as a receptacle for the rascality of England. Government was at its wit's end; and crotchety people were urging every kind of scheme on its attention. A hulk (the "Justitia") had been already stationed in the river, off the arsenal at Woolwich, for the reception of convicts, who were treated as in the worst prisons of the old school, so that every kind of disorder existed in the ship. Howard hoped for no success without a change of system; but his continental experience convinced him that home discipline was better for the criminal than deportation to a new country; and, after much consideration by ministers, his idea of trying the discipline of hard work was adopted, and Sir William Blackstone and Mr Eden were requested to make out the draft of a bill for the creation of a fitting establishment. A new prison was needed for the new plans; no jail in the country could answer for a trial; and Howard volunteered to go abroad and collect plans and other precise information.
He went to Amsterdam, and carefully examined the spin-houses and rasp-houses for which that city was famous. He passed into Prussia, Saxony, Bohemia, and Austria, through the lines of the German armies commanded by the Great Frederick and the Emperor Joseph II. His fame had gone before him, and he was received with the greatest distinction in Berlin and Vienna. He spent a morning with the Prince of Prussia, and dined with Maria Theresa. From Vienna he went to Italy, which he traversed from Venice to Naples, inspecting prisons, hospitals, and workhouses, and carefully hoarding up the peculiar merit or fault of each, for the use of Sir William Blackstone and his colleague. On his return from Naples towards Leghorn, he encountered a violent storm, which raged for three days with great fury. The little shallop, unmanageable, was driven on the Tuscan coast, but the inhabitants, fearful of plague, refused to allow the passengers to land. Driven back again upon the storm, they were carried by its force to the African shore, to be again driven off by the same fears. They had started from Civita Vecchia while the pest was raging there, and their foul bill of health alarmed Christian and Mohammedan alike. Howard suffered fearfully in health by this trial; and, after his prison labours were accomplished, and his health fully restored, he turned to the new and fearful
enemy, and finally lost his life in an attempt to discover the cause and the remedy for plague.
Howard, John. During this rapid continental tour he travelled 4600 miles. While in France his attention was again drawn to his old subject—the infamous neglect and unchristian treatment of prisoners of war. He was told that these prisoners were treated worse in England than elsewhere; that their loyalty was tampered with; and that they were systematically ill-used in order to compel them to forsake their allegiance, and enter the English service. Burning with indignation, he went to the Commissioners of Sick and Wounded Seamen, who expressed their astonishment at such assertions; and, on his saying that he meant to look into this affair for himself, they offered to assist his inquiries. Our prisoners of war had reason to be grateful for his interference.
The information obtained during his foreign tour was placed at the service of the House of Commons. A bill was introduced and passed for building two penitentiary houses in Middlesex, Surrey, Kent, or Essex (as might be determined afterwards), in which to try the experiment of a discipline of work. Howard was appointed first supervisor of this Act; Mr Whatley, of the Foundling Hospital, second; and Howard was allowed to name the third, Dr Fothergill (stat. 19 Geo. III., cap. 74). The scheme, however, under official restraints, proceeded slowly; Howard felt that his life was being wasted in small quarrels and unimportant discussions with Mr Whatley as to the sites of the proposed penitentiaries; and both Sir William Blackstone and Dr Fothergill dying while Mr Whatley was disputing, he wrote to Lord Bathurst, president of the council, begging the king's permission to resign his office. An impulse, however, had been given. Howard's ideas were adopted in many places. In all the new prisons erected from that time provision was made for setting the criminals to work. He turned his face to the continent, with a view to collect whatever might be useful to his countrymen in those lands which he had not yet visited; and began a new and longer journey, which gradually embraced the whole circle of Europe, his route lying through Holland, Schleswig, Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Russia, Poland; thence back to London, and so on to Portugal, Spain, France, and the Austrian Netherlands. This journey was full of curious and romantic incidents. At its completion Howard gave his collections to the public in a new edition of his State of Prisons, with appendices.
Being now free from serious responsibility as regards the subject of prisons, and being determined not to enter parliament (as he was again requested to do), he reverted to the terrible idea of the Plague. English commerce with the Levant was rapidly extending, and serious thoughts were entertained in official circles of establishing a regular quarantine (as at Marseilles and Venice) against all vessels arriving from the East. But nothing was known in England about lazarettos and quarantine establishments; and the plague itself (from vague historical recollections of the London pests of 1603 and 1665, when the disease swept away each time one-fifth of the population) (Petty's Political Arithmetic, 1686) was regarded with a terror more superstitious than rational. Government desired information; Howard offered to procure it, and equipped himself for the journey. He proposed to begin his studies at Marseilles with the newest of the lazarettos; afterwards to visit those of Venice and Leghorn; and, having gained all preliminary information in these cities, to proceed to Smyrna and Constantinople, the proper homes of the plague, and there study its symptoms and modes of treatment. The French government, however, mindful of the Bastile pamphlet, refused him a passport; so that, instead of gaining facilities for inspecting the lazaretto at Marseilles, he was peremptorily forbidden to set foot in the territory of France. Lord Carmarthen, our
ambassador in Paris, tried in vain to remove the bann; but, as Howard considered that his journey would lose much of its interest, and its chief use as regarded his own country, if he missed the fine lazaretto at Marseilles, he defied the threats held out, put himself into a good disguise, and entered France in the usual way among travellers in the diligence. A police agent attended him to Paris, for the French ambassador at the Hague had received intelligence from M. Le Noir, director of police in Paris, to keep watch over his movements; and it was by a miracle of rapid and courageous action that he escaped a dungeon in the Bastille. Sometimes as a French physician, sometimes as an exquisite of the Faubourg St Germain, he traversed France as far as Marseilles, obtained admission to the lazaretto, and shelter in the house of a Huguenot pastor, although the police were on the look-out for him, with a description of his person in their hands. His courage, his disguise, and his perfect manners, threw them off their guard; yet the risks he ran were very serious, and he breathed more freely when he had crossed the frontier. "I have now taken a final leave of France," he wrote to a friend from Leghorn; "I am sensible that I ran a great risk, but I accomplished my object. Happy was I to arrive at Nice, out of the country of a deceitful, jealous, and ungenerous people." He went to Florence, Rome (where he had an interview with Pope Pius), and Naples; and thence to Smyrna, where his skill as a doctor opened all the prisons and hospitals to his inspection. He remained at Smyrna, performing a few simple cures which rumour vastly magnified, until a fatal form of the plague broke out, and he had first-rate opportunities of studying it. He went on to Constantinople, whither the fame of his cures had gone before, and as soon as he arrived he was called in by a great pasha to treat the case of his daughter, who had been given over, it was said, by all the Italian doctors. She recovered; and of course Howard's fame rose with his wonderful work. He confined his visits, however, to the pest-houses, the prisons, and hospitals; he said he was only a physician to the poor. Our ambassador, Sir Robert Ainslie, aware of his patriotic and humane object, offered him a home at the embassy. This he declined, as being unwilling to expose another to the fearful risk of contagion, and took up his residence in the house of a physician, to whom he could communicate the course of his daily experience, as well to receive sound advice as to prepare his host for prompt action in case he brought the plague home. But he bore a charmed life. The smitten fell dead at his feet. He went into infected caravansaries and into pest-houses whither physician, guide, and dragoman, all refused to follow him. From these fearful visits he returned with a scorching pain across the temples, though an hour of fresh air and vigorous exercise served to carry it away. At length his researches were complete. With a trunk full of papers—plans of lazarettos, opinions of celebrated physicians living in the Levant, and copies of regulations and instructions—he prepared to return, and wrote to inform his friends of his intention to cross overland to Vienna. But while his preparations for departure were in progress, the idea flashed across his mind that all his acquired knowledge, various as it was, had been obtained from others—was second-hand, not original; that he had seen but not suffered the discipline of a European lazaretto; and that, possibly, something of material import to the practical working of the scheme (the want of which would be felt as soon as the system was commenced, if it ever were commenced, in England) had escaped his notice. The fear was enough. Altering his plan, he resolved to return; to find a foul ship, make the voyage in her to Venice, and there undergo the usual confinement of the suspected in the famous lazaretto of that city. Such a plan was full of peril. A late ambassador, Mr Murray, had died of the plague in that very lazaretto; but nothing would deter him from his pur-
pose, and he departed. Plague broke out in the ship, and a strong man died in a few hours; yet he went on to Smyrna, deliberately sought out a foul vessel, took his berth, and started for Venice. On the way they were attacked by pirates, when Howard astonished the Venetian sailors by his courage and by a lesson which he gave them in the noble art of gunnery. They acknowledged that the English physician had saved them from the slave market of Tunis or Tripoli. On the sixtieth day of the voyage they arrived in Venice, and were all transferred to the lazaretto, where Howard's health suffered severely from the confinement, though he was supported with the thought that he was gaining precious experience. His minute account of the discipline of this famous lazaretto is most interesting (Lazarettos of Europe, pp. 10-22).
Howard came out of his confinement reduced to a skeleton and flushed with fever. However anxious to get home (for a dreadful domestic calamity had occurred; his only child, now a young man, had lost his reason, and was under the charge of a keeper), he was too weak to travel for some days. He went to Trieste and Vienna, where he held a long and exceedingly curious interview with the Emperor Joseph II., himself a reformer, or rather an innovator, during which the English gentleman told the German ruler some very unusual truths. He reached England in February 1787, having been absent on his extraordinary mission sixteen months.
As soon as his domestic concerns were put into such order as they admitted, and his great work on the Lazarettos of Europe was published, Howard began a fresh and final review of the prisons of the three kingdoms. He visited all with care, and presented a bible to each of those in the county towns. Vast improvements had already taken place in the management and discipline of the prisons, in the food, clothing, work, and Christian teaching of the prisoners. Foremost among the magistrates who adopted the new system were those of Manchester. They built on the banks of the Irwell a large prison, with an express view to carrying Howard's ideas into effect; and on the foundation-stone of the edifice they set this inscription—"That their may remain to posterity a monument of the affection and gratitude of this country to that most excellent person, who has so fully proved the wisdom and humanity of the separate and solitary confinement of offenders, this prison is inscribed with the name of JOHN HOWARD." This final tour of the English jails occupied him for eighteen months; and the results of his inspection were recorded in a new edition of his State of Prisons.
While in the Levant he had enjoyed many opportunities of hearing the opinions of merchants and consular agents on the prospects of our trade with the East. It was said that were it not for fear of the plague that trade might be at once doubled. As we were without quarantine establishments, the people were afraid of any ship from infected districts; the consequence of which fear was, that the Dutch ran away with the traffic, without taking sufficient care about the plague. So we lost the profits without escaping the risks, as the Dutch ships might as easily introduce the pest at second hand as our own at first. This idea settled in Howard's mind, and helped to shape towards a more practical end those purposes which he pursued from purer and more romantic motives. In the postscript to his new book on Lazarettos, he told the public of his intention to follow up the new inquiries. "To my country," he said in a few noble and simple words, the last he addressed to it in print, "I commit the result of my past labours. It is my intention again to quit it for the purpose of revisiting Russia, Turkey, and some other countries, and extending my tour into the East. I am not insensible of the dangers that must attend such a journey. Should it please God to cut off my life in the prosecution of this design, let not my conduct be im-
puted to rashness or enthusiasm, but to a serious conviction that I am pursuing the path of duty." These words were prophetic.
From London he went to Riga, thence to St Petersburg and Moscow, from which place he proposed to travel to Warsaw, and through Vienna to Constantinople. But the war overruled his plans. Russia and Turkey were struggling fiercely on the Dnieper and the Pruth. Bender had just fallen, and the Muscovites were hurrying their forces to the south. Sad as had been his experiences, Howard had seen nothing to compare in atrocity with the reckless waste of life in Russia in time of war. The roads were almost choked with dead bodies. Raw recruits, most of them too young to bear privation, were hurled by forced marches, and at every sacrifice, towards the theatre of war. They dropped, and were left to die. Hunger, hardship, fever, thinned the ranks as they staggered on towards the Black Sea. Howard had no sympathy with military glory; and the sickening sights which he witnessed on the roads from Moscow to Kherson disgusted him with the hypocrisy of Russia's boast of having become a civilized power. Even the great question of the plague was laid aside for a while, in presence of all these horrors to be brought to light, all these miseries to be assuaged. In his portmanteau he had carried out, for the use of his expected plague patients, a quantity of James's powders, a medicine believed to possess all save miraculous powers; and he thought he should do wisely in placing these powders at the service of the poor Russian serfs who were falling in crowds around him, the victims of an infernal military system. So he went down to the coasts of the Black Sea, visited the hospitals of Crementschouk, Otschakow, St Nicholas, Kherson, and other places. His letters and his notes in his journals are heart-rending. "They are dreadfully neglected. A heart of stone would almost bleed! The abuses of office are glaring, and I want not courage to tell them so." Russian officials, with the cunning of an Asiatic race, so soon as they saw that Howard would expose their cruelties, and disabuse the western public of its false estimate of Russian civilization, an estimate drawn from the splendid misrepresentations of Voltaire and those French theorists who were willing to depose Providence in favour of the Czars—began to throw dust in his eyes. They prepared the hospitals for his reception, removed the more unsightly objects, pretended that he had inspected all where he had only seen a few prepared wards; but his experience defeated these attempts at imposition, and his conductor gained nothing save the dishonour attaching to a mean trick. Whoever wishes to see the military system of Russia in its true character, as conducted in the villages and cities of the Muscovite empire, must study the memoirs of Howard's last visit to Russia.
He died in the midst of his labours. He caught the camp fever at Kherson, from a young lady whom he attended as a physician, and died in that city on the morning of January 20, 1790, and was buried on the road to St Nicholas. (H. D.—N.)