New Light on the Newgate Six

Sometimes History Demands a Rewrite

History may seem still, a solid, reliable mass of fact, but it’s actually changing all the time. New facts come to light. Context shifts. To hew to the truth, the stories we tell ourselves about history have to change, too.

A printed history is a snapshot, a record of what we knew — or thought we knew — once upon a specific time and place. Websites, on the other hand, are endlessly, infinitely open to alteration.

Which is helpful when the available facts change.

In July, 1721, six felons under sentence of death in London’s infamous Newgate Prison agreed to serve as guinea pigs in a royally sanctioned inoculation experiment. In exchange for pardons, they agreed to let doctors from The Royal Society try the dangerous and newfangled procedure of “variolation” on them — essentially infecting them with smallpox in a (sort of) controlled way. To win their freedom all they had to do was survive.

That much remains true. As I researched and wrote The Speckled Monster in ten intense months across 2002, I relied on the sparse particulars about these six people that I could find in London libraries: no more than a few snippets about each them. They weren’t, after all, a team of people celebrated as England’s best and brightest. To lift the “Newgate Six” to dramatic life, I filled out their stories with details typical of Londoners sentenced to death for non-violent crimes in that period.

Since I published the book, libraries and archives have digitized staggering mountains of information and historical records, making them searchable in an instant. Research that used to consume years and involve lightning strokes of luck as well as painstaking labor now require a few keystrokes. That’s a long-winded way of saying that it’s now easy to see the trial records of all six prisoners via the online database The Proceedings of the Old Bailey (London’s major criminal court). Much of what I inferred turns out to be accurate. In other cases, notably regarding Ann Tompion, I was wrong.
 

Setting the Record Straight

To set the record straight, here are links to the trial records of the Newgate Six. Apart from reports of the inoculation experiments of 1721, they remain the only traces of these remarkable people that I have found:
 

Elizabeth Harrison

• The name “Elizabeth Harrison” shows up a number of times in trial records after 1721. Whether or not these refer to the same woman is unclear: both “Elizabeth” and “Harrison” were common names then, as they remain today. I still like to think that “Lizzie” made the most of the rare opportunity handed to her to climb out of the gutter.

Ann Tompion

• Of all six prisoners, the historical Ann Tompion differs most from the character in my book. As I speculated in my notes, the real Mrs. Tompion seems to have been the famous clockmaker’s niece by marriage, rather than his young widow. Her trial was particularly colorful and — as a record of “justice” — disturbing.

Mary North

• Originally sentenced to transportation
• Sentenced to death upon her illegal return to Britain

John Alcock (or Allcock)

John Cawthery (aka Cauthery or Cauthrey)

Richard Evans

All About Smallpox: Next

The Newgate Experiments drew the eyes of the world; in private, variolation and vaccination once prompted parties..

Painting: William Hogarth, A Scene from The Beggar’s Opera (1728-29), National Gallery of Art, Washington DC