The System of the World

The Court of the Old Bailey
20 OCTOBER 1714

“GUILTY!” SAID THE MAGISTRATE.

“That’s what I said,” said Jack Shaftoe. He worried that the magistrate had not heard his plea. His voice was enfeebled, as his breathing-musculature was fashed from having worked against three hundred pounds of resistance for days. And the other people sharing this patch of dirt with him were making a lot more noise than he was capable of.

“This court finds you, Jack Shaftoe, Guilty of High Treason!” the magistrate said, in case it had been missed in the uproar.

“This court doesn’t have to find me Guilty, as that is how I pleaded!” Jack protested, but it was useless.

He was a bit giddy from the removal of the weights, and from the light and food and water that had been lavished upon him when he had cried uncle, and owned up to invading the Tower of London, and blamed the whole thing on Charles White, and agreed to come down here and plead. So he saw things in an odd way, like a traveler from China to whom everything is impossibly strange. Some sort of judicial proceeding had been underway here, involving him. But he had paid no attention to it at all. He just could not bring himself to attend to the wigged chap up on the balcony. Of much more interest was the scene down here.

Court was a good English word meaning a yard. A slab of earth. A patch of dirt. Some courts, such as those on the Isle of Dogs when Jack had been a boy, were surrounded by scraps of wood, and full of pigs and of pig-shit. Other courts were surrounded by stone walls with arrow-slits in the top; people on the insides of such courts tended to have a better time of it than those who shared their courts with swine. The Queen had a court. No, scratch that, the Queen was dead. Long live the King! The King had a court. It was infested with courtiers. The theatres of Southwark were a particular type of court. There were countless other specialized types, e.g., tennis courts, forecourts, and the Court of Directors of the East India Company. One entire category of Courts was devoted to inflicting punishment on bad men. This, the Old Bailey, was one such.

Jack had familial ties to the Irish nation and knew that Baile Atha Cliath was their name for the city of Dublin. Bailey, it seemed, was just another word for Court. The bailiff brought you to the bailey and put you in the bail-dock, and you dasn’t stray from his bailiwick until you posted bail.

During this mental divagation of Jack’s, on the subject of Courts and Baileys, the magistrate up on the balcony had been washing the place down with a spate of legal mumbo-jumbo, as well as a homily about the error of Jack’s ways, and the error of his mother’s ways, and his father’s, and their mothers’ and fathers’, all the way back to the progenitor of their race, presumed to be one Cain. Little of this reached Jack’s ears, because of the uproar, and none of it penetrated his head, because he was not paying attention. He knew what the magistrate was saying: that Jack was a bad man-beyond bad, if truth be told-so surpassingly and transcendently bad that it was necessary for him to be put to death by the most gruesome and, hence, entertaining means that the English mind could conceive of.

The Old Bailey employed a man called a crier, whose chief qualification was that he could engrave his own words on a pane of glass, simply by shouting at it. He was deployed, from time to time, to quell the uproar. For the groundlings in this court cared naught for the words of the Justices. But the crier they respected for his loudness. He put it to work now: “Oyez! Oyez! Oyez! My Lords, the King’s Justices, strictly charge and command all manner of persons to keep silence while Sentence of Death is passing on the prisoner at the bar, on pain of imprisonment.” By the time he was finished, the crowd had actually heeded his words. No one was talking except for a few daft and/or deaf stragglers tucked away in the corners, who were quickly shushed by the others. Silence was a rare thing around Newgate, and fragile; but this was a different kind of silence altogether, it was contagious as smallpox.

The magistrate was on his feet, treading heavily up to the railing of his balcony. Clearly he was in a foul temper. He’d rather be at the Coronation festivities, drinking the health of the fresh-minted King. Really, the whole country ought to count this a holiday. It was extraordinary that a Judicial Proceeding was underway here on such a day! What could account for it? Certain Powers must have reached into a courtly revel with a long shepherd’s crook and fetched this magistrate out by the neck.

“The law is,” he bellowed, “that thou shalt return from hence, to the Place whence thou camest, and from thence to Tyburn Cross, where thou shalt hang by the neck, but not unto Death; that thou shalt thereafter be drawn and quartered, till the body be Dead! Dead! Dead! And the Lord have Mercy upon thy Soul.”

Those milling shades in the dimness behind the magistrate’s belcony must be those selfsame Powers, practically hopping from foot to foot in their eagerness to run back to Westminster and proclaim the news: Jack Shaftoe was broken by the peine forte et dure, he came to the court, he pleaded, and even now lies in chains in the Condemned Hold! That was the preordained Moral of the Morality Play being enacted in this place, which looked more like a theatre the longer Jack stood here. There were even extras, or, in Theatrical cant, spear-carriers. For the Justice’s kind final words, and the Lord have Mercy upon thy Soul, were nearly drowned out by the humble-bumble of many boots on the stairs within the building, and before the audience could even consider launching a riot, they found themselves surrounded by a company of Guards brandishing half-pikes.

Some might welcome the new King with toasts, medals, statues, or concubines. But there were men in London who could not think of any better party favor to present to their new Sovereign than Jack Shaftoe’s head on a platter. At an earlier stage of his life he’d have strained his eyes to resolve the faces lurking back there in the shadows behind the balcony, perhaps shouted something of a defiant nature. But he really could not care less about them now. Truth be told, he hadn’t heard a word the magistrate had uttered (aside, that is, from the terrible Sentence) in the last quarter of an hour. It was all because of the noise of the people who were down here in the dirt-the Court-the Old Bailey-with him. His people.

Something got crushed down atop his head. His knees buckled in alarm for a moment. But he was not being assaulted from behind. Someone had bestowed a hat on him. By the time he turned round, that someone had been chased back into the chanting rabble by a furious corporal of the Guard. But the rabble were very pleased by what they saw. A chant formed of the roar: “God save the King! God save the King! God save the King!”

The magistrate had stood up to make himself heard, his face was red, he was bellowing with such force that his wig was shuddering, but nothing reached the court. A bailiff snatched the thing from Jack’s head and flung it down. Before his boots crushed and treaded it down into the mud of the Bailey, Jack saw what it was: a makeshift crown, sporting a letter V in the middle. Not that Jack knew much about letters; but he recognized that one, because the same symbol was burnt into the brawn of his right thumb, and had been there for most of his life. For Jack had first been branded Vagabond when he’d been a young man.

It was a common designation. King of the Vagabonds, however, was a high title indeed, and one that had not been attached to his name until he had, through inconceivable exertions, earned it.