The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks

by Paul Simpson

  On 11 April, the two men attended church at the Tolbooth kirk, which was part of St Giles’ High Kirk next door to the prison. According to a contemporary report, they were accompanied by four of the town guard, and shortly before the sermon was about to begin, Wilson hauled Robertson from his seat and threw him away from the guards, exhorting him to run for his life. When the guards went to pursue the fleeing man, Wilson grabbed one with either hand, and apparently a third with his teeth. Robertson laid out the fourth guard with a punch and belted for the church exit. He was able to get out of the city gates before they were closed, and friends provided him with transport to get out of the country. Legend has it that he ran a bar near Rotterdam for many years – he certainly was never apprehended by the Scottish authorities.

  Wilson wasn’t so lucky. Although his selfless actions in helping his friend escape endeared him to the common crowd – and led to fears that the mob might try to free him when he was taken for execution – he was guarded more heavily as a result, and three days later went to his death at the Grassmarket. Despite the town guard’s fears that there would be unrest, there were no attempts to rescue him. However, after Wilson had been executed, the mob began throwing stones at the hangman, and town guard captain Porteous over-reacted when he and his men came under attack. Whether on his own initiative, or because he was ordered to do so by the magistrates present, he told his men to fire on the crowd. Between six to nine people lay dead at the end, and Porteous found himself on the receiving end of a death sentence three months later and sent to the Tolbooth.

  When the crowd learned there was a chance that Queen Caroline might pardon him, they took the law into their own hands, and Porteous escaped from the Tolbooth in a manner that he really would have preferred not to have done. After disarming the guard, and ensuring that the troops stationed nearby couldn’t intervene, the mob attacked the Tolbooth, and discovered which apartment was being used by Porteous. The former guard captain desperately tried to escape up the chimney, but, unsurprisingly, this had been barred to ensure that prisoners couldn’t get out that way. He was dragged out of his hiding place, and pulled through the streets to the Grassmarket where, on the third attempt, he was lynched from a makeshift gibbet.

  Other escapes were more straightforward. In 1765, the authorities were worried that Leith bucklemaker William Purcell would use his transfer from the Tolbooth at Leith to its counterpart in Edinburgh as an opportunity to make his escape, but he was still brought to the capital so that he could be tried in the Edinburgh courts, accused of stealing ten of the king’s weights from the port. They were right to be concerned: on the night of 10 December, he cut through the window of the West Gallery, tied a rope to the bars, and made his getaway.

  A year later came one of the most famous escapes from the Tolbooth, that of the convicted incestuous murderess Katherine Nairn, who had already escaped the gallows because she was pregnant. The evidence against Nairn and her lover, Patrick Ogilvy, was based mainly on the highly suspect testimony of Anne Clark, a cousin of the Ogilvy family. She maintained that Nairn, who had married Ogilvy’s brother Thomas, had begun an over-familiar relationship with Patrick when he returned from the East Indies – in those days incest wasn’t defined by blood relations between the two parties but by their relationship through marriage. When Thomas learned of this, there was a row between the brothers which resulted in Patrick’s departure, and, not long after, Thomas’ death, apparently from poison. (There’s good cause to suspect that Clark herself might have been the poisoner, particularly since the brother who stood to inherit, Alexander, had been her personal and professional partner!)

  Both Patrick and Katherine denied any involvement in Thomas’ death, but both capital charges were proven against them. Patrick was hanged on 13 November 1766, but because Katherine was pregnant – whether by Thomas or Patrick was never ascertained – she was allowed to see the child through to term. Her daughter was born on 27 January, and within a month the authorities began debating whether Katherine could now be put to death. When the decision was delayed for a week, a plan was put into action to spring her from the Tolbooth, which was carried out on 15 March.

  Katherine had been attended by midwife Mrs Shields (or Shiells), who continued to visit her after the baby’s birth. Shields pretended to be afflicted with a maddening toothache, so kept her head and face covered in a shawl when entering and exiting the Tolbooth. According to the report in James Grant’s 1880s collection of anecdotes about the town, Cassell’s Old and New Edinburgh, once the jailers were used to seeing Shields like that, “Katherine Nairn came down one evening in her stead, with her head enveloped, with the usual groans, and holding her hands upon her face, as if in agony. The warder of the inner door, as she passed out, gave her a slap on the back, calling her a ‘howling old Jezebel’, and adding a ‘hope that she would trouble him no more’.”

  However, according to the Grant version of events, Katherine nearly screwed up the whole plan by going to the wrong front door – instead of heading for the home of her father’s solicitor, she ended up knocking at the entrance to judge Lord Alva’s abode. The servant who answered it recognized her, and raised the alarm. Katherine fled the scene, and eventually found her way to the house of her uncle, William Nairn (later Lord Dunsinane). He then kept her hidden in the cellar until he could arrange for transport to get her to Dover. She travelled across the Channel, and eventually ended up in America. An alternate, if less exciting version suggests that a coach and horses was waiting for Katherine when she left the Tolbooth, and took her straight to Dover.

  The baby was not as lucky; she died or was smothered two months later. Alexander Ogilvy was put in the Tolbooth on charges of bigamy four days before Katherine made her escape; he was exiled from Edinburgh but fell to his death before he could depart. No one knows what happened to Anne Clark.

  Twenty guineas was offered for the recapture of James Hay, an eighteen-year-old glazier, one of three men found guilty in October 1783 of two vicious attacks, which had left a victim close to death. Sentenced to hang, Hay was able to flee from the Tolbooth after his father helped him to file through the chains (somehow managing to avoid detection when the jailers made their twice-daily inspection). Hay’s father persuaded one of the jailers to take a drink with them, and after they had got him drunk, suggested that he fetch more alcohol. The keeper left the apartment door open as he went, and Hay followed closely behind him. As soon as the drunken jailer had left the prison, Hay’s father called out to the doorkeeper to “turn his hand” once more, which the man, believing that it was to allow a visitor to the prison to leave, did. Hay raced through the open gate, and hid in the nearby graveyard – where he remained for six weeks until the hue and cry had died down, assisted with food and drink by fellow former pupils of George Heriot’s Hospital, which was next to the kirk. Even the princely reward didn’t tempt them to betray his location, and like most of the other escapees from the Tolbooth, Hay is believed to have headed for the continent.

  The Tolbooth survived until 1817, although construction on a new prison began in 1791 at Calton Hill – now the site of St Andrew’s House, the home of some of the most senior civil servants in the Scottish government. The dark and foreboding building was razed to the ground.

  Sources:

  Skelton, Douglas: Dark Heart: Tales from Edinburgh’s Town Jail (Mainstream, Edinburgh, 2008)

  Cockburn, Lord Henry: Memorials of his Time (Robert Grant & Son, Edinburgh, 1946)

  Grant, James: Cassell’s Old and New Edinburgh (originally a periodical in the 1880s, now online at http://www.oldandnewedinburgh.co.uk)

  The Book Smuggler

  Over the years, many disguises have been used to help prisoners escape from jail, and there have also been plenty of plots which involved the potential fugitive hiding within a container. Not often have the two been combined as successfully as the flight from Loevenstein Castle by the celebrated Dutch writer and philosopher Hugo de Groot (also known as Hugo Grotius, t
he Latinized version of his name that was used on his writings).

  De Groot’s later treatises would become recognized as the foundation for international law by those who study the subject closely – he outlined the principles of the conditions necessary to qualify a conflict as a “just war” as well as defining the freedom of the seas – but as one student pointed out, “Unfortunately the escape story seems to be more important to the average Dutchman than the books Grotius wrote.” He lived through one of the most turbulent periods in Dutch history, the Eighty Years War between the Netherlands and Spain, which began in 1568. He was part of the elite, and a precocious student, studying law at Leiden University aged only eleven, and gaining his doctorate five years later.

  Perhaps it was inevitable that de Groot became embroiled in the political and religious conflicts of the era; he followed the moderate teachings of Professor Arminius. However when riots broke out between the Arminians and their opponents, order had to be restored, and it was decided by the Synod of Dordrecht in 1618 that the moderates’ viewpoint should be banned. De Groot and two other key moderates were arrested. Tried in secret, de Groot and van Ledenberg, who had been Secretary of the States of Utrecht, were sentenced to lifelong imprisonment (some sources even claim that the sentence was imprisonment for “eternity”). Their colleague Johan van Oldenbarnevelt, the former Advocate of Holland, was executed in 1619.

  Van Ledenberg and de Groot were sent to serve out their term at Loevenstein Castle, which sits on the confluence of the Maas and Waal rivers. It had originally simply been a toll building, but at the start of the Eighty Years War, the Spanish had stationed troops there. The Dutch had tried to take it from their control in 1570 but were repelled; a second attack two years later brought it into the hands of the Dutch state. William of Orange then ordered the defences to be upgraded, with ramparts built and a moat dug. The castle at the centre of this new fortress became the “Staatsgevangenis” (state prison), where political prisoners could be safely housed.

  Van Ledenberg was unable to cope with the prospect of seeing out his days here and committed suicide. De Groot took a more philosophical attitude, and spent much of his time studying. His wife, Maria van Reigersbergen, chose to share his captivity, but after coming to a financial arrangement with some of the guards, was allowed to go out from the castle from time to time to buy necessities, and to make arrangements for de Groot to borrow books from his friends. De Groot spent twenty months reading ancient and modern literature, studying theology on a Sunday, and working on his thesis, “Jus Belli et Pacis”, which would eventually be published in 1625.

  Maria began to tire of the constraints, and looked for a way to help her husband escape. The books that were sent to him on loan were dispatched in large chests, as were deliveries of linen. The guards became accustomed to seeing the containers going back and forth between the castle and the nearby village of Gorcum (modern day Gorinchem), and gradually their checks on the contents became more and more lax. By the spring of 1621, they were hardly bothering to look at all.

  The chests might have been large enough to contain many heavy books, but they weren’t anywhere near the size of a man. After some persuasion from his wife, de Groot tried to squeeze his frame into the four-feet length, and experimented with how long he could remain in there without it becoming too uncomfortable. Once he had developed enough stamina, Maria bored some airholes into the top of the chest, and told her maid Elyse what she was planning and the part she would need to play.

  On 22 March 1621, a day when the governor was away from the castle on business, Maria begged his wife for permission to remove a load of Arminian books from her husband’s apartment because, she claimed, they were distracting him too much from spending time with her. The governor’s wife gave her consent, and Maria sent the repurposed chest up to the apartment. De Groot got in, and Maria then drew the curtains around his bed, leaving some of his clothes on a chair. She called some soldiers in to help her with the chest, claiming that de Groot was lying sick in bed so couldn’t assist her.

  Maria’s heart must have leaped into her mouth when one of the soldiers jokingly asked, “How come it’s so heavy? Is there an Arminian in it?” but she kept her cool, and said, “No, only Arminian books.” The chest was carried down from the apartment to a boat, where Elyse accompanied it down the river to Gorcum. Maria meanwhile stayed in the apartment, and lit a lamp in the same way her husband always did to aid with his studies. When the governor arrived back later in the day, he looked up at de Groot’s cell window, and came to the obvious conclusion. It was only the next day that the deception was discovered.

  By this time de Groot was far away. The trip down the river had been perilous, and the fugitive had had great difficulty keeping quiet during the journey. Elyse persuaded the skipper and his son to carry the chest to their destination, rather than placing it on a sledge, and she demonstrated a similar quickness of mind to her mistress when the son commented that he believed there was something alive within the chest. “Books have life and spirit too,” she said, and the boy said no more.

  The chest was delivered to the house of Jacob Daatzelaar, one of de Groot’s Arminian friends. Elyse immediately told him what – or rather who – was inside, but Daatzelaar refused to have anything to do with the escapee. His wife was made of sterner stuff, and sent her servants away so they wouldn’t see de Groot. She then released the prisoner from his chest, and gave him a rule and trowel so he could disguise himself as a mason. De Groot then was able to accompany her brother, another mason, through the streets to a boat, which began his odyssey to Antwerp and then Paris, where he waited for his wife.

  The governor was understandably angry with Maria’s actions, and she was kept prisoner at Loevenstein for a fortnight until the order was sent for her release. Her ingenuity, tenderness and courage were recognized. The pair were reunited in France, after de Groot agreed not to return to the Netherlands. De Groot died in 1645 after being involved in a shipwreck from which he did not recover.

  De Groot wasn’t the only Dutchman of the period to be assisted in an escape from prison by his wife’s actions. Six months after the flight from Loevenstein, Dominicus Sapma, another Arminian minister, was being held in jail in Amsterdam. His wife had applied to be allowed to visit him, since he wasn’t committed for any “villainous action”, but only because of his religious beliefs. Both she and his sister were given permission.

  On 22 September, Sapma’s wife and sister visited the jail around 4 p.m., following the detailed requests he had given them. His wife had a scarf wrapped around her cheek, as if she had terrible toothache. As the gate-bell rang to mark the end of visiting, Sapma put on her clothes, transferred her wedding ring to his hand, and used the scarf to cover his cheek. He then put on his wife’s veil and walked out, accompanied by his sister. His wife remained behind, expecting any minute to hear the alarm being raised by the keeper’s wife, an old, cunning woman whom her husband regarded as the greatest danger to the plan.

  In fact, it was this woman who let Sapma out of the prison and she even said something comforting to him, when she saw that “she” was crying. Sapma’s sister quickly replied on his behalf that she could not speak because of both grief and toothache. Even though they were through the gate, they weren’t safe – Sapma was too tall for the woman’s dress he was wearing, and had to go through the streets bent over so the height disparity wouldn’t be obvious. However, they arrived at their hiding place without discovery.

  When the deception was uncovered, the magistrates were extremely unhappy, and initially refused to release Sapma’s wife. It probably didn’t help that her first petition said that he had escaped “by the blessing of God” nor that her second claimed that she didn’t think she had “transgressed their Worships’ orders”. The latter was torn to pieces when it was read. A full week later, the court of Burgomasters and Schepens ordered her release.

  The delay in releasing her may have been connected to another escape by one of t
he Arminians, Vezekius; he had taken advantage of the decision by a court in Haarlem to allow his wife and children to visit him and for them all to wander around the prison, where he found an old rusty key. To his amazement, it fit the lock of the prison gate, and he duly let himself out and took shelter in a family friend’s house. His wife ended up in the workhouse in her husband’s place for five days, and was only released when their maid had a serious accident and was unable to bring the youngest child into the workhouse to be suckled.

  In fact, there was almost an epidemic of prison breaks by members of the Arminian movement. From 1619, ministers Johann Grevius and Prins were held at the workhouse in Amsterdam under a strict regime. Their families weren’t allowed to visit, candles were withdrawn so they couldn’t read in the evenings and after they made a slight complaint, the fires weren’t lit. However, around the middle of June 1621, conditions improved for a short time, and Dominicus Sapma was involved with planning an abortive break out using ladders to ascend the walls. When Sapma himself was arrested, the plans were put on hold in case he was sent to the same workhouse; however the day after Sapma had used his wife’s clothes to escape from the jail to which he had been consigned, some of the Arminians tried again, and only narrowly escaped without being discovered.