The Mammoth Book of Prison Breaks

by Paul Simpson

  Morris, John: The Life of Father John Gerard, of the Society of Jesus (Burns and Dates, reprinted by BiblioBazaar, 2010)

  Gerard, John translated by Philip Caraman, S.J. The Autobiography of a Hunted Priest (Ignatius Press, 2012)

  Burke, John: A Genealogical and Heraldic History of the Commoners of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (Colburn, 1836)

  Evening Post, 5 July 1919: “Escape from the Tower”

  A Heavenly Breakout

  Most of the prison breaks featured in this book required assistance from the outside in order to be successful. Whether it’s someone throwing a hacksaw over the prison walls to a predetermined spot, or being ready with a getaway car, a change of clothing and fake papers, the majority of escapees need help to complete their tasks. Sometimes of course that help is given unwittingly, or under coercion. On other occasions, it can take a more supernatural form.

  The escape of Juan de Yepes Alvarez, better known to worshippers of the Roman Catholic Church as St John of the Cross, from the Carmelite monastery in Toledo, Spain has been ascribed to the assistance of the Virgin Mary, who appeared to the future saint in a dream. Whether you believe he had divine assistance, or was just extremely lucky, his flight was certainly extraordinary – as witnesses at the time would point out, no ordinary person should have been able to use the route that he took.

  Brought up as a devout Catholic, young Juan entered the Carmelite Order in 1563 aged just twenty-one, and was ordained priest after four years. He was asked by Theresa of Avila to assist her attempts to reform the Order, and they worked together establishing a much more strict rule in their new houses across Spain. They became known as the “Discalced” (the “unshoed”) and became extremely unpopular with the Calced Carmelites, who still held sway. At a chapter meeting in May 1575, it was noted that “[b]ecause there are still some, disobedient, rebellious and contumacious, commonly called discalced friars, who against the patent letters and statutes of the prior general have lived and do live outside of the province of Old Castile . . . and who, excusing themselves with fallacies, cavilling, and misrepresentations, have been unwilling humbly to accept the mandates and letters of the prior general, it shall be intimated to the said discalced Carmelites, under apostolic penalties and censures, including, if necessary, the aid of the secular arm, that they shall submit with the space of three days, and if they resist they shall be severely punished.”

  At the same time, there was great suspicion in Spain generally of the changes within the Church. The Inquisition had been established to encourage Jews and Moslems to convert to Christianity, or leave Spain, and those in the “new” movements within the Church were open to betrayal and denunciation to the Inquisition, leading in many cases to death sentences.

  Although he tried to steer clear of the politics within the Church, Fray Juan de Santo Matia, as he was now known, was unable to keep out completely, and on 2 December 1577, he was arrested and taken to Toledo. He refused to renounce the way of life established by Theresa of Avila, and a result, was declared contumacious and a rebel. This meant that he was excommunicated from the Church, not allowed to say or receive the Mass, and locked up for much of the time in a tiny room, about six feet wide and ten feet long, with only a tiny slit to allow air and light in. From time to time he would be allowed out, only to receive a haranguing from the ministers, described as “a little friar, scarcely good enough to be a convent porter!” and told that “he seeks to reform others when he needs to reform himself”. This would be accompanied by scourging with a cane by other friars while the Miserere was said – regarded as the most degrading and severest punishment that could be doled out to a friar. Juan refused to retract his views, and his silence only served to rile his captors further.

  Kept in filthy conditions, Juan’s health began to deteriorate, and he suffered from dysentery. Throughout this, though, he composed poetry in his mind (and to many, he is still regarded as the Poet Laureate of Spain), which examined his faith and the way of the Cross. After about six months, a change of jailer gave him a few benefits, including a clean tunic – the old one had become encrusted with blood from the beatings that he endured – and a pen and paper, on which he began to write his poems.

  In the heat of summer, Juan began to wonder if he would survive, and hoped that he might have the opportunity to say Mass for the Feast of the Virgin Mary (15 August). He was told in no uncertain terms by the prior of the monastery the night before that that was not going to happen on his watch. By this stage, Juan was apparently so frail that he couldn’t rouse himself from the floor, despite an encouraging kick from the prior.

  Yet a couple of days later, he escaped. According to his first biographer, writing early in the seventeenth century, he had been visited earlier in the month during the night, by a vision of the Virgin Mary, who told him that his trials would soon be over, and he would be leaving the prison. Depending on which version you read, this either simply gave him the moral strength to look around for an escape route, or the Virgin actually put a vision in his mind’s eye of the way to go. It seems likely though that Juan took advantage of the change of jailer, who allowed him some latitude to leave his cell, and was able to calculate that he would be able to let himself down from a window over the city wall to within ten feet of the top of the wall’s battlements using the rugs the jailer had provided, cut into strips. He would need to be able to get out of his cell, and he used the time when his door was left open to work at the metal staples that secured it to the wall.

  It is worth noting that Juan himself never claimed that he received a vision: he told the nuns who assisted him later that he had received “help, consolation and inner impulses” from Christ and the Virgin after he prayed for aid for his escape.

  Around 2 o’clock on the morning of 16 August 1578, Juan guessed that the visiting friars who had been billeted in the guest room next to his cell were now asleep. However, when he pushed at the door, and the screws holding it padlocked shut came away from the wall, the clatter of the padlock woke them. Juan waited until they fell asleep again, and then headed out to the gallery that contained the vital window.

  He attached his makeshift rope to a joist, and began to lower himself down into the darkness, and let himself fall, trusting that he would be safe. He landed on a grass embankment, a mere couple of feet away from a sheer drop down to the rocks. Giving chase to a dog led him down into a lower courtyard, and he managed to get over the wall, into an alleyway in the city. (He later couldn’t recall how he had been able to climb over the wall – he felt as if he was suddenly taken up and over the obstacle.)

  Juan rested quietly for a few minutes, regaining his strength, hiding in a darkened doorway to avoid any passers-by. As the angelus rang, at 5 a.m., he made his way to the convent of St Joseph, which housed an order of Discalced nuns. Although a friar was not usually permitted to enter the convent, a quick-thinking member of the order said that she was too ill to go to the confessional, which meant that Fray Juan could be allowed in to hear her confession. The nuns then hid Juan from the search parties from the monastery, accompanied by constables, who tried to turn the place upside down looking for the missing friar. That night, he was taken to a hospital in Santa Cruz.

  Luck, or divine intervention, certainly played its part in Juan’s escape. As the warders discovered the next morning, the “rope” down which he had lowered himself was formed of tiny strips, which shouldn’t have been able to bear his weight. And rather more pertinently, the joist to which he had attached the rope was not secured at either end, and certainly should have come loose when he began his escape. His jailor, Juan de Santa-Maria, said: “As I am certain he could not escape by any other way, I regard his flight as miraculous, and ordained by Our Lord, in order that he might help the reform of the Discalced. And, although I was deprived of my rights and privileges for some days, still, in spite of all, I was glad that he had escaped, and so were some other religious, because we had compassion on him, seeing him suffer with so
much courage.”

  Fray Juan continued to serve as a Discalced Carmelite; he died in 1591 aged forty-nine. He was declared a saint in 1726, with his two key pieces of writing, The Spiritual Canticle and The Dark Night of the Soul, regarded as some of the best pieces of Spanish poetry and mystical theology.

  Sources:

  Kavanaugh, Kieran: John of the Cross: Selected Writings (Paulist Press International, 1987)

  Moore, Thomas: “Our Lady and Saint John of the Cross” www.ourgardenofcarmel.org

  Brenan, Gerald: St John of the Cross; His Life and Poetry (Cambridge University Press, 1975)

  Tunnelling Out of the Attic

  There are few people who won’t recognize the name of Casanova – the great lover who cut a swathe through the willing women of Venice and its environs in the eighteenth century. Thanks to highly romanticized screen versions of Casanova’s already embellished memoirs, he has gained a reputation as a swashbuckling, hard-living, hero. The reality was probably rather more mundane, but there is plenty of evidence from other sources to back up at least one of his more outlandish stories: his escape from the dreaded Leads prison cells at the Doge’s Palace in Venice. He is an inspiration to any prisoners who get so tantalizingly close to escape but are thwarted at the last moment; that didn’t just happen to Casanova once – he faced such problems twice, and in the end only surmounted them with what he made out to be divine intervention.

  Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt was born in Venice in 1725, and before his twenty-first birthday had enjoyed a brief career in both the Church and the military, neither of which particularly suited him. A more hedonistic lifestyle, gambling, womanizing and otherwise enjoying himself, was far more to his liking, but inevitably along the way, he made enemies among those in authority, and in July 1755, it became clear that he was about to be arrested. Certain that he had done nothing wrong, Casanova refused to flee Venice, but the next morning, agents of the presiding Tribunal came for him, using books of incantations of magic as their evidence against him.

  Casanova was imprisoned in the Leads, the lofts of the ducal palace, which took their name from the huge sheets of lead with which the roof was covered. The only way in or out was by the gates of the palace, the prison buildings, and the bridge connecting the palace to the cells, known as the Bridge of Sighs since it was the last sight of the outside world that prisoners would have before their sentences began. He was kept in one of the cells directly above the Inquisitors’ Hall, and only very occasionally allowed out to walk around the rest of the attic area. Without trial, Casanova was sentenced to serve five years in this apparently unescapable prison, without even a bed initially, just an armchair.

  During one of his brief trips out into the attic, he examined the contents of a chest, and found a piece of polished black marble, about an inch thick, 6 inches long and 3 inches broad, which he hid, anticipating being able to find a use for it. A little later, he found an 18-inch-long iron bar. With saliva acting instead of oil to lubricate the work, he sharpened the bar into an 8-pointed dagger which he hid within his armchair. However, he knew that if he tried to break through the door of his cell, he would have to deal with at least three guards, and he was unlikely to succeed. So Casanova decided to tunnel his way out of an attic room!

  His plan was admirably simple: he would dig down to the ceiling of the room beneath him, then on the night he broke through, he would use his sheets as a rope to lower himself down, then hide under a table until the doors were opened the next morning. At that point, he would make a dash for freedom, using his dagger as a weapon to fend off any sentries.

  Keeping the work from discovery was the first problem. Casanova had previously made a fuss about the state of the cell, and his jailer, Lawrence, now swept out the room to rid it of fleas each day. Once sufficient progress had been made with the hole, it would be obvious to anyone looking at their feet when the floor was swept, so Casanova carried out an elaborate charade to stop the sweeping, claiming that the disturbance of the dust made him ill. However, before he could start work properly, another prisoner was brought in to share his cell, who insisted on the cell being swept, so there was a further two-month delay before he got under way.

  Once he was alone, Casanova was able to work quite speedily, digging away at the deal beam, removing the debris in a napkin and hiding it in the garret, and then placing his bed over the ever-increasing hole. He got through three layers of wood without encountering too many more difficulties, but then hit a layer of marble pebbling. He used a bottle of strong vinegar to weaken the cement that bound the marble together, and was able to chip through it before reaching the final board.

  Casanova was on the point of breaking through that last obstacle when a new cellmate was brought in to share his small room, although luckily he was only there for a week. By 23 August, Casanova had completed his task, and decided that he would make his move four days later when he knew that the room adjoining the Inquisitors’ Hall would also be empty.

  On 25 August, two days before he intended to escape, Casanova was moved to a new cell which his jailer thought he would prefer, since it had access to more light, something Casanova had complained about previously. The young lord couldn’t believe his bad luck – but at least his armchair, with his dagger still hidden inside, was brought along to his new lodgings. He then had a tense two-hour wait while his jailer went to fetch his other belongings, and, of course, found the hole in the floor when he moved the bed. Although his jailer threatened him, Casanova said that he would tell the authorities that he had received the implements to make the hole from the jailer unless he kept quiet. After a few days, the jailer accepted the situation.

  It was clear to Casanova that he wouldn’t be allowed to try the same trick twice, and an examination of his surroundings made him realize that the only way out of this cell would be through the ceiling. Luck smiled on the young man once more: the jailer offered to exchange books for him with another prisoner. Using ink made from mulberries, Casanova started a correspondence with Marin Balbi, a portly monk, incarcerated in the cell next door; while Casanova didn’t trust Balbi’s discretion, he reasoned that he had little choice but to involve him in the escape.

  The new plan was for Balbi to break through the ceiling of his own cell, go up into the eaves, and then break through the ceiling of Casanova’s cell from above. He could hide the hole in his cell behind pictures of saints that he would ask the jailer to obtain (shades of The Shawshank Redemption!) The only snag: the dagger was still in Casanova’s cell. A plate of pasta became an essential part of Casanova’s plan to pass it across.

  Casanova had originally thought of hiding the implement inside a large Bible and asking the jailer to give the book to the monk. However, the dagger was a couple of inches too long, and stuck out either side of the binding. Casanova therefore asked permission to make a dish of pasta for his fellow prisoner as thanks for the books he was lending him, and borrowed a huge dish from the jailer to put it in. That evening, the jailer duly carried the pasta dish through, balanced on top of the bible, not noticing the bar sticking out from either end of the book.

  Balbi broke through the ceiling in eight days, covering the hole with a picture of a saint pasted up with breadcrumbs. It took him eight more days to get through a wall that separated the two cells and within a couple of days, was nearly through the ceiling of Casanova’s cell. All that remained was to remove the final piece of board, hoist Casanova up, and then the pair, along with Balbi’s cellmate if he wanted to join them, could make a hole in the roof of the ducal palace. From there, Casanova was happy to rely on chance to find a way to get to the ground safely.

  But once again Casanova’s planning was derailed. The afternoon before they were due to escape, a new cellmate, Soradici, was brought into Casanova’s cell. After a few days, during which Soradici had quickly proved himself untrustworthy, Casanova decided to play on the other man’s fears, and persuaded him that he had received a vision of the Virgin Mary. An angel
was going to rescue Casanova from the cell in the next few days and he would take Soradici with him if he promised to give up spying. Soradici was gullible enough to fall for this story, particularly once he heard the sound of Balbi breaking through the ceiling as he prepared for the escape. Casanova was able to cow him into submission, threatening him with strangulation if he breathed any word of the escape attempt to their jailer.

  Casanova had decided to make his breakout on All Hallows Eve, when he knew that the Inquisitors wouldn’t be sitting, and therefore there was no chance of any new prisoners being brought either into his or Balbi’s cell. He instructed Balbi to make the final breakthrough at midday, and warned Soradici that he would be required to cut the beards of both Casanova and the angel. At noon exactly, Balbi entered the cell as if by divine intervention, through the ceiling. The awe-struck Soradici made the necessary adjustment to the two men’s beards, then Casanova went to see if Balbi’s cellmate was going to join them. It was obvious that the old man wouldn’t be able to deal with the rigours of the climb, so he agreed to remain in his cell, praying for the escapees.

  After reconnoitring the roof space, and confirming that it would be easy to get out onto the roof itself, Casanova then spent four hours cutting up sheets and blankets, and threading them together to form ropes – he claimed that he was able to create 100 fathoms (600 feet) from everything in the cell, although 100 feet seems more likely. He and Balbi then made the hole in the roof, and levered the sheet of lead out of the way, only to discover that the moon was bright enough to cast shadows. If they went straightaway, they would easily be seen from St Mark’s Square.

  It was at this point that Balbi realized that for all of Casanova’s posturing, the young nobleman really didn’t have much of a clue how to proceed once they were on the roof, and both he and his cellmate tried to persuade Casanova to give up the escape. Soradici lost what little courage he had during this time, and elected not to join the other two as they crossed the rooftops, particularly as a fog was descending. Casanova and Balbi divided the rope and parcels containing their personal belongings, between them, and then, at 11 p.m., they went out onto the roof.