English Local Prisons, 1860-1900

Next Only to Death

Sean McConville, Professor Sean Mcconville

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781136104046
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

The local prisons of the latter half of the nineteenth century refined systems of punishment so harsh that one judge considered the maximum penalty of two years local imprisonment to be the most severe punishment known to English law: "next only to death". This work examines how private perceptions and concerns became public policy. It also traces the move in English government from the rural and aristocratic to the urban and more democratic. It follows the rise of the powerful elite of the higher civil service, describes some of the forces that attempted to oppose it, and provides a window through which to view the process of state formation.

1

THE SOCIAL AND PENAL IDEAS OF THE FOURTH EARL OF CARNARVON

LEADER AND FOLLOWER

Those active in public affairs in the 1860s and 1870s were products of the conventions of the 1840s and 1850s and, given the astonishing developments which had occurred in intellectual and moral life, were more than is usual bound to collide with the generation which began to come into office in the 1880s and 1890s. When we look to penal policy and prison administration, as shaped by that earlier generation, two men stand out in influence and power. In their biographies we may discern many of the untroubled certainties of mid-Victorian England, and in their different eclipses the passing from power of their generation. These two men were Henry Howard Molyneaux Herbert, fourth Earl of Carnarvon, and Edmund Frederick Du Cane. They were born little more than a year apart: Carnarvon in June 1831, and Du Cane in March 1830.¹ Neither was an original thinker; both were orthodox in thought and conventional in behaviour; both were intelligent and energetic.

To a marked degree, Carnarvon displayed the disdain, sensibilities and scruples of his class. Born to great wealth and high social position, power and influence came to him by his early thirties. An inability to accommodate to the twists and turns of politics ultimately prevented his exceptional industry and ability from achieving its highest fulfilment. From the lower, solidly respectable and conventional reaches of the gentry, Du Cane was the youngest son of a military widow of modest means. Fuelled by ability and energy, his career developed and progressed, also lifted by the rising number of opportunities made available by the expansion of mid-Victorian administration. The biographies of the two men exemplify mid-Victorian government: the easy flair of the gifted aristocratic amateur performing the policy-making and governing duties of his class, and the reliability and technical effectiveness of a dutiful middle-class administrator.

There is no record of the two having met (though it is likely that they did in 1872 at the International Prison Congress) but in the formation of penal policy they nevertheless constituted a partnership. The aristocrat decisively and confidently set out principles and prescribed methods; the administrator took up this unfinished material, grasped its logic and potential, gave it an administrative rationale and scientific legitimacy, and fashioned it into a plausible national system. Between them, the two men shaped the penal experience of the 1880s and 1890s, and exerted an influence which persisted well into our own century. In these first three chapters the development and implementation of Carnarvon’s ideas will be considered; Edmund Du Cane’s biography will be the subject of the chapter following.

PLACE, POLITICS AND PUBLIC SERVICE

Henry Howard Molyneaux Herbert was born into one of the great Whig families which, refusing to be reconciled to the 1832 Reform Act, had moved somewhat uneasily into the developing Toryism of the times. His father, the third earl, dedicated to the aristocratic ideal in government and the life of the nation, but certainly no backwoodsman, embraced a liberal culture and respect for learning, and passed these qualities to his son. Exposed early to public life and to travel,² educated by his father and by tutors, Carnarvon passed from Eton to Christ Church, where he took a first in Greats in 1852.

Living the life of the wealthy country nobleman, and in keeping with the structure of government and distribution of authority, Carnarvon took as great an interest in local as in national affairs. He held estates in Somerset and Wiltshire, but Highclere in Hampshire was the family seat, and it was in that county that he most zealously discharged the landowner’s duties of public service. Appointed a magistrate in 1855, he was elected chairman of the Judicial Committee of Quarter Sessions in 1860, at the age of 29, succeeding Lord Eversley.³ He developed a thorough knowledge of both the administrative and judicial duties of the magistracy: court and prison work, as well as that other great time-absorber – the poor laws.⁴ Holding the patronage of a number of livings, Carnarvon was pressed into Church affairs, and indeed the Church occupied a central place in his political, social and personal beliefs. It was characteristic of his thoroughness and seriousness that he always made detailed personal inquiries about the clergy who applied for the various livings in his gift, rather than leaving such matters to staff or senior clergy. Similarly, although he employed agents and the usual quota of staff, Carnarvon paid close attention to the demands of his various estates, often intervening in matters of minute detail.

His period on the cross-benches ended in 1857, and Carnarvon was thereafter a Conservative, though always uneasy with party affiliation.⁵ The following year he became a Colonial Under Secretary in Derby’s second administration, working with Lord Stanley (Colonial Secretary) and Herman Merivale (Permanent Under Secretary). This first taste of national office was fleeting, since in June 1859 Derby gave way to Palmerston. Out of office until Derby’s third administration was formed eight years later, Carnarvon then became Colonial Secretary. His resignation from office over the terms of the Second Reform Bill, just nine months after re-entering government, led to another politically fallow period. He returned to office as Colonial Secretary in Disraeli’s second administration (February 1874) but resigned once more in February 1878, this time over Disraeli’s policy in the Russo-Turkish war. Carnarvon finished his political career on a consistent theme, by resigning the Lord Lieutenancy of Ireland, in December 1886.⁶ Thereafter he continued to speak in the Conservative interest, although uneasy and distressed at the party’s accommodation to democracy.⁷ His age, the resignations which had punctuated his career, and a lack of sympathy with the times, would probably have held him from further office, had he lived.⁸

Local and national public work blended naturally with Carnarvon’s extensive duties as a major land holder. His papers are saturated with examples of the conventional doctrine of trusteeship which was basic to his political outlook and personal code. Wealth and position flowed from the land. Title and honour came from the accident of birth, and the landowning aristocrat, living with entailment and primogeniture, was conscious of his transience: others had gone before him; there would be succession. Stewardship, rather than possession, was a persuasive view to take of title, property and place; it was also an ethic, and a legitimizing political theory.⁹

If diligence and service were tests of the sincerity of these political and moral views, Carnarvon’s dedication to the aristocratic ideal was beyond question. Employing a small secretariat, in addition to the usual estates’ staff, he conducted business at the rate of a department of government. Almost invariably, he undertook courses of private study to prepare himself for new posts and responsibilities. Throughout his life he also published in fields as diverse as travel, classical translation, biography, penal policy and various of the political issues of the times. The British Library holds 344 volumes of his privately conducted correspondence and papers, and the Public Record Office holds other deposits of ministerial papers. Meticulous in preservation, even his Eton blotter has survived, with other childhood memorabilia.¹⁰ Such method is of course helpful to the historian, but also points to a life in which order, method, continuity and an awareness of posterity were central.

RELIGIOUS BELIEFS

Educated and entering into young manhood during the zenith of Benthamism and classic political economy, Carnarvon’s approach to public policy was substantially utilitarian, alloyed with a religious outlook worked out well before the hurricanes of the 1860s and 1870s, and with an aristocratic theory of politics that sat not too uncomfortably with utilitarianism’s inherent elitism. His attitude towards religion was buttressed by the position of the Anglican church in constitutional and social arrangements. While he may have found public piety distasteful and embarrassing, he accepted the necessity for the public discharge of certain religious duties. Affirmations, apostrophes, or aspirations of a personal spiritual nature are few in his papers, and even rarer in his publications or speeches, but there are numerous attestations to his devotion to the Church of England. Remarks made in the course of an 1868 Lords speech are particularly revealing. Religion, he asserted, was part of the institutional continuity upon which the life of the nation depended. He did not believe the claim that most of the new graduates of Oxford and Cambridge tended towards religious scepticism, but even were it true, he suggested, “it was, after all, only one of the phases of thought which might be here today and gone tomorrow, and which would produce no more effect than the wave which swept over the sands of the sea shore, but which in its retiring left the old landmarks clearly definable.”¹¹

Deep though his interest was in church affairs, Carnarvon did not allow himself to be gathered up by any of the doctrinal controversies which raged in his youth. This may in part have been due to his family circumstances, as well as his cautious temperament. His mother had been deeply influenced by the Evangelicals, whose prominence was greatest in the 1820s and 1830s. His father, by contrast, was the close friend and later the brother-in-law of Philip Pusey, whose brother, Dr Edward Pusey, was the Tractarian leader. Both the High Church and Evangelical wings of Angelicanism were thus represented in Carnarvon’s immediate family background, and his own outlook was, perhaps consequently, Broad Church and tolerant. He was, however, anti-disestablishment, and appeared to make this the anchor which connected him to the Tories.¹² Nor was he prepared to extend religious toleration into spheres of public and institutional life which he thought were properly reserved for the Anglican Church. Thus in 1868 he spoke in the Lords against an attempt to abolish religious tests in the universities.¹³

But he did not carry anti-disestablishmentarianism to an extreme, and opposed new legislation on rubric and ritual.¹⁴ Appointed to the 1868 Royal Commission on Ritual, he was unable to sign the final report and instead drew up a minority statement.¹⁵ It is hard to weigh its ultimate effect on his religious and social outlook, but he was an active and devoted Freemason, rising through the Order to become in 1875 the Pro Grand Master, a position which meant, since the then Prince of Wales was Grand Master, that Carnarvon was “the working chieftain of the Masonic Order in England.”¹⁶ He achieved world renown and was, arguably, the most prominent Mason of his generation. The plight of Freemasons in certain Roman Catholic countries greatly moved him, and he made various efforts to assist them.

A social perception of religion, doctrinal toleration, and knowledge of the effects of religious persecution led Carnarvon, at a time when there was much opposition to the idea, to encourage the involvement of Roman Catholic priests in prison ministry.¹⁷ This toleration is especially noteworth...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of figures and tables
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 The Social and Penal Ideas of the Fourth Earl of Carnarvon
• 2 A Prophet In His Own County
• 3 Carnarvon and National Penal Policy
• 4 The Social and Penal Ideas of Sir Edmund Du Cane
• 5 The Flawed Prospectus
• 6 Enforcing Uniformity Discipline, labour and instruction
• 7 Enforcing Uniformity Health, dietary and discharge arrangements
• 8 Enforcing Uniformity Special categories
• 9 New Tasks Identification and executions
• 10 The Justices React to Nationalization Individual committees
• 11 The Committees Attempt to Organize
• 12 Triumph of the Clerks
• 13 The Call for a Prison Inquiry
• 14 Personalities and Preoccupations
• 15 Compounding Errors
• 16 Aftermath
• 17 The Final Act
• Bibliography
• Corrigenda, volume 1
• Index