CHAPTER XXII
THE BOMB BRIGADE
The appalling explosion which checked the impending conflict between the volunteers and the Leaguers, causing the latter to melt away from Lincoln’s Inn and rush in surging hordes in the direction of Clerkenwell, was the most terrible outrage that had yet befallen the alarmed capital. It was not without precedent; indeed precedent was, in some respects, carefully followed by the organisers of this desperate attempt to release the imprisoned incendiaries. Nearly fifty years earlier the prison wall had been blown down for a somewhat similar purpose by a desperate gang of Fenians. The effect of that diabolical outrage on the policy of Mr Gladstone is matter of history. On that occasion many houses in Corporation Lane were partially wrecked, four persons were instantly killed, and some forty others were maimed or injured in various degrees. The immediate object of the prisoners, however, was not attained, for, though a considerable breach was made in the prison wall, none escaped.
On the present occasion the damage to life and limb was somewhat less; only two were killed, and thirty-one injured, but the destruction to property was far more extensive than before. The latter fact was, to some extent, explained when it was ascertained that there had been in reality two explosions, different in character, but rapid in succession.
Early in the afternoon all the prisoners had been taken into the prison-yard for exercise, as usual. Raggett, one of the alleged incendiaries (son of the half crazy shoemaker), was observed to fall out shortly after a small indiarubber ball was thrown over the wall. The ball was supposed to have been thrown by a street boy, and a warder threw it back, not dreaming that it was in reality a pre-concerted signal. Raggett was ordered to join the ranks, but made some excuse about a nail in his boot hurting him, and obstinately kept aloof.
Meanwhile, on the other side of the wall, two men, having the appearance of chimney-sweeps, and whose faces were covered with soot, were observed in the act of wheeling a hand-truck on which was a large barrel. Fitted in the barrel was a funnel, or tun-dish, which undoubtedly held a fuse. The supposed chimney-sweeps, having wheeled the truck rapidly but carefully to a selected position in close proximity to the prison wall, suddenly deserted it, and disappeared immediately and without question in the adjacent slums. A few people, moved by a fatal curiosity, stopped and gazed at the truck; and a policeman, noticing first the loiterers and then the barrel, approached slowly, and perhaps with some suspicion. Before he could reach the spot, a terrific flame burst from the ignited gunpowder, and with a rending crash a large section of the prison wall fell outward into the street. The unfortunate constable, struck on the temple by a broken paving-stone, fell dead, and by his side a woman, whose face was covered with blood, stumbled with outstretched arms into the gutter and lay there prostrate. Bricks, stones, and fragments of masonry fell in all directions, beating down the shrieking, panic-stricken people as they fled through the adjacent streets. Crash after crash followed, as the walls of other buildings tottered and collapsed; then, as a crowning climax of the outrage, another distinctive detonation came from the Sessions-house, designed, no doubt, to distract attention from the prison. It served, unquestionably, to facilitate the escape of Raggett and three of his fellow-prisoners, who scrambled over the fallen masonry and got free before the dazed and stupefied warders could realise what was happening. Two warders and three prisoners lay wounded and bleeding in the prison-yard.
In the neighbouring Sessions-house at the time there were only three cleaners and a man who was employed as usher when the Court was sitting. This man subsequently described what he saw. Awed by the gunpowder explosion and the nerve-destroying sounds that followed it, and ere he had time to rush into the street, he suddenly heard a crash of broken glass, as some hard object was hurled through one of the windows of the Court. As it fell on the floor a blue flame shot into the air; there was an ear-splitting report. The building seemed to rock, huge beams gave way and fell, and every window with its framework was blown outwards. A cloud of dust and powdered mortar filled the air. The women lay huddled and screaming in a heap, and the usher, with a gash in his cheek caused by splintered wood, staggered back against the wall, gazing helplessly upon the shattered seat of justice.
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In the midst of the welter that followed the foregoing catastrophe, the Cabinet, at a hastily-summoned meeting, at last decided on something in the nature of drastic action. Since the suppression of the Leaguers, for the time being at any rate, was quite impossible, it was resolved to raid the offices of the _Epoch_, which had become more and more revolutionary in its articles, and was held by the police to have indirectly incited the recent outrage. It certainly was significant that this very moment was chosen for publication of a sketch of the career of Jack the Painter, who was extolled by the _Epoch_ as a hero and martyr for his attempts to destroy certain of the royal dockyards in the time of the American war with the mother country. The _Epoch_ dwelt on the brutality of the punishment dealt out to this man, who was convicted at Winchester in 1777, and sentenced to be executed at the gate of Portsmouth dockyard. There the wretched man was drawn up by pulleys to a gibbet sixty-four feet high, made of the mizzenmast of the frigate _Arethusa_, higher than Haman hanged on the gallows he had meant for Mordecai. His body afterwards hung in chains at the entrance to the harbour for several years. This, and many another barbarous punishment, said the _Epoch_, was ruthlessly carried out in the sacred name of Justice. “Let Justice be purified by the shedding of blood--an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth, exacted by a counter-claim which no statute of limitations should avail to bar.”
Further articles containing like passages were found ready in type when the police in great force made a sudden descent on the offices of the journal; but, apparently, the contingency had been anticipated. No resistance was offered by the staff, but after only a day’s interval the _Epoch_ reappeared, published at another printing-office, and printed this time in blood-red ink.
The Christmas holidays were drawing near; and, impressed by the lamentable condition of his province, the newly-created Archbishop of London issued a pastoral, which was read from hundreds of pulpits to the assembled congregations. His lordship called upon all faithful children of the Church to keep the approaching Bank holiday, not as a day of feasting and pleasure, but as one of solemn prayer and national humiliation, to the end that the divine mercy might be vouchsafed and the tyranny of the time be ended speedily. He reminded Churchmen that, though too much ignored, the 26th December was the great commemoration-day of the first Christian martyr--Stephen, a man full of faith; Stephen who fearlessly denounced a stiff-necked generation, uncircumcised in heart and ears, rebels against the Just One, of whom they had been the betrayers and murderers. Christians, so-called, said the Archbishop in this modern time were not less betrayers and murderers of the Just One. They had received the law by the disposition of angels and had not kept it. “Because there is wrath, beware lest he take thee away with his stroke; then a great ransom cannot deliver thee.”
This episcopal admonition made a deep impression. At St Stephen’s Church in particular special services were arranged, and a great street procession was organised for the approaching Bank holiday. But while the pastoral counsel was adopted in many of the metropolitan churches, a spirit of rebellion sprang up in other quarters, and there was much resentment at what was described as an act of ecclesiastical dictation. The publicans, in particular, were furious at the idea of their custom being diminished on one of the great drinking days of the Christian year. In all these past months of stress and trouble the trade had reaped huge gains from the disorder that prevailed. The swing-doors of their Temples of Bacchus at nearly every street corner were never still. Men and women thronged the showy bars; they drank, and drank again, the flaring lights shining on their dulled eyes and sodden faces. They talked, maundered, shouted choruses, quarrelled, fought; the beer engines poured forth unending streams into innumerable “pewters” and the money poured into the tills. Humanity sank deeper and deeper into the slough of despond and the slime of self-indulgence; and the brewers and publicans reaped their rich reward as licensed purveyors of poison for the people.