Haydon fought on to the last, but the end was very near when he speaks in 1842 of “thirty-eight years of bitter suffering, incessant industry, undaunted perseverance, four imprisonments, three ruins and five petitions to Parliament, never letting the subject of State support for national art rest.” He chafed, not without reason, that at a public inquiry then in progress, neither Chairman nor Committee, witnesses nor pupils gave any sign that they were conscious that such a creature as Haydon existed.
“After this,” says Taylor, “the clouds settled down upon him and grew darker and more dense every month of his few remaining years of life. It is painful to follow day by day his struggles with disappointment, despondency and embarrassment.” He was vexed and harassed more and more, misfortunes multiplied, no fresh venture prospered and his last, the exhibition of his own cartoons, was a dismal failure. No one came to see them, the receipts on Easter day were beggarly; he took little more than a pound, and next door thousands and thousands thronged to see Tom Thumb. The future had never looked so black; “the butcher, the baker, the tax collector, the landlord gave louder knocks than before.” At length, he says, he “came home in excruciating anxiety,” not able to raise the money for the rent of the Egyptian Hall where his cartoons were exhibited. Fresh executions were to be put in and he says, “I felt my heart sink, my brain confused, I foresaw my family’s misery and a prison!” The desperate struggle was nearly over; he held on with but small hope of deliverance and at last gave up in despair. He entered his painting room for the last time and there shot himself on the 22nd of June, 1846, “when temporarily of unsound mind” as the coroner’s inquest charitably decided.
The third great prison of old London, but which survived down to the middle of the last century, was the Marshalsea, which stood originally in the High Street, Southwark, and a house now numbered 119 was the site of the chapel. But it was removed by and by to other premises nearer the St. George’s church that stands at the corner of the High St. Borough. This prison derived its name from the Marshals of England to whom it appertained and whose jurisdiction extended over the King’s household. The royal servants were arraigned in the Marshal’s Court and committed when in fault to the Marshalsea prison. It also received debtors, arrested for even trifling sums, within a circuit of twelve miles from Westminster Palace, and was especially used for the confinement of persons awaiting trial. No exact record is preserved of its first erection. The earliest account is that of a riot by sailors in 1377. A man belonging to the fleet commanded by the Duke of Lancaster was slain by a gentleman imprisoned in the Marshalsea, whereupon the men-of-war’s men conceiving that the murderer was sheltered by great folk broke into the prison, took him and hanged him on a gallows near the gaol, and returned in triumph to their ships with trumpets sounding. The prison was again attacked four years later by the insurgents headed by Wat Tyler and at that time the marshal lost his life. On this occasion the marshal of the King’s Bench adjoining, Sir John Imworth, was seized and beheaded. Much importance attached to the prison in the reigns of Henry VIII, Mary and Elizabeth, when it was used for State purposes. Bishop Bonner, the last Roman Catholic bishop of London, was sent to it, when suspended by Queen Elizabeth. The story runs that he preserved a grim humour despite his misfortunes. When a man greeted him with the insulting address, “Good morrow Bishop Quondam,” the bishop promptly retorted, “Farewell, Knave Semper.” When on his way to the prison, some one called out, “The Lord confound thee, or else turn thy heart.” “The Lord send thee to keep thy breath to cool thy porridge,” was the defiant reply. Bonner died in the prison in 1569 after a confinement of ten years. Poets, pamphleteers and political satirists were often committed to the Marshalsea and among them George Wither, Christopher Brooke and many Puritan martyrs. After the Restoration, as John Evelyn tells us, Colonel Culpeper was sent there as the aggressor in an affray with “my lord of Devonshire,” when the latter stood very near His Majesty’s bed-chamber. Some hot words passed between them and Lord Devonshire gave Culpeper the lie. Upon which the colonel “struck him a box on the ear,” but the lord returned it and “felled him.” They were soon parted; Culpeper was seized and carried by the King’s order before the Board of Green Cloth where he got his deserts by being confined in the Marshalsea.