Newgate Prison - Famous Prisoners

Famous Prisoners

Other famous prisoners at Newgate include:

  • Melissa Ayisi (1510-1600), governor general
  • John Bradford (1510–1555), religious reformer.
  • Thomas Bambridge, former warden of Fleet Prison
  • John Cooke – English Prosecutor of Charles I, regicide executed in 1660
  • Giacomo Casanova – Venetian Libertine, imprisoned for alleged bigamy
  • William Chaloner – Currency counterfeiter and con artist
  • William Cobbett – Parliamentary reformer and agrarian
  • John Frith – Protestant priest and martyr
  • Thomas Neill Cream – prominent doctor who was tried and convicted for poisoning several of his patients, claimed to be notorious serial killer Jack the Ripper while on the gallows.
  • Daniel Defoe – author of Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders (whose protagonist is born and imprisoned in Newgate Prison)
  • Daniel Eaton, who was the subject of the defense Percy Bysshe Shelley offered in his famous essay, A Letter to Lord Ellenborough.
  • Lord George Gordon – UK politician whom the Gordon Riots are named after
  • Ben Jonson – playwright and poet, imprisoned for the 22 September 1598 killing of his fellow actor Gabriel Spenser in a duel. Freed by pleading benefit of clergy.
  • William Kidd – aka Captain Kidd, the infamous pirate hunter
  • John Law – economist
  • Thomas Lloyd (stenographer) – first stenographer of the U.S. Congress
  • James MacLaine – aka "the Gentleman Highwayman" – notorious robber
  • Sir Thomas Malory – highwayman, possible author of Le Morte d'Arthur, a saga about King Arthur
  • Catherine Murphy
  • Titus Oates – anti-Catholic conspirator
  • William Penn – the Quaker who founded the state of Pennsylvania
  • Miles Prance – alleged witness to the murder of Edmund Berry Godfrey
  • Jack Sheppard – thief, escapee
  • Ikey Solomon – successful and infamous fence of the late 18th and early 19th centuries
  • John Bellingham – assassin
  • Saint Robert Southwell – Jesuit priest, poet and martyr
  • Owen Suffolk – Australian bush-ranger
  • Jane Voss (alias Jane Roberts) (d. 1684) – highwaywoman and thief
  • Ellis Casper (b. 1784) convict no. 5185, – the famous Gold Dust Robbery of 1839
  • Mary Wade – Youngest female convict transported to Australia
  • Edward Gibbon Wakefield – British politician, the driving force behind much of the early colonization of South Australia, and later New Zealand
  • John Walter Sr. – Founder of The Times, for libel on the Duke of York
  • Catherine Wilson – nurse and suspected serial killer. Last woman hanged publicly in London

Read more about this topic:  Newgate Prison

Famous quotes containing the words famous and/or prisoners:

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    Willa Cather (1873–1947)

    We are all conceived in close prison; in our mothers’ wombs, we are close prisoners all; when we are born, we are born but to the liberty of the house; prisoners still, though within larger walls; and then all our life is but a going out to the place of execution, to death.
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