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