TOM POOLEY IN PRISON.

 “O the Horrid touchers I Have Seen!  So, if mines His a Deluson it Carrid me into a Christain Hell, or the Goal, wear the Christain Governer Played the Part of the Christain Divil Compleat and the turnkeys wear the Divil’s Engles Compleat.”    T.  Pooley

So that was that!   The blasphemer had been dealt with and the busy judge and barrister had washed their hands of him and there were other cases to be tried and heard.   John Duke later wrote of the jury and the audience in the Crown Court at Bodmin that he was “well convinced that if the punishment of the prisoner had been left to them , he (Pooley) would have ill exchanged what is called the severity of the judge for the mercy of the people.”  He, publicly at least, always maintained that Pooley had only been dealt with according to the fruits of his doing.   

To Sir John Coleridge, bewigged and gowned, the very thought that the pathetic, ragged  blasphemer Thomas Pooley whom he had seen only  briefly in court, dirty and dishevelled and in a highly excitable state, should be in any way compared to his blessed Friend and Saviour, the Lord Jesus Christ, would have seemed to be a shocking blasphemy in itself.  And yet Tom, now sentenced to serve twenty-one months in prison, handcuffed and escorted by policemen and no whit less defiant of authority, was being sent down to his punishment and any sensitive person familiar with the Christian story might have fleetingly made the comparison.   The courtroom scene that was enacted in Bodmin Town Hall where a righteous judge sent away a poor blasphemer to meet his punishment parodies an image of Christ before the Roman Prefect, Pontius Pilate.  Certainly, this judgement was for Sir John a ‘What is truth?’  moment but his faith was tried and true and, unlike Pilate, he could answer that question without any doubt whatsoever and get on with his job.   

If, for a paragraph or two, I have the temerity to present Tom Pooley of Liskeard as an imitator, conscious or unconscious, of Jesus of Nazareth I must start by listing some of the obvious differences between the two.   The Christ of the Gospels is recorded to have assembled disciples, to have been loved and admired by all who knew him, to have spoken beautifully and preached to thousands, to have worked miracles and to have been welcomed into Jerusalem as the king of the Jews.   Tom Pooley wrote and spoke nonsense and was taken seriously by no-one.  Tom could not aspire to be like this Christ.  When, on the other hand, Sir John Coleridge had once been described as being “like Christ in beauty and in character,” this was very much the Christ he was being compared to.  There was, however, another Christ recorded by all four Evangelists, somewhat paradoxically.  A Christ who necessarily fitted the prefigurations of the prophet Isaiah and who, to this day, troubles Christians who are wealthy and powerful.  This Christ was despised and rejected of men, poor, humble, persecuted, tried for blasphemy and was a man of sorrows acquainted with grief.  Here there are unavoidable similarities between the man and Tom Pooley.          

In writing about Tom Pooley’s activities it is difficult not to use words associated with Christ, the Apostles and the Prophets of the Old Testament.  Pooley had experienced revelation.   He had discovered a gospel to deliver to the world.   He was his own evangelist and wanted nothing more than that his message should be written and recorded.   He claimed that he was born to show the world how to follow virtue and live better lives.   “For I have only done that work that I was born to do.  That is to knock out all the rotten props that has keep all men in total darkness, vice, misery and blasphemy and called all men to the grave and to seek the true laws.”   His stated purpose in life was to reveal to others the will of his One Almighty.   There is some small evidence that he acted as a preacher as well as a writer,  The legal charges against him included words he had spoken in a public house and words he had addressed to the policemen at the magistrate’s court.  He was, said his daughter, “a man who likes his own opinion.”

Sir John, although he would have tried to push all such thoughts to the back of his mind, could hardly altogether have escaped the parallel.  Certainly it occurred  to others.  One of the contributors to The Reasoner was quick to compare Sir John to Pontius Pilate but the judge claimed never to have been made aware of anything that had been written about him in that scurrilous, atheistical paper. It may have troubled him later, however, that he, in all his glory, had sat in judgement on a blasphemer,  which was precisely what Pilate had done.  And Pooley had stood below him, poor and friendless, despised and rejected and he had handed down a weighty sentence.  He might have reflected that Jesus and Pooley alike were found guilty of the charge against them and both were led away to suffer, although time served in the cells of Bodmin Gaol hardly equated to a Roman crucifixion.   

Sir John’s journal entries reveal that he was given to moments of critical, self-searching and, when the public attack on his judgement finally came home to him, if not before, he would have wondered hard and long in his intensely religious private thoughts about Pooley’s case.    From his address to the jury Sir John had given the impression that he knew in advance many more of the details of this blasphemy case than came out in court.  Perhaps, if he was aware of it, it was Pooley’s ignorant and arrogant belief that he, like Christ and the Apostles claimed to have been summoned to ‘preach’ to a world of sinners that troubled the judge and angered him more than anything else.  Pooley had not needed to struggle with the question of Apostolic Succession that had so much troubled the Anglican clergy.  He, like Christ, had been tasked directly by the Almighty to do that work that he was born to do.  It is evident from Tom’s language and in part from his behaviour that he modelled himself on what little he understood of Christ and the Apostles of the New Testament and the prophets of the Old.  His arrogant “I have only done that work which I was born to do.” is an echo of Christ’s reported words, “For I came down from heaven not to do mine own will, but the will of him that sent me.“  Tom was, no doubt, altogether pathetic in the role of a messiah but that  essentially was the part he was playing.   

In 1782 John Howard, the great prison reformer had come to Bodmin to see the gaol which had been built according to his humane precepts.   He wrote, “By a spirited exertion, the gentlemen of this county have erected a monument of their humanity and attention to the health and morals of prisoners.”   Now seventy-five years later the Inspectors had declared this prison unfit for purpose and major improvements had been planned but not yet executed.  Although Bodmin had been, for the eighteenth century, a model prison, the thick granite walls gave to the place an air of depressing security which must have daunted generations of prisoners.

Tom was admitted back to prison and was written down as a Jew.  There was nothing Jewish about Tom, as far as I know, although his mother was called Rebecca, but probably, in the circumstances his gaolers felt that they could hardly write him down as C of E.   At his induction to the prison he was told he would be punished for his contemptuous behaviour in court, his speaking out of turn and struggling with the constables in order to take his daughter by the hand.   His additional punishment was to suffer solitary confinement in one of the prison’s dark cells and to be given only bread and water for three days and three nights.  Pooley ever afterwards blamed Sir John Coleridge for this punishment although the judge may have known nothing about it.    “Will or can Judge Coleridge dare or attempt to deny that he was the author of my having three days and three nights in the Christians’ dark dungeon on bread and water for shaking hands with my daughter?  When I asked him to allow me to shake hands with my daughter ‘No!’ was the answer.”  This was typical Pooley logic.  When Tom asked a ‘reasonable’ favour he didn’t expect it to be denied.

These cramped dark cells with their granite walls were dungeons indeed.  Bodmin Gaol is nowadays a dumbed-down tourist attraction and the crowds enter in their hundreds and are allowed freely to depart.  Much has changed but many of the buildings from Tom’s time are still standing and for a few pounds one can experience the aura of unrelieved misery and despair that pervades the place.       

Meanwhile, back at Moon’s Court, Mary Pooley senior, was coming to terms with the loss of her husband.   She had been at home in Liskeard since the trial without other news of Tom than her daughter had given her.  Her bad leg was troubling her and she was taking in washing and working hard.   Then she had received a visitor. This was a clergyman’s wife, probably the wife of their parish priest, whose sole purpose in visiting seems to have been to let Mary know that she was glad Pooley was being punished.  Mrs Pooley was a woman of spirit.  She was roused and is reported to have said:“Well, my husband never did us any harm, and Christianity has.  It has taken him away from me and I am left to support my youngest child and myself unaided.  The boy is now learning carpentering and the first year he is to have nothing, the second year, a shilling a week, the third year,eighteenpence but no Christian has ever asked how I am to live.  The parish gives me nothing and I have to work harder than at my age I ought and sometimes my daughter comes home to live and must be supported as well” Perhaps this was Mary Pooley standing on her own doorstep with her hands upon her hips and talked loudly enough for the neighbours to hear.  

Even while Tom was still suffering his initiatory three days in his ‘dark cell’, the star witness who had given evidence against him, whom he now considered to be the first of his enemies and whom he had now named, again, unconsciously perhaps, identifying himself with Jesus Christ,  the Reverend Judas Iscariot Bush, was writing a long letter of triumph, dated the first of August, from his Rectory at Duloe to the London Guardian newspaper.   Bush’s version of events was as follows: “The inhabitants of this and other parishes in the neighbourhood have been much scandalised of late by certain blasphemous and impious writings in chalk upon gates, doors etc.  A reward was offered for the apprehension of the writer who was known to be an avowed infidel and scoffer; for several weeks he continued his impious practice, often narrowly escaping detection, but at last was detected,  summoned to the petty sessions,  committed by the magistrates to the county gaol , and indicted…. The prosecution was most ably conducted by Mr J D Coleridge.  The prisoner was found guilty upon three, out of four, counts and sentenced to one year and nine months imprisonment.”  

But the main thrust of the Reverend Bush’s letter was propagandist.  He knew, he wrote, that there was a “large quantity of blasphemous as well as other infamous publications” in existence which, despite the valiant efforts of the Society for the Suppression of Vice, endangered public morals.  He hoped that other good men would take note how easily he, Paul Bush, had managed to prosecute Tom Pooley.  The learned judge, Sir John Coleridge, had said such cases were very rare and this had been for the Reverend Bush a “cause for regret”.   He supposed this rarity was on account of “some imagined difficulty”. “I say imagined difficulty, for real difficulty there is none  (at least I found none in the case in question,  which was by no means a clear case), beyond the expense of the prosecution , which being for misdemeanour, falls upon the prosecutor….. I cannot help hoping that my successful prosecution of a blasphemer, if made known, may induce others and particularly those who are bound to check all profaneness and irreligion,  to take the course which I have taken,  disagreeable though it be,  and enforce the law against blasphemy.” 

This letter indicates again that the Reverend Paul Bush, and probably some of his fellow clergymen, had already made up their minds that they would hunt down the ‘blasphemer’ and drag him through the courts not only in the hope that he would receive a sentence that would act as a deterrent  to blasphemers but also in the hope that one successful conviction for blasphemy might lead to many more,  But if Paul Bush believed and hoped that his example would signal an open season for blasphemer-hunting he was to be disappointed.  No others of those particularly ‘bound to check all profaneness and irreligion’, by which he meant his fellow clergy, rose to the challenge.

Tom suffered his three days and nights in solitary confinement and came out rebellious still.  He reacted to prison as though he were some wild creature that had been captured and caged.  For a while he ate nothing and very soon the decision was made that he must be fed by force.  The warders had the melancholy task of trying to stuff food down his throat.    Tom not only resisted the prison food but steadfastly refused to wear the prison dress, a suit of several colours branded Bodmin Gaol. In his own account he makes no mention of having done any work while he was in prison.  He struggled daily with prison officers, sometimes as many as six of them, who forcibly dressed him, only for Tom to tear the shameful and hateful garments into shreds and sit defiant and naked in his cell.   The authorities also tried to cut away Tom’s famous beard but he combatted this with all his considerable strength and kept his beard.  The prison officers must have wondered at this wild blasphemer who had been delivered to them and Tom must have imagined himself persecuted, abandoned and forgotten by the world.   But this last was far from the case.

Of all the deprivations which prison life entailed the one of which Tom complained the loudest was not being allowed to write.  He was not slow to ask for pen, ink and paper but, hardly surprisingly, in view of Tom’ s refusal to conform to the prison routines, this was denied him.   “And when I asked the Governor of this gaol to write a letter to my wife for to see her, this Christian Governor, -  behold his horrid shaking limbs his Christian unjust tyranny has brought him to!  - and he would not let me write after my trial.  Is this Christianity or is it Christian torture?”   It would appear that for the thirteen days and nights that Tom was in Bodmin Gaol he did not write a word, This must have been the unkindest cut of all.

Tom claims to have met  the Governor of Bodmin Gaol face to face which is quite likely for there were only sixteen male staff to run the prison.  The governor at this time was John Bentham Everest who had been a naval officer and as such had been posted to serve as commander aboard the prison hulks at Chatham.   Thence, for his zeal in the public service, he came to Bodmin.  When he met Tom, if he met Tom, he was seventy-six years old and close to his retirement and death. He had served as Governor of Bodmin for nearly 20 years so it would not be surprising that he had horrid shaking limbs.  He was said by the Inspectors to be one of the best prison governors in England and his prison, one of the best conducted.

In view of what Sir John had said when sentencing Tom about the chance of his discovering that his pretended superiority of knowledge and wisdom were the consequence of the greatest blindness, the governor made sure that he was regularly visited by the Prison Chaplain. “Is it decent to give a man one year and nine months in the Christian dungeon with a drunken Chaplain and drunken turnkeys?”  The Chaplain was briefed as to Sir John Coleridge’s expressed observation that a new light might dawn on Pooley in prison and to him was given the task of encouraging Sir John’s wish for Tom to reproach himself and to progress to a state where he repented in bitterness of heart the words he had uttered and written.  No doubt the poor Chaplain did his best but he made only a very negative impression on Tom: “when he (Coleridge) said that I was to go back to the gaol from whence I came and go under the Chaplain’s instructions, now, what was this Parson or Chaplain?  A filthy drunkard that drinks a pint of ale and a half of gin, rum or brandy every night before he goes to his bed?”  Tom was not going to allow himself to be instructed by anybody and he would not be gammoned:. “as I told that drunken Parson in Bodmin Gaol or Christian Hell to look at the character of Lot and his two daughters.   And let no drunken Parson come against me.  Get thou hence thou drunken sot!  Is this gaol the place where Christians and their poor deluded dupes (come) to be corrected?   First let Christians show to all men honest laws and honest books and destroy their old laws for they are very bad.” 

The speed with which the prison authorities came to the conclusion that Tom was mad and that his proper place was down the road in the madhouse speaks volumes as to how outlandishly and unacceptably Tom behaved in custody.   To send him to the Asylum required the warrant of the Secretary of State but this seemed to have been obtained without delay and on 13th August Tom was officially informed that he was a madman and was removed the short distance from Bodmin gaol to the County Asylum.  He had been in prison for just a fortnight.