At Wapping, those who claimed the shelter of the Seven Cities of Refuge did not merely bar their doors against bailiffs. They maintained their own rolls, took their own oaths, and even erected a counterfeit tribunal of their own devising. Whenever an officer arrived to seize an indebted man, the crowd would seize the officer in turn, drag him before a magistrate chosen from among the rabble, and execute a sentence no statute had ever authorized. It was within this world of improvised jurisdiction that Charles Towers took part in the rescue of John West; and it was his blackened face, held up to the jury as a prohibited disguise, that ultimately brought him to the gallows.
These sanctuaries perpetuated an ancient pretension. The chronicler recalls that several such retreats had formerly drawn their privilege from the Roman religion; long after their suppression, insolvent debtors continued to insist that civil officers had no warrant to penetrate their quarters. The ancient Mint in Southwark stood among the foremost of these strongholds. Parliament had at length ordained that the sheriffs should execute their writs therein, commanding all necessary aid, and severely punish any who sought to wrest a prisoner from the law. This statute, according to the record, curtailed such outrages in almost every quarter, yet the Mint continued to resist.
Officers who ventured within its bounds were beset, beaten, and dragged through filthy ditches and foul alleys. A horn sounded to summon men disguised in masquerade, the better to terrify those charged with executing legal process. When the franchise of the Mint was formally extinguished, its former denizens scattered abroad, and many soon fell into debt anew. Rather than submit to the ordinary course of the law, they banded together and sought to erect another such enclave near Wapping, styling it the Seven Cities of Refuge. A former justice of the peace named Santloe, stripped of his commission and himself turned fugitive and Fleet prisoner, is said to have assisted them in organizing this confederacy.
Its members inscribed their names in great ledgers and swore mutual defense against all bailiffs. Nor did they restrict themselves to repelling arrests upon their own thresholds: they would forcibly deliver prisoners and invade the dwellings of the officers who held them. Thus did the fraternity convert a league of debtors into an engine of violent coercion. They instituted a court, summoned witnesses, and placed bailiffs in the dock upon charges of breaching their peace. Those whom their mock magistrate pronounced guilty were scourged or subjected to cruelties which, the chronicle notes, imperiled their very lives.
Towers had long been entangled in ruinous affairs. To oblige an acquaintance, he had undertaken to answer for a considerable debt in exchange for a guinea or two; the friend defaulted upon his obligation, and Towers was compelled to seek sanctuary in the old Mint. He soon removed to the new association at Wapping, which pursued its aggressions against the officers of justice with even greater audacity. The chronicle depicts him among those who upheld this rogue jurisdiction and frequented its mock trials, later identifying him as one of the most zealous participants in the rescue of West.
John West had been arrested by the bailiff John Errington, who carried him to his own dwelling near Wapping Wall. On a Sunday morning, the refugees assembled in great numbers, armed with fowling-pieces, broadswords, cudgels, and other weapons. They marched upon Errington’s house and, cowing all within, dragged West from custody. They proclaimed they were acting only in accordance with their solemn oaths, West being duly enrolled in their books as an initiate under their protection.
Towers stood in the foremost ranks of this expedition, according to the indictment cited by the chronicler. He wore a blue sailor’s frock, without hat, wig, or shirt, his face and chest blackened with what the record describes as a mixture of soot and grease. This tumult took place after the enactment, on June 1, 1723, of the statute directed against disguised and armed offenders known as the Waltham Blacks. It was the concurrence of these two circumstances—the armed assault to deliver West and the blackened countenance of Towers—that formed the capital substance of the charge.
At his trial, the facts were, in the chronicler’s view, plainly established before the jury. Towers answered that he had worn no disguise beyond what sheer necessity imposed: he lacked decent raiment, and his face had merely been dirtied by street mire. The jury returned a verdict of guilty, and sentence of death was pronounced upon him. The conviction rested strictly upon the capital offense framed by the statute against disguises. Yet, until his final hour, Towers vigorously denied that his face had been blackened with any such felonious design as the act contemplated.
He confessed to having attended and assisted at several of the New Mint’s pretended courts. He denied, however, that he had ever sat as judge during the barbarous punishment inflicted upon a bailiff named Westwood. The chronicle also notes his bitter resentment against the officers, recounting the savagery with which he alleged they treated fugitives when they held them at their mercy. A carpenter, he maintained, had his right arm so hacked and severed by bailiffs that it was obliged to be amputated; others, Towers asserted, were maimed beyond the capacity to earn their bread. He himself bore deep wounds upon his head received six weeks prior, which remained unhealed at the hour of his death.
Concerning the blackened faces, he persisted in declaring that no such practice had ever obtained in the New Mint. He admitted that masquerades had indeed been held there, stating that he had once gone disguised as a miller, his face powdered entirely white. Yet he denied having used soot or grease to render himself indistinguishable during the rescue of West; he maintained that he had worn his ordinary clothes, precisely as the other men of the company had done. This defense availed nothing against the verdict, but it remained the central protest of his dying days.
Towers framed a petition for the Royal mercy, setting forth the circumstances of the case and the excessive rigor he believed he suffered through a strained interpretation of the statute. He pleaded the destitute condition of his wife and two infant children, with a third then quickening in the womb. His wife carried the petition to the King at the Council Chamber door, but returned without obtaining any remission of the sentence. When Towers learned of this failure, he declared himself resigned to his fate, willing to depart into a place of peace from a world he had found full of trouble and torment. He then gave himself up to fervent prayer, displaying, as the chronicle observes, no lingering malice toward his prosecutor or the witnesses.
On January 4, 1725, he was conveyed in a cart to the gallows at Wapping. The crowd, in a manner the chronicler noted as uncommon, pitied his plight and shed copious tears. Towers remained composed during the final prayers. Then, turning toward the multitude, he solemnly reaffirmed that he had been in no disguise when West was delivered. He pointed to Captain Buckland, and not himself, as the man who had sat as judge during the sham trial of the bailiff Jones, adding that he had been cruelly used while in confinement on that account.
He likewise denied the robberies and petty larcenies laid to his charge, declaring that such imputations were entirely false as he stood upon the brink of eternity. He conceded that some money might have dropped from a bailiff’s pocket when the mob flung the man into a ditch, but protested that he knew not what became of it and had touched none of it. He declared himself innocent of any design against the mansion of Sir Isaac Tilliard. Thus, even while acknowledging his general transgressions, Towers scrupulously severed his part in the Mint’s enterprises from the specific accusations of disguise, robbery, and burglary.
He accounted the sentence of Heaven just on the score of his many sins, but deemed the penalty of the law over-severe, believing he had done nothing worthy of death within the true meaning of the act under which he stood condemned. He uttered a final rebuke against the cruelty of the bailiffs, then vehemently called upon God to receive his spirit. He died that day upon the tree. Towers’s execution did not extinguish the confederacies of debtors: the chronicler records that further attempts to harbor fugitives and defy the execution of process persisted. Yet this man’s end bore witness to the perils of an enterprise that dared confront the King’s law with its own ledgers, weapons, and illicit courts.