The youngest convict.
The convict transport Friendship
carried the youngest male felon, a lad named John Hudson. Born about 1774, he was
an orphan and chimney sweep, who was sentenced to seven years’ transportation
at the Old Bailey on 10 December 1783, when he was described as a
nine-year-old. By rights, given his crime, he should have been sentenced to
death, but the judge had worked hard to save the boy.
The versions of convict trials we read in novels or see and
hear in movies and on TV usually centre on a vicious ‘hanging judge’, a
sneering brute, dealing out savage sentences to innocent heroes and heroines.
While there were many, many offences for which the punishment was hanging,
judges were commonly lenient and gentle, as we can see here.
Hudson was charged, among other things, with breaking into a
house at night. If he had been in the house while it was dark, that was not
mere breaking and entering, but burglary, a hanging offence. To avoid the jury
deciding this way, the judge instructed them carefully as the Old Bailey
records reveal. Note that the “prosecutor” here was the person robbed, not the
lawyer conducting the prosecution.
The boy’s confession may be admitted, in evidence, but we
must take it with every allowance, and at the utmost it only proves he was in
the house; now he might have got in after daybreak, as the prosecutor was not
informed of it till eight the next morning… his confession with respect to how
he came there, I do not think should be allowed, because it was made under fear;
I think it would be too hard to find a boy of his tender age guilty of the
burglary; one would wish to snatch such a boy, if one possibly could, from
destruction… [1]
The jury heard his message and obediently found the boy
guilty of a felony but not guilty of burglary, and he was sentenced to be
transported for seven years. Originally Hudson would have gone to America, and he
was actually sent towards America in
March, 1784, at a time when the newly independent United States of America was
no longer accepting British convicts, but one man was still sending off ships
of prisoners who might be sold in America as “servants”, effectively as slaves.
The planned destination of the transport Mercury is unclear, but just off the coast of England, the convicts
took over the ship and sailed it into Torbay, where some of them went ashore to
get drunk, though a few reached London before they were retaken. Some were
hanged for the crime of “returning from transportation”, others like John
Hudson were merely thrown into gaol, and later transferred to the hulk Dunkirk.
The boy spent a considerable time in the hulks before being
transferred to Friendship, and was
one of 67 Mercury veterans who sailed
in the First Fleet. Hudson was sent to Norfolk Island in March 1790, where he
received 50 lashes in February 1791 for being “out of his hut out of hours”,
after which he disappears from the records.
[1]
Old Bailey records, JOHN HUDSON, Theft > burglary, 10 December 1783. http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/browse.jsp?id=t17831210-19&div=t17831210-19
Reference Number: t17831210-19: this record is worth reading in full.
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