Читать книгу Prisoners of War in Britain 1756 to 1815. A record of their lives, their romance and their sufferings онлайн

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The letter referred to, sent on by Stormont to Lord North, contained the chief grievance that ‘stripes had been inflicted on some to make them commit the deepest of all crimes—the fighting against the liberties of their country’. The reply to this was the stereotyped one ‘that all possible was done for the prisoners: that they were permitted to receive charitable donations, and that complaints were attended to promptly’. A contemporary number of the London Packet contains a list of subscriptions for the benefit of the American prisoners amounting to £4,600. The Committee for the collection and administration of this money, who sat at the King’s Arms at Cornhill, seem to have occupied themselves further, for in 1778 they call attention to the fact that one Ebenezer Smith Platt, a Georgia merchant, had been put in Newgate, and ironed, and placed in that part of the prison occupied by thieves, highwaymen, housebreakers, and murderers, without any allowance for food or clothes, and must have perished but for private benevolence.