Waller was said to have received £80 for his part in the conviction of Dalton. However, suspicions about him surfaced even before Dalton’s death: the Daily Post reported on 28 April that, aside from Dalton, four people were in Newgate on charges of robbing Waller on different occasions. At the Old Bailey in May 1730 he accused Charles Ditcher and John Wells of robbing him. They were acquitted after it was alleged that Waller had accused various other people besides the defendants. Undaunted, Waller carried on. In August 1730 Isaac Pearce prosecuted Robert Newel for robbery; during the trial Newel not only brought alibi and character witnesses, but also made accusations about Pearce’s character, claiming that he had been put up to it by Waller. Newel was acquitted, and the judge, having decided that it was a malicious prosecution brought for the reward, ordered Pearce to prison.
Still Waller carried on. In October 1731 he prosecuted Charles Knowles and Sarah Harper for a robbery on him. In evidence it was alleged that Waller had been in Surrey County Gaol with Harper, and that she had prosecuted him at the Surrey Assizes at Kingston, but he had been acquitted. The judge, who had presided at the Kingston trial, seemed to feel that although there was little to choose between the two, Waller’s character was marginally worse, having ‘rendered himself Notorious, and he having Sworn Robberies upon several Persons (probably only for the reward) who were acquitted as Innocent, and hang’d Dalton: The Court thought no regard was to be given to his Evidence against the Prisoners.’
Waller switched his operations to Hertfordshire Assizes where in May 1732 he unsuccessfully charged with robbery John Edlin and a man called Davies, who had, in the previous February, been acquitted at the Old Bailey of cattle stealing. He then managed to get two people condemned for robbery at Cambridge Assizes, but it was reported that there was some local dissatisfaction with the verdict, and the trial judge, Baron Cummins, ordered an inquiry into Waller’s activities. Waller was quickly arrested and convicted at the Old Bailey in May 1732 of falsely charging Edlin, Davies and another with robbery in Hertfordshire. His sentence included being put in the pillory with his head uncovered for two hours on three days. The first occasion was on 13 June 1732 at 11 a.m. Within minutes of being put in the pillory he had been pulled down, beaten with cauliflower stalks and then jumped upon. He died soon afterwards. The coroner said that, ‘His Head was beat quite flat, no Features could be seen in his Face’. Two men were condemned for the murder, Richard Griffiths and a man called Edward Dalton, who, it was alleged, acted to revenge the death of his brother, James. It was later said that ‘Waller swore against many, and convicted several, yet no Man suffered Death on his Account but James Dalton.’ See OBSP, 16–21 October 1728, 13 May 1730, 28 August 1730, 13 October 1731, 23–5 February 1732, 25–9 May 1732, 6–11 September 1732; The Life and Infamous Actions Of that Perjur’d Villain John Waller, Who made his Exit in the Pillory at the Seven Dials, on Tuesday, the 13th Day of this Instant June, London, W.James, 1732.
III THE ORDINARY OF NEWGATE’S ACCOUNT: MARY YOUNG (1741)
5 INTRODUCTION
Mary Young was born, according to this biography, in about 1704, and was hanged at Tyburn in 1741. The role of women in the criminal biographies of men has already been discussed; in this biography a woman is the main subject. As in The History Of the remarkable Life of John Sheppard, the route into crime lies in the youth leaving the disciplined supervision of a working environment: Young was ‘reckon’d an extraordinary Workwoman with her Needle’ whilst she was under her ‘nurse’. Unlike Sheppard who is seduced from his apprenticeship by a woman, it is Young who removes herself from the relationship with her nurse: she has ‘an itching Desire to see London and Quarrelling with the old Woman who kept her’ she left. So, whereas Sheppard’s initial downfall is blamed on Lyon, Young’s downfall lies in her own desire for independence. It is as an independent woman that, like Lyon, she is powerful. Wishing to go to England from her home in Ireland, Young casts around for some means of financing her trip. She alights on ‘a young Fellow’ who is ‘very sollicitous to persuade her to become his Wife’, and she promises to marry him if he will get her to England. The man, who is ‘a Servant to a Gentleman of Fortune’, robs his master in order to pay for the trip. The text assures us that Young had no thought of crime at this stage, but then neither it seems did Lyon when she met Sheppard, and yet both are depicted as corrupting the men with whom they become involved. The source of that corruption is portrayed as lying not in any intentional action by Young or Lyon, but in the mere fact of their independent state which releases the tendency for corruption inherited by women from Eve.1
There is an obvious difference between Lyon and Young. Lyon’s involvement in crime at any point in The History Of the remarkable Life of John Sheppard is indirect, whereas Young is directly involved. Her crimes are marked by their deviousness and their perversion of the values which were regarded as the foundations of society: the ‘natural’ incidences of ‘femininity’, such as the mental and physical weakness of women and their dependence on men. For example, she exploits the chivalry of ‘the young Spark’ at the meeting house in the Old Jewry by stealing his ring when he assists her. The fact of her having taken advantage of the assistance offered marks her corruption as much as the crimes which she commits. His action was offered within a patriarchal view of the male-female relationship; her exploitation of that relationship is only possible because she stands outside such social values. Indeed, her action is more threatening than other criminal acts by men since it depends on a more fundamentally anti-social position. This broader element is exemplified by the passages on her relationship with the other members of her gang. The gang is presented as a perversion of what were regarded as the highest ideals of the nation-state: a world-turned-upside-down. Young, a woman, is the leader, and under her the gang adopts a structure which resembles the national constitution with its own oath of allegiance, rules, punishments, executive authority, treasury, tithe and language. Its rules are not directed towards the virtuous ends of the nation, as contemporary political philosophers saw them, but to the corrupt purposes of the gang.
This biography was published under the title of the Ordinary of Newgate; this was the office of the clergyman appointed by the City of London to attend to people confined in Newgate Prison.2 Newgate was, amongst other things, the place where those condemned at the Old Bailey were held prior to their execution at Tyburn or, if convicted of a crime at sea, at Wapping.3 From the late seventeenth century the various Ordinaries produced an Account following each hanging day and there might be as many as eight of those in a year. It has been claimed that the Accounts ‘enjoyed one of the widest markets that printed prose narratives could obtain in the eighteenth century’.4 In them were reported the behaviour, biographies and confessions of all those from Newgate who had been hanged. For the most part the Accounts published until 1712 were a single-sheet, double-sided and double-columned publication which probably sold for a penny. The Stamp Act of 1711, section 101, changed this. Its differential rates of duty for broadsheets and pamphlets favoured the latter. The Ordinary at that time, Paul Lorrain, petitioned for relief from the duty on the ground that the Account was within the terms of section 102, which exempted publications devoted solely to ‘Matters of Devotion or Piety’. He was unsuccessful and as a result the Account moved to a multi-page format.
By the 1730s each Account had effectively been split into two parts. They begin with a summary of the ‘condemned sermon’, the sermon preached, usually by the Ordinary, to the prisoners in the prison chapel; this is followed by a note on the behaviour of all those who were subsequently hanged and the discussions between them and the Ordinary; next come short biographies; then there is a description of the events of the hanging day; this first part ends with the name of the Ordinary, which is placed rather in the manner of one who is signing off at the end of his involvement; there then follow much longer biographies, which are typically alleged to have been written by the prisoners themselves, and which, in vie
w of the differences between them and the biographies in the first part, seem to support the view that the two parts were by different hands.5
The first Ordinary to put his name to a publication of this type was Reverend Samuel Smith, whose An Account of the Behaviour of the Fourteen Late Popish Malefactors, whilst in Newgate. And Their Discourses with the Ordinary appeared in 1679. But it was not until May 16846 that it became a regular series as a result of the joint efforts of Smith and George Croom, a bookseller who had already been granted a monopoly by the City of London over the publication of the reports of trials held at the Old Bailey (OBSP).7 The justification for the Accounts was declared to be the desire ‘to prevent for the Future all false Intelligence concerning the Confessions and Dying Speeches of Malefactors at Tyburn’. It was claimed that the state of penitence, or otherwise, of the prisoners was being misrepresented, and that since it was only the Ordinary who had direct access to the prisoners at all times, then he was the only person qualified to inform the public about such matters.
The Account seems to have been a market leader in the field of criminal biography for the next seventy-five years.8 In order to gain a share of the market, rivals were forced to attack the Ordinary and the accuracy or authenticity of his Account, or to allege some superior form of contact with the subject, or to publish their biography before the Account appeared, or to produce fake Accounts.9 For their part the Ordinaries sought to forestall competition by publishing their work on the day after the hanging day and by warning prospective readers against imitators.10 The need for speed probably forced the Ordinaries to write most of the Account before the hanging day: as early as 1689 Smith wrote of one condemned person, ‘I shall say the less of him, because he hath promised to give me the narrative of his Life at the publick place of suffering.’11
The Ordinaries declared that it was their function to bring the offenders to repentance through confession. They were always keen to impress on their readers the amount of effort they had put into this task and the success they had achieved where others, such as the courts, had failed: for instance, in an early Account Lorrain noted, ‘I at last prevail’d upon them to uncover, and own those Crimes, which they had before so industriously endeavour’d to hide or excuse’.12 Repentance, the Ordinaries told the prisoners, was a precondition to obtaining the divine mercy which would not only ensure entry into Heaven, but also make death easier to face and, therefore, less painful. What amounted to evidence of repentance was clearly defined. Sorrow on its own was insufficient. Emphasis was placed on the need for a ‘particular and full’ confession not only of the crime for which the person had been condemned, but also of ‘all past Sins’, and from this came the religious justification for the inquiry into a person’s life history. Moreover, as the Ordinary Roger Wykes told John Simpson in 1700, ‘his Repentance could not be sincere, till he had discovered all his Accomplices’.13 All this led one writer to remark that the Ordinary was ‘as diligent in inquiring out the Particulars of their Lives, as tho’ he were to send a catalogue of their Sins along with ‘em for a Passport’.14 It is wrong to dismiss the tactics used by the Ordinary as far-fetched and unlikely to succeed, although if any confessions were made to him it is inevitable that they would have been subjected to the Ordinary’s own selection, interpretation and restructuring to make them ‘clear and fit for perusal’ by readers.15
Richetti has argued that it is this ‘struggle for the criminal’s soul’ which is the key feature of these publications, and he points to the way in which the Ordinary dwelt on this issue rather than on ‘the more secular aspects of the execution and…the blasphemy and despair which he doubtless witnessed more often than hopeful resignation’. Richetti concludes that this emphasis shows the appeal which ‘the spectacle of sinful man confronting certain death and faced with the terrible uncertainty of divine judgement still possessed for his readers’.16 It is true that the Ordinaries liked to show the lengths to which they had gone in order to bring the prisoner to repentance, indeed one contemporary writer referred to the Ordinary as the ‘Physician of Souls’,17 but Richetti ignores the importance of the more secular aspect of the Accounts. As the Accounts increased in size it was the secular biographies which were expanded and, as a consequence, took on a more central role. The historian Peter Linebaugh has argued that these biographies can provide rare sources of historical data for the study of the lives of the labouring poor.18 The approaches of Richetti and Linebaugh to the literature are both valuable, but it is important to recognize that the Accounts were formed by the intersection between the religious and the secular. The biography was shaped by the fact of the capital conviction, by the views, including the religious views, of the Ordinary and any other writers or editors who may have been involved, by the cultural tradition within which such crime literature fitted, and, because this was first and foremost a commercial venture, by an estimation of what would make the Accounts sell.
Linebaugh has argued that the longer of the two biographies of Young published in the Ordinary of Newgate’s Account and reprinted here was based on an interview with Young. This is because of the similarity between the biography and the OBSP reports of her trials, and because of the inclusion of various slang terms which do not appear in a selection of contemporary canting dictionaries.19 Of course, it could just as easily be argued that anyone writing a biography of Young would naturally make use of material published on her, such as the report in the OBSP, because the writer would have been well aware that such materials were readily available to readers. Moreover, the similarity with the OBSP does not guarantee the accuracy of other information included in the biography. Employing slang terms is an obvious way of lending credence to claims that a biography is authentic and might indicate nothing more than a familiarity with the language of the street, rather than an acquaintance with a particular offender; indeed the slang seems to be used in a ponderous and deliberate fashion rather than in the natural way that might have been expected had the manuscript been the work of Young herself. On the other hand, as has been argued in the General Introduction to this book, this does not mean that the long biography was not based on interviews with Young which were then written up for publication by an editor.
BIBLIOGRAPHICAL NOTES
Rev. Mr. Gordon, The Life and Circumstantial Account of the Extraordinary and Surprising Exploits, Travels, Robberies and Escapes, of the famous Jenny Diver, The most noted Pickpocket of her Time, Who was executed for a Street Robbery, on the 18th of March, 1740. With an Introduction Written by Herself. To which is added A Narrative of the chief Transactions of Harry Cook, And also the Gang to which he belonged. Written by the Rev. Mr. Gordon, Ordinary of Newgate, London, n.d.,
pp. 27–37: there is a close resemblance between this and the Ordinary’s Account.
NOTES
1 See the introduction to The History Of the remarkable Life of John Sheppard.
2 P.Linebaugh, ‘The Ordinary of Newgate and his Account’ in J.S.Cockburn (ed.), Crime in England 1550–1800, London, 1977, pp. 246–69; P. Linebaugh, ‘Tyburn: a study of crime and the labouring poor in London during the first half of the eighteenth century’, unpublished Ph.D. thesis, Warwick University, 1975, pp. 166–325; W.J.Sheehan, ‘Finding solace in eighteenth-century Newgate’ in Cockburn, Crime in England, pp. 229–45. The Ordinaries of Newgate during the heyday of the Account were Samuel Smith, who was succeeded briefly by John Allen (1698–1700) and Roger Wykes (1700); then came Paul Lorrain (1700–19), Thomas Purney (1719–27), who enjoyed some fame as a moderate poet, and James Guthrie (1727–46), who had also been deputy to the often-absent Purney from 1725 to 1727 and under whom the Account reached its peak. After him came Samuel Rossell (1746–7), John Taylor (1747–55), Stephen Roe (1755–64), John Moore (1764–9), John Wood (1769–74) and John Villette (1774–99), who compiled The Annals of Newgate; or, Malefactors Register,4 volumes, London, 1776.
3 The Old Bailey, the popular name for the Justice Hall, was situated next to Newgate Prison. Th
ose tried there included people charged with felonies committed in Middlesex and the City of London. The Court of Admiralty, which tried offences committed at sea, also sat at the Old Bailey. Although Tyburn and Wapping were the normal places of execution until 1783, when the regular place of execution in London shifted to outside Newgate Prison, occasionally those charged with what were regarded as particularly heinous offences, such as murder, might be hanged near the place where the crime had occurred: see, for instance, Ordinary of Newgate’s Account, 14 August 1741, pp. 3–4. Military executions, by firing squad, took place in Hyde Park, not far from Tyburn: Ordinary of Newgate’s Account, 19 January 1742/3, pp. 13–14.
4 Linebaugh, ‘The Ordinary of Newgate and his Account’, p. 250. See also the General Introduction in this volume, pp. 4–9.
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