The Thieves' Opera: The Remarkable Lives and Deaths of Jonathan Wild, Thief-taker and Jack Sheppard, House-breaker

by Lucy Moore

  The Thieves’ Opera

  The Remarkable Lives and Deaths of Jonathan Wild, Thief-Taker, and Jack Sheppard, House-Breaker

  Lucy Moore

  Copyright © Lucy Moore 1998

  The right of Lucy Moore to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by her in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988.

  First published in the United Kingdom in 1998 by Penguin Books.

  This edition published in 2014 by Endeavour Press Ltd.

  Table of Contents

  A Note on the Text

  Introduction

  Part One

  Chapter One – London

  Chapter Two – Initiation

  Chapter Three – Struggle

  Part Two

  Chapter Four – Underworld

  Chapter Five – Apprenticeship

  Chapter Six – Dissolution

  Part Three

  Chapter Seven - Business

  Chapter Eight – Aspiration

  Chapter Nine – Fame

  Part Four

  Chapter Ten – Law

  Chapter Eleven – Punishment

  Chapter Twelve – Gaol

  Part Five

  Chapter Thirteen – Death

  Chapter Fourteen – Decline

  Chapter Fifteen – Trial

  Chapter Sixteen – Hanging

  Epilogue

  Bibliography

  Extract from Scotland Yard Casebook by Joan Lock

  A Note on the Text

  A brief note on money. I am not an economic historian, so this is a very rough estimate based on my own understanding of what things were worth in the eighteenth century as compared to the present day. Although goods had different comparative values in the eighteenth century, roughly one can assume that a shilling was worth about ten pounds in today’s money, and a pound, or twenty shillings, was worth about 200 pounds. I think some historians would say that this is over-generous, but considering how much lower the standard of living would have been then, the actual value of money and goods would have been far higher because they were accessible to so small a proportion of the population.

  A shilling was made up of twelve pence (each penny worth just under a pound in today’s money). A groat was 4d.; a crown was 5s.; and half a crown was 2s. 6d.; a mark was 13s. 4d., a guinea 21s., a moidore, 27s.

  A skilled labourer, for example a tailor or carpenter, would earn about 20s. a week; an unskilled labourer about half that. When prices were high, more than half of his salary would be spent on bread to feed his family. A pound of bread cost between 1½d. and 2d. (£1.50-£2). The gulf between rich and poor was vast: some peers spent more on wine each year than their humblest tenants would earn in a lifetime.

  Stealing anything worth more than a shilling carried the death penalty. Lace and silk were luxury items, handmade and often imported at great expense; they were frequently stolen because they were hard to trace and easy to dispose of, as well as being much in demand. A lace neckcloth would have cost about 5s., or £50. Similarly, wigs were favourites with thieves; they might be worth anything up to 40 guineas — well over £8,000 in modern money. London was rich, even if the wealth was concentrated in a small proportion of the population; and crime paid, even if the penalty for being caught was high. It was worth the risk.

  Generally, when quoting eighteenth-century writers, I have modernized grammar and spelling and taken out random italics and capitals, to the extent that it makes the text easier to read.

  Introduction

  I see Jonathan Wild and Jack Sheppard on several levels. In the first place, and perhaps most importantly for the purposes of this book, their lives were full of excitement and adventure — a great story to tell. As much as possible, I have quoted from original sources to allow the story, and the characters, to speak for themselves.

  Secondly, they were a means through which I could explore and discuss aspects of the society in which they lived — its rituals and mores as well as the day-to-day details of living and surviving. Structurally, I have tried to insert my digressions, for example on hanging or prison life, where they seemed most relevant to the story; they do interrupt the narrative, but I hope the information they provide overrides the inconvenience.

  The fictionalized accounts of Wild’s and Sheppard’s lives, most notably The Beggars’ Opera and Jonathan Wild the Great, gave their lives an additional resonance: they became literary figures as well as mere historical ones. Dickens based aspects of Fagin on Wild, and the Artful Dodger is not wholly unlike Jack Sheppard. Later in the nineteenth century, Sherlock Holmes compared his arch-enemy, Moriarty, to Wild.

  Wild’s story is particularly relevant to criminal history. Fielding’s Bow Street Runners used techniques employed by Wild in his self-created role as Thief-taker General. The techniques of interrogation that Wild perfected — dividing suspects to elicit confessions, promising pardons in return for information — are still used by policemen today. On the other hand, his criminal empire can be seen as the prototype of modern criminal organizations, including the American Mafia and East End gangs like those of the Kray brothers.

  In a sense, they are archetypal figures, too: Wild, the criminal bureaucrat who appears to conform in order to achieve his ambitions; and Sheppard, the individualist for whom freedom is the only aim, the original, uncontainable rebellious youth.

  I would like to thank Georgina Capel; Robin Birley and Andrew Roberts for introducing me to her; Peter Carson, Andrew Kidd, Keith Taylor, Richard Duguid and Jessica Brooks at Penguin; Bela Cunha; and Clare Paterson and Jonathan Burnham for their initial encouragement.

  This book is dedicated to my grandparents.

  *

  TOM CLINCH

  As clever Tom Clinch, while the rabble was bawling,

  Rode stately through Holborn to die in his calling,

  He stopt at the George for a bottle of sack,

  And promised to pay for it when he came back.

  His waistcoat, and stockings, and breeches, were white;

  His cap had a new cherry ribbon to tie’t.

  The maids to the doors and the balconies ran,

  And said, ‘Lack-a-day, he’s a proper young man!’

  But, as from the windows the ladies he spied,

  Like a beau in his box, he bow’d low on each side!

  And when his last speech the loud hawkers did cry

  He swore from his cart, ‘It was all a damn’d lie!’

  The hangman for pardon fell down on his knee;

  Tom gave him a kick in the guts for his fee:

  Then said, ‘I must speak to the people a little,

  But I’ll see you all damn’d before I will whittle!

  My honest friend Wild (may he long hold his place)

  He lengthen’d my life with a whole year of grace.

  Take courage, dear comrades, and be not afraid,

  Nor slip this occasion to follow your trade;

  My conscience is clear, and my spirits are calm,

  And thus I go off without prayer-book or psalm;

  Then follow the practice of clever Tom Clinch,

  Who hung like a hero and never would flinch.

  JONATHAN SWIFT, 1726/7

  Part One

  ‘London is their scene of action; and to live in any other place is living like fishes out of water.’

  G E., Authentic Memoirs of the Life and Surprising Adventures of John Sheppard by Way of Fam
iliar Letters from a Gentleman in Town, 1724

  Chapter One – London

  In 1708, when Jonathan Wild arrived in London from the Midlands town of Wolverhampton, it was ‘undoubtedly the largest and most populous city in the whole of Europe’.[1] The city boasted a population of over 600,000, more than a hundred times that of Wolverhampton and twenty times larger than that of Norwich, the second-largest city in Britain. London’s circumference, encompassing its many fast-growing suburbs like Chelsea, Hampstead and Camberwell, as well as the city proper from the Tower of London to Westminster, was estimated in 1725 to be thirty-six miles.

  Much of the centre of the city had been destroyed in the Great Fire in 1666, and the old timber buildings had been replaced hurriedly and cheaply in the rush to rehouse London’s new homeless. The cobbled streets were full of mud and dust because of the building work that was constantly under way, which combined with the clouds of sooty smoke that hung over the city to coat its buildings and inhabitants with a layer of dusty grime. The new houses were made of brick or stone, rather than wood, for obvious reasons, and on the whole were more hygienic, healthier places in which to live; but the haste with which they had been constructed made them unstable. It was not uncommon to hear the loud crash of masonry tumbling or even to see a whole building collapsing, as the house in the background of Hogarth’s Gin Lane is doing. Dr Johnson described the London of his youth as a place where ‘falling houses thunder on your head’.

  Although efforts were made in some areas to rebuild London on modern lines, with wide pavements and stately houses, these kinds of improvements were expensive and time-consuming, and were largely restricted to the new residential area of Mayfair, which was patronized almost exclusively by the gentry and aristocracy. Most streets in central London, stretching from Cheapside down along the Thames past Blackfriars and along the Strand, were still narrow and ramshackle, laid out largely as they had been before the fire. Gutters ran down the centre of them, filled with refuse that would be washed away by the rain. At intervals, ‘causeways’ allowed people to cross the road on broader stones. The streets were overhung with painted signs marking shops, taverns and businesses. ‘Our streets are filled with blue boars, and black swans, and red lions; not to mention flying pigs, and hogs in armour, and many other creatures more extraordinary than any in the deserts of Africa.’[2] These signs might be so ‘large, and jut out so far, that in some narrow streets they touch one another; nay, and run across almost quite to the other side’, wrote Cesar de Saussure, a Swiss visitor to London whose letters home were circulated throughout Europe but not published in England until 1902. Every shop had ‘a sign of copper, pewter, or wood painted and gilt’[3] suspended over the street on iron or gilt branches and could cost up to £100 to make.

  Houses were not numbered, and directions were commonly given by descriptions of prominent shop signs and landmarks — making London’s maze of streets almost indecipherable to a newcomer like Jonathan Wild. A toy shop advertising in the Female Tatler was ‘at the sign of the Griffin, at the corner of Bucklersbury in the Poultry’ — impossible to find if one did not know the city well. To make matters even more complicated, many businesses operated under signs that had been erected for previous proprietors and did not relate to their work at all. ‘What can be more inconsistent,’ complained Joseph Addison in the Spectator in 1711, ‘than to see a bawd at the sign of the Angel?’

  London’s street names, like its signs, were exuberantly colourful: in Southwark alone there were streets with names like Melancholy Walk, Dead Man’s Place, Love Lane, Bear Garden and Maid Lane. Others elsewhere included Dog and Bitch Yard, Labour in Vain Hill, Flying Horse Yard, Soldier and Trumpet Alley, Pelican Stairs and Dancing Bridge. Street names often indicated the character of a place, like the physiognomy of a face, or recalled a local landmark: thus one would look for a prostitute in Maiden Lane, or find Newgate Gaol (actually housed in an old, but once new, gatehouse) in Newgate Street. Hogarth’s Idle Apprentice is arrested in Plate IX of the series at Blood Bowl House, in Hanging Sword Alley, off Fleet Street — an area notorious as a hiding-place for violent criminals and used deliberately by Hogarth to indicate the depths to which Tom Idle has sunk.

  The streets were filled with as much bustling activity as their names often indicated. The provincial Jonathan Wild, his eyes accustomed to the slow pace of life in a small Midlands town, would have been amazed by the city’s energy and excitement. This description of Fleet Street was written in the 1770s by a German visitor to London, but still conjures up what must have been the atmosphere of the city streets the incredulous Jonathan first gazed on at the start of the century:

  In the road itself chaise after chaise, coach after coach, cart after cart. Through all of this din and clamour, and the noise of thousands of tongues and feet, you hear the bells from the church-steeples, postmen’s bells, the street-organs, fiddles and tambourines of itinerant musicians, and the cries of the vendors of hot and cold food at the street corners. A rocket blazes up storeys high amidst a yelling crowd of beggars, sailors and urchins. Someone shouts ‘Stop, thief,’ his handkerchief is gone. Everyone runs and presses forward, some less concerned to catch the thief than to steal a watch or a purse for themselves. Before you are aware of it a young, well-dressed girl has seized your hand. ‘Come, my lord, come along, let us drink a glass together,’ or ‘I’ll go with you if you please.’ An accident happens not forty paces away. ‘God bless me,’ calls one. ‘Poor fellow,’ cries another. A stoppage ensues and you look to your pockets. Everyone is intent on helping the victim. There is laughter again: someone has fallen into the gutter. ‘Look there, damn me,’ cries a third, and the crowd passes on. Next comes a yell from a hundred throats as if a fire had broken out, or a house were falling, or a patriot had looked out of a window. In Gottingen you can go anywhere and get within forty paces to see what is happening. Here, that is at night and in the City, you are lucky to escape with a whole skin down a side alley until the tumult is over. Even in the wilder streets all the world rushes headlong, as if summoned to the bedside of the dying. That is Cheapside and Fleet Street on a December evening.[4]

  ‘Crowds heaped on crowds,’ was how John Gay described London in his ode to the city, Trivia. Fashionable women glittered in dazzling colours — pinks and greens and yellows of all shades — creamy bosoms rising out of fitted bodices, slender waists accentuating wide, flowing skirts, frothy lace or ribbon at the neck and cuffs, holding delicate squares of perfumed muslin to their noses. Men were no less gorgeous, wearing knee-length jackets over pale breeches and silk stockings or spit-shiny boots, their wide sleeves open to reveal a cascade of lacy cuff beneath, flashes of embroidered waistcoats just visible, swords slung by their sides, perhaps holding a silver-topped cane. Fops minced past in red high-heeled shoes, clouds of powder like flour billowing out behind them. Both men and women of the upper classes wore powdered wigs, but people of lesser means could not afford them. The best were made out of female hair — the lighter the shade the more desirable — and could cost up to forty shillings. Women allowed their own hair to grow underneath their wigs, or wore hairpieces, but men shaved their heads and glued the wigs to their bald pates; Hogarth’s Rake’s wig has slipped off his head in the frenzy of the gambling house. When they were not wearing their wigs, men wore night-caps or turbans to cover their bald heads.

  Chimney-sweeps marked passers-by with tiny sooty paws; round-cheeked, white-capped girls with grubby petticoats sold musk-melons or oysters, lace or ribbons. Trade in London, as in the rest of England, was seasonal and transitory for much of society. A woman living poorly in the city might follow ‘sometimes the business of picking up rags and cinders, and at other times that of selling fruit and oysters, crying hot-pudding and grey-peas in the streets, and the like’.[5] Their cries filled the busy streets, each item with its own individual, recognizable song. Jonathan Swift wrote several verses ‘made for women who cry apples, &c.’ including asparagus- and oyster-sellers’ crie
s:

  Ripe ’Sparagrass,

  Fit for lad or lass,

  To make their water pass:

  O, tis a pretty picking

  With a tender chicken.

  Charming oysters I cry,

  My master come buy,

  So plump and so fresh,

  So sweet is their flesh,

  No Colchester oyster,

  Is sweeter and moister,

  Your stomach they settle,

  And rouse up your mettle,

  They’ll make you a Dad

  Of a lass or a lad;

  And, Madam your wife

  They’ll please to the life;

  Be she barren, be she old,

  Be she slut or be she scold,

  Eat my oysters, and lie near her,

  She’ll be fruitful, never fear her.

  Street-sellers mingled with lords and pickpockets rubbed shoulders with merchants. Steele, writing for the Spectator, describes being accosted in Warwick Street:

  As I was listening to a new ballad, a ragged rascal, a beggar who knew me, came up to me, and began to turn the eyes of the good company upon me, by telling me he was extreme [sic] poor, and should die in the street for want of a drink, except I immediately would have the charity to give him sixpence to go to the next alehouse and save his life. He urged, with a melancholy face, that all his family had died of thirst.

  Although it was one of the largest cities in Europe at the time, by modern standards London’s population was so small — there were probably only 70,000 inhabitants within the city walls — that it was common for a gentleman to be familiar with a beggar. In such a closed environment, it was easy to stand out or to become notorious. Jonathan Wild would have quickly been able to recognize the faces of London’s more prominent figures. The nobility, for instance, who were identifiable by their liveried servants and crested carriages, were celebrities whose comings and goings and doings were related regularly in the daily newspapers: ‘The Duke of Marlborough, who is in good health, went lately on horseback as far as Fulham, and designs to reside next summer at Blenheim House,’ reported the Weekly Journal on 24 January 1719. An advertisement like this one, in Parker’s London News on 8 April 1724 — ‘A liver-coloured and white small spaniel bitch, with a mottled face and turn up nose, she is very fat; taken from an alehouse in Mark Lane, on Wednesday last: whoever shall bring her to Mr Martin’s at the lower end of Mark Lane shall have 5 s. reward’ — which today would only be effective in a local newspaper, presumably produced results. Individual, random occurrences were noted with interest. The Weekly Journal of 8 August 1724 reported that ‘Last Monday morning, a working man fell down dead suddenly in the Temple.’