by Lucy Moore
Blueskin’s life was typical of a man brought up in hardship on the streets of London. He was in and out of prison from the age of fifteen. Although he had had ‘no aptitude for learning’ while he was at school, he was said to have robbed a Cambridge scholar of his suitcase, and given him £4 for it — ‘so great a regard had Blake to learning’. If in no other subject, Blueskin was diligent in his application to crime. lie was ‘one who studiously took the paths of infamy, in order to become famous’. Just as for Wild and Sheppard, for Blueskin the only way to escape the drudgery, want and frustration of his life was through criminal notoriety.
Although he was described as fat and lazy, if only a tenth part of the stories about Blueskin are true, he seems to have had enormous success with women. On one occasion, he took a fancy to a servant girl who loved music, and promised her if she went with him to the Turks’ Head Tavern he would show her a merry dance. The girl arrived and,
finding him alone, enquired where the fiddle was; ‘It will be here presently,’ saith he, ‘Sweetheart, and you will have a great deal of pleasure, but you must take some pains yourself,’ and then began to kiss and snuggle her, till the girl fell in a swoon, but when she recovered out of her trance she asked him if he had done already, for she was never so well pleased in her life, it was the finest music she thought she had ever met with. After this they took an opportunity at home almost every day to have another tune, the girl thinking she should never have her belly full...
Sometimes he had to fend women off, so eager were they for his charms. His landlady in Islington ‘fawned upon him like a spaniel’ and pestered him to let her come to his bed. One night he consented, knowing her husband was asleep downstairs. In the meantime, he invited a party of countrymen visiting London into his chamber for a drink, saying that he could not sleep for fear of the ghosts that haunted his room — but that he suspected it was only the maid trying to frighten him. He asked them to buy some rods, and whip her soundly when she entered his room, ‘that she may never come again’, which rejoiced the rustics as much as if they had been invited to a wedding. They rushed off to buy the rods, and came back to lie in wait. When the landlady crept quietly through the door, looking forward to her assignation with Blueskin, the men fell on her, taking up her dress and flogging her so soundly that her screams wakened her husband. Not knowing where the sounds came from, he began looking around downstairs while she sneaked hack to bed. Meanwhile the landlord had reached Blueskin’s room, where the rustics fell upon him as they had upon his wife, but he fought back and knocked one of them down. The terrified men, taking him for a hobgoblin, ran away. Blueskin came out of hiding, and his landlord, much shaken up, told him his room was haunted and advised him to gather his things together and leave as soon as possible...which Blueskin speedily did.
Another story about Blueskin shows his love of practical jokes. He was just outside London when he passed the home of a man ‘noted for having more money than brains’, and thought he might be able to take advantage of the situation. He saw a ladder leaning against the house and climbed up it to look through the window and see if there was anything to steal. To his surprise, he saw the squire ‘at play with his lady’, saying to her that ‘he would give £500 to have her “Tow-Vow” set an inch higher’. The following day, having waited until the squire had gone out, Blueskin presented himself at the door as a ‘Tow-Vow Setter’, sent by the squire to set his lady’s Tow-Vow, for which she was to pay him £500.
‘Well do your work as well as you can, and I’ll give you the money,’ which she did, after he had performed it to her satisfaction, and then turning her smock over her face, he charged her to lie in that posture about two hours, without speaking a word. Her maid, seeing what was done, offered him forty pounds to rectify her Tow-Vow, which he did at the head of the stairs, and left her in the same posture, which the cook-maid perceiving, gave him ten pounds to mend her kettle too, which he had no sooner done but throws her clothes over her head and clasps the end of a calf’s tail into her Tow-Vow, charging her not to stir for two hours, lest she spoil the operation, and then marched off with his booty.
The squire returned unsuspecting, but finding the cook-maid looking as if she was about to give birth to a calf, and the maid prone at the top of the stairs, he thought they had both been possessed by the devil. He rushed to his wife’s chamber but she begged him not to disturb her as the two hours had not yet elapsed, because she had had her Tow-Vow reset according to his order. The squire, enraged, rode off in pursuit of the impostor. Passing Blueskin on the road he asked him if he had seen anyone running away. Blueskin said a man had just raced past him into the wood; the squire handed him his horse, asking him to take it back to his house for him, and set off into the wood after the supposed villain. Blueskin carried on his way, on horseback, feeling very well satisfied with himself.
Despite his apparent willingness to take advantage of the female sex, Blueskin did draw the line at prostitution. Mother Wisebourne was returning from Hampstead in her coach with a young girl whose virginity she had just sold for twenty guineas when Blueskin held up the coach, and asked for her purse. Mother Wisebourne, furious, swore she recognized him, and that she would see him hanged for robbing her. Blueskin calmly replied,
‘You double-poxed salivating bitch, you deserve hanging more than I, for ruining both body and soul of many a poor man and woman, whom you procure to work iniquity for your own profit; there is nobody your friends, but the beadles and justice clerks who for a bribe may work your peace with [their] masters: Come, no dallying, deliver your money, or else your life must be a sacrifice to my fury.’ At which she delivered her money, calling him a thousand names...and for her sauciness [he] stripped her stark naked.[88]
The year before he met Jack Sheppard, Blueskin had testified for Jonathan Wild against his partners in a robbery. He expected a share of the cash reward for turning evidence, but on learning that he would only receive his liberty (because he had been an involuntary witness) he flew into a violent rage, wounding himself in his frenzy, and was arrested again and taken to Wood Street Compter. During his stay there, Jonathan Wild paid him a weekly allowance of 3s. 6d. as well as paying for the treatment of the cut Blueskin had inflicted on himself. It is not clear why Wild paid Blueskin this salary. Blueskin might have been acting as Wild’s agent in gaol, or the money may have been a recompense for failing to secure Blueskin a share of the reward. Either way, it is clear that Wild valued him in some way, and that he in part at least owed his survival to Wild.
Blueskin Blake met Jack Sheppard soon after he was released from Wood Street and the two men started working together, fencing the goods they stole through William Field, one of Jonathan Wild’s assistants, whom Jack and his brother Tom had used the previous year as a fence. Field was the model for the oily Filch in The Beggars’ Opera. He had started his career as one of Charles Hitchin’s Mathematicians, and carried on working for Wild when he went into business on his own. Wild had saved him from the gallows in 1720 and Field had earned his protection: he impeached in turn everyone with whom he worked, hanging perhaps thirty people during the course of his career. Jack called him ‘a fellow wicked enough to do anything, but his want of courage permitted him to do nothing but carry on the trade he did’[89] — fencing stolen goods and informing on the people who brought them to him.
On 12 July 1724 Sheppard and Blueskin, and possibly Field, robbed Mr Kneebone’s house in the Strand, taking goods worth £50. Kneebone, determined to recover his belongings, went straight to Jonathan Wild, who promised him he would find out what he could. Jack and Blueskin stowed their booty in a hired warehouse near the Horseferry in Westminster, and offered it, as usual, to William Field to sell for them. Field went to their warehouse, removed the cloth they had stolen from Kneebone, and brought it to Wild as evidence against them. Defoe, speaking for Jack, wrote that Field’s act was ‘one of the greatest of villainies that could be acted, for another to come and plunder them of things for which the
y had so honourably ventured their lives’. Meanwhile Sheppard and Blueskin turned their talents to highway robbery, holding up a coach on the Hampstead Road on 19 July, and robbing an attorney nearby the next day.
Wild knew, through Field, that it was Sheppard he wanted for the Kneebone robbery; so he sought out Edgworth Bess, knowing that she would lead him to Jack. He took her to a tavern and plied her with drink. (This incident was used by Hogarth for Plate IX of Industry and Idleness.) Bess soon let slip that Jack was staying at Blueskin’s mother’s brandy shop in Rosemary Lane, and the following day, 23 July, Wild sent Quilt Arnold there to arrest him. Jack ‘snapped a loaded pistol, and designed the present of the plumb that was in it for Arnold, for his good intentions’,[90] but the pistol — or ‘popp’ in cant terminology — ‘miss’d fire’, and Quilt arrested him easily. Jack was taken to Newgate to await his trial.
Jack’s arrest was noted by the press, whose interest in him had been excited by his escape with Bess from New Prison, Clerkenwell. But as yet they knew very little about him and confused the facts they had, mixing Jack up with his brother Tom. ‘Yesterday [24 July 1724] one Shepheard, who lately made his escape from New Prison, and had impeached his own brother, was committed to Newgate, having been re-taken by Jonathan Wild; he is charged with several burglaries, &c.’ On the same day, the Covent Garden madams Mothers Needham and Bird were arrested for having ‘two women in bed with two gentlemen of distinction’ in their houses; the ‘gentlemen were bound over to the Sessions [let go until their trial], and their mistresses were sent to Tothill Fields Bridewell to hard labour’.[91] Only the whores were considered guilty; the men who had paid for their services were exonerated.
On 13 August Jack Sheppard was tried for three robberies. He was acquitted of breaking into the houses of William Phillips and Mary Cook and robbing them, because of insufficient evidence. The third count was an accusation of stealing 108 yards of woollen cloth, worth £36, and sundry other goods, from William Kneebone’s house in the Strand. Kneebone took the stand first, identified Jack, and said that he had visited him in Newgate, ‘and asked him, how could he be so ungrateful as to rob me, after I had shown him so much kindness? He confessed he had been very ungrateful in doing so, but said he had been drawn into it by ill company.’ Kneebone sounded more disappointed in Jack than angry with him; he had been fond of him.
Both Jonathan Wild and William Field gave evidence against Sheppard, as they later did against Blueskin in October that year. Wild corroborated Kneebone’s evidence, adding only that he had persuaded Field to confess, knowing he had been involved, in order to procure Sheppard’s capture and conviction. William Field testified that Jack had approached him and Blake and told them he knew a ‘ken worth milling’ (a house worth robbing) and had taken them to Kneebone’s house. He said that he and Blueskin thought the job might be too difficult, but Sheppard assured them that because he had once lived there he knew the house inside-out, and would enter it alone if they would keep a watch out. This he had duly done. Jack was convicted of a capital felony on this evidence, and condemned to death. Asked if he had heard he was to be hung, he replied, ‘Yes, so my great Lord and Master says, but, by God, I’ll do my best endeavours to prove him a false prophet.’[92]
Both Sheppard and Blueskin refused to admit at any point that Field had been involved in the burglary until they approached him and asked him to fence their loot for them, although they both confessed to robbing Kneebone. They said they had told Field all about the robbery when they had bumped into him outside Mrs Blake’s brandy shop a few days later, and that Field had used their words in evidence against them in court, perjuring himself in Wild’s service. Had Field not produced an eyewitness account of the robbery, and acquired the stolen items for evidence, it would have been far more difficult for Wild and Kneebone to pin the crime on Jack and Blake in the courts.
Although Sheppard was undoubtedly guilty of robbing Kneebone, this trial was a set-up, engineered by Wild to rid himself of a cocky upstart who refused to toe the line he had drawn. Jack insisted until his death that Field had had no part in the robbery, and Defoe shows sympathy to him on this point. He records Jack saying,
I declare upon the word of a dying man, that Will Field was not concerned with Blueskin and myself in the breaking and robbing of Mr Kneebone’s house, although he has sworn the same at our respective trials...But he has done the work of his master, who in the end no doubt will reward him, as he has all his other servants. I wish Field may repent and amend his wicked life, for a greater villain there is not breathing.[93]
Part Three
‘In fine, his business in all things was to put a false gloss on things; and to make fools of mankind (which was his own expression).’
H. D. (DANIEL DEFOE), The Life of Jonathan Wild from his Birth to his Death, 1725
Chapter Seven - Business
In 1717 the second Transportation Act was passed. Its most important elements concerned not transportation, but receiving of stolen goods. Provoked in part by Wild’s successes, it was the first law to make receiving a capital felony.
And whereas there are several persons who have secret acquaintance with felons, and who make it their business to help persons to their stolen goods, and, by that means, gain money from them, which is divided between them and the felons, whereby they greatly encourage such offenders, be it enacted by the authority aforesaid, that wherever any person taketh money or reward, directly or indirectly, under pretence, or upon account of helping any person or persons to any stolen goods or chattels, every such person, so taking money or rewards as aforesaid, (unless a person doth apprehend such felon who stole the same, and give evidence against him) shall be guilty of felony and suffer the pains and penalties of felony, according to the nature of the felony committed in stealing such goods, and in such and the same manner as if the offender had himself stole such goods and chattels in the manner, and with such circumstances, as the same was stolen.
This act was aimed at the heart of Jonathan Wild’s emerging empire: it was known colloquially as ‘Jonathan Wild’s Act’. Defoe saw it as an unequivocal warning,
so directly aimed at Jonathan’s general practice that he could not be ignorant enough not to see it...[But] he that was hardened above the baseness of all cautionary fear, scorned this advice, and went on in his wicked trade, not warily and wisely, as he had formerly done, but, in short, with more impudence and shameless boldness than ever, as if he despised laws, and the governors, and the provoked justice of the nation.
In practice, however, the act made very little difference to Wild’s business. After it became law, Wild merely made sure that he never handed over stolen goods himself, always sending a messenger to exchange the item for money at a place and time he had arranged. Increasingly he did not accept a fee for his service, relying instead on the money he made in selling the goods back to their original owner — money that the person paying assumed was going straight to the robber. These precautions kept his hands clean, and the worst offence he could be charged with if he was caught was a minor common law misdemeanour.
From 1718 he consolidated his control over London’s crime world and boldly attempted to use his power within it as a passport to respectability. It was almost as if he saw the law as a challenge to his perverse genius; as Defoe said, ‘good advice to Jonathan Wild was like talking gospel to a kettle-drum, bidding a dragoon not plunder, or talking of compassion to a hussar’.
During the last years of the 1710s he became the acknowledged (if unofficial) Thief-taker General, using this title to mark himself apart from his rivals. One reason for his increasing dominance was his ability to appear as a quasi-servant of the law, despite his close alliance with pickpockets and highwaymen.
He acquired a strange, and indeed unusual, reputation for a mighty honest man, till his success hardened him to put on a face of public service in it, and for that purpose to profess an open and brave correspondence among the gangs of thieves, by which his house beca
me an office of intelligence for inquiries of that kind, as if all stolen goods had been deposited with him in order to be restored.[94]
Ironically, as Defoe noted, it was the appearance of integrity he cultivated that made his intimacy with London’s rogues and villains acceptable to his clientele.
He was much in demand. ‘As soon as anything is missing, suspected to be stolen, the first course we steer is directly to the office of Mr Jonathan Wild.’[95] All this attention made Wild believe he was vastly important.
Jonathan Wild’s house about eight a clock in a morning was as full as if it had been an Exchange [stock exchange], gentlemen and ladies from all parts resorting thither, to desire Mr Wild’s interest to recover their lost things; who never vouchsafed to come out of his chamber till his emissaries told him his levee was full; and then like a Prime Minister, he dispatched all away with good words, though many of them had aching hearts at the same time.[96]
From 1721 Wild conducted his business in a large house in Great Old Bailey, but many small traders worked out of a coffee-house or tavern, as he had done when he first set up his own office in Mrs Seagoe’s Blue Boar tavern.
The nascent stock exchange was in Cheapside, near the Royal Exchange, and was essentially a group of coffee-houses that bought, sold and traded stock and information on ventures like the South Sea Company, which crashed in 1721. The hustle and bustle of London’s Royal Exchange made ‘this Metropolis a kind of emporium for the whole earth’.[97]
Lloyd’s Insurance was founded in the 1680s in Tower Street by Edward Lloyd. In 1692 it moved to Lombard Street, where four years later it first published Lloyd’s News, the precursor of Lloyd’s List and Shipping Gazette, and in 1712 it moved again to Pope’s Head Alley. The Jerusalem and Jamaica coffee-houses were frequented by people involved in trade with China and the Indies — merchants, sea-captains and brokers. Grigsby’s, in Threadneedle Street, was a coffee-house specializing in foreign news. Bankers went to Garraway’s, in Cornhill, or to Jonathan’s or the Amsterdam in Temple Bar. In 1723 the Bank of England moved to Threadneedle Street, where many of the early trading companies were based. Private banks were formed by the dozen in this period, including Hoare’s and Child’s, which are still in existence — but many others were less successful. Each bank was allowed to issue its own notes so any investment was a high-risk business: if a bank went bankrupt, there were no independent guarantees that its notes would be honoured.
