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

by Lucy Moore

  In 1700 there were about 500 coffee-houses in London, either in the city or near the Strand. ‘You have all manner of news there: you have a good fire, which you may sit by as long as you please; you have a dish of coffee; you meet all your friends for the transaction of business, and all for a penny.’[98] They were warm, noisy, bustling places, with a large fire burning at the far end of the room on which pots of coffee steamed. Ned Ward described coffee-house customers thus: ‘Some going, some coming, some scribbling, some talking, some drinking, others jangling, and the whole room stinking of tobacco like a Dutch barge or a boatswain’s cabin.’ Many coffeehouses had billiard tables, although cards and dice were forbidden, as was swearing, for which a fine of a shilling was exacted. If a fight broke out, the instigators had to buy coffee for the rest of the customers. In addition to coffee and tea, one could buy liquor and snuff; at some, even toothpastes, beauty creams, lozenges and medicinal elixirs were available. Batson’s, in Cornhill, was used by surgeons as a consulting room.

  By 1700 there were three weekly deliveries of mail into and out of London; people used coffee-houses as addresses, when their actual address may have been less permanent. Swift had his post directed to him care of the St James’ coffee-house. Advertisements were posted on the walls, not only for products, but also for a lost pet, or relating personal messages such as a husband looking ‘for his beloved better half, who has abandoned him in order to follow her sweetheart’; or another husband warning shopkeepers not to sell anything to his wife on credit.

  The main attraction of these places, however, was not the refreshments, but the news. Eighteen weekly newspapers were published in London in 1709. ‘All Englishmen are great newsmongers,’ commented Cesar de Saussure. ‘I have often seen shoeblacks and other persons of that class club together to purchase a farthing paper.’ Probably 60 per cent of male Londoners could read in 1750 (the rates were slightly lower for women), but if one couldn’t read, the papers were read aloud throughout the day. Another foreign observer called London’s coffee-houses ‘the seats of English liberty’. Everyone, whatever his rank or fortune, had ‘the right to read all the papers for and against the government’.[99] Coffee was called ‘Politician’s Porridge’, because of the freedom of discussion on all topics in coffee-houses.

  It was not only educated men such as Swift who commented on the corruption of Walpole’s government. Illiterate men and women also understood and enjoyed political satire. The South Sea Bubble, which swelled in 1720 and burst in 1721, laid bare the corruption and greed of Walpole’s administration, much to the scorn of the common Londoner. Roving players at St Bartholomew’s Fair, which was held annually at Smithfield and was frequented by the dregs of London society, put on a performance of The Broken Stock-Jobbers: Or, Work for the Bailiffs just a few weeks after the Bubble burst. In it, Mr Pluckwell, the director of a bank, and his assistant, Mr Transfer, swindle first Lord Equipage, then down through the ranks of society to Sir Frippery Upstart, Dr Sinecure, and finally Headless, before losing everything themselves as well.

  Further signs of the increasing rates of common literacy were the government’s attempts, from the end of the seventeenth century, to keep subversive ideas out of popular hands. Previous methods of censorship had concentrated on the educated elite, because it was thought that the mass of the population would not understand radical ideas, even if they were to hear them read.

  The old medieval emphasis on the church as the centre of the urban community was shifting to coffee-houses, political clubs, dissenting chapels, and reformation societies. The old system of parishes had been outgrown by the changing geography and population of London since Tudor times. In 1711 the London Churches Act assigned money for fifty new churches, but only ten were actually built. This was probably due to a combination of factors: a preference for fewer, grander places of worship than many smaller, perhaps more useful, ones, combined with the growing irrelevance of parish churches to London society. These impressive new constructions, including Nicholas Hawksmoor’s Christ Church Spitalfields and St George’s Bloomsbury, were built for the rich, with imposing box pews that left little space for a humbler congregation (A Rake’s Progress V shows the interior of a London church). Many of the poorest people in London only entered churches to steal from the wealthy worshippers lost in prayer. Charity also assumed a new secular, philanthropic air, with private, non-religious donations providing the funds for hospitals like Guy’s, founded in 1725.

  As the church lost its role as a focus for urban society, it was replaced by clubs for hobbies, moral improvement, sport or politics — indeed, for almost anything. The Society of Gardeners was a group of twenty nurserymen who met at Newhall’s coffee-house in Chelsea. In 1717 the Spitalfields Mathematical Society was founded, with a proviso that membership must not exceed forty-nine members, or seven squared. In 1750 the novelist Edward Kimbar estimated that 20,000 men met nightly in London’s social clubs. The high concentration of people gathered together, exchanging ideas, made the city a forum for political and social discussion. London’s emergent middle class was challenging the aristocratic culture that had dominated the metropolis for so long. The coffee-house was its habitat, clubs and newspapers the means of expressing its views, Defoe’s novels, Gay’s plays and poems, Hogarth’s engravings, its life.

  Because most Londoners, except the very rich, lived in rented rooms, almost everyone ate their meals in a coffee-house or tavern. Pontack’s Eating House, in Abchurch Street, was reputed to serve the best food in London. Fast food was also available. Some bakeries and pie shops had open shopfronts, and passers-by could take what they wanted and throw a penny in to pay for it. Bread cost a penny or two a pound. Food on the streets was plentiful as well, with hawkers selling anything from sausages to mussels, hot cross buns to peaches and plums.

  Dinner was the main meal of the day, still at midday for most people — a habit regarded as odd by the French observer Henri Misson: ‘Gluttony at noon, and abstinence at night.’ The beau monde ate dinner increasingly (and fashionably, in the continental style) later, thus creating space during the day for new meals, luncheon and tea, to fill the gap while one waited to dine. Supper was a snack after a ball or the theatre.

  Elaborate dishes were prepared in the houses of the aristocracy, such as salmagundi, a salad of meat, eggs and fish that was piled into a pyramid. The common man ate more usual tavern fare — pigeon pie, roast meats with home-made pickles and chutneys, salmon with fennel sauce — accompanied by vegetables ‘well peppered and salted, and swimming in butter’, washed down with beer, weak ale or wine, and followed by fruit tarts or jellies. In 1732 the painter William Hogarth and some friends journeyed to Kent for a ‘peregrination’. A typical meal, described in the diary of one of Hogarth’s companions, Ebeneezer Forrest, consisted of ‘a dish of soles and flounders with crab sauce, a calf’s heart stuffed and roasted, ye liver fried and the other appurtenances minced, a leg of mutton roasted, and some green pease, all very good and well-dressed, with good small beer and excellent port’. Henri Misson was fond of English puddings: ‘“To come in pudding-time” [a common saying] is as much to say, to come in the most lucky time in the world!’ But he was less impressed by the table manners of the English.

  Belching at table, and in all companies whatsoever, is a thing which the English no more scruple than they do coughing and sneezing. This is as strange to us, that come from a country where custom has ordained that belching should be a privilege reserved to hogs, as it is natural and usual among them.

  Meals were bountiful, and as Misson noticed, people ate enthusiastically, all digging into a central platter with their own knife and fork. ‘The goose is a silly bird,’ wrote Samuel Ogden in the middle of the century, ‘too much for one, and not enough for two.’ Fielding’s Tom Jones ate at one sitting ‘three pounds at least of that flesh which formerly had contributed to the composition of an ox’.

  But Wild, who had gained so much in importance since his release from Wood Stre
et Compter, no longer had to work in a public house among all this gluttony. His methods of business were highly organized and efficient. He received his clients in a respectable office, but according to contemporary rumours he had another house nearby which he used for meeting robbers and sheltering fugitives. During rebuilding in 1844, the Red Lion tavern in West Street, Clerkenwell (called Chick Lane in Wild’s time), and the chandler’s shop next door to it were excavated. Human remains were found there, as well as instruments of torture and a knife engraved with the name ‘J. Wild’. The two buildings were a tortuous maze of narrow staircases and twisting passages, with an underground opening leading on to the Fleet Ditch, a sewer that flowed into the Thames. A flight of rickety stairs led to a huge cellar, used by Wild as a store-room for stolen goods, and a workshop for his men forging coins and altering loot for resale. There were hiding-places for men Wild was sheltering from the law, trapdoors and secret exits to foil their pursuers, and possibly even a tunnel to Newgate Prison.

  It was sometimes called Jonathan Wild’s house, and the ‘Old House in West Street’. From its remarkable adaption as a hiding place, with its various means of escape, it was a curious habitation. Its dark closets, trapdoors, sliding panels, and secret recesses, rendered it one of the most secure places for robbery and murder. It was here that a chimney-sweep, named Jones, who escaped out of Newgate about three years before the destruction of the house [1841], was so securely hidden for about six weeks that, although it was repeatedly searched by the police, he was never discovered until his lair was divulged by one of its inmates...It was here that a sailor was robbed, and afterwards flung naked through one of the convenient apertures in the wall into the Fleet [Ditch]...A skull, and numerous human bones, were found in the cellars...the place looked as if many a foul deed had been there planned and decided on, the sewer or ditch [with which it was connected] receiving and floating away anything thrown into it...[100]

  The Fleet Ditch was London’s main sewer. Immortalized by Swift in ‘A Description of a City Shower’, it was full of

  Sweepings from butchers’ stalls, dung, guts and blood,

  Drown’d puppies, stinking spratts, all drench’d in mud,

  Dead cats and turnip-tops come tumbling down the flood.

  This was the worst of London, the stench of dead animals and rotting food and silage and waste, to which all the drains in the city flowed and where anything too disgusting to be disposed of in the street was taken. Drunks, typically, stumbled into it in the dead of night. Because of the stinking, fetid atmosphere of the areas around Fleet Ditch, they were inhabited by none but the most desperate. Some of the most notoriously dangerous, filthy, poorest and most crime-infested areas in London were within smelling distance of the Fleet Ditch — Smithfield, Clerkenwell, Whitefriars, Holborn, Fleet Street, Lincoln’s Inn Fields — and the city’s four main prisons, Newgate, Ludgate, the Fleet and Bridewell, were also very close to lt.

  A medical report written in 1838 detailed some of the causes of disease in London: imperfection or want of sewers and drains; uncovered and stagnant drains and ditches; undrained marshland; accumulation of refuse in streets; exhalations of cesspools, slaughterhouses and burial-grounds; gross want of cleanliness; and keeping hogs in dwelling-places. Most historians of London agree that matters of health and hygiene in the city had improved, albeit only slightly, over the eighteenth century, so the conditions which allowed this verdict must have been even worse the century before.

  No one knew for certain who owned the Red Lion tavern, even when Wild was alive. It was one of many ‘flash houses’ in London at this time, ‘flash’ being a cant word for a successful criminal. Two of the most notorious and celebrated criminals of the eighteenth century — Jack Sheppard, the house- and prison-breaker who was to become the instrument of Jonathan Wild’s fall from power, and Dick Turpin, the legendary highwayman — frequented the Red Lion. Flash houses were academies of vice, where criminals lodged, planned robberies, gambled, drank and whored. The landlord was often a fence, and might also run a sideline business storing and altering the goods he bought from thieves. In this respect Wild’s flash house differed little from any other in London during the eighteenth century.

  William Harrison Ainsworth, the nineteenth-century novelist made Jonathan Wild one of the central characters in his 1839 novel Jack Sheppard. He told a story, based on rumours still circulating over a century after Wild’s death, of how the fictional Sir Rowland Trenchard had visited Wild on evil business. After Sir Rowland had been shown into his office Wild signalled to his assistant, Abraham Mendez, who was waiting behind a cupboard. Mendez sprang out from his hiding-place and flung a cloth over Trenchard’s head. Picking up a staff, Wild beat his head until the cloth covering it turned red, but Sir Rowland struggled vigorously and pulled off the cloth to reveal his pulped and bloody face. Even Wild and Mendez, the hardened murderers, were shocked by this terrible sight. Through a sticky crimson haze, Trenchard saw an open door and rushed for it, hoping to make his escape, but Wild struck him hard with his bludgeon. The injured man fell through the door into a pool of slimy water at the bottom of a brick well. Holding a candle down into the well, Wild and Mendez saw him struggling to stay afloat and get a firm grip on the slime-covered walls. Mendez, horrified, cried, ‘Shoot him! Shoot him! Put him out of his misery!’

  But Wild coldly replied, ‘What’s the use of wasting a shot? He can’t get out.’

  Ainsworth also created a fictional ‘Museum’ belonging to Wild, full of exhibits in glass cases, meticulously organized and labelled:

  On this side was a razor with which a son had murdered his father, the blade notched, the haft crusted with blood; on that a bar of iron, bent and partly broken, with which a husband had beaten out his wife’s brains...In front of them lay a large and sharp knife, once the property of a public executioner, and used by him to dissever the limbs of those condemned to death for high treason; together with an immense two-pronged flesh-fork, likewise employed by the same terrible functionary to plunge the quarters of his victims in the cauldrons of boiling tar and oil.[101]

  The idea of a museum of criminal tools was derived from Wild’s ‘armoury of all kinds of instruments used in thievery’[102] from which he would choose according to the job at hand. The wild speculation that emanated from these stories about Wild no doubt pleased him. He ‘delighted in investing himself and his residence with mystery, encouraged and perhaps originated these marvellous tales’. His reputation for cruelty and utter ruthlessness can only have bolstered his standing in the eyes of the men and women who worked for him and were ruled by their terror and distrust of him.

  Wild’s control over his ‘Corporation of Thieves’ often began from their childhood. Like Mother Wisebourne, the famous Covent Garden madam, Wild trawled the streets of London in search of children or down-and-outs whose hunger and loneliness made them willing to sign their lives away to him.

  To see him, I say, pick up an unthinking youth in the streets, covered with dirt and rags, and willing on any terms to get out of his misery, to see this superlative wretch pretend charity to the child, and tell him he would provide for him, and thereby engage the lad to him, as a man sent from heaven to do him good, and provide for him; but instead of doing all this, he takes him by the hand and leads him to Hell Gates, and after that like a true devil thrusts him in: for first to tempt, and then to accuse, is the very nature of the devil.[103]

  Joseph Blueskin Blake, Jack Sheppard’s companion and accomplice, reportedly said that ‘Jonathan first made him [Blueskin] a thief and then hanged him.’ Defoe called these youngsters Wild’s ‘foster children’, whom ‘he has himself caused afterwards to be apprehended and hanged for the very crimes which he first taught them to commit’.

  Some of the best sources of desperadoes were the ‘bastard sanctuary’ areas scattered around London, notorious hotbeds of thieves, debtors, prostitutes, down-and-outs and escaped criminals and transportees. They had been the sites of monasteries whi
ch, when they were dissolved in the 1530s, had retained their ancient liberties, one of which included sanctuary from the law. Constables and marshals, even the militia, dared not enter these areas. While only the Mint in Southwark, named for the Royal Mint it housed, officially retained its old freedoms (until 1723), other areas such as ‘Alsatia’, officially Whitefriars, between Fleet Street and the Thames, were still known to be populated almost exclusively by criminals. The most famous of these old bastard sanctuary areas was Thieving Lane, in Westminster, but they also included Smithfield, parts of Holborn, much of Covent Garden, and the Savoy.

  Wild would have crossed the Thames to reach Southwark, probably by ferry. It cost tuppence to ‘cross the river direct’ in 1741 and might cost up to a shilling depending on how far downriver or upriver the destination was, and how seaworthy or crowded the boat. On land there were two forms of transport, apart from walking: the coach, either private or hackney, and the sedan chair. In London in 1739 there were nearly 2,500 private carriages, and just over 1,000 hired carriages, their iron-bound wheels clattering noisily over the cobbled streets. Some thoroughfares had post-and-rail fences separating pedestrian traffic from horse-drawn vehicles but many more did not

  A man of importance would have owned a coach-and-six, with liveried footmen clinging precariously on to its swaying back, or might drive himself through St James’s Park in an open chaise, drawn by two prancing steeds, the better to bow graciously and skilfully at ladies. One of Wild’s first purchases once he had achieved the wealth and importance he desired was a coach-and-six. The rest of the population had to settle for a seat in a hackney coach, the eighteenth-century equivalent of a black taxi. These cost 1s. 6d. for an hour’s hire, and the same for a journey of average distance, say from Royal Exchange to Drury Lane, and were far less comfortable than a private carriage. They were dark and musty inside, their windows blocked up with perforated tin to keep the mud of the streets from splashing on to the passengers, and the drivers were notoriously truculent and aggressive about fares. Competitive between each other, too, to judge by a description in the Spectator: ‘the coachmen make signs with their fingers as they drive by each other, to intimate how much they have got that day’. Roads were rough and uneven, and most carriages, even the best-made and most expensive, were badly sprung. The blue stocking Elizabeth Montagu, shaken by her travels, began ‘to think ‘from my frequent overturns a bone-setter a necessary part of my equipage’.