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

by Lucy Moore

  Sedan chairs, like carriages, were either private or hired. The bearers of hired chairs had to deposit a relatively large amount of money before being allowed to register as chair-carriers, to ensure that they didn’t get too excited at the thought of rich pickings from a well-dressed client. Private chairs borne by liveried footmen, like private carriages, could be incredibly luxurious and comfortable, usually sporting the coats of arms of their owners on the sides. Sedan chairs were raced through the streets, often a danger to passers-by who had to be constantly alert for the cry of ‘Chair!’ that warned them to move out of the way. The onslaught of thundering carriages, sprinting sedan-carriers and overladen carts and wagons made London’s streets perpetual obstacle courses.

  In the early eighteenth century the Thames was still the hub of the city. London was not only the central market of England, but a thriving seaport receiving goods from all over the world. These were the years of the consumer revolution, which turned England into the proverbial nation of shopkeepers. Silks, spices, cottons, wine, porcelain, timber, tobacco, furs — all these and more came into London from China, the Indies, the Americas, Africa and Europe, to be haggled over and despatched again. Swaggering bronzed sailors regaled packed taverns with tales of Oriental mysteries and African monsters; black captives were sold as slaves to fashionable ladies and wiry Lascar deck-hands had their first hesitant glimpses of a modern European city.

  Until Westminster Bridge was built in 1750, the only bridge across the Thames was London Bridge. It looked a little like Florence’s Ponte Vecchio, piled high with ramshackle buildings, shaking slightly as its perpetual burden of laden carts and wagons thundered over the river. It can be seen in the background of Plate VI of Hogarth’s Marriage à la Mode. Most lands south of the river were still fields and marshland; Southwark was the only built-up part of the area except for Lambeth, the palace of the Bishop of London, directly across the water from Westminster. The whole of Southwark, not just the Mint, was a disreputable area, and had been so since Shakespeare’s time.

  In the winter of 1718-19 Jonathan Wild visited the Mint. He kept his horses nearby, at the Duke’s Head, in Red Cross Street, and one of his warehouses was in Newington Butts, in Southwark, so he was often south of the river conducting business. His quick wit, obvious wealth, and concerned interest made him a popular figure in the Mint, allowing him to pick and choose among the rogues he befriended according to what he needed them for. On several occasions he met a young (unnamed) cheesemonger from Oxfordshire who was in hiding from his creditors, and according to his usual practice he bought him some food and beer, lent him a little money, and offered to put some work his way if he was interested. Wild flattered the young man by implying that he thought him too good for mere robbery, and offered to set him up as a highwayman, with a horse and pistols, if he would share his profits with him. An offer like this was every young man’s dream, and the cheesemonger leapt at the chance to join the criminal élite.

  Highwaymen, or ‘Snafflers’, were seen, and saw themselves, as ‘Gentlemen of the Road’. Tales of their gallantry abounded. Some begged to be excused for being forced by dire necessity to rob; many refused to point their guns at ladies, or search them, and chivalrously insisted on returning to them items of sentimental value; others took only some of the goods they found. One highwayman held a man up, and took his watch. His victim politely asked him if he would be willing to accept two guineas and a promise that he would not turn him in to the authorities, instead of his watch, of which he was particularly fond. He suggested that they ride to his home so he could get the money for him. The highwayman agreed, they rode off together, the exchange was completed, and ‘after the drinking of a bottle of wine, with mutual civilities they took leave of each other’.[104]

  The highwayman’s traditional love for his horse was another aspect of his romantic image. Dick Turpin’s beloved Black Bess, who, according to legend, collapsed and died carrying him on his celebrated ride to York in 1739, was renowned as a symbol of the devoted love of an animal for its master. William Spiggot, who was tried in 1721 for highway robbery, refused to plead in court unless his horse was returned to him, and as a result faced peine forte et dure, a torture involving being weighted down until one could bear it no longer, and submitted to the demands of the court. Spiggot lasted half an hour with a weight of 350 lb. on his chest, and gave in and agreed to plead only when another fifty pounds were added. As a mark of the admiration of his valour, after he was hanged his body was carried off by the mob and hidden.

  This example of physical courage was typical of highwaymen. They were at their most bravely defiant on the scaffold, facing death. One of them, James Maclean, kicked off his shoes and jumped into the air holding his knees to his chest, to hasten his death, like a child doing a cannonball jump into a swimming pool. Dick Turpin’s coolness on the scaffold was betrayed only by the trembling of one leg, which he tried to quell by stamping his foot repeatedly. Like Maclean, he refused to wait for the cart holding him to move away, and flung himself off the platform. The more a criminal showed his defiance of the authorities, the more he was respected by his peers.

  Such stories lent highwaymen an allure that captivated the reading public — particularly the female side. Claude Duvall was one of the best-known highwaymen of the late seventeenth century — a heart-throb, as famous for his lovemaking (he was French) as for his wit, generosity and wild lifestyle. One of the most often told stories about him recounts how he held up a couple and asked the gentleman for permission to dance with his beautiful young wife, which the man could hardly refuse. Duvall helped her out of the coach and danced a minuet with her on the roadside. ‘Scarce a dancing master in London, but would have been proud to have shown such agility in a pair of pumps, as Duvall showed in a great pair of French riding boots.’ His epitaph read,

  Here lies Duvall, Reader, if male thou art,

  Look to thy purse, if female, to thy heart.[105]

  Sophie von la Roche, a German visitor to England in 1786, had heard of a respectable young man forced to take to the road because of his gambling debts (quite a common motivation); he was reformed, and reclaimed for respectability, by the generosity of an association of his lady victims, who had collected 150 guineas to give him to save him from ruin. In 1709 Mrs Crackenthorpe of the Female Taller mocked the fantasies of middle-class women dreaming mistily of being held up by a masked highwayman who kisses their sweaty palms as he takes their husbands’ money, and gallops off into the distance, his cloak streaming out behind him.

  Mrs Mary Fanciful, having heard a world of stories about highwaymen, has a curiosity to see one. She sets out for the bath, on Monday next, with ten guineas (not hid in the privat’st part of her coach) therefore, if any of these gentlemen please to clap an uncharged pistol to her breast, only that she may know how it is to be robbed, they shall receive the ten guineas with a sincere promise never to be prosecuted for the same. Her sister, Mrs Sarah Fanciful, wants mightily to see a ghost.

  Of all types of criminals, highwaymen most clearly fitted the public’s idealized vision of an honourable outlaw. The idea of the noble highwayman was a fusion of several different concepts. Most obviously, the accomplishments of the ideal highwayman were essentially those of a gentleman: horsemanship, courage, the ability to handle weapons well, wit and eloquence with which to disarm his victims, a certain insouciance, a sense of honour. Men of gentle birth turned to the road rather than to other forms of crime because it glorified these qualities, and allowed them to take pride in their actions. Even if they were of common birth, as most were, these qualities exalted their crimes. A highwayman could be as famous for his charm as for his bravery. Because he had a fast horse, and time to ride off before an alarm could be sounded, his chances of escape were high, while a footpad or pickpocket, desperate to avoid recognition and escape untouched could not afford to treat his victims with respect. Highwaymen also made a lot of money from their trade, because carriages and stagecoaches offered r
ich pickings. They could afford to be discriminating about whom they robbed, or to give money back to someone if they discovered they were poor.

  Highwaymen were often trained footmen. Claude Duvall had been a footman in the French court of Charles II and had come in his entourage to England in 1680. Footmen were hired as much for their looks and presence as their skills, because they were meant to display their masters’ magnificence; their arrogance and unruliness were legendary. They saw the luxuries of their masters and to some extent shared them — dressing in rich liveries, eating fine foods left over from their employers’ meals, watching balls and plays while they waited to take them home, driving behind high-stepping horses — but were paid a pittance. The magnificence of the lifestyle they were denied was daily displayed to them in all its glory. They used the manners they had learned to rob the very people who had exposed them to these riches.

  Obviously, not all highwaymen fell into this category, but the popular conception of these outlaws was such that any highway robber could imitate the manners of the aristocracy, priding himself on his chivalry and honour. One noted eighteenth-century highwayman had begun his career on a hired mount. While some came from very poor, labouring families, others came from a middle-class background. James Maclean, a country parson’s son, financed his apartment in St James’s (one of the smartest areas of London; neighbouring St James’s Square housed six dukes in 1721), in which he lived with his mistress, by nightly excursions — including, famously, holding up and shooting at Horace Walpole in Hyde Park in 1752, his bullet grazing the side of the great man’s head. He was a well-known society figure, who was believed to live off the income from his extensive (imaginary) estates in Ireland. Idleness, called by Defoe the ‘mother of mischief’, was seen by much of eighteenth-century society as the ‘badge of gentry’. The financial freedom their lives of crime gave highwaymen and thieves also brought them an aristocratically idle way of life, described in the 1724 ballad, ‘The High-Pad’s [highwayman’s] Boast’:

  I keep my horse; I keep my whore;

  I take no rents; yet am not poor;

  I travel all the land about,

  And yet was born to ne’er a foot.

  With partridge plump and woodcock fine,

  At midnight, I do often dine:

  And if my whore be not in case,

  My hostel’s daughter has her place.

  The maids sit up and watch their turns;

  If I stay long, the tapster mourns;

  Nor has the cookmaid mind to sin,

  Tho’ tempted by the chamberlain.

  But when I knock, O how they bustle;

  The Hostler yawns, the geldings jostle:

  If the maid be sleepy, O how they curse her,

  And all this comes of, ‘Deliver your purse, Sir!’[106]

  The ambiguity of the relationship between gentlemen and highwaymen was summed up at the end of The Beggars’ Opera: ‘It is difficult to determine whether (in the fashionable vices) the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen.’ Macheath sends his men off with a chivalrous, ‘Success attend you!’ The whores with whom he dances address each other as ‘Dear Madam’, punctuating their speech with polite phrases such as, ‘I would not for the world...’ In Captain Alexander Smith’s eighteenth-century biography of Robin Hood, he says that two legends exist as to Robin’s background: that he was either the illegitimate son of the Earl of Huntingdon — and thus, in the romantic tradition of an aristocrat who turned to robbery to restore his fortunes; or that he was a butcher, a profession which, like that of a footman, was common among highwaymen. Thus in the retelling of a centuries-old story the duality of the romantic idea of a highwayman was expressed.

  Sympathy with the Jacobite cause was another mark of the highwayman’s romanticism. Claude Duvall was a royalist who had served Charles II; his dashing style was intimately bound up with his links to the glamorous court-in-exile. One of the original members of the Hawkins gang was an Irish soldier, Captain Leonard, who turned to highway robbery during a visit to England to raise money and men for the Pretender’s cause. He was arrested by the King’s Messengers (a private royal force) in 1718. Ralph Wilson, tried in 1721 for highway robbery, was accused in court of ‘drinking a health to the devil, and damnation to King George, and success to King James the Third (as he called the Pretender), and swore that, if he was in the field, he would fight for him against King George’.

  Despite their reputation as gentlemen, if crossed highwaymen could be cruel to their victims. They might shoot or hamstring horses to prevent the coach travelling any further, or murder coachmen. In 1721 an old woman, witness to a highway robbery, shouted out to the victims that she recognized one of the thieves, and could inform on him; her tongue was cut out. Any sign of resistance or lack of respect could cause a highwayman to fly into a violent rage, and kill or injure the perpetrator of the insult.

  The life of these outlaws was seen as one free from the restrictions and struggles of day-to-day existence. A biography of the seventeenth-century highwayman and royalist James Hind held that ‘the virtue of the brave...made him scorn to be a slave’. Implicit in their rejection of ‘normal’ societal roles was their glorification of their own courage, wit and nobility. Ballads celebrated life on the road, outside conventional society, free from entanglements and complications. Many songs held up the life of the gypsies as an ideal of independence and liberty; the gypsies, in their turn, made heroes out of criminals, for example frequently naming their children Dick after Dick Turpin, whom they thought of as one of their own. Highwaymen were neither shackled by service, nor living off the poor, and as such they inspired popular adulation. Common people lived vicariously through the defiant adventures of their heroes, and identified with their defiance of conformity precisely because they themselves would never have dared to throw off the chains that bound them as these men had managed to do.

  Highwaymen were seen as the ideological descendants of Robin Hood. Thomas Easter, a Norwich butcher turned outlaw, held up a carriage on Putney Heath. ‘Why, I took you for an honest man!’ exclaimed the man inside. ‘So I am,’ replied Easter, ‘because I rob the rich to give to the poor.’[107] A ballad called ‘Turpin’s Appeal to the Judge’ typified the common idealization of these noble robbers, living by a code of honour but refusing to be shackled by society’s restrictions.

  He said, the Scriptures I fulfilled,

  Though this life did I lead,

  For when the naked I beheld,

  I clothed them with speed:

  Sometimes in cloth and winter-frieze,

  Sometimes in russet-grey;

  The poor I fed, the rich likewise

  I empty sent away.[108]

  Largesse was considered an essential attribute of a gentleman of the road, and it served a vital dual purpose. Not only did it satisfy an altruistic desire to redistribute the wealth of the rich among the poor, but it also secured support for the highwayman within the local population, ensuring they would protect him against the forces of law, and supply him with food, information, horses or hiding-places when necessary.

  Highwaymen worked all over the country, taking advantage of the vast development of the road network across England since the first toll roads were created in the 1660s. These improvements had made travel easier in England than on the continent. It took only four days to go from London to York or to Exeter by stagecoach. The better-paved toll roads favoured highwaymen, too: both by tempting more travellers on to the road, and by making escape easier for the robbers. While some highwaymen, most notably Dick Turpin, were rural brigands, most lived in London and worked on the main arteries leading into and out of the city. They had within easy access the large London network of safe houses and receivers, as well as a concentration of the richest pickings. Ralph Wilson described the successes of the Hawkins gang, of which he was one of six members:

  One morning we robbed the Cirencester, the Worcester, the Gloucest
er, the Oxford and the Bristol stagecoaches, all together; the next morning the Ipswich and Colchester, and a third morning perhaps the Portsmouth coach. The Bury coach has been our constant customer; I think we have touched that coach ten times.

  The cheesemonger Jonathan Wild had approached in the Mint, down on his luck, was well aware that he could transform his fortunes by taking to the road as a highwayman. He accepted Wild’s offer gratefully, began working around London, and for a time did very well. But soon he started to resent Wild’s control over him, particularly his insistence on taking over half his earnings, and disappeared with the horse and guns Wild had given him.

  Wild was furious, but powerless until he could discover where his errant associate had fled. In the spring of 1719 he received news that a young highwayman was making the roads around Oxford almost unpassable, and knew he had his man. He obtained a warrant, and ‘stuck round with pistols, as thick as an orange with cloves’,[109] he set off to Oxford to make an example of this truant. He chased the former cheesemonger across country until he caught up with him and challenged him. The young man said that he wanted to change his ways and lead an honest life, but Wild, who was determined to have his blood, and anyway would never have accepted that excuse for his betrayal, shot him, and took the body to the local magistrate, expecting to be feted for ridding the area of a known criminal. But the young man, who had grown up near Oxford, was well known there and Wild was arrested for murder. He was released after putting up his bail, ‘it having been thought not reasonable to imprison an honest man for killing a rogue’.[110] but the whole incident was embarrassing to all concerned: to the authorities, who had unwittingly arrested the man reputed to be the greatest thief-taker in the land; and not least to Wild, whose personal dignity and public reputation, so carefully guarded, were a little tarnished by the unhappy affair.