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

by Lucy Moore

  Wild was always quick to make an example of any villain who thought he could get away with not working for him. One such was John James, a successful highwayman, who, working with his partner Nathaniel Hawes, had been able to support very comfortably a wife, three children and two mistresses. Wild clearly had no option but to get rid of him; it would never have done for the highwaymen who worked for him to see how rich they could be if they didn’t have to share their profits with him. Therefore he had persuaded Hawes to inform on James and had secured a warrant for his arrest. Bursting through the door of John James’s lodgings in Monmouth Street with the warrant, Wild surprised the outlaw in bed with one of his mistresses.

  Another highwayman Wild apparently hunted down successfully was Benjamin Child. Like many of his peers, he was known for his womanizing, gambling and drinking, but he seems also to have been genuinely concerned with the plight of others. On one occasion he freed all the debtors in Salisbury gaol with profits he had made from his robberies. According to his biographer, he made a fortune from his career in crime despite his expenditures: he was reported to have left over £10,000 in his will. Wild was desperate to have the honour of being the man to bring him to justice because he knew the government wanted him caught: Child’s actions highlighted the injustice endemic in English society, and his presence encouraged an attitude of defiance.[111] It is not known whether or not Wild actually had a hand in his arrest, but John Hawkins, another highwayman later hanged by Wild, swore he would be avenged on the man who had impeached Child; many believed that man to be Wild.

  From 1718 Wild cleared London of all the major gangs working there, either appropriating their members into his Corporation, or making examples of them by sending them to the gallows. He was responsible for the breaking-up of William Spiggott’s gang of eight highwaymen, of John Hawkins’s gang of six, and Shaw’s and Carrick’s gangs of about fifteen footpads each. A measure of his control over London’s criminal population was the fact that there were no arrests of highwaymen from 1723 until his death. It was no wonder that his power was unchallenged by any other thief-taker, or that his assumed authority was not squashed by the state, because he was in fact ridding the city of the gangs that had terrorized it for the previous few years.

  Wild’s control extended beyond London, but it is unclear whether an arrest in a provincial town, credited to him, would have been carried out by him in person, or by one of his agents. He was responsible in some way for capturing criminals in Bristol, Portsmouth, Oxford, Maidstone, Gravesend, Dover and Southampton. Arrests in port towns were usually of returned transportees who had not served out the seven or fourteen years in America to which they had been sentenced.

  The 1719 Transportation Act increased Wild’s control over the men and women who worked for him. The government extended the system of rewards to include £40 to anyone who could discover and convict a returned transportee. Thus Wild, who previously had indebted people to him only by playing on their poverty or fear, was able to wield his power over a new group of criminals. As well as debtors such as the cheesemonger, who depended on him to live, he had a new set of desperate runaways who depended on him, quite literally, for their lives. Felons who had been transported and returned illegally to England already had experience working in crime, having been tried and convicted of at least one offence, but could not begin an honest life because they had to hide from the law. If they were caught by the authorities — or were given up to them — their lives were forfeit. Working for a man like Wild was their only means of survival because they could remain underground, unnoticed; but Wild could turn them in whenever he pleased, maybe to make an example of them to their peers, or perhaps merely to claim the reward. To him, they were disposable assets, to be used to increase his power and discarded when they were no longer needed.

  The two exceptions were Quilt Arnold and Abraham Mendez, Wild’s closest associates. Respectively Clerk of the Northern Road and Clerk of the Western Road (theoretically to control crime on the main arteries into and out of London; in reality, they patrolled these areas as thieves themselves), Wild depended heavily on both men. They acted as deputies when Wild was unavailable, and accompanied him as strong-arm bodyguards when he was on a dangerous thief-taking mission.

  Wild’s very public assistance to the government in its ineffectual fight against crime, by preying on men and women whose last resort was the life of dependence and parasitism that Wild offered, only enhanced his reputation as a master thief-taker. His ostensible service to the public disguised his lust for power.

  And thus by taking some of his own gang now and then, because they disobliged him, and apprehending others because they were not part of his gang, and hanging them...he was reckoned a very useful man, and was often called upon by the court to look at the prisoners, and give them characters [references]; which seemed to have great weight at the time.[112]

  The authority with which Wild was credited by the courts greatly enhanced his fame, both among his clients and among the criminals. He is mentioned frequently in the popular published accounts of trials, either giving evidence against men he had decided to sacrifice or defending his loyal servants. Wild let it be known that he was on terms of intimacy with London’s magistrates, often leaving word at his office that if anyone called for him, he could be found in such-and-such a tavern with Justice So-and-so.

  Wild was a past master in the art of self-promotion, creating an image that appealed at once to the respectable middle and upper classes who relied on him to restore their stolen property to them, and to the members of London’s criminal underworld who were effectively his servants. He was close not only to justices of the peace, but also to the officials at London’s prisons. The Ordinary, or chaplain, of Newgate, as a perk of his job was entitled to publish very popular and very profitable first-hand descriptions of the last days of condemned men — many of whom had been brought to their end by Wild. These accounts showed Wild as a determined thief-taker who always got his man.

  By 1720 Wild had become a celebrity. He was recognized wherever he went. For the first time newspapers were now being read by a broad section of London’s society, and they contributed immeasurably to Wild’s fame and success by portraying him in a positive light. Not only did his use of advertisements keep his name in the news, but his movements were also frequently reported by the London daily and weekly papers, just like those of the aristocracy. His successes were celebrated, and he lost no opportunity to announce them to the world at large.

  On Sunday morning, Mr Jonathan Wild had apprehended a gang of about ten persons in Southwark, supposed to be guilty of several robberies on the highway; they were examined before Justice Machen, Marshal of the King’s Bench, and most of them committed to the county gaol.[113]

  Grub Street was the centre of London’s newspaper and broadsheet publishing. In his ‘Letter to a Young Poet’, Jonathan Swift wrote, ‘Everyone knows, Grub Street is a market for small-ware in wit, and as necessary considering the usual purgings of the human brain, as the nose is upon a man’s face.’ Henry Fielding, like Swift, looked down on Grub Street and its populist attitude towards literature, reflecting the new power and self-confidence of the urban middle class: he said the world of letters as epitomized by Grub Street was becoming ‘a democracy, or rather a downright anarchy’.

  The term ‘hack’ originated in this period, derived from the verb to hack, or to turn hackney or prostitute, ‘to traffic commercially in something fundamentally admirable, and thus to sully it’. Grub Street was seen as a corrupting influence on literature, doing for the art of writing what prostitution did for sex. One writer decried Grub Street as ‘Thou fruitful nursery of tow’ring genius!’, using the word ‘nursery’ deliberately: it was common slang terminology for a brothel.[114]

  Johnson’s description of his friend, the notorious Richard Savage, could be applied just as easily to some hacks today:

  He spent his time in mean expedients and tormenting suspense, living for the gr
eatest part in fear of prosecutions from his creditors, and consequently skulking in obscure parts of the town, of which he was no stranger to the remotest corners. But wherever he came, his address secured him friends, whom his necessities soon alienated; so that he had, perhaps, a more numerous acquaintance than any man ever before attained, there being scarcely any person, eminent on any account, to whom he was not known, or whose character he was not, in some degree, able to delineate. To the acquisition of this extensive acquaintance every circumstance of his life contributed. He excelled in the arts of conversation, and therefore willingly practised them. He had seldom any home, or even a lodging in which he could be private; and therefore was driven into public houses for the common conveniences and supports of nature. He was always ready to comply with every invitation, having no employment to withhold him, and often no money to provide for himself; and, by dining with one company, he never failed to obtain an introduction into another. Thus dissipated was his life, and thus casual was his subsistence; yet did not the distinction of his views hinder him from reflection, nor the uncertainty of his condition depress his gaiety.

  Despite the harshness of this judgement and the image the name ‘Grub Street’ conjures up, it was in parts at least a vital industry. It nurtured writers such as Defoe and Swift, who wrote for a middle-class London market enjoying for the first time its own literature and philosophy independent of the elitist world of court and aristocracy. Much of the new literature was based on crime, and Wild was in an ideal position to benefit from this contemporary fascination with criminals and their world.

  He also used his appearance to augment his authority in the eyes of the public. Defoe described the figure Wild cut at the height of his power: ‘He now became very eminent in his profession of thief-catching, and made a considerable figure in the world, having a silver mounted sword, and a footman at his heels, and scarce an Assize passed but Jonathan slew his man.’ This sword, a remnant of his days with Hitchin, was a symbol of nobility. Members of the middle classes who aspired to leave their humble backgrounds behind them wore swords to signify their gentility.

  Another similar manifestation of the social aspirations of the lower classes was their insistence on fighting duels. The Westminster Journal reported in 1735 that a duel had been fought

  behind Montagu House between two journeyman laceweavers...One of the parties discharged his pistol, the ball from which took away part of the sleeve of his antagonist’s coat, and then like a man of courage without waiting for the fire being returned made the best of his way off the field. The quarrel began at a public house about the mode of cooking a dish of sprats, one insisting on having them fried and the other on having them boiled. With the assistance of some friends, the sum of 3s. was raised to procure the use of pistols to decide this important contest.

  As late as 1812, Lord Chief Justice Ellenborough, fed up with dealing with cases involving merchants and tradesmen challenging each other to duels, announced that ‘really it was high time to stop this spurious chivalry of the counting-house and counter’.[115]

  Wild’s weapons served a dual purpose, adding to his image both as a ruthless catcher of ruffians who would stop at nothing to capture his quarry, and as a man of style and gentility.

  The people had a notion that his presence frightened away the thieves; and, to countenance this belief, he went doubly and trebly armed, and often wore armour under his clothes, which he took care to show in all companies; being attended by three or four, and sometimes half a dozen, terrible looking fellows by way of garde du corps.[116]

  Wild went often to fairs with his entourage, conducting business and displaying himself to the criminals who congregated at them. Fairs (cf. Hogarth’s Southwark Fair) were well known as centres for distribution of stolen goods and meeting places for criminals. Amid the ‘coffee-houses, taverns, eating houses, music shops, buildings for the exhibitions of drolls, puppet shows...mountebanks, wild beasts, monsters, giants, rope dancers, etc.’[117] roamed an indiscriminate gathering of thieves, whores, receivers, swindlers and outlaws, all alert to the opportunity that might present itself at any moment. The hawkers, acrobats, jugglers, quacks and clowns provided a colourful background for this activity. Cesar de Saussure visited St Bartholomew’s Fair, at Smithfield, but didn’t enjoy it much. ‘The noise and uproar is so continuous and overwhelming, besides which you run a perpetual risk of being crushed to death, and also of being robbed.’ May Fair, which took place annually between Piccadilly and Oxford Road (now Oxford Street), was banned in 1708 because of the ‘drunkenness, fornication, gaming and lewdness’ that occurred at it.[118]

  Wild was seen everywhere, at races, fights, conducting business at coffee-houses, watching the opening of Parliament, as well as at fairs. He attended the hanging of the Waltham Blacks at Reading in 1723, although he had played no part in the capture of any of the miscreants. His connection with the Blacks was probably limited to an involvement with the black market trade in venison in London, although one of the Blacks, Aaron Maddocks, was known by the nickname Wild’s Man’, because he had worked for Wild in London before joining a band of maverick poachers in Enfield.

  Wild always carried a silver baton on these expeditions, ‘to gain credit with the ignorant multitude’,[119] which he claimed represented the authority he had been invested with by the government. The City Marshals (like Hitchin) carried similar silver maces; Wild’s appropriation of this symbol of power is evidence not only of his ambition but also of his arrogant egotism. His success was due in part to his creation of ‘a public persona as servant of the state’ despite his continuing private status.[120] His assumption of this official role, and his image as a government-sanctioned thief-taker, only made it more difficult for the state to challenge his authority or try to curb his ever-growing dominion.

  Chapter Eight – Aspiration

  But Wild was not wholly content with his unofficial role as ‘Thief-taker General’. Although he had virtual immunity from the law because the service he provided was considered so valuable, his achievements had not been officially recognized. In 1720 he was consulted by the Privy Council about the increase of crime in London. Wild, hoping to augment the income he derived from thief-taking, suggested that the government offer higher rewards to those who turned in wanted criminals. The Council duly instituted a temporary £100 reward for villains apprehended within the London area.

  Although Wild benefited economically from this new measure, he still had not been singled out for what he liked to portray as his service to London society. What he wanted above all was professional recognition and social acceptance. In order to accomplish this aim, Wild applied for the Freedom of the City of London late in 1723. He claimed admission because ‘Your petitioner has been at great trouble and charge in apprehending and convicting divers felons...[and] has never received any reward or gratuity for his service.’ His application got as far as a reading in front of the Court of Aldermen on 2 January 1724 but was finally refused, with no reason given.

  Wild, undeterred, continued to aspire to bourgeois respectability. He insisted that the work he did was for the benefit of society rather than himself. Is it not possible, he would ask, that a man can serve his country without suspicion? Did not the number of arrests and deaths he had brought about prove his worth to society? Was his office not the only place to go to recover stolen property? Did he not as often as not refuse to accept a fee for the service he provided? His air of injured innocence when he was accused was part of the front of respectability he assumed hoping that, one day, others would accept it.

  Lord Chesterfield, one of Wild’s clients, called him deliciae sui temporis, but had reservations about the manner in which he conducted business:

  His levee was crowded with personages of the first rank, who never regretted any expense or imposition that gave them the opportunity of paying court to so illustrious a man. Jonathan was a merry facetious fellow, had a very dextrous volubility of speech, yet received them rather with an
awkward familiarity, than with that submission and civility which he owed to his superiors.

  Wild ‘kept a country house [in Dulwich], dressed well, and in company affected an air of grandeur’.[121] In the eighteenth century, for a tradesman — for presumably that is how Wild hoped to pass himself off — to own a country house was the first step towards gradual infiltration of the rural gentry and, eventually, he hoped, the aristocracy. A merchant’s children would be brought up as the children of a gentleman were, in the country, educated at the same schools, wearing the same clothes, reading the same books; and with the added attraction of a vast fortune might marry well. This tradition of accessibility to the upper echelons of society, usually over a few generations, was well established in England and it was a far easier ladder to climb there than elsewhere in Europe at that time. Defoe quipped,