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

by Lucy Moore

  Jack went to court for the last time on 10 November, and was told that if he would inform on his accomplices — and thus tar himself with the brush of betrayal and diminish his honour by informing on his friends — he could save himself from the gallows. Jack replied that the judges knew all his accomplices in his robberies already: his brother Tom, who had just been transported; Blueskin Blake, who was awaiting execution; William Page, who had been arrested with him at Finchley Common; and Edgworth Bess, who had been arrested at Wild’s instigation after helping Jack escape through the window of the condemned cell. Jack insisted that his only accomplice in his last escape had been ‘God Almighty’. The shocked judges berated him for his profanity; if he had been assisted by supernatural intervention, they believed it was the devil who had come to his aid, not God. But Jack steadfastly refused to name any accomplice, offering as proof of this statement to display his skills by extricating himself from his handcuffs if the judge would have them put on him. Although a man and a woman had been found with some of the goods Jack had stolen from the Rawlins’s pawnshop in Drury Lane, and arrested, he refused to implicate them, and they were let go.

  As Justice Powys could get nothing out of Jack, he was resentenced to death as the Duke of Newcastle had decreed. He was taken back to Newgate, and put into the condemned hold to await his execution. A constable trying to keep back the waiting crowd that surged forward to see Sheppard as he was taken from Westminster Hall to Newgate had his leg broken in the crush.

  Back in his cell at Newgate, Jack expounded on his theory of loyalty. ‘If all were such Tight-Cocks as himself, the reputation of British thievery might be carried to a far greater height than it had been done for many ages, and...there would be but little necessity for gaolers and hangmen.’[142] He remained utterly loyal to Page and to Blueskin Blake. In the autobiography published by Applebee, Jack adds a revealing postscript to his life story: ‘After I had escaped from the Castle, concluding that Blueskin would certainly be decreed for death I did fully resolve and purpose to have gone out and cut down the gallows the night before his execution.’

  Meanwhile, Blueskin, who had fallen dangerously ill in October (he had not been expected to survive to be hanged), had recovered. He and his cell-mate, Abraham Daval, a forger, were caught trying to saw through their irons. Two days later, on 11 November, the day after Sheppard’s trial, they were hanged.

  Blueskin, being delivered by the Keepers of Newgate, and put into the cart at the foot of the stone steps, a great quarrel arose among the sheriff’s officers concerning Daval’s going in a coach; during the disorder, Blueskin with his teeth got his handstrings off, and was endeavouring to loose the halter with which he was tied, and to have escaped out of the cart, the crowd countenancing the attempt by a profound silence, &c. But the heat being over, the officers found out what he was doing, and prevented his design.[143]

  Blueskin turned to drink to still his terror as he faced death. It was vitally important to put on a brave face before one died, as the words to a seventeenth-century ballad showed: ‘His heart’s not big, that fears a little rope.’[144] Despite these brave sentiments, many condemned to the gallows went to their executions incapable of walking unsupported, weeping uncontrollably, screaming and fainting. Though Blueskin ‘drank deeply to drive away fear, yet at the place of execution he wept again, [and] trembled’.[145] He was remembered as the man who had nearly killed Jonathan Wild. ‘Joseph Blake alias Blueskin was notorious for many things, and only famed for one, that is, in attempting to cut Jonathan Wild’s throat, which he not doing effectually, was the only thing that grieved him...”[146]

  Part Four

  ‘The fury after licentious and luxurious pleasures is grown to so enormous a height, that it may be called the characteristic of the age.’

  Henry Fielding, Charge to Westminster Grand Jury, 1749

  Chapter Ten – Law

  Although there was a well-established legal system in eighteenth-century England, with an equally well-established popular tradition of using that system to settle disputes, there was as yet no modern police force to enforce the nation’s laws. The tired system which existed was based on medieval structures which had long been outgrown, particularly in London where the centuries had effected more change than in slow-moving rural areas.

  In England’s counties, justice emanated down from a royally appointed Lord Lieutenant, who in turn appointed unpaid justices of the peace, or magistrates, who played both administrative and judicial roles. These men, like Lord Lieutenants, were usually chosen because of their wealth, land and birth; from 1732 JPs had to own lands that brought them over £100 in income per annum. Some were active, and had a working knowledge of the law; many more accepted the position for the ‘credit and tide in their county’ that accompanied it, but stopped short of ‘giving themselves the trouble of doing the duty’.[147] In 1714 only three-quarters of the newly appointed JPs in Kent took the optional oath to play an active role; still more swore to do their duty, but failed. The reasons for this inertia were manifold. Many of the magistrates’ tasks were boring administrative ones — they were responsible for the regulation of wages, distributing Poor Relief, settling local disputes and mediating in local rivalries. These duties took up a lot of time, and, if properly done, were expensive. The magistrate’s office had once been seen as an honour, a patriotic duty; but it had become a burden that few were willing to shoulder. In 1751 the reforming JP, Henry Fielding, dismissed the majority of the justices as being ‘as regardless of the law as ignorant of it’.

  Many areas fell between the city’s confused boundaries: St Giles bordered the municipalities of both London and Westminster but was included in neither — possibly because neither borough wanted to claim such a poor slum area. In addition, very few rich gentlemen in London were willing to take on the responsibilities of the magistracy, because of the high incidence of crime in the city and the onerous burdens of the duties they would be expected to undertake. Therefore, London JPs were often what was known as ‘trading justices’, who used their offices for personal gain, rather than in the traditionally paternalistic spirit originally envisaged by the system. Fielding’s description of Justice Thrasher’s ignorance and corruption in Amelia was typical of London magistrates in this period: ‘To speak the truth plainly, the justice was never indifferent in a cause, but when he could get nothing on either side.’ Law in London was becoming a ‘bureaucratic lottery’.[148]

  While magistrates were supposed to handle the judicial and administrative sides of county affairs, sheriffs, also ostensibly under the guidance of the Lord Lieutenant, dealt with the military concerns. They mustered and trained the local militias, and in cases of emergency, such as a food riot or a Jacobite rising, led them against the rebels. If a murderer was on the loose, or a convict had escaped, the sheriff or JP — or, indeed, any responsible citizen — would raise ‘hue and cry’ and the posse comitatum (literally, power of the company; every adult male in the county) would ride out to capture the miscreant. This system was woefully badly organized; until 1735 no officer was specifically responsible for raising the cry. In London the sheriff used the gaolers of Wood Street Compter as his official armed escort. They were known as ‘Javelin Men’ and their duties included marching alongside the condemned men on their way to Tyburn.

  Parish watches and constables were responsible for keeping the peace on a day-to-day basis. This system dated back to the thirteenth century and was, by 1700, completely inadequate for the needs of a large city like London. Parish laws, which included provisions for street lighting (each house was required to have a lantern hanging by its front door) and for pavements (it was the duty of the householder to build and maintain a pedestrian path along his house-front), had, by the eighteenth century, outgrown the areas they were meant to control. The laws were based on the principle that householders should share the responsibility for the protection of their properties. In practice, these regulations were far better heeded in some areas than
in others, according to the wealth of the tenants: richer householders could afford to pay for well-lit streets, wide pavements and efficient watchmen, while the poor did not have the luxury of choice.

  Every year, each parish elected constables from its men whose duty was to patrol the night-time streets, stopping suspicious-looking individuals and questioning them as to their intentions, keeping their eyes open for any wrong-doing. Constables were appointed, unpaid, for the term of a year, but to properly perform their parish duties they often had to neglect their normal business. Thus most appointees chose to pay a deputy constable to act in their place. Because the constable-elect had to pay for his deputy himself, he tended to hire the cheapest, and often, therefore, most incapable, man available. They were

  chosen out of those poor old decrepit people who are, from their want of strength, rendered incapable of getting a livelihood by work. These men, armed only with a pole, which some of them are scarcely able to lift, are to secure the persons and houses of his Majesty’s subjects from the attacks of gangs of young, bold, stout, desperate and well-armed villains.[149]

  Because of their extreme poverty, which had obliged them to take this thankless job in the first place, constables were particularly susceptible to bribery.

  There was obviously a little confusion as to exactly what the constables’ duties were, as this 1724 advertisement shows:

  Just published, The Complete Constable; directing constables, headboroughs, tithing-men, church-wardens, overseers of the poor, surveyors of the highways, and scavengers, in the duty of their offices, according to the power allowed them by the laws, wherein the constable’s duty, relating to the passing of rogues, vagabonds, and sturdy beggars is fully set forth. To which is added, abstracts of an act for preventing riots, &c.. Act for punishing robberies committed in houses. Act for preventing mischiefs by fire. Printed for and sold by Tho. Norris at the Looking Glass on London Bridge. Price bound, one shilling.[150]

  The difficulties of the deputy constable’s job were compounded by his lack of any official powers. He did not wear a uniform that would distinguish him from other passers-by, or lend him authority in their eyes. He was not allowed to search or forcibly enter any property. He could not pursue a criminal beyond the boundaries of his parish, or arrest the perpetrator if he was as little as one step outside his jurisdiction. (In London, parish areas were tiny: there were 676 in the City of London alone.) His powers of arrest were limited, and he could be held personally accountable for a wrongful arrest, or if someone he had arrested later escaped. It was far easier, and safer, for him to keep his eyes to the ground, and accept a penny or two to keep his mouth shut if by chance he happened to see something he shouldn’t have. Furthermore, the people scorned the efforts of their constabulary to maintain order or enforce restrictions. When William Vanderman’s Covent Garden gambling-house was raided in 1722, he shouted rudely, ‘A turd on your proclamation! I don’t give a fart for it!’ at the constables.[151]

  In 1655 Oliver Cromwell had set up a gendarmerie on the French model, but it proved so unpopular that within eighteen months he was forced to abolish it. The British considered their lack of an effective police force a matter for national pride. (The word police as we use it now is anachronistic; it was not in use in England until the nineteenth century.) In the eighteenth century a police force was a standing army. The French name for policemen, gendarmes, was derived from the word for soldiers, gens d’armes, because the first policemen were soldiers left idle in peacetime. In England, soldiers were more likely to be criminals tempted to fight for king and country by the offer of two guineas and a new suit of clothes, than crime-fighters.

  Despite the increase in crime, and the perpetual threat of popular risings, the English staunchly refused to form a standing army or a permanent police force, believing it would infringe on individual liberties. They believed a police force might be corrupted into a network of government spies, or still worse, a private state army. Vagrancy had plagued English governments since Elizabeth I’s time, but imprisoning beggars en masse, as the French had done since the seventeenth century, was seen as too drastic a step (although individual cases had always been punished by incarceration). Relative stability such as that enjoyed by France was too high a price to pay for the loss of freedom. Liberty was the birthright of every free-born Englishman (this meant male landowners only; women, children and servants were excluded).

  There is nothing an Englishman can value himself upon beyond any other subject in the world, so much as the enjoyment of liberty; a Frenchman, a Spaniard, or an Italian, may boast of a finer climate, a sweeter air, and a soil productive of greater delicacies for the uses of life, but wanting liberty, they want that which must give a value to all the rest.[152]

  The idea of an Englishman’s birthright, determined not by his station in life but by his nationality and individual freedom, permeated political thought at this time. The revolutions of the seventeenth century, although not (strictly speaking) popularly inspired, had shown Englishmen of all classes that their views could affect the government of their country. Despite the supremacy of the Whig aristocracy, their domination of property and law, every Englishman believed he had certain inalienable rights: freedom of speech and conscience, freedom to own property, freedom from foreign rule and domestic tyranny, freedom from arbitrary government. Although the philosophies that bolstered the position of the governing classes emphasized their exclusive right to rule, there was a prevailing belief that rich and poor were born and died equal, regardless of how fate had determined their rank or fortune. Jonathan Wild, who refused to kowtow to his aristocratic clients, and Jack Sheppard, who defied the rigid structures of eighteenth-century society, were living proponents of this new democratic world-view.

  It was not just people at court or directly involved in politics who held strong opinions on public affairs and argued them volubly. Joseph Addison commented of this period that, ‘There is scarce any man in England of what denomination soever, that is a free-thinker in politics, and hath not some particular notions of his own...Our nation, which was formerly called a nation of saints, may now be called of statesmen.’ This egalitarianism shocked some foreign visitors, who were used to seeing the lower classes cowed and beaten; but it excited others, such as Voltaire, who saw in it the realization of their ideals of democracy and individual freedom. The right to protest, while often annoying to governments and sometimes threatening, was also a cause for pride. ‘Better to be governed by a mob than a standing army.’[153] ‘I love a mob,’ said the Duke of Newcastle, Secretary of State under Robert Walpole. ‘I headed one once myself.’

  Generally speaking, popular risings were highly localized, and resulted from specific grievances. They were cathartic, providing an outlet for pent-up frustration almost more than actively seeking reform: once their grievances were aired, the rioters usually dispersed. Despite the élite’s fears of popular radicalism, most mobs sought to defend an existing situation against proposed changes. The Black Act of 1723 provoked perhaps the most important uprising of the early eighteenth century. New penalties against poaching, a crime seen by the landowners as a form of rebellion against their authority, provoked violent resistance. A virtual ‘woodland war’ broke out in some areas, most notably Waltham Forest in Hampshire. Poachers with blackened faces (hence their name, the Waltham Blacks) fought gamekeepers to defend what they saw as their traditional rights, which were being usurped by selfish landlords.[154] This situation exemplified the gradual extension during the eighteenth century of laws to protect individual property. Crime was being defined in new ways, and what had once been considered acceptable — for example, an estate worker helping himself to the occasional stag — was increasingly defined as illegal.

  Smaller risings were common. In 1720 7,000 journeymen tailors struck in London, and were forbidden by Parliament to ‘combine’ in the future. Factory workers, frustrated by their lack of control over their lives, took to ‘machine-breaking’; in 1727 smas
hing stocking frames was made a capital offence. The literature of these disputes often displayed a naivety and paranoia that reveal the ignorance of their organizers. ‘To the damned eternal firebrands of Hell belonging to Odiham [Hampshire] and its vicinity. In other words to the damned villains of farmers that withhold the grain,’ stated one manifesto. ‘Both simple and gentle shall starve if any do,’ averred another. Horace Walpole ascribed the mob’s motivation to the dullness of their lives. ‘The dreariness of provisions incites, the hope of increase of wages allures, and drink puts them in motion.’ They were a ‘sable shoal’ with ‘destinies obscure’. Because the mass of the population during this period had little notion of the future — they lived for the present, did not have savings or mortgages, worked when there was work and rested when there was none — risings generally erupted spontaneously, with little planning, and had short-term objectives.

  One exception was an incident that took place in 1765, and was described by the Northampton Mercury. An announcement was placed in the newspaper on 29 July:

  This is to give notice to all gentlemen gamesters and well-wishers of the cause now in hand, that there will be a football play in the fields of Haddon aforesaid, on Thursday the 1st day of August, for a prize of considerable value; and another good prize to be played for on Friday the and. All gentlemen players are desired to appear at any of the public houses in Haddon aforesaid each day between the hours of ten and twelve in the forenoon, where they will be joyfully received and kindly entertained.