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

by Lucy Moore

  The next issue of the paper, on 5 August, carried the following report:

  We hear from West-Haddon, in this county, that on Thursday and Friday last a great number of people being assembled there, in order to play a football match, soon after meeting formed themselves into a tumultuous mob, and pulled up and burned the fences designed for the enclosure of that field, and did other considerable damage.

  This rising was probably planned, with the advertisement a prearranged signal; but it is typical of many others in that it was merely a demonstration that dispersed once its goal had been achieved. The reference to ‘gentlemen players’ in the initial announcement shows the aspirations of the protesters to gentle status — and thus, to the right to have their opinions heard. The social ambitions that marked these rioters were manifest also in Jonathan Wild’s yearnings for respectability and acceptance by his betters.

  Popular risings were part of a long-standing tradition in England, dating back to the Middle Ages. As was the case in many medieval rebellions, eighteenth-century mobs were often manipulated by powerful individuals to further their own ends. The Duke of Newcastle’s remark about having headed a mob is significant not only because it shows the aristocracy’s paternalistic pride in the courage and determination of the English lower classes, but also because he implies he used the force of a mob for his own purposes.

  London was considered by contemporaries to be one of the most volatile cities in Europe in the eighteenth century. It was ‘an insecure city where King Mob might at any time resume his reign after the briefest interregnum’.[155] But for all the terror the idea of a riot could inspire, the English ruling classes steadfastly refused to control the country by instituting methods that would endanger the traditional freedoms on which the nation prided itself, and which it believed were making England great.

  Throughout the seventeenth century England had been weakened by civil war; diplomatically, she was still less powerful than France or Spain in the early eighteenth century, but both politically and commercially was emerging as an important force on the world stage. The eighteenth century was dominated by images of England’s greatness: ‘Rule Britannia’ and ‘God Save the King’ were written, as were the songs ‘The Old Roast Beef of England’, Fielding’s oral version of Hogarth’s 1748 painting of The Gate of Calais, and ‘Hearts of Oak’. César de Saussure thought there was no nation ‘more prejudiced in their own favour than the British people’.

  The English were a ‘self-conscious nation, openly proud of their virtues and secretly fascinated by their vices’.[156] They saw their virtues as solid good sense, independence, industriousness and honesty. ‘As they have in all times been fond of liberty, they can’t bear constraint. They are not given to talking, but when they speak, ’tis not so much to flatter a great man as to tell the truth,’ wrote Baron Muralt in 1726. Seven years earlier, his countryman, Henri Misson, had agreed. ‘The idea of the English is that civility (unlike on the continent) does not consist wholly of these outward shows, which very often are hypocritical and deceitful.’ It is hardly surprising that the books of both Muralt and Misson, when published in England, were bestsellers.

  England was the plucky, dogged defender of freedom, a David to the continental Goliaths of the Bourbon and Habsburg dynasties, who oppressed their peoples through a combination of ‘popery and wooden shoes’. The French reply to this taunt was that they were ‘as happy in their wooden shoes, as our people [the English] are with their luxury and drunkenness’.[157] While Hogarth saw the English vices — a love of drinking, gambling and a preoccupation with violence and cruelty — as qualities that degraded them, many of his contemporaries took a perverse pride in them. Ironically, while the English prided themselves on their dissolution (‘the ordinary amusements of the English are wine, women and dice, or, in a word, debauchery’), they believed that the source of their depravity was foreign. Hogarth’s scathing portrayal of the country’s aristocracy’s preoccupation with Italian paintings, French cooks, fencing teachers and dancing masters, and German musicians reveals his disdain for the continental fashions that corrupted the native virtues of the English (cf. The Rake’s Levee). Despite this fascination with European fashions, the English remained unashamed of their jingoism. César de Saussure was frequently splattered with mud as he walked the streets of London, and called ‘French Dog!’ He must have been consoled by the fact that it was the elegance of his attire that marked him out from the crowd.

  Their liberty entitled Englishmen ‘to be as wicked as we think fit’;[158] Misson believed that ‘the excessive clemency of English laws gave room for abundance of ill actions that would not else be committed...There is much less danger in being wicked at London than at Paris.’ Despite this light-hearted view of the English legal system, there was a great deal of pride in the nation’s laws. England was ‘not an arbitrary tyranny, but a land governed by a known and rational constitution’.[159] Laws had developed over the centuries according to the rights of its subjects, unlike in the autocratic governments of the European ancien régimes. They depended on trial by jury; other states, whose justice systems were based on Roman law, depended instead on autocratic control. The law was the ‘cornerstone of English liberty’;[160] and on this foundation rested the tenet that a police force would infringe on the personal liberty of England’s citizens.

  One of the great drawbacks of the parish system of watches was that it was completely separate from the county justice system of magistrates and sheriffs. Because there was no centralized form of policing, and the structures that existed were so appallingly inefficient, other, more rudimentary means of detecting and catching criminals were used. It was considered the duty of the victim of a crime to bring the perpetrator to justice, from apprehending the villain, to taking him to court and prosecuting him. Every man was responsible for the protection of his own property. If he needed help he could raise a ‘hue and cry’ and summon the sheriff’s forces. He could hire a lawyer, but many people preferred to plead their own cases — that is, if the matter got to court at all. It was very expensive to bring a case to court, and until the 1750s neither witnesses nor prosecutors were repaid the costs of their involvement in a trial. The accused also had to pay for the privilege of being charged with a crime, a higher rate for pleading not guilty, and again when he was either convicted or acquitted. Going to court did not benefit the prosecutor, who might pay more in legal fees and loss of business during a trial than he had lost initially; nor the accused, who would not want to go to gaol if he was convicted but did not want to lose money defending his case even if he was innocent; nor the constable, who might be accused of wrongful arrest. If the matter could be settled out of court — as the young Jonathan Wild was able to do with the Wolverhampton man whose horse he stole — it was in everyone’s interests to do so. Traditional methods of extracting compensation for a crime were enshrined in a law that gave any traveller robbed on the highway the right to claim damages from the inhabitants of the district in which the crime had taken place unless they could catch the perpetrator within forty days of the incident.

  If, in the end, the criminal was condemned, his victim could relax and congratulate himself on putting a lawbreaker safely behind bars awaiting the gallows or transportation. And congratulate himself he did, for the government’s regular reward to a man who facilitated the capture and conviction of a known criminal was £40, no insignificant sum in those days. In certain cases, the reward would be raised to compensate for the risk involved in intercepting so dangerous a villain; the reward offered for Dick Turpin, the most wanted man in the land in the 1730s, was £200. In addition, private individuals or companies, as well as the government, might offer rewards for the capture of specific miscreants.

  The high rewards for thief-catching were almost a government sanction for thief-takers such as Jonathan Wild because only a professional could benefit from this system. A thief-taker had to have inside knowledge of the criminal underworld in order to track down specif
ic villains, as Wild had found Mrs Knap’s murderers. He had to wield power over criminals to make them betray one another; to gain this power, he had to be involved in their world. And the money he received was used to expand his empire, bribing magistrates and witnesses, paying spies, financing smuggling operations or hiring warehouses to store stolen goods — not to mention paying the high costs of bringing a case to court in the first place.

  It was easier for the government to rely on thief-takers than to try to control crime; they encouraged the business of men such as Charles Hitchin and Jonathan Wild because they fulfilled a role, however underhandedly, that the government was unwilling to take on. Nothing less than a total overhaul of the existing system would have sufficed to reform it, as corruption had infiltrated every layer of officialdom in every department, from top to bottom. In 1720, in response to a public outcry in the capital about crime, the government — on Jonathan Wild’s advice — merely issued a proclamation adding £100 to the existing reward of £40 for the prosecution and conviction of footpads within a radius of five miles of London and Westminster. By 1732 the government had begun to recognize its mistake: the act was revoked because the inordinately high rewards encouraged people to perjure themselves, or even to lead others into crime in hopes of giving them up to the law, for the sake of the money.

  Thief-takers were supported by the incentives offered to criminals who informed on their peers. Royal pardons were granted to those who, like Isaac Ragg, revealed the identities of their accomplices to the authorities. Persuading men to impeach each other — no thieves’ honour here — was one of Wild’s most valuable skills. Using one man’s evidence against another, he would create havoc among a gang of criminals by implying to each of them that the others were just about to turn evidence against the rest; often they would vie to be the first to betray their companions to ensure their own freedom.

  As well as cash rewards and pardons, another incentive for inform-ants was the ‘Tyburn Ticket’, instituted in 1699. This exempted the holder from liability for parish duties, including the hated night-watch. It was also transferable; in some parishes, such as Covent Garden, which was notoriously dangerous at night, and therefore a particularly difficult beat for a constable, a Tyburn Ticket could be sold for as much as £25. These rewards, incentives and threats encouraged and often forced people to become unwitting agents in the state’s corruption. The government’s need to appear to be controlling the rising tide of crime forced it to harness that which ostensibly it was trying to eradicate.

  If criminals were celebrated for evading the law when they were free, it was much harder for them to do so in court. L. O. Pike, a nineteenth-century legal historian, deplored ‘the old [eighteenth-century] attempts to crush a prisoner by invectives from the bench, to interpret everything to his disadvantage, and to deprive him, as far as possible, of a hearing’. Until 1731 Latin was still the official language of the court, although most oral proceedings took place in the vernacular. Therefore, legal advice was essential for a badly educated defendant or plaintiff. But legal advice was forbidden to defendants, although prosecution lawyers were permitted, because defendants were supposed to be under the protection of the judge. It is no wonder that prisoners spent most of their time in gaol conducting mock trials and reading law manuals.

  The Old Bailey was the main criminal court in London. To protect the lawyers and judges from the vile diseases carried by the defendants, the quarter sessions were held, theatrically, in the open air in front of the main building. Crowds of people watched the trials, jostling each other and calling out to the prisoners. There was massive, almost obsessive, popular fascination with crime in the eighteenth century, which reflected a broadly based hostility to the government and its laws. Newspapers and magazines were full of accounts of crimes, arrests, trials and hangings. In the 1720s accounts of trials in the Old Bailey were published eight times a year. Broadsheets costing a penny or two carried invitations to the executions of particularly unpopular villains, or copies of the epitaphs of the convicted. Sellers of the last dying speeches of those about to be executed did a roaring trade on hanging days. Ballad-writers sang songs exalting the actions of condemned men. Bound copies of the lives and confessions of those about to die sold like wildfire for a shilling apiece.

  In addition to the system’s inherent prejudice towards the accused, lawyers were notoriously corrupt. Swift described them in Gulliver’s Travels as ‘a society of men...bred up from their youth in the art of proving by words multiplied for the purpose, that white is black, and black is white, according as they are paid. To this society all the rest of the people are slaves.’ Witnesses could be bought for a penny or two: ‘straw-men’, so called because they stuck pieces of straw in the buckles of their shoes to identify themselves, walked up and down outside the Old Bailey waiting to be asked by crooked lawyers to come inside and perjure themselves for a price. ‘A lawyer is an honest employment,’ states Peachum in the opening scene of The Beggars’ Opera, ‘so is mine. Like me too he acts in a double capacity, both against rogues and for ’em; for ’tis but fitting that we should protect and encourage cheats, since we live by ’em.’ Lawyers practised an esoteric craft, inaccessible to the outsider; they were looked on askance because their work, which so often seemed to benefit none but themselves, was carried on behind a veil of complicated language and specialized costume. Satirical prints throughout this period commonly portrayed lawyers as being in the service of the devil.[161]

  Jonathan Wild, whose tortured genius extended to legal wranglings, was almost always successful in court, either defending his man or bringing down his opponent: criminals considered his backing essential for victory in a case. Lying and bribery were only the start of it. He thought nothing of plying witnesses with drink so that they were too drunk to stand in court and testify against his man, who would be acquitted through lack of evidence.

  Although legal procedure favoured the prosecutor, it was still difficult to get a conviction. Witnesses were a vital part of every case, because conclusive forensic evidence did not exist, but often, because of the expense and inconvenience involved, they did not want to testify. Without eyewitness evidence, it was not easy to determine guilt unless a confession had been extracted. A great deal of evidence was required to convict someone of murder; infanticide, a common crime among poor young women, could be disproved by the defendant producing in court a little shirt she had sewn, which would show that she had been preparing for the birth of her baby — even if, unbeknownst to the jurors, she had made it the day before she appeared in court. This was where an effective arguer, like Wild, could be of use to people he wanted to save: providing alibis for them, or demonstrating the weaknesses in the prosecution’s argument, or introducing technicalities that rendered a case null and void.

  No person was tried at the Old Bailey, or anywhere else, if Jonathan was in court, but Mr Wild was consulted about the character of the criminal: which gave such interest among the thieves, that many of them really thought, if they could but keep in with Mr Wild they need not fear, let them commit what rogueries they would.[162]

  In October 1723 Quilt Arnold, Wild’s right-hand man and his official ‘Clerk of the Northern Road’, was accused of stealing a pair of silver shoe buckles from the house of one Martin Bellamy, a well-known thief who had forged Wild’s signature to cash a note of hand in his name worth nine guineas. Wild told the court he had ordered Quilt to enter Bellamy’s house (an illegal act in itself) and bring Bellamy to him. Quilt was unable to find Bellamy, but brought back to Wild Bellamy’s shoes as evidence of having been there — hence their disappearance. In his testimony Wild emphasized how important Quilt was to him in his business of apprehending violent and dangerous criminals. Quilt was acquitted, but the judge reprimanded Wild for ‘countenancing people to enter houses by no other authority than his orders’. Although the authorities were willing to turn a blind eye to Wild’s pretensions of official status, the judge did not like this blatant flaunt
ing of his power, and he was rapped on the knuckles.

  The laws themselves did nothing to protect the innocent or oppressed. ‘Laws grind the poor, and rich men rule the law.’[163] John Gay’s The Beggars’ Opera criticized the social system that allowed thieves to be judged and punished by men who also committed crimes, but prospered by them rather than being punished for them. Peachum, the character based on Wild, and Lockit, the turnkey, are compared by Gay to courtiers and politicians, specifically Robert Walpole, Chief Minister at the time. Both Peachum and Walpole gloss over their crimes — manipulation, selfishness and greed — with false sentiment. In some ways, they are less honourable than the thieves off whom they feed, because ‘Macheaths’ are forced to live by courage and wit, while the ‘Wilds’ of the world survive sustained by hypocrisy and deception.

  In the words of John Locke, ‘Government has no other aim but the preservation of property’; and those like Macheath or Jack Sheppard who threatened the sanctity of property ownership through crime were condemned to the harshest penalty. After the Glorious Revolution in 1688, a torrent of legislation raised the number of capital crimes from about fifty to over 200 by the turn of the nineteenth century. In place of the social infiltration and control that a police force would have imposed, crime was to be deterred by brutality, often incommensurate with the crime it was supposed to punish and sometimes inconsistent with punishments for comparable crimes.

  This discrepancy was noted by Henri Misson. ‘A man that is convicted of having forced a door, a window, or a pane of glass, with intent to steal, is guilty of burglary and condemned to death, even though he has taken nothing; whereas one that steals, finding the door is open, is punished less severely.’ New statutes included the Shoplifting Act, in 1699, making shoplifting a capital offence. The first act against receiving stolen property was passed in 1691 (3 William & Mary c.9; section 4), making a fence an accessory after the fact. Until Jonathan Wild’s Act, this was only a common law misdemeanour, punishable by branding in the hand rather than by death.