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

by Lucy Moore

  Finchley Common was one of the capital’s many growing suburbs. Though they were being rapidly absorbed into London proper, in the early part of the eighteenth century they still retained their strongly rural feel. Meat, fruit, vegetables and dairy products were all supplied to the city from the suburbs, and sold in one of the large markets in town which traded six days a week. Smithfield, then as now, was a meat market, dealing also in live cattle, sheep and horses; Covent Garden sold fruit, vegetables and flowers; meat, poultry, game, eggs and hides were on offer at Leadenhall; and fish and coal could be bought at Billingsgate. Many of these goods came into town by river to be distributed around the capital: cheese from Cheshire, Gloucestershire and Warwickshire; fruit from Kent; coal from Newcastle. London was the largest market town in England, the centre for all English trade. Despite its size — it was ten times bigger than any other city in the country — in parts it still had the feel of a country market town, with milch-asses roaming the streets, sallow milkmaids delivering milk from the lactarium’ in St George’s Fields, just south of the river, horses everywhere and mud, straw and manure fouling the streets (cf. Hogarth’s Evening, which shows the rural nature of London’s outskirts). When Sheppard and Page stumbled out of the city to Finchley in the early hours of the morning of 9 September 1724, with the rising sun dispersing the mists that covered the nearby fields, they would have passed graziers and hog-keepers minding their flocks and milkmaids and farmers busily preparing to take their goods into town to be sold.

  Jonathan Wild was determined to reap the glory of recapturing Sheppard. He found Edgworth Bess almost immediately, but she didn’t know where Jack had gone — or would not tell Wild. He sent a man to Stourbridge to look for Sheppard, but he was following a false trail. Wild was made to look a fool when the keeper of Newgate, at the head of a posse, caught up with the fugitives at Finchley Common and took them back to gaol. The keeper, like Wild, wanted to take the credit for bringing Sheppard back to justice. In the Daily Courant of 4 September 1724, he had advertised a twenty-guinea reward just for ‘discovering’ Sheppard: ‘He is about twenty-three years of age, and about five foot, four inches high, very slender, of a pale complexion, has been very sick, did wear a light bob wig, a light-coloured cloth coat and white waistcoat, has an impediment in his speech, and is a carpenter by trade.’

  Jack gamely tried to slip the keeper’s grip as he got out of the coach at Newgate, but could not. He was taken to a cell known as the ‘Castle’, the innermost stronghold of the gaol, and fastened to the floor with double fetters.

  From the time he escaped Newgate’s condemned hold with the help of Edgworth Bess and Poll Maggott, the public could not read enough about Jack Sheppard. His exploits were all over the newspapers.

  He [Sheppard] has hinted in dark terms, that he hath committed robberies since his escape, and denies he was ever married to the woman who assisted him therein, and who is now in the Compter for the same, declaring that he found her a common strumpet in Drury Lane, and that she hath been the cause of all his misfortunes and misery; he takes great pains in excusing his companion Page of being in any way privy to his crimes, whom he says only generously accompanied him after his escape.[186]

  The London Journal, a weekly paper, mentioned Jack in almost every issue from 5 September 1724 until his death. Broadsheets were published depicting his adventures. More space was devoted to him in London’s newspapers than to any other single news item: other stories might merit a sentence or a few lines, but there was always a long paragraph about Jack.

  Practically as soon as he was re-incarcerated, Sheppard began planning his next escape. Within the week, he had a file smuggled in to him in a Bible; when questioned about it, he retorted, ‘One file’s worth all the Bibles in the world.’ His irreverence shocked the middle classes, but must have appealed to his peers, to whom religion was a foreign territory, occupied solely by their pious, respectable betters. Jack refused to treat the divines who visited him to try to save his soul with respect, calling them ‘gingerbread fellows’ (cant for moneymen) motivated more by curiosity than by charity. In chapel one Sunday, one of the Lord Mayor’s men asked to have Jack Sheppard pointed out to him. Jack called out impudently, ‘Yes Sir, I am the Sheppard, and all the jailers in the town are my flock, and I cannot stir into the country but they are all at my heels baughing after me.’[187]

  A few days later, two files, a chisel and a hammer were discovered hidden in the rush matting of his chair. How he had got them is a mystery, but the inmates of Newgate were renowned for the ingenuity of their escape attempts. In 1735 a gang of highwaymen had pistols smuggled into their cell in ‘smoking hot pies’. Jack was distraught at his plan being foiled. When he perceived his last effort to escape thus discovered and frustrated, his wicked and obdurate heart began to melt, and he shed an abundance of tears,’ reported the Daily Journal on 17 September.

  In early October Jack was found by his keepers walking freely about his cell, having released himself from the chains that had bound him to a staple in the floor. ‘‘Twas troublesome to be always in one position,’ he announced nonchalantly to the stunned turnkeys. Parker’s London News reported,

  They searched him from head to foot, but found not so much as a pin, and when they had chained him down again, the head keeper, and others, came up and entertained him to discover, by what means he had got himself free, he reached forth his hand, and took up a nail, and with that, and no other instrument, unlocked himself again before their faces. Nothing so astonishing was ever known! He is now handcuffed, and more effectually chained.

  Jack obviously took great pleasure in showing off his skills to his dumbfounded keepers, but he played down his achievement: ‘Though people have made such an outcry about it, there is not a [black-] smith in London but what may easily do the same thing.’[188] As a punishment for his disobedience, and to prevent him escaping his shackles once more, the guards placed him in solitary confinement, handcuffing him as well as stapling him to the floor. For the first time in prison he was practically immobile. His old employer, Mr Kneebone, visited him for a second time soon after this incident; he begged the keepers with tears in his eyes to preserve Jack from ‘those dreadful manacles’.[189]

  Jack’s hopes of escape began to fade; according to one newspaper, he threw himself on the mercy of Jonathan Wild.

  Jack Sheppard, the condemned malefactor in Newgate, entertaining no hopes of life, has flung himself upon the charity of Jonathan Wild, who not only furnished him very handsomely with meals of substance in prison, and with proper books of devotion, but has promised him after a decent execution, to take care of his decent interment at his own cost and charge.

  There is no other evidence of Jack’s turning to Wild in this way and it is possible that Parker’s London News got its facts slightly wrong, and were talking about Blueskin, instead of Jack. The Daily Journal states that it was Blueskin, not Sheppard, who threw himself upon Wild’s mercy and this fits in with subsequent events. Neither Sheppard’s or Wild’s pride would have allowed them to enter into an association with the other: Jack hated Wild for using Edgworth Bess to find him and for sending Hell-and-Fury Sykes to capture him when he was first arrested; and in turn he had become to Wild a sort of nemesis, humiliating him by slipping through his previously successful clutches. Perhaps Wild deliberately placed the information in the paper as some kind of public relations exercise, hoping that Londoners would look on him with sympathy if he were seen to be helping the man who they now regarded as a hero.

  Part Five

  ‘Happy had it been for him if Blake’s wound had proved fatal, for then Jonathan had escaped death by a more dishonourable wound in the throat, than that of a penknife.’

  Captain Johnson, The Lives of the Highwaymen, 1734

  Chapter Thirteen – Death

  On the day that Blueskin Blake was executed, Jack Sheppard was moved for the last time into the condemned hold. His cell-mate was a Frenchman named Louis Houssare, ‘the French b
arber’, who had violently murdered his wife. Both prisoners were stapled to the floor, and two guards were on round-the-clock duty. The week before Jack’s execution ‘was a week of the greatest noise and idleness among mechanics [manual workers and apprentices] that has been known in London’:

  His escape and his being so suddenly retaken made such a noise in the town, that it was thought all the common people would have gone mad about him; there being not a porter to be had for love nor money, nor getting into an alehouse, for butchers, shoemakers and barbers, all engaged in controversies, and wagers, about Sheppard. Newgate night and day surrounded with the curious from St Giles’s and Rag-Fair, and Tyburn Road daily lined with women lest he be hanged Incog [incognito; anonymously].[190]

  At nine o’clock on the morning of Monday 16 November 1724, Jack Sheppard was taken out of the condemned hold to the chapel to receive his last rites from the Reverend Wagstaff, one of the prison chaplains. Reverend Purney, the Ordinary, or head chaplain of Newgate, was ill and in the country recuperating; normally, he would have presided over the ceremony for a prisoner as notorious as Jack. The keepers made a profit by charging visitors for the privilege of watching the condemned men in chapel the day before they died. ‘For a full two months we have been hindered from going to chapel because the keepers...make a great show of the condemned prisoners in the chapel by which they raise great sums of money.’[191] According to custom, Jack sat in front of his own black-shrouded coffin to hear the service.

  The Ordinary’s attempts to impose religion (and thus, order) on his charges were invariably met with resistance and mockery. His weekly sermons were marked by the prisoners’ irreverence and insolence. They talked throughout the services, sometimes loudly threatening to shoot the Ordinary. They ate and drank off the altar, smoked during the sermons, even relieved themselves in the corners of the chapel. They spat on the Ordinary’s pulpit and cut off the tassels from the pulpit cushion. But the blasphemous behaviour of their charges did not unduly worry Newgate’s chaplains. They were motivated more by the desire for profit than any altruistic wish to save damned souls. Most Ordinaries published accounts of the condemned malefactors who passed under their gaze, which sold like wildfire. Hogarth places the Ordinary on a parallel with a hawker of last dying speeches in the Tyburn scene of the Idle Apprentice series: they are the only two figures who look directly out towards the viewer, one placed immediately above the other in the centre of the print. So profitable were their accounts that some Ordinaries even threatened to withhold the Holy Sacraments from those prisoners who refused to tell their story to them. Most prisoners, though, were tempted by the prospect of having enough money for a decent suit of clothes in which to hang, and a coffin. John Allen, Ordinary at the start of the eighteenth century, ran a small funeral business as a sideline to his publishing work.

  Some malefactors refused to repent. The last man to be hanged in chains shouted from the scaffold, ‘There is no God. I do not believe there is any and, if there is, I hold Him in contempt.’ Others were penitent, seeking salvation in the last moments of their lives. One man, converted by the Methodist evangelist John Wesley just before he was hanged, said beatifically as he was dying, ‘I feel a peace which I could not have believed to be possible. And I know it is the peace of God, which passeth all understanding.’ Wesley’s crusade to save the souls of the damned led him to Tyburn in the 1730s. He tried to convert a gang of highwaymen awaiting execution but they refused to listen. Two nights before they were due to die, two of the robbers escaped but were caught when trying to release their fellow prisoners. They were hanged wearing ‘white cockades in their hats in token of their triumph over this world’. White cockades were a public protestation of innocence; in this case, they were also a symbol of the dead men’s resistance to Wesley’s faith. He was preaching the surrender of the sins of the world; but he was trying to teach the rewards of renunciation to men whose lives had been ruled by a desire for material gain and the pleasures of the flesh.[192]

  After visiting the chapel, Jack was taken by his guards to the Press Yard where Watson, the Under-Sheriff, made the traditional formal demand for his body. His fetters (or ‘Darbies’) were knocked off his feet with a block and hammer. Jack appeared in high spirits, stammering out witticisms to the guards, but when he saw that his hands were being rebound he demanded furiously that his handcuffs be removed. Traditionally, as he well knew, condemned men travelled to Tyburn in an open cart with their wrists free, but their arms bound by the rope that would be tied into their noose. Watson jokingly replied, ‘You’re an imp of mischief and it will be impossible to deliver you safely at Tyburn unless you have irons on your wrists.’[193]

  Jack pulled violently away from the Knight of the Halter who was securing him in the cart and raised his manacled hands over Watson’s head in an effort to strike him. The turnkeys got hold of him before he brought his hands down, and Watson began searching Jack’s person. With a scream of pain, he withdrew his hand from Sheppard’s waistcoat pocket, revealing a cut and bloody hand. He had caught it on a sharp clasp penknife, fastened into Jack’s inside pocket with the blade pointing out. Seeing there was no point in feigning innocence, Jack laughed delightedly and began telling the guards of his ingenious plan to cut off the rope binding his arms by rubbing it surreptitiously against the clasp knife as the cart bore him to Tyburn. Once he was free, he had planned to

  throw himself over among the crowd, and run through the narrow passage [at the Little Turnstile, near Lincoln’s Inn Fields], where the officers could not follow on horseback, but must be forced to dismount; and in the meantime doubted not, but by the mob’s assistance, he should make his escape.

  Secured by heavy handcuffs, his last-ditch plans for escape foiled, Jack was driven through the streets of London towards Tyburn (on the site of Marble Arch). There had been a gallows at Tyburn since 1571, but it was only one of many execution sites in eighteenth-century London — known as the ‘City of the Gallows’ for the multitude of gibbets a visitor to London passed on his way into the city. Criminals might also be hanged at Newgate, Putney Common, Kennington Common, Smithfield, Finchley Common and the aptly named Execution Dock in East Wapping. Women were burned at the stake outside the church of St Bartholomew the Great, near Smithfield.

  The procession to Tyburn took about two hours. It passed St Sepulchre’s Church where the bells traditionally tolled for the miscreants’ wickedness and sin’. ‘And knowing it is for you going to your death, may you be stirred up heartily to pray to God to bestow his grace and mercy upon you whilst you live,’ exhorted the Ordinary. Jack rode towards the gallows with his noose around his neck and his coffin at his feet. The cart was attended by mounted, liveried Javelin Men and led by one of the City Marshals, proudly holding his silver mace before him.

  The streets were thronged with well-wishers; in some places the crowd was so dense the procession had to stop and wait for the way to be cleared. On some hanging days, spectators were trampled to death in the crush. There was a carnival atmosphere as people from all levels of society flooded the streets to see their hero die a noble death. Samuel Pepys got a cramp in his leg from standing on a cart wheel, the better to see all the action, at an execution in 1663; in the next century James Boswell confessed that he was ‘never absent from a public execution’. There were often as many as 30,000 people; one hanging in Moorfields in 1767 attracted 80,000 spectators. At Tyburn, permanent wooden grandstands known as ‘Mother Proctor’s Pews’ had been erected to seat the crowd.

  The eight annual hanging days were commonly known as ‘Hanging Fairs’ — with hawkers selling food and drink, taverns and inns serving customers on the street, ballad-mongers and jugglers entertaining the assembly (Plate XI of Industry and Idleness). You could buy ‘invitations’ to the ‘Hanging Match’ and cheap broadsheet copies of the victims’ last words. Jack’s unofficial last dying speech was being sold for a penny or two:

  Like Doctor Faustus, I my pranks have played,

 
(By contract with his Master long since made)

  Like him lived gay, and revelled in delight,

  Drank all the day, and whored the livelong night.

  To raise my name above all rogues in [hi-]story,

  I’ve made chains, bolts, and bars fly all before me:

  But, Hark, the dismal sound! The clock strikes one:

  The charm is broke, and all my strength is gone:

  The dragon comes, I hear his hideous roar;

  Farewell my friends, for now poor Jack’s no more.

  Cant expressions for hanging abounded in street slang because of the personal relevance hanging had for London’s poor. If much of the city’s destitute population were driven to crime at some stage in their lives, then many of them, too, would have seen the gallows as a very real spectre. Making a mockery of the government’s ritual humiliation of their number was the only way they could diminish its importance. Hanging days were known as the ‘Sheriff’s Ball’; hanging itself was called ‘Dancing the Paddington Frisk’ and ‘Dangling in the Sheriff’s Picture Frame’. When one was hanged one was tucked up, or turned off. One common expression held that hanging was nothing more than ‘a wry neck, and a wet pair of breeches’.

  Although the threat of the gallows was a very real one to much of the crowd, it did not deter thieves from practising their craft. Instead hanging days almost seemed to encourage them to ply their trade among the spectators distracted by the main event. The moment when the crowd was absorbed in concentration on the dying man was the perfect time for pickpockets to pounce on their unsuspecting prey.

  ‘Sometimes the girls dress in white, with great silk scarves, and carry baskets full of flowers and oranges, scattering these favours all the way they go.’[194] While men saw Tyburn’s victims as popular heroes, women often saw them as heart-throbs. In The Beggars’ Opera, Mrs Peachum sums up the attitude of her sex towards men like Jack Sheppard: ‘The Youth in his cart hath the air of a Lord/ And we cry, there dies an Adonis.’ Polly Peachum echoes her mother’s sentiments as she laments Macheath’s death.