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

by Lucy Moore

  Is [Goodchild] good because his name inclines others to expect good of him and treat him well, or is he named (allegorically) to correspond to his good character? Have others been prejudiced against Idle by his name and so discouraged him that he has taken on the qualities which his name assigned him?[203]

  While on the surface, Hogarth holds Goodchild up as an example of the ideal apprentice, an apprentice looking at the series would notice immediately the sinister implications of Goodchild’s swift marriage to his master’s daughter and the insidious, inexorable takeover of his master’s business. Hogarth, who had seen himself as an idle apprentice, indulging in the stereotypical apprentices’ pastimes of gambling, drinking and whoring, could hardly have been unaware of the impression his portraits of Goodchild and Idle would create in the minds of their real-life counterparts. Hogarth was saved by his ambition and creativity, which served to free him from the drudgery of his ‘long apprenticeship’, but Tom Idle had no avenues of escape except those open to Jack Sheppard and others like him: taverns, gin shops, brothels, flash-houses and eventually, inevitably, the gallows.

  Chapter Fourteen – Decline

  Jonathan Wild, who had been so instrumental in the capture and conviction of Jack Sheppard and Blueskin Blake, found that his popularity, far from rising as a result of these successes, was on the wane. For the common people of London, Jack’s adventures had been a joyful respite from their dreary, struggling lives. When he died they mourned their loss. And Jonathan was the object of their grief and anger.

  Wild had needed to remove Jack. Throughout his career, he had focused his energies on ridding London of any groups of criminals who worked independently of him. He had purged the capital of five major gangs of highwaymen and footpads and by 1724 most of the members of the city’s criminal underworld were under his control. All, that is, except Sheppard, whose charisma and charm attracted into his sphere men such as Blueskin, who had once been part of Wild’s ‘Corporation of Thieves’. Jack’s emphasis on loyalty to one’s associates and independence from authority — both government authority and its mirror image within the criminal hierarchy — challenged all that Wild had achieved since his years in Wood Street Compter. Jack Sheppard was a maverick, the wild card that threatened to destroy Wild’s criminal empire by undermining the principles of selfishness and suspicion on which he based his control over his Corporation.

  Wild had been seriously wounded by Blake’s attack in the Old Bailey. He was confined to his bed for several weeks — to his chagrin, no doubt missing Jack’s execution — while his throat healed. He was lucky to have survived. In the eighteenth century even a small cut could prove fatal since there were no antibiotics. Minor ailments lingered for months, surgery was rare and very dangerous without anaesthetics, and liquor and opium were the only effective pain relievers.

  Despite the increasing confidence that disease ‘was a foe medical science could vanquish’,[204] there were as yet few scientific advances to improve the health of the mass of the population. Physical defects either at birth or as the result of an accident could not be corrected surgically, so the sight of a twisted cripple or mutilated, scarred face would have been common. Indeed these people might even capitalize on their misfortune by displaying themselves to curious crowds at fairs and markets. Quacks abounded, like the ‘dentist’ in the window of Hogarth’s Night, exploiting victims of the dread diseases of the age — smallpox, leprosy, consumption, tetanus — through a mixture of sham medical knowledge, dressed up with a few words of Latin, and the terror and pain of their patients. Their remedies contained ingredients such as live hog-lice and worms, goose shit and ground human bones. Extravagant claims were made in advertisements like this one, which were pasted on the walls of coffee-houses and inserted in newspapers:

  Purging sugar plums for children and others of nice palates, nothing differing in taste, colour, etc. from sugar plums at the confectioner’s, having been experienced by thousands to sweeten and purify the blood to admiration, kill worms, cure green sickness in maids, pale looks in children, rickets, stomach aches, King’s evil [scrofula], scurvies, rheumatisms, dropsia, scabs, itch, tetters [skin eruptions], etc. Good in cases where purging is necessary, doing all that is possible to be done by purging medicine being the cheapest, fastest, pleasantest medicine in the world. Fit for persons of all ranks, ages, and sexes; price is on the box, to be had only at Mr Spooner’s at the [sign of the] Golden Half Moon in Lemon Street, Goodman’s fields, near Whitechapel, with directions [for use].

  Some remedies were hailed as total panaceas, like the ‘Pectoral, Healing, Balsamick, Chymical QUINTESSENCE’ advertised in one newspaper. Even hypochondria had a cure: ‘famous drops for Hypochondriack Melancholly, which effectually cure on the spot’.

  Many reputable doctors had a touch of the charlatan: Dr Richard Mead, medical adviser to Queen Anne, sat daily in Batson’s coffeehouse writing prescriptions at half a guinea a go for apothecaries whose patients he didn’t even see. Despite popular dependence on these men, through necessity rather than choice, they were universally derided:

  But baneful quacks, in physick’s art unread,

  To weaving, cobbling or tumbling bred,

  Or else poor scoundrels, who for scraps & thanks,

  Swept stages for their master mountebanks,

  These to the world destructive slops commend

  And do their poys’nous cheats to live extend,

  By vain pretences pick the patients’ purse,

  And with sham med’cines make ’em ten times worse.[205]

  But medical advances were being made. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought back to England in 1718 a technique of inoculation she had seen practised successfully in Turkey, which was soon in common use by the upper classes. It was considered a marvel:

  We are certainly informed that Mr Horace Walpole, son to the Right Honourable Robert Walpole Esq [later Prime Minister], who was inoculated for the smallpox three weeks since by Mr Maitland, apothecary in Pall Mall, has had the disease very fair and favourable, and is recovered to the great satisfaction of all his friends.[206]

  William Harvey had published his theory of the circulation of blood in 1628; thirty-nine years later, in 1667, the first blood transfusion was performed at London’s Royal Society. The widespread use of criminals’ corpses for anatomical research and demonstration greatly increased surgeons’ knowledge of the human body. Several new hospitals opened in London over the first half of the century, including Westminster General Infirmary in 1719, Guy’s Hospital in 1725, St George’s Hospital in 1733 and the London Hospital in 1752.

  Eighteenth-century men lived, on average, to between forty and fifty years of age. Jonathan was an old man of forty-one or forty-two when Blueskin stabbed him, and found it difficult to recover his drive. He was not as strong as he had once been, and his successes had softened him. The ruthlessness he had possessed as a younger man was diluted by his mature desire to become an accepted part of London’s bourgeois élite. He no longer judged situations as adroitly; his reactions had become blunted.

  As soon as he recovered, Wild turned his attention to a crisis which had sprung up concerning one of his men, Roger Johnson, a hardened malefactor. He had been arrested in 1718 for ‘Preaching the Parson’, a confidence trick by which, disguised as a churchman, he exchanged forged coins for real ones. Tried and condemned to death, he informed on his own mother in order to obtain his freedom. He began working for Wild soon after his release from prison. In the early 1720s Wild bought a ship and placed Johnson in it as captain. Johnson ferried the sloop back and forth between London and Flanders, taking stolen goods which could not be sold in England to a warehouse in Flushing for resale in Europe, and then smuggling foreign goods back into London. He masqueraded as a respectable trader, advertising that he was to be found at the Graecian coffeehouse, on the Exchange, to conduct business.

  Johnson, suspecting one of his sailors of stealing some valuable Holland cloth which they were bringing to Engl
and to sell, stopped the man’s wages. The sailor, furious at the accusation, went to see an old enemy of Johnson’s called Tom Edwards, who owned the Goat tavern in Long Lane, and told him when Johnson was expected in London. Soon after Johnson’s arrival, Edwards procured a warrant for his arrest. This was an easy enough process for a man like Edwards whose underworld associations would have brought him into contact with corrupt constables or JPs who had the right to issue warrants, and would do so for a price. The two men met outside the Black Lyon alehouse in the Strand (not the Black Lion in Drury Lane where Jack Sheppard had been corrupted by Edgworth Bess and her friends) and Edwards took Johnson into custody. Johnson, however, managed to get a messenger to Wild. Pausing only to collect a constable and a warrant, Wild rushed over to the Goat, released Johnson, and had Edwards arrested.

  Within a few days Edwards had procured his own release from Wood Street Compter. Knowing the way to get at Johnson was through Wild, he obtained a warrant to search one of Wild’s warehouses and seized the contraband goods Wild and Johnson kept in storage there. Wild, apoplectic with rage but aware that he could not implicate himself in a dispute over what were clearly stolen goods, could do no more than try to claim them in Johnson’s name. He had Edwards rearrested, but Edwards’s agents, in turn, sent out constables to arrest Johnson. This they did, but once again he was able to send for Wild in the nick of time. Jonathan, attended by Quilt Arnold, arrived at the alehouse in Middlesex where the constables were having a drink before placing Johnson in custody. A fight broke out, Wild and his men emerged victorious, and Roger Johnson once more escaped the clutches of the law. Meanwhile, Edwards had bailed himself out of Marshalsea Prison and had sworn revenge on Wild and Johnson.

  This incident only confirmed to the public what they had suspected since Wild’s feverish pursuit of Jack Sheppard: that Jonathan Wild, far from being the public-spirited benefactor he pretended to be, was a self-serving, professional villain. It was obvious that his interests had been threatened by Edwards’s assault on Johnson; and that Johnson himself was little more than a smuggler, a pawn in Wild’s game. Afraid of the wrath of Tom Edwards, and aware that the law would not back him if he tried to bring the affair into the open, Wild went into hiding for several weeks. He tried to stem the rising tide of antipathy towards him by putting advertisements in newspapers offering a reward of ten guineas to any person who discovered the source of the rumours circulating about him.

  When he thought the affair had blown over, Wild came out of hiding to attend to business. On Saturday 6 February he was summoned to Leicester House, the London residence of the Prince and Princess of Wales, to offer his opinion about a gold watch which had been stolen from one of their attendants; Wild advised them that the watch was ‘past all hopes of recovery’. This uncharacteristic failure to act, to take advantage of the social and professional cachet of being consulted by Leicester House, shows how distracted he was by the affair with Johnson and Edwards, and how his wound and long illness had sapped his strength.

  Just days after this honour, on 15 February 1725, Wild was arrested. Thomas Jones, constable in the parish of Holborn, came to Wild’s office in the Old Bailey, seized him and Quilt Arnold and took the two men to Sir John Fryer, a magistrate, ‘who, being indisposed, sat up in his bed to examine him [Wild]’. Wild was charged with helping Roger Johnson, described as a ‘highwayman’, to escape from a constable at a tavern in Bow, Middlesex. He was taken to Newgate and placed in custody.

  No proceedings were brought against him at first, but Constable Jones’s affidavit stated that there were two people willing to stand evidence against Wild in court. John Follard, a thief, and Thomas Butler, a ‘Passing Lay’, or card shark, had agreed to charge Wild with a capital crime in return for immunity. Significantly, Thomas Butler’s brother owned the Black Lyon alehouse on the Strand outside which Thomas Edwards had first arrested Roger Johnson. A ‘Warrant of Detainder’ was also issued, charging Wild with ‘forming a kind of Corporation of Thieves of which he was the head or director’. In twelve points, it detailed his crimes: organizing of robberies; using returned transported convicts as virtual slave labour; receiving, concealing, altering, smuggling and selling stolen goods; and finally selling ‘human blood’ by regularly giving up to the gallows in return for the government’s cash reward some of the criminals who worked for him. He was accused of carrying a silver staff as a spurious display of the authority he assumed. Another section indignantly pointed out that he often charged well over half the value of the goods he recovered for clients: the implication being, that while it was all very well to be a thief-taker and receiver, Wild had abused his clientele by monopolizing the trade, and thus being free to demand the fees he wanted because people were in thrall to the thieves who overran London at Wild’s command.

  The newspapers, for so long Wild’s greatest tool of promotion, turned against him. He was referred to sarcastically as ‘Honest Mr Wild’. In the spring of 1725 the Original London Half-Penny Weekly serialized an unflattering version of his life. There was endless conjecture as to precisely what crimes he would stand trial for.

  The particulars of his [Wild’s] accusation are as yet uncertain, but we hear that very great bail has been refused, which occasions various speculations, some being apprehensive of the loss of his intelligence and protection by his being obliged to travel [i.e., no longer working], and others entertaining the more dismal opinion, that he’ll leave the world in his own way...

  But few doubted what his eventual fate would be. ‘The general opinion is, there will be work for a hangman.’[207]

  Public opinion swung further and further away from Wild. William Duce, a footpad against whom he had given evidence in court, accused Wild of being worse than the thieves at his control, parasitically sucking them dry for his own advantage. ‘There is not a greater villain upon God’s earth than Jonathan Wild. He makes it his business to swear away honest men’s lives for the sake of the reward, and that is what he gets his livelihood by.’[208] Blueskin’s assault on Wild in front of the Old Bailey had opened the floodgates; from that point on, he was a sitting target. And it was not just thieves who were emboldened to speak out against him. Defoe summed up the new attitude to Wild in his Authentic Life of Jonathan Wild, stressing the collective guilt of those who, even though suspecting his active association with criminals, had chosen to turn a blind eye because the service he offered was so useful.

  I think it unpardonable, that a man should knowingly act against the law, and by so doing powerfully contribute to the increase, as well as safety and maintenance, of pilferers and robbers, from no other principle, than a criminal selfishness, accompanied with an utter disregard to the public; yet nothing is more common among us. As soon as anything is missing, suspected to be stolen, the first course we steer is to the office of Mr Jonathan Wild...Here we are so far from hating our enemy, that we proffer him a recompense for his trouble, if he will condescend to let us have our own again; and leaving all revenge to God, to show that we are willing to forgive and forget, we consult, in the most effectual manner, the safety of a person that deserves hanging for the wrong he has done us.

  However, Wild did not seem unduly disturbed by recent events, his conviction that he had served the public too well for them ever to turn against him apparently unshaken by his arrest. His work had taken him to Newgate many times throughout his career, so although he had never stayed there before he soon settled in. He lived in luxury, sleeping on a flock mattress between his own sheets, drinking his favourite wine brandy, and conducting business in his cell as if it were his own office. His agents visited him daily, and he issued orders according to his usual habits.

  On 10 March Wild invited a lace-seller, Catherine Steatham, to visit him in his cell at Newgate. She had come to his office at the end of January offering twenty-five guineas for the restoration of some lace which had been stolen from her shop. When they met in Newgate, Wild told Mrs Steatham he had found her lace, and that when it was deliver
ed back to her she should pay the messenger ten guineas. The grateful old lady begged him to let her give him a reward for the trouble he had gone to on her behalf. Magnanimously, Wild refused to accept anything. ‘As you are a widow and a Christian I desire nothing more of you but your prayers, and for them I shall be thankful.’[209]

  On Thursday 5 May 1725 another trial, unconnected to Wild or Sheppard but which attracted an equal amount of interest, began. It was the trial of Thomas Parker, Earl of Macclesfield, Walpole’s Lord Chancellor and close personal friend of King George I, who was also the stepfather of Dr Johnson’s friend, the journalist Richard Savage, later convicted of murder and then pardoned in an eighteenth-century cause célèbre. In a dispute with a stranger in the private gaming room of Robinson’s coffee-house in 1727, Savage ran him through the chest with his sword. Macclesfield stood accused of receiving bribes, selling offices and embezzling over £100,000 of Chancery funds. Represented by the same lawyer who had defended the notorious Dr Sacheverell, Macclesfield got off lightly. He was fined £30,000, which he paid easily (having lined his pockets so thickly during his years in office), and earned his freedom from the Tower of London on 21 July. George I was so upset by the harsh treatment accorded his friend that he promised to pay him back out of the Privy Purse, in £1,000 instalments, but died having made only one payment.

  Grub Street seized on the parallels between the cases of Wild and Macclesfield with shameless gusto. As early as 1723 John Gay had written scathingly of professional politicians, ‘I cannot but wonder that the talents for a great statesman are so scarce in the world, since so many of those who possess them are at every month cut off in the prime of their age at the Old Bailey.’ In Mist’s Weekly Journal, the editor, Nathaniel Mist, called Wild ‘that celebrated statesman and politician’, comparing the skills he had used to dominate the London underworld with those Walpole deployed to control Parliament. Both used a complicated system of spies and informers, playing on their followers’ fears of being betrayed before they were able to turn evidence themselves. Both sacrificed pawns with impunity when they were no longer needed; and the success of both crucially depended on making the public believe that it needed the services they provided.[210] While Walpole created the illusion that without his leadership the government of the country would fall apart, Wild was able to make people believe that he was the last bulwark against the rising tide of crime — at the same time encouraging and stimulating its very growth.