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

by Lucy Moore

  In response to the trials of Macclesfield and Wild, the Tory Duke of Wharton suggested that instead of being hanged, Jonathan Wild should be set the task of recovering the £8,000,000 Exchequer deficit which, Wharton implied, was due to the corruption of Walpole’s government:

  From sunset to daybreak, whilst folks are asleep,

  New watch are appointed th’Exchequer to keep

  New bolts and new bars fasten every door,

  And the chests are made three times as strong as before;

  Yet the thieves in the day-time the treasures may seize,

  For the same are entrusted with care of the keys;

  From the night to the morning ’tis true, all is right,

  But who will secure it from morning to night?

  Quoth Wild unto Walpole, ‘Make me undertaker,

  I’ll soon find the rogues that robbed th’Exchequer,

  I shan’t look among those that are used to purloining,

  But shall, the first, search in the chapel adjoining.[211]

  But it was Wild, the upstart, who was punished for his sins while the rich, titled, well-connected Macclesfield eluded justice.

  Wild’s name became a metaphor for political corruption almost as soon as he was arrested. Mist’s Weekly Journal published an article in June 1725, two weeks after Wild died, calling him a ‘Great Man’, a term commonly used to describe politicians and statesmen.

  He [Wild] bore a very great veneration for men of parts, and was often heard to say, that men of wit, who have no other inheritance to maintain them, should ride the world, and bridle and saddle the rest of mankind one way or another...It was his opinion, that men of parts (in which clause he sometimes included thieves and idle fellows) should be maintained by the public, and whether it was done by picking their pockets, or boldly taking their money by force, he thought it much the same thing.

  This was the first explicit comparison of Wild with the corrupt politicians headed by Walpole against whom Tory writers such as Swift and Pope railed. The Beggars’ Opera was another anti-Walpole tract. Mr Peachum, the character based on Jonathan Wild, was also a satirical portrait of Robert Walpole. ‘In one respect indeed, our employment may be reckoned dishonest, because, like great statesmen, we encourage those who betray their friends,’ says Peachum to the turnkey, Lockit. He sings:

  The priest calls the lawyer a cheat,

  The lawyer be-knaves the divine,

  And the statesman, because he’s so great,

  Thinks his trade is as honest as mine!

  Alexander Pope, who helped his friend Gay revise the play, added these lines to Macheath’s part as he prepares to die at Tyburn:

  Since laws were made for every degree

  To curb vice in others as well as in me

  I wonder we hadn’t better company

  Upon Tyburn Tree...

  Gay’s attacks on Walpole’s political corruption were underlined by the slights against him as a womanizer. The love triangle between Macheath, Polly Peachum and Lucy Lockit echoes Walpole’s relationships with his wife and his mistress, Molly Skerrit. Macheath’s wanton seduction of the innocent Polly is intended as an analogy of Walpole’s rape of the English nation.

  The play’s barbs stung their target. In February 1728 Jonathan Swift wrote to Gay to discuss Walpole’s reaction to The Beggars’ Opera. ‘Does Walpole think you intended to affront him in your opera? Pray God he may, for he has held the longest hand at hazard [a dice game] that ever fell to any sharper’s share, and keeps his run when the dice are charged.’ In 1737, as a direct result of the violent political antagonism of The Beggars’ Opera, Walpole put through Parliament a bill requiring all plays to be licensed by the Lord Chamberlain, the first act censoring the theatre for many years.

  The most outspoken attack on Walpole and his administration using Wild as metaphor was Henry Fielding’s novel, MrJonathan Wild the Great, published in 1743. Fielding, later the reforming magistrate of Bow Street, compared Wild’s criminal organization directly with Walpole’s control of the government. He outlined his intentions in the book’s introduction:

  Here, they will meet with a system of politics not unknown to Machiavel; they will see deeper stratagems and plots performed by a fellow without learning or education than are to be met with in the conduct of the greatest statesmen who have been at the heads of governments.

  And, indeed, when things are rightly compared, it will be found that he had a more difficult game to play; for he was blind to the eyes of the world, to find out what tricks to evade the penalties of the law; and, on the other side, to govern a body of people who were enemies to all government; and to bring those under obedience to him who, at the hazard of their lives, acted in disobedience to the laws of the land.

  Both men shared the same selfish ambitions, Fielding argued — to derive the greatest personal gain and power from their manipulation of the public. ‘I had rather stand on the summit of a dunghill,’ says the fictional Wild, ‘than at the bottom of a hill in Paradise.’ Fielding based his character’s life loosely on Wild’s, but was more interested in the similarities in method and aim shared by Walpole and Wild than in any historical accuracy.

  The same parts, the same actions, often promote men to the head of superior societies, which raise them to the head of lower; and where is the essential difference, if the one ends on Tower Hill [where nobles were executed], and the other at Tyburn?...A cod’s head is a cod’s head still, whether in a pewter or a silver dish.

  The criminal underworld, in which the novel was set, was used as a metaphor for the government; cant emphasized the esoteric nature of this corrupt world. This is clear in the fictional Wild’s definition of honour: ‘Nor can any man possibly entertain a higher and nobler sense of that word, nor a greater esteem of its inestimable value, than myself. If we have no name to express it by in our cant dictionary, it were well to be wished we had.’

  Chapter Fifteen – Trial

  Jonathan Wild was heard to say, two days before he went to court, that he wished he had been killed by Blueskin Blake and thus avoided the ignominy of having to stand trial for his crimes. His feelings were reflected in a contemporary ballad supposedly sung by him at this period, called ‘The Complaint of Jonathan Wild’.

  Ye Britons! Cursed with an unthankful mind,

  Forever to exalted merit blind,

  Is thus your constant benefactor spurned?

  Are thus his faithful services returned?

  More generous Blueskin! — O, that thy design

  Had ended this unhappy life of mine!

  O, that success had crowned the stroke you gave!

  Then I had gone with honour to the grave!

  But Wild remained convinced that the public service he had provided over the years would stand him in good stead, and as part of his defence, he took with him to the Old Bailey on 15 May 1725 a carefully compiled list of the felons he had brought to justice. It named thirty-five highway robbers, twenty-two house-breakers and ten returned transportees, and continued,

  Note, several others have been also convicted for the like crimes, but remembering not the persons’ names who have been robbed, I omit the criminals’ names.

  Please to observe, that several others have also been convicted for shoplifting, picking of pockets, &c. by the female sex [i.e., by whores], which are capital crimes, and which are too tedious to be inserted here, and the prosecutors not willing to be exposed.

  In regard therefore of the numbers above convicted, some, that have yet escaped justice, are endeavouring to take away the life of the said

  JONATHAN WILD

  Jonathan seemed oblivious to the fact that this proud broadcasting of his successes merely darkened his name in the eyes of the public. Once his activities had been exposed, anything he said in his defence only implicated him further in the tortuous maelstrom of crime from which he had for so long feigned dissociation. ‘He thought his being useful in the first (serving the public by detecting some criminals) w
ould protect him in being [branded] criminal in the last; but here he was, we say mistaken, and fell into a snare which all his pretended merit could not deliver him from.’[212] Surprisingly, Wild was tried neither for the list of felonies he was accused of on the Warrant of Detainder presented to court, nor for the crimes with which Follard and Butler had agreed to charge him when he was first arrested. Wild ‘saved them that trouble [of standing as witnesses] by committing a felony’.[213] He stood accused of stealing fifty yards of lace, worth £40, from Catherine Steatham’s shop in Holborn, on 22 January 1722, and of receiving stolen goods (the same lace). Catherine Steatham was the woman who had visited Wild at Newgate in March, for whom he had recovered the lace while he was in prison.

  Henry Kelly and Margaret Murphy claimed that Jonathan Wild, finding them having a drink with his ‘wife’ and Mrs Johnson, Roger’s wife, in his house in the Old Bailey, had put them up to robbing Mrs Steatham.

  ‘I’ll tell you what...there’s an old blind bitch, that keeps a shop within twenty yards of Holborn Bridge, and sells fine Flanders lace; and her daughter is as blind as herself. Now if you’ll take the trouble of calling upon her, you may speak with [steal] a box of lace. I’ll go along with you, and show you the door.’

  The trio had walked up to Holborn, Wild pointed out to them Mrs Steatham’s shop, and Murphy and Kelly had entered and stolen a box of lace. ‘At last the old woman stept upstairs to fetch another piece, and in the meantime I took a tin box of lace, and gave it to Murphy, who put it under her cloak.’ They went outside, found Wild, and returned to his office where he examined the contents of the box. Kelly stated,

  He asked us, if we’d have ready money, or stay till an advertisement came out? Stock was pretty low with us at that time, and so we chose ready money, and he gave us three guineas, and four broad pieces.

  ‘I can’t afford to give any more,’ says he, ‘for she’s a hard-mouthed old Bitch, and I shall never get above ten guineas out of her.’

  Margaret Murphy corroborated Kelly’s evidence, adding that Wild had told them he couldn’t afford to give them more money for the lace, ‘for, though I have got some influence over her, by helping her to goods two or three times before, yet I know her to be such a stingy old bitch, that I shan’t get above ten guineas out of her’.

  Then Catherine Steatham took the stand. She testified that on discovering the lace had been stolen, she rushed to Wild’s office in the Old Bailey to engage his services. Not finding him there, she had advertised independently, offering fifteen guineas for the return of the missing lace, with no questions asked. Soon after, she went back to Wild’s office and told him she would give twenty or twenty-five guineas to have her property back; he told her she would have to wait, according to his usual practice, while he looked into the affair — even though the lace had been in his possession since the day it was stolen. ‘Don’t be in such a hurry,’ says he; ‘I don’t know but I may be able to help you to it [the lace] for less, and if I can I will. The persons that have it are gone out of town; I shall set them to quarrelling about it, and then I shall get it the cheaper.’

  When she visited Wild in gaol, he charged her only ten guineas for the lace on behalf of the thieves (although the money went straight into his pocket), and refused to accept any direct payment for himself — probably hoping that by being seen to do her a good turn, he would secure her loyalty. He told her,

  I don’t do these things for worldly interest, but only for the good of poor people that have met with misfortunes. As for the piece of lace that is missing [one piece was not returned with the rest], I hope to get it for you ere long, and I don’t know but that I may help you not only to your money again but to the thief too; and if I can, much good may it do you. And as you are a good woman and a Christian, I desire nothing of you but your prayers, and for them I shall be thankful. I have a great many enemies, and God knows what may be the consequence of this imprisonment.

  The combined testimonies of Steatham, Murphy and Kelly show the unabashed duplicity that characterized Wild’s behaviour. On one hand, he was all conniving conspiracy, ruthlessly planting the idea of crime in the minds of his companions; on the other, he was a charming businessman, helping to solve problems with all the modest goodwill in the world.

  Appearing ‘very much dejected’, Wild replied to the charges with a plea for mercy on account of his supposed ceaseless fight against crime, his harsh Staffordshire accent untainted by nearly twenty years in London:

  My Lord, I hope even in the sad condition in which I stand, I may pretend to some little merit in respect to the service I have done my country, in delivering it from some of the greatest pests with which it was ever troubled. My Lord, I have brought many bold and daring malefactors to just punishment, even at the hazard of my own life, my body being covered with scars I received in these undertakings. I presume, my Lord, to say I have done merit, because at the time, they were esteemed meritorious by the government; and therefore I hope, my Lord, some compassion may be shown on the score of those services.

  It proved impossible to convict him of theft proper, but after only half an hour’s deliberation, the jury found Wild guilty of receiving stolen goods, under the so-called ‘Jonathan Wild Act’, and sentenced him to death. It was ironic that he should finally have been charged only with a crime that had taken place after he was committed to Newgate, and that he should have been convicted for so relatively petty a theft. But although it was less spectacular than some of the robberies with which Wild had been involved, the Steatham robbery was typical of the way in which he had made his name and his fortune. It was poetic justice that he should be condemned for a minor misdemeanour, when he would have gloried in standing trial, very publicly, for an audacious, scandalous, miraculous heist worthy of Claude Duvall, or of Jack Sheppard.

  Undeterred by the court’s response to his pleas for mercy, Wild wrote to the king hoping to obtain a pardon on account of his services to society. He ‘could not be made to believe he should suffer at last, for what he had publicly done unpunished so long’.[214] He even tried to use his wife’s distress to his advantage. Mary Brown, or Wild, had attempted to commit suicide the day after his sentence was passed, ‘but someone coming into the room accidentally, cut her down; by which means she had a reprieve against her will’.[215] He begged,

  ’Tis nothing but your Majesty’s wonted goodness and clemency that could encourage me to sue for your royal favour and pardon...

  For since your Majesty has many times been graciously pleased to spare the lives even of traitors themselves, I cannot but hope for a reprieve from so good a prince, whom I can esteem no less than an inexhaustible fountain of mercy; wherefore, most dread and august sovereign, humbly prostrating myself at your royal feet, I presume to set forth my wicked and melancholy circumstances and from your bounty to seek that favour which is nowhere else to be found.

  I have indeed been a most wicked and notorious offender, but was never guilty or inclined to treasonable practices, or murder, both of which I hold in the utmost detestation and abhorrence which affords me great comfort in the midst of my calamity and affliction.

  I have a sickly wife loaded and oppressed with grief, who must inevitably go to the grave with me, if I suffer; or lead a most miserable life, she being already non compos mentis.

  If I receive your Majesty’s royal favour of a reprieve, I do firmly resolve to relinquish my wicked ways and to detect (as far as in me lays) all such who shall persevere therein, as a testimony of which, I have a list ready to show to such whom your Majesty shall appoint to see it, which is all that can be offered by your Majesty’s most dutiful, loyal and obedient petitioner.

  This list mentioned by Wild in his petition might have been the list he produced in court, but it sounds as if it contained new information on criminals who might be convicted as a result of his complicity and intended reform. It is surprising, then, that no efforts were made to discover with what revelations he had hoped to buy his freedom.
/>   Back in Newgate, waiting for a response to his petition, Wild confronted the prospect of death while Mrs Steatham collected the forty pounds she was owed by the government for bringing him to justice. Although Fielding’s Jonathan Wild, when asked if he was afraid to die, boldly answered, ‘Damme, it is only a dance without music,’ the real Jonathan Wild was plagued by terror at his impending fate. It was driving him insane. He refused to eat after returning from the Old Bailey. His old ailment, gout, had hit him badly. He refused to go to church, because he thought that everyone would stare and ‘discompose’ him.

  He never went to the chapel during the whole time that he continued under sentence of death, saying, he was lame, and unable to support himself on his legs [because of the gout], and much more unable to go up so far. Another reason, he added, was, that certain enemies of his, among the crowd, would not only interrupt his prayers by pointing, whispering, &c. but would, he had reason to believe, insult him, and if they dared, would raise a tumult and riot on his account. Therefore, as he knew that to pray to God without attention or regard to Him, was worse than wholly to omit prayers, and as he knew he could not attend to his duty amidst so vast a crowd as appeared at the chapel, he earnestly desired he might never be carried to it.[216]