CHAPTER FOUR
The Rake’s Progress
flesh’d villains, bloody dogs
—Shakespeare
Wadesmill, a pleasant village on the road from London to Cambridge, stands not far from Ware, the old brewing town. Thurtell went down in the company of Miss Dodson and took rooms in the Feathers, a coaching inn still extant. It was a brilliant time. “Squire” Elliot, Hickman’s principal backer, was there; so, too, was Baird, the proprietor of a hazard table in Oxenden Street. Thurtell was in his element, and he soon devised a training regimen for Hickman: “exercise and abstinence, abstinence and exercise.” But after a hard day of physical exertion, a little play could do no harm, and in the evenings Thurtell took his seat at the card table.
His luck had changed for the better. Mr. Weare, whom Thurtell knew from Rexworthy’s, had joined the company, as “neat and clean in his person” as ever. Whether he brought his gun and hunting dogs with him—Weare was fond of a day’s shooting—has not transpired; but Thurtell was doubtless gratified to find himself beating the veteran player so regularly at Blind Hookey.
Weare affected the character of a lawyer—more precisely, of a solicitor; and he had chambers in Lyon’s Inn, the nursery of such luminaries of the Bar as John Selden and Sir Edward Coke. But he was not a lawyer. A “man of low birth” and “slender education,” he had started in life as a tavern waiter. Later he found a place in a gaming house, got up a thinnish veneer of gentlemanliness, and by degrees became a croupier and a leg. In addition to his Rouge et Noir table in Pall Mall, he had an interest in a couple of gaming houses in the East End. No spider, it was said, darted with more alacrity upon a fly than Weare upon a novice gambler. After drawing Thurtell in with an affectation of unskillfulness, he took him for £300, skinning him of his last sovereign guinea.
Thurtell’s situation was now desperate. The £1,500 he had filched from his creditors was gone. The license of the Black Boy was revoked. And yet we catch a glimpse of him, in December 1821, in all his habitual swagger, riding in the Bath Mail to Newbury. At Reading a fellow passenger, who had been up on the box with the coachman, took shelter from a dripping mist in the saloon of the coach, and there made the acquaintance of Thurtell. Both men were going up for the fight between William Neate and the “gas-light man,” and Thurtell expounded to his brother aficionado his philosophy of training: “exercise and abstinence, abstinence and exercise.” He soon fell into a heavy slumber. But his fellow passenger did not forget him; he was William Hazlitt, and he recorded his encounter with Thurtell in his essay “The Fight.”
In the summer of 1822, as Thurtell descended ever deeper into the hell of gaming, another hell-diver was exploring a different pit. Thomas De Quincey, thirty-six years old, had in his own explorations of the abyss already made notable discoveries, and the previous year that black pearl of English letters, the Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, had appeared in installments in the London Magazine. The writing had cost De Quincey great pains, and he had found himself relying on the very opium-demon he was anatomizing to see the piece through the press. But in the summer of 1822 he was trying to wean himself from his “dark idol,” the opium tincture known as laudanum to which he had for many years been addicted.
De Quincey had been born in 1785, in Liverpool, the son of a prosperous merchant who died young. He was a brilliant scholar; “that boy,” one of his schoolmasters said, “could harangue an Athenian mob, better than you or I could an English one.” But the boy could not endure a settled routine. He ran away from school; had adventures in Wales; explored the “unfathomed” depths of London. He dissipated his fortune; studied at Oxford without taking a degree; was admitted to the society of the Lake Poets, and had become friends with its two foremost figures, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Such experiences, duly recorded in books and essays, were the foundation of De Quincey’s literary reputation: so also was his opium-taking. For opium was not merely the subject of the book that made him famous: it was a literary tool, one that, if it was ruinous to his health, enabled him to illuminate those deeper levels of experience which the eighteenth-century writers had overlooked.
Perhaps, then, it was for the best that his attempt to kick the habit failed. “I must premise,” De Quincey wrote a friend from his retreat at Fox Ghyll in the Lake District, “that about 170 or 180 drops [of laudanum] had been my ordinary allowance for many months. Occasionally I had run up as high as five hundred, and once nearly to 700.* In repeated preludes to my final experiment I had also gone as low as 100 drops, but had found it impossible to stand it beyond the fourth day, which, by the way, I have always found more difficult to get over than any of the preceding three.” “I went off,” he said, “under easy sail—130 drops a day for three days; on the fourth I plunged . . . to 80. The misery which I now suffered ‘took the conceit’ out of me at once; and for about a month I continued off and on about this mark; then I sunk to 60, and the next day to—none at all. This was the first day for nearly ten years that I had existed without opium.” It was agony—“infandum dolorem,” grief not to be uttered, though symptoms might be enumerated: “violent biliousness; rheumatic pains; then pains resembling internal rheumatism—and many other evils; but all trifles compared with the unspeakable, overwhelming, unutterable misery of mind which came on in one couple of days, and has continued almost unabatingly ever since.”
As De Quincey lay, that summer, in a darkened room, “tossing and sleepless for want of opium,” he amused himself “with composing the imaginary Confessions of a Murderer,” the “subject being,” he said, “exquisitely diabolical.” These murderous Confessions were never committed to paper, or at any rate were never delivered to the world; but the exercise bore fruit in a little essay on murder, the first of several De Quincey would write. It was to shed a curious light on what was to be the most notorious murder of the age.
In spite of so many reversals of fortune, Jack Thurtell was as sanguine as ever, and in the autumn of 1822 he even appeared to contemplate a return to the crape-and-bombazine business. He purchased £500 worth of fabric, the money apparently furnished him by his father in Norwich; and he leased a space in Watling Street in the East End, just above a wine-and-spirits shop kept by a man named Penny. He then set about making repairs to the property. These were of a peculiar nature; and it was noted that, among other things, he instructed the carpenter to board up all the windows of the place. A short time later, he went to the offices of the County Fire Office in Regent Street. There, in a spacious office overlooking Piccadilly Circus, he insured the merchandise at Watling Street for £2,500.
Not long afterward, in January 1823, he went out on the town. He crossed Westminster Bridge into Lambeth, and in the Mitre Tavern came upon an acquaintance, Joseph Ensor, a young clerk in the Bank of England. They had a drink together, and Thurtell told Ensor he had tickets for the opera. Would Ensor care to join him? It happened that some of Ensor’s family were to be at the opera that night, and the young man accepted the invitation. It was snowing when they reached Covent Garden. The opera was Maid Marian, the story drawn, the playbill said, “from one of Mr. Peacock’s very clever novels.” Afterwards, Thurtell and Ensor sauntered in the crush-room. But the crowd was great, and Ensor could see nothing of his family. It was snowing hard when he and Thurtell went out again. Ensor proposed that they go for a drink at the Cock, a tavern in the Haymarket. “No,” Thurtell said, “I will take you to a better place; I will take you to the Saloon in Piccadilly.”
In the Saloon they sat carousing till a late hour. The snow lay deep in Piccadilly when, at half past four, they ventured forth. “It was the most dreadful night I ever remember,” Ensor said; “there was snow half up the leg.”
“Let us try and get a coach,” he said to Thurtell.
But there were no coaches to be had, and he and Thurtell made their way through the snow on foot. When they reached the King’s Mews, where the National Gallery now stands, Thurtell said, “You had better go and take a bed at the w
arehouse” in Watling Street. “No,” Ensor said, “I will go to my mother’s.” They parted. Ensor went down Whitehall, where he heard the Horse Guards’ clock striking five. Thurtell went east to the Strand and reached his lodgings on Garlick Hill sometime before dawn.
The next morning, he was lying in bed with Miss Dodson when the washerwoman came in, greatly excited. Mr. Penny’s shop in Watling Street was in flames.
Thurtell lounged languidly in the bed.
“Thurtell,” Miss Dodson said, “the warehouse is on fire; get up, come on, get up!”
Thurtell called for the landlady and told her to grease his boots (to protect the leather against the snow). He later submitted a claim to the County Fire Office for £1,913 in losses as a result of the conflagration.
Thurtell seemed at last to have gotten the better of fortune. But Barber Beaumont, the head of the County Fire Office, was suspicious. Thurtell, he conceded, appeared to have a solid alibi, having been out all night with a Bank of England man. But curiously enough, no traces of burnt fabric were found in the ashes of Watling Street. Nor had Thurtell been able to produce the customary certification, signed by two inhabitants of the parish, that the fire was the result of accident, not arson. Beaumont refused to pay. Thurtell brought suit against him and won his case. The court awarded him £1,900. As for poor Mr. Penny, the wine-and-spirits man, he had no insurance and was ruined.
* De Quincey said that at the height of his opium addiction he had taken “so large a quantity as a thousand drops” of laudanum a day.
CHAPTER FIVE
The Wounded Egotist
A great deal of bankrupt vanity had taken quite the malignant shape.
—Thomas Carlyle
On the surface, life was as amusing as ever. Thurtell, who was again in money, took the lease of another public house, the Cock in the Haymarket, and acquired an interest in a house in Manchester Buildings, Westminster, a stone’s throw from the Thames, which was to be a repository for fraudulently obtained goods. Yet he was uneasy. All around him there were ominous portents. His brother Tom was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy; and in May his old friend Squire Elliot met his lurid end. That gentleman of fortune was awakened one morning in his house in Hunter Street, Brunswick Square, by the sheriff’s officer, come to arrest him for debt. Dressed only in his nightshirt, he begged a moment’s leave. Retiring to his bedroom, he sat down and put a horse pistol to his belly. The jurors at the coroner’s inquest charitably returned a verdict of insanity.
A Greek chorus could not more effectually have admonished Thurtell of the fleeting nature of a sporting man’s prosperity. He had long been accustomed to defy conventional prudences and restraints, and had trusted to the charm and swagger of his person to see him through. But it was not enough; charm, he now conceived, was nothing without an income; he must look about him if he were to procure a steady stream of funds.
Among the habitués of the Cock was a wine merchant named Probert. He was in his early thirties, and of a gigantic physical stature; his wine business had recently failed, with debts of £14,000. But he was not stony broke, for some years before he had married a Miss Noyes, the generously dowered daughter of a prosperous brewer whose money was beyond the reach of his creditors. Miss Noyes—she was now Mrs. Probert—had an unwed sister with dowry money of her own. Here, Thurtell thought, was the means to an income.
One day, Probert took Thurtell down to his country “lodge,” a cottage near Radlett in Hertfordshire, where he introduced him to his sister-in-law. When Thurtell returned to London, he professed himself in love with the lady. The comely Miss Dodson was peremptorily dismissed; her embraces no longer pleased him; he must wed Miss Noyes. She, however, had promised her hand to another, a Major Woods. Thurtell determined to supplant the obnoxious rival, and whenever practicable he went down to Probert’s cottage to call upon the lady. But it was in vain; a chum of Thurtell’s recalled how “one Saturday, when he was going down there, he met Major Woods and Miss Noyes coming to town in company together.” This “very much vexed and mortified him”; but when he endeavored to retrieve the situation by writing love letters to Miss Noyes, they “were either unnoticed or returned under cover.” This “only served to irritate” Thurtell still more, and “he inveighed most bitterly against Woods.”
The failure of the love-suit was followed by a still more consequential reverse. A grand jury indicted Thurtell for conspiracy to defraud Barber Beaumont’s County Fire Office.* For the first time, his bright assurance failed him. An abyss had opened up before him, and he was consumed by morose thoughts. In his bedroom above the Cock, he poured forth a stream of vituperation against those who had betrayed him, punctuating the wild invectives with bullets fired from an air gun. But the Cock itself soon became too hot for him; there were warrants out against him, and he was liable to arrest at any moment. Probert advised him to take refuge in the Coach and Horses, an inn on Conduit Street. Mr. Tetsall, the proprietor, was an obliging fellow and would “keep a good look-out” for him.
At the Coach and Horses, the wounded egotist wallowed in his grievances. He dreamt of revenge. Major Woods was to be the first victim. Thurtell would invent some spurious pretext to entice him to come to the warehouse in Manchester Buildings, where he would bludgeon him to death with a pair of dumbbells. One of his confederates, a slow-witted fellow named Joe Hunt, promised to assist him in the business.
Dressed as a servant, Hunt went one morning to Major Woods’s lodgings in Castle Street and told him that Mrs. Brew (a great friend of Woods’s) wished him to come at once to a house in Westminster. Major Woods followed Hunt to 10 Manchester Buildings. The door was ajar, and Hunt went in, expecting Woods to follow. But when he looked round, he saw that Woods had stopped on the threshold, being “no doubt deterred from going in” by the sight of Thurtell standing “at the foot of the stairs, close to the back parlour door, with his coat and shoes off, a red shawl over his head to disguise him, and a dumb bell in each hand ready to strike.” Deterred Major Woods no doubt was, and a moment later was seen judiciously running off.
“It was lucky for him he did run,” Thurtell said, “or else he would never have run again.” He toyed with other plans for doing away with Major Woods, but in the meantime his cronies were becoming impatient. “Damn and blast Woods,” one of them exclaimed. “What is the use of killing him? Barber Beaumont is the man we want out of the way.” “Never fear,” Thurtell replied: “he is booked . . . you may depend on it.” And indeed, for several nights Thurtell lay in wait for Beaumont with his air gun. But Beaumont, too, eluded him.
* The jury was satisfied that before the fire in Watling Street, Thurtell had sold the fabrics he had insured to two purchasers, William Steadman, a merchant in Cumberland Street, and the firm of Margrave & Co. His actual losses in the fire did not exceed a hundred pounds.
CHAPTER SIX
Ultra Flash Men
Weare, Thurtell, Hunt, and Probert, were all sporting blades, ultra flash men, and gamblers—preying alike upon each other. . . .
—The Fatal Effects of Gambling (1824)
The maples were beginning to change color when, on an afternoon in October 1823, Jack Thurtell and his brother Tom were walking in Spring Gardens, near the eastern end of St. James’s Park. With them was Joe Hunt. As they approached Rexworthy’s billiard rooms, Jack expressed a desire to go in. He exchanged a few words with Rexworthy himself, then went over to a fastidiously dressed little man who was sitting at one of the tables.
“Mr. Weare, how are you?”
Weare stood up and shook hands. After an interchange of pleasantries, the two men left the room together. When, some twenty minutes later, they returned, Tom Thurtell said he must be off. Jack, too, had to be going, and he and Hunt went out together. Hunt would later recall how, as they went up the Haymarket, Jack told him how he had accused Weare of cheating him with false cards. “You dare not say a word,” Weare had replied, “for you know you have defrauded your creditors of that money”; and he
had afterwards refused Thurtell a loan of five pounds. “Go and rob for it as I do,” he told the desperate supplicant.
“I do not forget this treatment,” Thurtell said.
While Thurtell struggled in the pit, another young man, a year his junior, was beginning his ascent from the regions of the damned. In October 1823, Thomas Carlyle was living in Kinnaird House in the Tay Valley of Scotland, having sequestered himself to “clean and purify” himself in the “penal fire” of his own inward inferno. It was (he supposed) the price of illumination. As his fellow mystic and somewhatish friend De Quincey said, “Either the human being must suffer and struggle as the price of a more searching vision, or his gaze must be shallow, and without intellectual revelation.” After a tussle in the pit “with the foul and vile and soul-murdering Mud-Gods” of his epoch, Carlyle took up the prophetic mantle and howled, much as Isaiah and Jeremiah had howled before him. The customs of his people were vain: fed on a diet of materialism and rationalism, they were withered up, he said, “into effete Prose, dead as ashes.” Having sacrificed the native splendor of their being on the altars of profit and loss, they were become automatized, pattern-figure persons, unacquainted with the “mystic deeps” of their souls. They had sold their birthright for a mess of merchandise, and were less content than ever.
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