Jane Austen's England

by Roy Adkins,Lesley Adkins

  A gentleman gazing at a print-shop in the Strand, had his pocket picked of his purse, in which were bank notes to the amount of 700l. A poor woman that stood by observed the transaction, gave notice, and the fellow was pursued and taken, and the purse recovered. The fellow, after being rolled in the kennel [drain], and had undergone the discipline of the mob, was permitted to escape, and the woman who had discovered the theft rewarded with five guineas.17

  This pickpocket may not have realised what he was stealing, but had he been prosecuted, such a substantial theft would have warranted the death sentence.

  For lesser amounts, the judge might reduce the sentence to transportation, as in the case of thirty-five-year-old Sarah Smith. At her trial for ‘pocketpicking’ in April 1793, John Harrison testified:

  I am a breeches maker in Fleet-street, and I keep the Crown, Clement’s Inn-passage. I was coming from that house to my house in Fleet-street, this woman accosted me with, my dear, will you go home with me? I said, good woman is that your home, pointing to the Hole in the Wall [a tavern], the next door but one to mine, she said it was, and ran after me down to my own door; I said, good woman I am at home, you had better go home yourself and I rung the bell to go into my own house; she hung about me, my breeches pocket being open, and she took the money out of my breeches, and I never perceived it.18

  On being asked ‘Where did she rob you?’ Harrison replied, ‘In the street; it was at my own door…I pushed her from me, and she went away easy enough, I did not miss the money till after I had rung the bell…and I put my hand into my breeches pocket as I was standing by the door, and I found my money gone.’19 Harrison said that he immediately cried out for the night watchman, before pursuing the woman, who was arrested and his money recovered.

  Sarah Smith was accused of stealing nine guineas and three half-crowns, a total of 196s. 6d. (£9 16s. 6d.). Before the law was changed in 1808, the theft of property worth more than forty shillings by picking a pocket would incur a death sentence, but the jury found her guilty of a lesser charge, valuing the guineas and half-crowns well below the amount she had actually taken. This legal fiction was regularly used by juries to allow a judge to avoid a mandatory death penalty. Sarah Smith was sentenced to seven years’ transportation, and she sailed on board the Surprise in February 1794, landing in New South Wales in October after a voyage of 176 days.20

  Next to pickpockets in the hierarchy of criminals, according to Moritz,

  come the highwaymen, who rob on horseback; and often, they say, even with unloaded pistols, they terrify travellers, in order to put themselves in possession of their purses. Among these persons, however, there are instances of true greatness of soul; there are numberless instances of their returning a part of their booty, where the party robbed has appeared to be particularly distressed; and they are seldom guilty of murder.21

  Highwaymen haunted roads (highways) on the outskirts of towns and cities, preying on travellers. Many were ex-soldiers – officers and cavalrymen – who were excellent horsemen and could make a rapid escape. They had some reputation for gallantry, even chivalry, and a few tried to portray themselves as latter-day Robin Hoods. Most were not particularly violent or brutal and might even be deferential towards their victims.

  Dick Turpin, the highwayman best known today, belonged to an earlier era. He was executed in 1739, but his legend lived on, and Francis Place noted that ‘Oh Rare Turpin Hero’ was a popular ballad sung in the streets.22 It was first published as a broadside ballad around the time of Turpin’s execution under the title ‘Turpin’s Rant: A New Song’,23 but over the years the song changed and expanded as it circulated by word-of-mouth.24 Only the central theme remained constant, that of Turpin fooling the better-off, which three verses common to most versions related:

  On Hounslow Heath, as I rid o’er,

  I spy’d a Lawyer just before,

  I asked him if he was not afraid,

  Of TURPIN, that mischievous blade?

  Sing, O rare Turpin, O rare Turpin, O.

  Says Turpin, I have been most cute,

  For my Money is hid within my Boot,

  Says the Lawyer, there is none can find

  For mine lies in my Cape behind.

  They rid till they came to the Powder Mill,

  When Turpin bid the Lawyer to stand still,

  Stand, Sir, your Cape I must cut off,

  For my Horse does want a saddle cloth.

  Sing, &c.25

  Whether the victim was a lawyer, exciseman, judge or wealthy farmer, what made the song popular was the notion of an establishment figure being brought low. Turpin may not have been a true Robin Hood, as he did not bestow money on the poor, but widespread satisfaction was felt from his robbing the rich.

  Highwaymen could be violent, and a common tactic of theirs was to shatter the glass windows of vehicles and then fire at passengers, though some resisted, as in one incident reported by the Oxford Journal in January 1797:

  Tuesday night, as the Earl of Strathmore was returning to town [London] from Wimbledon, he was attacked by a highwayman, who, without ceremony, broke the glass, and fired into the carriage, but luckily missed his aim; on which the Earl, who had a loaded blunderbuss between his knees, fired, and immediately killed the assailant on the spot, who appears to be one Lancaster, liberated out of prison for want of evidence only a few days since. He had an accomplice, who escaped.26

  The dead highwayman was the notorious criminal William Lancaster, who had until recently been detained on a charge of robbing Lord Boringdon.27 The death penalty seemed little deterrent to highwaymen, and the unpredictability of their behaviour and the number of robberies made travellers nervous. In 1805 a Horse Patrol of mainly ex-cavalrymen was established as an offshoot of the Bow Street Runners, which led to a decline in the number of highwaymen.

  Footpads (highway robbers on foot) were another source of anxiety for travellers, and Moritz considered them worst of all because they ‘often murder in the most inhuman manner, for the sake of only a few shillings, any unfortunate people who happen to fall in their way. Of this several mournful instances may be occasionally read in the English papers. Probably they murder, because they cannot, like the highwaymen, aided by their horses, make a rapid flight.’28 Footpads often operated in gangs, and they would even ambush coaches at bridges and other constricted places where horses were reined in: ‘On Wednesday [13 June 1792] night as JAMES FRY, Esq. of Wimpole-street, in company with five young Ladies, were returning home from the Richmond Theatre, they were stopped in a coach by six footpads, who robbed Mr. FRY of four guineas and some silver. Previous to the robbery the villains fired a pistol at the window, the bullet of which shot away one of the young Ladies earrings.’29

  In 1796 the magistrate Patrick Colquhoun published a treatise on crime in London,30 demonstrating that it went far beyond the obvious street offences and burglary. In his view, there were worse crimes, such as counterfeiting, metal theft and the vast amount of pilfering from warehouses and ships along the Thames. As a result, the Marine Police Force was set up in 1798 at Wapping, and when William Holland was in London in 1805, he visited the Wapping police office as a guest of his friend William Kinnaird, one of the justices there. Holland was impressed by the office and amazed at the river traffic it policed: ‘We padded through many dirty narrow streets and got at last to the water side. There we took boat, and pass’d through groves of shipping. There seem’d to be no end of ’em; it was a gloriously awful [awesome] sight and gave a lively idea of the greatness of this nation. Boats were passing and repassing continuously.’31

  Most people were understandably terrified of being robbed at home, and stories were constantly circulating about all manner of thefts from houses. In the summer of 1775 the Bath Chronicle reported: ‘Monday morning [31 July], at two o’clock, three fellows got into Copt-hall [Copped Hall], the seat of John Conyers, Esq., near Epping, and bound the butler neck and heels and took away [silver] plate to the value of near 2000l. They carried
it off in a post-chaise which waited for them at the Park-gate.’32 This weekly newspaper was published far from the scene of the robbery, but such unsettling crimes were newsworthy right across England.

  The Bath Chronicle’s account had actually been overtaken by events, because the ringleader was already in custody – Lambert Reading, a former coachman at Copped Hall. In the ensuing one-day trial, the butler testified as to how he had been threatened: ‘three men entered his chamber [around 3.00 a.m.], one of whom, with a drawn sword and dark lanthorn, came to his bedside, and swore in a most violent manner, that, if he spoke or made any resistance, he would cut his throat; after which he threw the bed-cloaths over his head, and stood as a guard over him, whilst the others collected a large quantity of plate’.33 This was an ambitious robbery: ‘from the conversation that passed between them, he apprehended they filled four sacks with the house-plate’.34 Their downfall was locking the butler in his room rather than killing him, and while the rest of the gang was not apprehended for some weeks, Lambert Reading was executed just five days afterwards.

  Such a deliberately planned theft from a large country house was exceptional. It was easier to attack less wealthy establishments, which generated a universal dread of burglary, and in January 1808 Fanny Platt wrote from Kensington to her sister Sarah Wilkinson: ‘The robbing trade is so brisk here you cannot think, scarce a night but one or more houses are broken into and robbed. James has hitherto escaped but I believe he quakes thinking he shall not much longer, as they last night were robbing on each side of him.’35

  Thefts were often little more than opportunistic crimes, but the penalties could still be severe. In August 1814 the Morning Chronicle reported:

  an old man, who makes a living by picking up bones in the street, was yesterday charged by Mrs. Hill, of Tottenham-court-road, with stealing a silver spoon, her property, which she gave a child at the door to play with, who having dropped it, the prisoner picked it up and went off with it…he denied any knowledge of it, but being searched by a constable the spoon was found in his possession. He was committed to Newgate for trial.36

  The accused man was Thomas Norman, a street scavenger. The charge was grand larceny, stealing property with a value of more than one shilling with no aggravating circumstances. Because the spoon was valued at fifteen pence (1s. 3d.), he was facing a possible death sentence if found guilty. As was customary, the victim or any interested party was the prosecutor, not the state. The husband William Hill actually owned the spoon, but he failed to attend the court case three weeks later, and so the old man was acquitted.37

  Servants were often accused of stealing from their employers, and one such theft at a London public house was featured by the Morning Chronicle in August 1806 in its regular ‘Police’ column:

  On Sunday se’night a female servant of Mr. Jaggers, of the Hand and Racket, in Whitcomb-street, very unexpectedly left her place. In a short time after she was gone, Mrs. Jaggers discovered that she had been robbed of cash, several articles of plate, and wearing apparel.– Application was made to Donaldson, a constable, to apprehend her; the officer learnt, from her connection in St. Giles’s, that she was gone to Bristol, whither he pursued her.38

  St Giles was the overcrowded warren of narrow streets, courts and alleys centred around Seven Dials, a refuge for beggars, poor street traders and criminals, with a substantial Irish population. For George Donaldson, a Bow Street Runner, it was the obvious place to start pursuing the servant Eleanor Russel, because it was not many streets away from the Hand and Racquet public house. He finally caught up with her in Bristol, just before she sailed to Ireland, as he testified at her trial for ‘theft from a specified place’: ‘GEORGE DONALDSON sworn. I am an officer; I went to Bristol after this woman, I…took [arrested] her there; I found the gown, the shirt, the pinafore, and the gold pin, in her box, and two guineas and a half in gold, and three shillings and six pence in silver.’39

  Despite the value of the recovered items exceeding seventy shillings, the jury merely found her guilty of ‘stealing to the value of thirty-nine shillings’,40 a shilling short of a capital punishment for this crime. She was sentenced to seven years’ transportation and sailed for New South Wales on board the Sydney Cove in January 1807. The transportation register describes her as ‘Eleanor ux [uxor – Latin for ‘spouse’] William Russell’,41 though soon after arriving in Australia she married another convict, Simon McGuigin.42

  It was rare for any member of the gentry and upper classes to be tried for theft. They were much more likely to buy off the prosecutor before their case came to trial, and if that failed, they had a much greater chance of being acquitted since they could afford to pay for lawyers or resort to bribery. When Mrs Jane Leigh-Perrot was arrested in August 1799 for stealing lace worth twenty shillings from Elizabeth Gregory’s shop in Bath, she was refused bail, but instead of being held in the County Gaol at Ilchester, she was allowed to live with her husband in the adjacent prison-keeper’s house. For people of their rank, even this situation was intolerable, as a letter written a few months later to Mrs Leigh-Perrot from a cousin reveals: ‘You tell me that your good sister Austen has offered you one, or both, of her daughters to continue with you during your stay at that vile place, but you decline the kind offer, as you canot procure them accommodation in the house with you, and you cannot let these elegant young women be your inmates in a prison nor be subject to the inconveniences which you are obliged to put up with.’43 The two elegant young women were Jane Austen and her sister Cassandra, and Mrs Leigh-Perrot was their aunt.

  The trial took place at the next Assizes at Taunton Castle, at the end of March 1800, when Mrs Leigh-Perrot was accused of grand larceny. Whether or not she was guilty of shoplifting (and many believed the shopkeeper had deliberately set out to extort money), the stakes were high because such a high-value theft from a shop was a capital offence. On 22 March, a few days before her trial, William Holland was in Nether Stowey, some 10 miles from Taunton, and he was told about rumours that the prosecutor (the shopkeeper Elizabeth Gregory) had been bribed:

  Met Mr Symes the lawyer at Stowey. He told me that Mrs Parrot [Perrot] had bought off her prosecutor. Alas, Alas! that money should be able to screen a person from justice in this kingdom so remarkable for good laws and uncorrupted judges. She was accused of stealing lace out of a shop in Bath, is a person of considerable fortune and has a poor Jerry Sneak of a husband, who adheres to her through all difficulties.44

  Mrs Leigh-Perrot was acquitted by the jury, but her expenses were considerable. The case was still being gossiped about a month later when Holland was in Bath and went to a different shop from the one that had accused her of theft: ‘Went to Brookman’s the milliner, a clever woman, sensible and well behaved…Miss Brookman was present at a detection of Mrs Lee Perrot [in another crime] many years ago, confirmed the fact, everything clear against her.’45

  Penelope Hind, the long-time friend of Holland, learned in November 1804 that she was once again being accused of theft in Bath, this time of a plant, but no prosecution followed.46 Five months later, the extremely wealthy Mrs Leigh-Perrot appeared in one of Jane Austen’s letters, none too favourably: ‘My aunt is in a great hurry to pay me for my cap, but cannot find it in her heart to give me good money.’47 Instead, Jane was invited to accompany her to ‘the Grand Sydney-Garden Breakfast’. Polite society in Bath was already avoiding her aunt, and possibly for this reason Jane declared: ‘such an offer I shall of course decline’.48 Two days later, she added to her letter: ‘My Uncle and Aunt drank tea with us last night, and in spite of my resolution to the contrary, I could not help putting forward to invite them again this Evening. I thought it was of the first consequence to avoid anything that might seem a slight to them. I shall be glad when it is over.’49

  Other prisoners on trial at the same Assizes at Taunton in March 1800 were not so lucky as Mrs Leigh-Perrot. Those found guilty included ‘John Branch, aged 14, for burglary…Robert Phillips, for sheep-stealing; Thoma
s Coles, and William Hartland, for burglary at Langport’.50 They were all sentenced to death – a real demonstration of the Bloody Code in action – while three more were sentenced to seven years’ transportation: ‘Wm. Spratt, for stealing wheat from an out-house; Thomas Broadhurst for stealing sundry pieces of muslin from his master, Mr. Slack, of this city [Bath]; and Joseph Jones, for stealing a trunk’.51

  While it was very rare for any of the elite to be sentenced to death or transportation, even for killing someone, most convicted murderers faced execution. Sensational crimes generated lengthy accounts far beyond their locality, and murders were avidly covered by the newspapers. In Somerset on 25 October 1807, Holland wrote in his diary: ‘No material news in the paper but a shocking account of a murder committed in Hertfordshire.’52 The murder scene was a house in the High Street of Hoddesdon village, in the parish of the Reverend William Jones, who wrote in his diary:

  Poor, wretched mortals! what horrible consequences follow their being given up into the power of Satan, & their own mad, unbridled passions, for ever so short a season! I know not how even to glance at two most horrid murders, which were last night committed in my parish [Hoddesdon], at old Mr. Borham, the farmer’s house. Mrs. Warner, B—m’s daughter, who was within 5 or 6 weeks of her delivery, & Mrs. Hummerstone, Batty’s housekeeper, were the poor sufferers. The villain’s name is Simmons, not more than 20 years of age! To describe the shocking circumstances would be too painful!53

  The newspapers were not so sensitive, and the Hampshire Chronicle revelled in the gory detail:

  Elizabeth Harris, on seeing his approach, retired within the scullery, and shut the door against him. He demanded admittance, which she refused: high words accordingly arose and he plunged his hand, armed with a knife, through a window-lattice at her, but missed his aim. The noise alarmed the company in the parlour…Mrs Hummerstone was the first to come forth, in hope of being able to intimidate and send away the disturber, but just as she had reached the back-door, leading from the parlour to the stone-yard, Simmons, who was proceeding to enter the house that way, met her.54