by Lucy Moore
The prostitutes who worked for Jonathan Wild and Mary Milliner would never have been able to afford to buy dresses embroidered with silver. They would have been more like ‘Corinna, pride of Drury Lane’ (an area notoriously populated by whores), to whom Swift addressed his satirical poem, ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’.
Corinna, pride of Drury Lane,
For whom no shepherd sighs in vain;
Never did Covent Garden boast
So bright a battered, strolling Toast;
No drunken rake to pick her up,
No cellar where on tick to sup;
Returning at the midnight hour;
Four storeys climbing to her bower;
Then, seated on a three-legged chair,
Takes off her artificial hair:
Now, plucking out a crystal eye,
She wipes it clean, and lays it by...
Now dextrously her plumpers draws,
That serve to fill her hollow jaws.
Untwists a wire; and from her gums
A set of teeth completely comes.
Pulls out the rags, contrived to prop
Her flabby dugs, and down they drop...
Up goes her hand, and off she slips
The bolsters that supply her hips.
With gentlest touch, she next explores
Her shankers, issues, running sores;
Effects of many a sad disaster,
And then to each applies a plaster.
But must, before she goes to bed,
Rub off the dawbs of white and red;...
She takes a Bolus e’er she sleeps;
And then between two blankets creeps.
With pains of love tormented lies;
Or, if she chance to close her eyes,
Of Bridewell and the Compter dreams,
And feels the lash, and faintly screams;...
Or, to Jamaica seems transported,
Alone, and by no planter courted.
Or, near Fleet-Ditch’s oozy brinks,
Surrounded with a hundred stinks:...
Or, struck with fear, her fancy runs
On watchmen, constables, and duns,
From whom she meets with frequent rubs;
But never from religious clubs;
Whose favour she is sure to find,
Because she pays them all in kind.
Corinna wakes. A dreadful sight!
Behold the ruins of the night!
A wicked rat her plaster stole,
Half ate, and dragged it to his hole.
The crystal eye, alas, was missed;
And Puss had on her plumbers p—st.
A pigeon picked her issue-peas;
And Shock her tresses filled with fleas.
‘Corinna’ was an example of the cheapest type of streetwalker, known as a Buttock-and-File: ‘buttock’, for obvious reasons — clearly, a piece of ass meant the same thing then as it does today — and ‘file’, for the tool that thieves used in house-breaking. Buttock-and-Files could combine their trades, robbing their clients of their purses during a moment of abandonment. Some whores used to take the purse out of their client’s pocket as they had sex, and replace it with another one weighted with lead so that when the client left, feeling his pocket to ensure the purse was still there, he would believe he hadn’t been robbed. A Buttock-and-File usually worked with a ‘Twang’, a male companion who watched covertly as his partner found her victim and engaged him in intercourse while she robbed him. At a given signal, he would come up to them and knock the ‘Cull’, or victim, down so that they could make their escape before he realized he had been robbed.
Wild worked as Twang for Mary Milliner, and for the other girls in their establishment. He was of average height, but strong. As a Twang he was ideal because he was ruthless enough to consider any cruelty fair play; his victims would seldom have been able to pursue him or raise a hue and cry. He also fenced, or sold, the goods the girls stole. This was more to his taste, for although he was physically brave he preferred to remain in the background masterminding situations, rather than being actually involved himself. ‘Nor indeed, had he any occasion to run a hazard himself, he finding himself as much a gainer in the part he acted as if he had shared in the adventure,’ recorded Defoe. Small-time receiving was the perfect introduction to thief-taking, the profession Jonathan Wild was to dominate and transform during his career.
Britain in the early eighteenth century could be a brutal, frightening place. Violence was an inescapable fact of life at all levels of society. ‘Anything that looks like fighting is delicious to an Englishman,’ wrote Henri Misson, a French visitor to England, who published his observations of the differences between the French and the English in 1719. Even recreations might involve violence, albeit somewhat randomly. Hogarth and some friends went on a junket to Kent in 1732. Their country ramble degenerated into an extraordinary scene when they started throwing bits of dung at each other, which led to ‘a battle royal with sticks, pebbles and hog’s dung’.[41] Lionel Copely, a Yorkshire gentleman, was indicted in 1664 for beating a man, putting a bridle into his mouth, and after climbing on to his back, riding him for half an hour.
Disputes were often settled by force. Duelling was still common, and was carried out quite openly in the fields in and around London. Hyde Park, which was five or six miles in circumference, filled with deer and still very wild, was a particular favourite but any open space, such as Lincoln’s Inn Fields or Leicester Fields, might be used. In 1712, Lord Mohun and the Duke of Wharton slew each other in Hyde Park. Killing one’s opponent in a duel was generally considered manslaughter, not murder, in the eyes of the law, and was punished only as a common law misdemeanour. Seconds sometimes got carried away and joined in the fray: Captain John Hamilton, one of the seconds, was tried for his complicity in the deaths of the principals in the Wharton-Mohun duel. An eyewitness testified that both seconds had their swords in their hands, ‘assisting the Lords’. All four probably took off their wigs for ease of movement and vision, and fought bare-headed.
Cesar de Saussure commented on the frequency with which fist-fighting was used to settle an argument. ‘Would you believe it, I have actually seen women — belonging, it is true, to the scum of the people — fighting in this same manner.’ Sometimes this might have tragic results. William Yates was tried for murder in Surrey in 1726. His defence shows the ease with which spontaneous violence could rage out of control.
I and the Deceased were playing a match at cricket, and the Deceased doing some things which I did not like, together with my being in a fair way to lose, ruffled my temper; whereupon I went up to the Deceased and desired him to be easy, otherwise I would knock him on the head with my bat. The Deceased still persisting to provoke me, I challenged him to box, but he refusing...I was easy, and all was quiet.
A few minutes later, his opponent had challenged him to fight, and ‘not wishing to be thought a coward’, Yates accepted. They ‘stripped, and went into a pound, where we fought some time, till he allowed me to be the best man. The pound being locked, we were both obliged to get over the rails, and he, in all appearances got over as well as I’, but he died half an hour later, from ‘mortal bruising’ inflicted by Yates. Yates was found guilty of manslaughter, not a capital offence, burned, or branded, in the hand, and discharged.’[42]
The nobility were not exempt from fighting in the street in this manner. In 1719 Henri Misson described seeing ‘the late Duke of Grafton at fisticuffs in the open street, with such a fellow [a hackney-coach driver; the Duke was disputing the fare], whom he lamed most horribly’. Misson’s footnote reads: ‘In the very widest part of the Strand. The Duke of Grafton was big and extremely robust. He had hid his blue riband [the mark of his rank] before he took the coach, so that the coachman did not know him.’
This volatility, a speed and heat of reaction when slighted or crossed, was common. In 1714 Henry Plunkett killed the wig-maker with whom he lodged, when he refused to lower his price for a w
ig Plunkett had ordered more than a guinea: Plunkett slit Thomas Brown’s throat from ear to ear with a razor lying on the counter. A newspaper report of 1719 reveals an incident of similar mindless violence. ‘On Saturday night last, a Link-Boy, lighting two gentlemen home to their lodgings in the Strand, and not going fast enough for them, they stabbed him in the back, of which he died the next morning but the murderers escaped.’[43]
Group violence was as prevalent as individual acts of brutality. They might be politically or socially motivated, like the actions of mobs. In 1723 a group of rioters called the Waltham Blacks, in their struggle against the gamekeepers of Waltham Forest who were trying to enforce their masters’ orders to tighten poaching restrictions, threatened murder, assaulted people, burned down houses, and staged dramatic rescues of imprisoned offenders. Riots might also be genuine acts of treason, like the risings in support of Jacobite pretenders. Wild rumours circulated constantly in this period of Jacobite invasions from Scotland or France.
It was not just the needy and desperate who created this powder-keg atmosphere. Upper-class disturbances were not unknown. The Mohocks were a band of young rakes who roamed through London causing havoc. Their name was a bastardization of Mohawk, an Indian tribe renowned for its reckless bravery. The only qualification for membership was ‘an outrageous ambition of doing all possible hurt to their fellow creatures...In order to exert this principle in its full strength and perfection, they take care to drink themselves to a pitch...’ Members had different areas of specialization: some, called ‘Dancing Masters’, taught ‘their scholars to cut capers by running swords through their legs’; others stuffed their victims in barrels and rolled them down hills; still others assaulted and defaced people they met on the street. Cutting off people’s noses was a particular favourite. They went down streets tearing the knockers off the front doors of every house they passed.[44] In March 1712 a group of Mohocks, ‘all peers and persons of quality’, killed the landlady of a tavern after causing a fight on her premises; all five were acquitted, despite the atmosphere of terror the Mohocks had created.[45] Who has not trembled at the Mohocks’ name?’ asked John Gay. That year, Swift mentioned them in a letter: ‘Our Mohocks go on still, and cut people’s faces every night; faith they shan’t cut mine, I like it better as it is.’ He thought the destruction the Mohocks caused was part of a Whig conspiracy to create an atmosphere of chaos on London’s streets, under cover of which they could have Lord Oxford, the leader of the Tories, assassinated undetected.
The Bold Bucks, of which the Duke of Wharton was a member, was another aristocratic association like the Mohocks, but with blasphemy rather than violence as its raison d’être. To join, its would-be members had formally to deny the existence of God; every Sunday the club ate a dish called ‘Holy Ghost Pie’. The Bucks’ activities were more specific than the Mohocks’; they concentrated on sexual adventures, in which women were usually unwilling participants. The Hell-Fire Clubs had similar tenets and aims to the Bold Bucks, guided by principles of ‘atheism and sexual depravity’. Black Masses were held, read by members dressed as monks, attended by prostitutes in nuns’ habits; books of erotica were bound as Books of Common Prayer; group masturbation and orgies were held. Its members included Sir Francis Dashwood, whose mistress, Mrs Stanhope, a brothel-keeper, was known as ‘Hell-Fire Stanhope’; and John Montague, the future Earl of Sandwich, who was ‘completely depraved, as mischievous as a monkey and as lecherous as a goat’. In April 1721 George I released an order against ‘certain scandalous clubs or societies of young persons who meet together...[to] insult the most sacred principles of our holy religion...and corrupt the minds and morals of one another’. The specific acts in which they indulged were obviously too scandalous to spell out in an official document.[46]
The streets of London were so dangerous that one had to travel fully armed to go out to dinner. Men habitually carried swords, and often pistols as well. No one could be trusted in the dank, unlit streets. Even link-boys, whose job it was to light the street lanterns intended to make London’s streets safer at night, didn’t hesitate to put out their torches and rob passers-by, or for a penny or two lead them into the clutches of a gang of armed footpads; they were known as ‘Moon Cursers’. Servants in a big London house were armed and prepared to defend their master’s property as if it were under siege. Footmen were not just used to decorate the back of a carriage; they were also there to defend their master and his family against robbers. Stagecoaches and private coaches took outriders with them to protect their passengers from violent highwaymen. In 1720 ladies going to court carried blunderbusses in their carriages ‘to shoot at rogues’. Later in the century, Horace Walpole, who had been shot at in Hyde Park by a highwayman, said, ‘One is forced to travel, even at noon, as if one was going to battle.’ London was a battlezone. ‘The streets of this town, and the roads leading to it, will shortly be impassable without the utmost hazard.’[47]
Rates of crime were particularly high after a war, when demobilized soldiers returned home. The army was a hotbed of corruption: a bribe could arrange anything; in fact, little could be done without bribery. Commissions were sold illegally; officers took advantage of their soldiers for their own profit; drinking, gambling and whoring were glorified; violence was a way of life. The mechanics of life in the army thus predisposed demobilized soldiers to a life of crime. Furthermore, ex-soldiers often had no skills, some having joined up to avoid the strictures of apprenticeship, others tempted by the promise of two guineas and a new suit of clothes ‘for every rake that will run away from his wife and family’.[48] Many were thrill-seekers, who joined the army to see the world and make their fortune; frustrated, empty-handed, they returned to grab what they could. With the end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1713, there was the usual rise in criminal prosecutions, and this increase was sustained well into the 1720s. Crime was rife; London was being ‘plundered wholesale’.[49]
Most offences were crimes against property. London, as the principal city in the country, was where the country’s wealth was concentrated. The gulf between the lives of the lower and upper classes was vast — the ostentatious luxury of the rich was flaunted without modesty, and the poor saw the consumption of their betters and knew that nothing they could ever achieve would bring this type of life within their reach. Crime was their only method of venting their feelings of frustration at this inequality. But crime generally meant theft; although robberies often involved brutality, injury was not the chief aim of the exercise. Rape was common, but it was little reported and still less prosecuted. The age of consent was set at ten in 1576, and there was not much moral support for the victims of sexual abuse. Premeditated murder was rare, but victims of crime were sometimes killed when they were attacked by a gang of footpads or held up by a highwayman.
Practically the only check on this outbreak of violence and lawlessness were thief-takers. Since Elizabethan times, people had sought them out to retrieve their stolen property. Any means might be used, even the supernatural; John Bonner, of Short’s Gardens near Covent Garden, advertised his services in 1703, claiming to be able to track down missing items by necromancy. The limitations of the legal system allowed thief-taking to flourish; quite simply it was cheaper and easier for the government to defer responsibility for controlling crime into the hands of men willing to deal with it. Thief-takers were often receivers of stolen goods, or fences, whose knowledge of the criminal world provided them with unique access to criminals, and by the 1710s thief-taking had become a complex trade involving blackmail, informing, bribery, framing and organization of theft, as well as mere receivership. ‘Black Dog’ was the cant name for a receiver in sixteenth-century London. Moll Cutpurse was known as the ‘High Directress’ of crime in Restoration London, with an office on Fleet Street. She was an unusual woman,
troubled by none of those longings which poor maidens are subject to: she had the power and strength to command her own pleasure of any person who had reasonable ability of body
; and therefore she needed not whine for it, as she was able to beat a fellow to a compliance, without the unnecessary trouble of entreaties.[50]
An anonymous report in the British Journal in 1725 recalled the activities of thief-takers, from the point of view of the people who worked for them, at the start of the century:
The thief-takers are our absolute masters; and they have intelligence from tapsters, ostlers, and porters etc., at inns, and from people, that only for a disguise [enough gin to get drunk on] cry things about the streets; and others, who draw in servants to be accessory in robbing their masters; and they send us into several wards and stations (as a corporal sends soldiers to stand sentinel); and if we refuse to go, they’ll immediately have us committed for some former crime; or...bring evidence to swear away our lives wrongfully.
The author knew six thief-takers working in London at this time, ‘and where they kept their nightly clubs, to which if their gangs did not repair, they were in danger; and from whence they must go wherever he sent them’. He detailed how they would go to prisons daily to look for new offenders, whom they could free in return for their future loyalty, and ‘whichever thief-catcher came first to such new offender, he must be his slave for ever after, and rob when he bid him, or be hanged for refusing’.
Thief-takers informed on the thieves who worked for them — ‘these people swear my life away for the sake of the reward’ protested a defendant on trial in 1738 — but the thieves were forced to rely on thief-takers because, without them, the property they stole was worthless to them. They were hugely unpopular because the nature of their profession prevented them from any sentimental attachment or loyalty, and they were always willing to turn someone in if they deemed it necessary. Some thief-takers actually enticed young men into crime specifically to impeach them for the £40 reward the government offered to anyone providing evidence that would convict a criminal. Thief-takers were far and away the best placed to reap these rewards; only they had the necessary sources of information on individual miscreants, and the contacts to secure their arrests. The rewards offered, instead of helping to curb robbery, allowed thief-taking to flourish.