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

by Lucy Moore

  One of Wild’s Spruce Prigs hired an expensive house in the newly constructed Queen Square on a twenty-one-year lease. Each time the landlord visited the house, he was dismayed to find that his tenant had not yet moved in, but seemed to be ordering the fittings the landlord had just had installed at great expense to be ripped out. The tenant, who was well spoken and immaculately turned-out, assured him that he was only readying the house for the arrival of his wife and family. He spoke vaguely about the fine paintings and furniture that he was having brought up from his country estate; and the landlord, his suspicions allayed by his greed, was reassured. Several weeks later, he returned to the house to find that it had been completely stripped of its panelling, wainscoting, looking-glasses, chimney-pieces — even a staircase. And of the respectable, rich-looking tenant, there was no sign. The landlord had been duped by a master of the art known among the criminal classes as the ‘Lodging Lay’.

  Other valuable criminal skills included the ability to look inconspicuous, to blend into the crowd. Mental agility was as important as manual or physical dexterity, with a combination of steadiness and shrewdness vital for spotting and grasping opportunities, and for getting out of tricky situations. What was known as ‘larceny sense’ to twentieth-century American gangsters, the instinctive knowledge about when it was safe to commit a crime, was every bit as important in eighteenth-century London. Thieves took great pride in their specialized skills and individual expertise: ‘the craftsman’s satisfaction in being master of his mystery’.[54]

  Mary Young, alias Jenny Diver, executed in 1740, was one of the most celebrated pickpockets of her day, known for her subtlety, timing and flair. Her most successful disguise was a costume that made her look heavily pregnant. She had artificial arms folded across her belly, allowing her to slip her real arms unnoticed out of the sides of her dress to cut watch-chains and purse-strings. She would go to church dressed as a fine lady, attended by a footman, to rob wealthy worshippers at Mass. ‘Diver’ was a cant word for a prostitute, and in The Beggars’ Opera Jenny Diver is one of Macheath’s loose women. Gay also warns against female pickpockets in Trivia:

  But do not, like that bold chief, confide

  Thy vent’rous footsteps to a female guide;

  She’ll lead thee, with delusive smiles along,

  Dive in thy fob, and drop thee in the throng.

  Defoe’s Moll Flanders describes how she avoided arrest after an unsuccessful attempt to rob a lady in the crowd:

  I had full hold of her watch, but giving a great jostle, as if someone had thrust me against her, and in the juncture giving her watch a fair pull, I found it would not come, so I let it go at that moment, and cried out as if I had been killed, that somebody had trod upon my foot, and that there were certainly pickpockets there; for somebody or other had given a pull at my watch; for you are to observe, that on these adventures we always went very well dressed, and I had very good clothes on, and a gold watch by my side, as like a lady as other folks.

  I had no sooner said so, but the other gentlewoman cried out a pickpocket too, for somebody, she said, had tried to pull her watch away.

  When I touched her watch, I was close to her, but when I cried out, I stopped as it were short, and the crowd bearing her forward a little, she made a noise too, but it was at some distance from me, so that she did not in the least suspect me; but when she cried out a pickpocket, somebody cried Ay, and here has been another, this gentlewoman has been attempted too.

  At that very instant, a little farther in the crowd, and very luckily too, they cried out a pickpocket again, and really seized a young fellow in the very fact. This, though unhappy for the wretch was very opportunely for my case, though I had carried it off handsomely enough before, but now it was out of all doubt, and the loose part of the crowd run that way, and the poor boy was delivered up to the rage of the street [mob justice], which is a cruelty I need not describe, and which however they are always glad of, rather than be sent to Newgate, where they lie often a long time, till they are almost perished, and sometimes they are hanged, and the best they can look for, if they are convicted, is to be transported.

  Although a man reported in 1735 that he had been held up by a ‘well-mounted’ woman riding side-saddle, most female criminals worked as pickpockets and prostitutes — Buttock-and-Files, like Mary Milliner. The other crime that women commonly committed was infanticide. Not a session passes but we see one or more merciless mothers tried for the murder of their bastard children,’ wrote a shocked Defoe. Unmarried mothers, terrified of the life of prostitution and destitution that they saw as inevitable after the shame of bearing an illegitimate child, covered up their pregnancies, and when their child was born either left it exposed to the elements to die, or abandoned it by a hospital or workhouse where they hoped it might be given the chance to live — a practice known as ‘dropping’. In the first six months of 1743, a dozen babies were dropped in the parish of St George’s, Hanover, a prosperous neighbourhood where presumably a child would have more chance of survival than in St Giles or Smithfield.

  Three in four of London’s children died before they reached the age of six; the Committee on the Care of the Poor in St Martin-in-the-Fields reported that 900 of the 1,200 babies born in the parish in 1715 had died. Even in workhouses the chances of reaching adulthood were slim. A contemporary estimate of the infant death rate in workhouses set up after 1720 was 88 per cent. Swift offered a solution to this problem in his satirical essay, ‘A Modest Proposal’. He suggested that unwanted children should be used for food, thus eliminating in one stroke both infanticide and hunger. ‘A young healthy child well-nursed is at a year old a most delicious, nourishing, and wholesome food.’

  Thieves on foot were known as ‘footpads’, and they usually worked in groups of two or three, though a gang might number up to twenty. They roamed the streets at night, like the Mohocks, taking advantage of the poor lighting and inefficient watches. ‘Street robberies are generally committed in the dark,’ observed Henry Fielding. ‘The persons on whom they are committed are often in chairs and coaches, and if on foot, the attack is usually begun by knocking the party down, and for the time being depriving him of his senses.’ Footpads were forced to use more savage methods than highwaymen to disable their victims to allow them enough time to escape on foot. In 1738 a man was attacked in Ludgate Hill by a gang of three footpads, who cut him with a sword, ‘so that his teeth and jawbone could be seen’, knocked him down, ‘to stop him crying out’, and ran off with only a shilling.[55]

  Stolen goods were usually resold through safe pawnshops for a fraction of their value. Most thieves used their wives or girlfriends as receivers and distributors of stolen goods, or fences like Hitchin and Wild. Some gangs had warehouses and workshops that altered goods so that they could be resold without attracting suspicion, or hid them until they could be sold safely.

  Whoever considers the cities of London and Westminster, with the late vast addition of suburbs, the great irregularity of their buildings, the immense number of lanes, alleys, courts and by-places; must think that, had they been invented for the very purpose of concealment, they could scarce have been better contrived. Upon such a view, the whole appears as a vast wood or forest, in which a thief may harbour with as great security, as wild beasts do in the deserts of Africa or Arabia.[56]

  London was the perfect setting for crime, with a network of safe taverns, inns, stables and receivers. The Hawkins gang of highwaymen regularly used a livery stable just outside the city, paying the owner a share of their profits, his ‘snack’, in return for the use of his horses. The stable provided them with a hideaway, as well as a constant supply of fresh horses. The Dog and Duck in St George’s Fields, south of the river, was a popular resting place for highwaymen; young boys used to go there to watch them mount up and say goodbye to their ‘flashy women’ before setting off to earn their living on the highways. Horse thieves could dispose of their spoils easily in London, because individual horses were unli
kely to be recognized as easily as they would be in the country. Some gangs of horse thieves — individually known as ‘Priggers of Prancers’ — simply sold in the north what they had stolen in the south, and vice versa.

  Many criminals operated within a loosely organized gang. Edward Burnworth, giving evidence in court of his criminal activities during the 1720s, provided details of forty-one burglaries he had committed with accomplices. He used ten men at different times, but he never worked in a group of more than three for any single robbery. He had also carried out nine street robberies, working in a pair with one of seven different men. Large groups of over five were unwieldy, so a gang of fifteen or twenty would split up into smaller groups to ply their trade. His gang, active in the mid-1720s, was formed after Wild broke up Carrick’s Gang, in which Burnworth had cut his teeth as a footpad.

  These gangs, by their nature, had a very fluid membership. Members would drift in and out of gaol, go back to their families in other parts of the country, be hanged or transported, sometimes return from the colonies; new members would join. The highwayman Dick Turpin’s career was typical of this type of mobility and adaptability. He was able to use the skills he had learned as an apprentice butcher in his first criminal enterprise, stealing cattle. He began holding up stagecoaches soon after, and for a short while managed an inn, the Bull-Beggars’-Hole in Clayhill, Essex, where he used to rob his customers as they slept. He also worked on and off with Gregory’s Gang, a notorious band of about twenty outlaw housebreakers who used a clearing in Epping Forest as their base. As a highwayman, he worked with Tom King, whom he met by accident as he tried to rob him. ‘What, dog eat dog? Come, come, brother Turpin; if you don’t know me, I know you, and shall be glad of your company.’[57] He dealt in stolen horses, and carried on stealing cattle and sheep until his arrest and execution.

  The transience of gangs meant that despite the oaths of friendship and allegiance sworn by their members, incentives of pardon or reward often tempted them to inform on their companions. John James and Nathaniel Hawes were highwaymen who had performed eighteen successful hold-ups in their first two weeks together, but soon ruined their working relationship by arguing. They fell out initially because Hawes insisted on returning a ring to a man they held up despite James swearing he’d shoot Hawes through the head if he didn’t retrieve it. Soon after, they quarrelled again when James refused to give a whip back to its lady owner at Hawes’s request. Their mutual distrust was exacerbated by arguments over division of the spoils. Finally, convinced that James would inform against him, Hawes went to Jonathan Wild and impeached James; his evidence earned him a gaol sentence but hanged his ex-partner. Hawes managed to escape from gaol, but was captured by a gentleman he held up on Finchley Common, who seized the pistol with which Hawes was trying to hold him up, and took the crestfallen highwayman back to Newgate on a passing cart.

  This pattern of distrust, fuelled by motives of self-preservation, was common. ‘It was not my common method to rob with comrades,’ recalled John Wigley, another victim of Wild’s system of informers, at his trial in 1721:

  For though they swore to be true to each other, and there was sometimes found some faith among them when their interest was not too nearly concerned, yet when their lives were in danger they grew regardless of their oaths and would betray and impeach their most intimate friends.[58]

  Some gangs were better organized than others. Smuggling, for instance, required a sophisticated system, under strong, efficient leadership, as did horse-thievery and forgery. Fraudsters and forgers abounded, many of them men like Jonathan Wild, with a training in metal-working. By George III’s reign, it was thought that there were more forged shillings in circulation than real ones. Gold coins were clipped, and the clippings sold as bullion. Coins were also ‘sweated’, put into bags and shaken until particles of gold from them lined the bag. This residue was collected and sold. Gold and silver were melted down, and mixed with base metals before being recast. The debased coins were then recirculated. Guineas were heated, to make the gold soft, and then restamped with a die of a higher value, for example a moidore, which was worth 27s. Banks issued their own notes, a virtual invitation to swindlers and confidence tricksters. Forgeries were made of stamps, of bonds, of deeds of exchange, even of the seal of the Bank of England.

  It was vital for these activities to have a distribution system that covered a large area of the country, as well as an efficient network of spies and informers. An estimated 3,000,000 lb. of tea was imported annually by smugglers in the eighteenth century, which would have required a system of almost military precision. Efficiency was one of Jonathan Wild’s strongest skills, and it was that, combined with his ability and willingness to manipulate people, which enabled him to gain control over the wide-ranging network of thieves operating in London in the 1710s.

  Wild encouraged those who worked for him to do so in specific areas at specific times, thereby creating a system of gangs of highly specialized thieves each with their own patch of London to work. He told them that following his orders would benefit them because it made them more efficient and thus made his job, finding the real owners and returning the goods, simpler. In fact, all it did was make it easier for him to control them. He could check up on their stories to see if they had lied to him about what they had taken, or disposed of their loot through anyone other than him. He asked his clients detailed questions about where and when they were robbed, and of what, and if their answers were corroborated by the thieves’ stories, he knew they were serving him well. It also enabled him to find out if there were thieves on London’s streets working independently of him.

  On one occasion, Wild was approached by a gentlewoman who let lodgings in Hackney. She had been robbed by a female lodger, attended by a footman and a maid, who had stripped her rooms of everything she could carry. Wild looked through his books and saw that Wapping [‘Fucking’] Moll, Tawney Bess and Harry Smart — all experts in the Lodging Lay — had last been heard of in Hackney. According to their usual practice, Moll had used the alias Lady Smith, Bess had played her lady’s maid, and Harry Smart had completed the illusion of respectable gentility dressed as Moll’s footman. To their surprise, Wild tracked them down and forced them to fence their loot through him. Incidents like this demonstrated to his thieves that Wild knew as much about their actions as they did, and they learned not to disobey or deceive him. ‘It was no less than death to sink upon him, as he termed it, for there was scarce anything stolen which was worth having again but he heard of it, and knew who the person must be that took it, as well as those who lost it.’[59]

  In September 1714 Wild had one of his first major successes working alone. A gang of house-breakers broke into the Banqueting Hall at Whitehall and made off with some of the communion plate from the nearby chapel. Using methods similar to modern interrogation techniques, Wild persuaded one member of the gang to ‘impeach’ two others, and another one to betray the rest of them. Within three months he had had seven people arrested and collected over £700 in reward money. Wild’s hands were clean, because he had never touched the goods. This was an approach that he was to use frequently with great success throughout his career, persuading a gang member to inform on his fellows in return for a reduced sentence. As an added bonus, after the trial and sentence had passed, he had another criminal to add to his ‘Corporation of Thieves’, one who owed his life to Wild — and on whom he had enough information to have him hanged, which ensured his continued loyalty.

  Wild did not hesitate to bring to justice those who displeased him. He would send to the gallows people who he knew had passed on their goods through another fence, or who would not accept the price he offered them for a stolen item, or who challenged his authority by inciting dissatisfaction among the other thieves. He was able to do this because he always made sure that he gathered enough evidence against those who worked for him that he could have them hanged at any time. The expression ‘double-cross’ is derived from Jonathan’s ruthless busine
ss techniques. He kept immaculate ledger books, detailing criminals working for him and the crimes they had committed. He would mark an ‘X’ by each name in his ledger once he had the evidence to convict them — for instance, when the information on a certain robbery given to him by both the victim and the thief tallied. When he had given them up to the law, he would mark another ‘X’ by their name: they had been double-crossed, or betrayed.[60]

  Turning thieves in served a dual purpose for Wild. Not only did it set an example to the criminals who worked for him by showing them how much control he had over them, how much he knew and could use against them — it was said of Wild that he slept with his eyes open — but it also made him into a popular hero. He became known as a benefactor, a friend and protector of society. Although thief-taking and receiving had always been seen as allied professions, Wild was the first thief-taker to risk his own skin to capture wanted criminals, as well as finding and returning people’s stolen property to them.

  The case that made him famous was that of Mrs Knap, the ‘murdered gentlewoman’, who was killed in the spring of 1716. She was walking home from a concert in Sadler’s Wells, a popular destination for city-dwellers taking day-trips to the country (cf. Hogarth’s Evening), with her son when they were accosted by thieves in the ‘Jockey Fields’ near Gray’s Inn, and in the ensuing melee she was killed. Her son described the accident in court: