by Lucy Moore
In an instant, some fellows coming up, my link [lamp] was blown out, my hat and wig were taken off, and I was knocked down, upon which my mother screamed out, and thereupon one of them fired a pistol close by me, and immediately I heard my mother cry ‘Lord help me! Help me!’ and then the rogues fled...Having lighted my link, I went back and found my mother on the ground.[61]
This story outraged Londoners, who were accustomed to being robbed every day of the week but for whom the senseless murder of an elderly lady was a different and shocking matter. ‘I never pardon murder,’ Wild declared pompously, and used his network of thieves to track down the men who had committed the crime. They were found within a few days and Wild persuaded one of the gang, Isaac Ragg, against whom he had hanging evidence for a different offence, to impeach the others. Ragg testified that his companion, Will White, had done the deed, ‘to frighten the woman, and make her hold her tongue’. They had all been carrying loaded pistols, and after Mrs Knap was shot, they had retired to a tavern where they had checked their guns to see who had fired theirs, and there White had confessed. All of Ragg’s accomplices were tried and convicted except one, Timothy Dun, who was in hiding, holed up in a cellar in Southwark.
Wild had bet that he would have Dun before the next sessions, and though he could not find his hiding-place he was determined to get him. One day he saw Mrs Dun in the street outside his office — Dun had sent her to find out if Wild was still on his trail — and had her followed back to her husband’s hide-out. Collecting a warrant for Dun’s arrest, Wild crossed the river with his posse and surrounded the criminal’s house in the dim light of dawn. Dun heard the men coming and tried to sneak out of a back window on to the pantry roof, but one of Wild’s men, Abraham Mendez, spotted him and shot him in the shoulder. Dun rolled off the ledge into the waiting arms of his captors.
Wild received a huge cash reward for his part in the adventure, as well as dramatically improving his reputation — both among respectable citizens who saw him as a hero, and among criminals, who saw the wisdom in working for rather than against him.
Another incident from this period illustrates Wild’s hands-on approach to thief-taking. In 1720 he captured James Wright, a highwayman who had stolen a sapphire ring from the Earl of Burlington and a gold watch from Lord Bruce when he held them up in Richmond, by holding him ‘fast by the chin with his teeth, till he dropped his firearms, surrendered, and was brought to Newgate’.[62] Wright was a member of the Hawkins gang, which worked independently of Wild.
Another gang member, Ralph Wilson, was one of several eighteenth-century criminals who agreed, for a large fee, to dictate their ‘memoirs’ to a publishing house such as Applebee’s, for which Defoe worked. These ghost-written lives were accessibly written and cheaply produced, ensuring their widespread popularity with London’s increasingly literate lower classes. Wilson claimed, ‘We never dealt with Wild, and neither did he know any of us.’ This was a little naive, since Wild would have made it his business to seek out any criminals working in London outside his sphere of influence — and it explains Wild’s savagery in dealing with Wright. Lord Bruce had offered Wild £100 for the return of the ring alone, and Wild, who had no contact within the gang, was humiliated at not being able to get it back for him, and furious about losing such a large reward. Wright’s fate was unusual: he was tried and acquitted for lack of evidence; then he reopened his barber-shop on Ludgate Hill and apparently lived happily ever after.
Wild was canny as well as brave. Two ‘ancient’ women came to his office with a proposal a year or two after he had set himself up in the Old Bailey. They lodged at the house of a wealthy cane-chair maker in Wormwood Street, and they wanted to assist Wild’s men in robbing their landlord in return for a share of the profits.
Wild, howsoever he might approve of the proposal, thought it not advisable to be an adventurer in such an enterprise, the application being so odd, and the women strangers, without recommendations or proper credentials from any of the ‘Business’, he very discreetly made a merit of the matter, by seizing them; they were committed to Newgate, and at the ensuing sessions, convicted of the misdemeanour, and for it fined and imprisoned.[63]
But Wild could be merciful to those who had served him well, even if they did turn against him at the end. Jack Butler had stolen a pair of diamond earrings, a gold watch and a packet of lace and instead of bringing them straight to Wild had hidden them in his lodgings. Wild, who found out that Butler was holding out on him, raised a hue and cry and led a posse to the dyer’s shop where the thief lived. They searched the house up and down, and finally found Butler hiding under a large upturned tub. ‘So Mr Son-of-a-Bitch!’ cried Wild. ‘Have I caught you at last!’ He swore that he would hang Butler for this betrayal if there were never another rogue in England. But the criminal, terrified, admitted everything. ‘If you’ll step into my room again, and look behind the bed’s head, you may find something that will make you amends for your trouble.’ Wild found what he wanted, and was ‘well satisfied’, but because he had come with a posse he could not prevent Butler’s arrest (even if he had wanted to; since Butler had intended to swindle him, Wild would have been unlikely to let him back into his trust). He was, however, able to have his sentence transmuted from hanging to transportation.[64]
At about this time Wild was accused of selling stolen goods that he had in his possession, not just acting as a broker between the thief and his victim. Cornelius Tilburn, a quack doctor, had consulted Wild about recovering some stolen property, but was outraged at the amount he suggested would be necessary to tempt the robbers to part with it. Tilburn accused Wild of having the stuff in his possession, a heated row ensued, and Tilburn stormed out of the Lost Property Office and reported Wild to the police. Wild held firm; he insisted that he was only an agent, and went to court to defend himself; he won the case, and his position was vindicated. After this incident, he appeared invincible. His business had been proved to be beyond the reach of the legal system, and the thieves who worked for him were astounded at the ease with which he had vanquished his enemy, challenged the law, and defeated it on its own ground.
In 1718, when Wild had established himself as the best and most powerful thief-taker in London, an anonymous pamphlet was published, supposedly by a prisoner in Newgate, condemning him and his work. ‘The thief-taker is a thief-maker,’ it declared. Wild’s response was to reveal the true author of the article, his one-time associate Under-Marshal Charles Hitchin, whose business was suffering as a result of Wild’s success. Calling it a ‘nonsensical treatise’, he turned the tables on Hitchin in his own pamphlet, accusing him of sins as great as his own — if not worse. ‘[My reply] will fully show, by former practice, that the greatest progress this pretended reformer is likely to make in the work of reformation is by plundering the purses, abusing the persons, and the highest impositions, as well upon the guilty as the innocent.’[65]
It was in this pamphlet that Wild first used the title ‘Thief-taker General of Great Britain and Ireland’, as a mark of his victory over Hitchin. He claimed in his defence that ‘no person has been more forward [than Wild] in apprehending and bringing to justice the boldest criminals even to the hazard of life’. Hitchin had accused Wild of having the power to hang whom he liked; Wild countered, ‘To say that justice is governed by a thief-taker is such a slur to the reputation of a magistrate, and such an affront to authority, that nothing can equal it.’ When Hitchin decried the spread of crime, Wild reminded him of his position as an officer of the City of London, and accused him of not performing his duty: ‘The asking by what means these irregularities [i.e., the incidence of crime] are suffered is a plain implied arraignment of justice.’ Although Wild dictated the pamphlet to a lawyer, his mastery of tortured logic, his ambition, and his determination to wear a mask of respectability throughout his career are evident.
He went on to expose Hitchin as a homosexual, concluding his reply to Hitchin’s attempt to dethrone him thus:
I
’ll assure you I’ll serve your Excellency with the same infidelity and perfidiousness as you have hitherto done the Magistracy of the City of London in your office of Marshal. Particularly I’ll take care that no woman of the town shall walk the streets or bawdy house be kept without your Excellency’s licence and trial of the ware; that no sodomitish assembly be held without your Excellency’s presence and making choice for your own use, in order to which I’ll engage to provide a female dress for your Excellency much further than what your Excellency has been accustomed to wear...
This accusation, repeated throughout Wild’s testimony and backed up by a good deal of anecdotal detail, destroyed Hitchin’s reputation, although he retained his position as Under-Marshal. Nine years later Hitchin was accused of ‘sodomitical practices’ by a man who seems to have acquiesced fairly willingly to his advances at the time of the alleged incident. He was tried, convicted and fined £20, sentenced to stand in the pillory at the end of St Catherine Street in the Strand, and given six months’ imprisonment. Although he had taken the precaution of wearing a suit of armour to the stocks, he was so badly beaten that he had to be removed from the pillory before his allotted hour was up because he was close to death; he died less than six months after this ordeal, from injuries sustained at the stocks.
Contemporary attitudes towards homosexuality were unequivocally intolerant. In 1707 several men were tried and convicted for ‘the loathsomeness of their wicked crimes of unnatural lewdness with their own sex, contrary to the order of human nature, and that not having the fear of God before their eyes, did commit very filthy and unseemly actions, not fit to be named in a civilized nation’. One can almost hear the judge spluttering in horror as he read out the sentence.
Ironically, these views often displayed almost as much misogyny as homophobia. A popular satire on London street society by the journalist Ned Ward in 1709 described a ‘Mollies’ Club’: ‘Thus everyone in turn makes scoff of the little effeminacy and weaknesses, which women are subject to, when gossiping o’er their cups on purpose to extinguish that Natural Affection which is due to the Fair Sex & to turn their juvenile desires towards preternatural polotions.’ The attitude of the time was evidenced by slang terminology: ‘Mollies’ could be either homosexuals or transvestites, and they so assiduously frequented the path dividing the two gardens that made up Moorfields that it was known as ‘Sodomites’ Walk’.
Moorfields, just outside the city walls on the north-east, was one of the most notorious areas of early eighteenth-century London. It was considered disreputable for more than just its high population of ‘sodomites’ and prostitutes, both male and female. The bodies of suicides, which could not be afforded a Christian burial, were burned in the ditches there. Some parts were used as refuse tips. Thieves were stripped to the waist and flogged on the edge of the fields as public punishment for their crimes. And New Bethlehem, or Bedlam, which had housed London’s lunatics since 1676, stood in Moorfields.
In this period there was no compassion in dealing with the insane. Bedlam’s inmates were left to rot in their own filth and depravity, tormented by their nightmares, with no attempts made to calm their delusory visions or provide standards of cleanliness, comfort and nutrition that would ease their terrible distress. To add insult to injury, a popular pursuit of the fashionable classes was visiting Bedlam to laugh at the antics of the mad men and women housed there, just as the two simpering ladies in the background of the madhouse scene of Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress are doing. The keepers used to feed the inmates in front of visitors to shock and frighten them, and to give them their money’s worth. The highwayman Ralph Wilson, aware that he would shortly be arrested by Wild for his association with the Hawkins gang, ‘went into Bedlam, where the many melancholy objects I saw there inspired me with a thorough sense of my own worse condition’.
The admission of visitors to Bedlam increased its revenues by over £400 a year; it was not until 1770 that the doctors realized that being stared at like animals in a zoo ‘tended to disturb the tranquillity of the patients’,[66] and closed the hospital to sightseers. In 1784 the poet William Cowper recalled visiting Bedlam as a boy:
In those days when Bedlam was open to the cruel curiosity of holiday ramblers I have been a visitor there. Though a boy, I was not altogether insensible of the misery of the poor captives nor destitute of feeling for them. But the madness of some of them had such a humorous air, and displayed itself in so many whimsical freaks, that it was impossible not to be entertained, at the same time that I was angry with myself for being so.
Chapter Six – Dissolution
Owen Wood’s home, where Jack Sheppard lived and worked during his apprenticeship, was in Wych Street, just off Drury Lane in Covent Garden — ‘that receptacle of sharpers, pickpockets, and strumpets’.[67] All the sins of London were concentrated in Covent Garden. Here painted whores plied their trade, desperate gamblers tried to save their families’ fortunes, gentlemen of the road lost the profits they had made earlier in the night on the highway, and drunks stumbled randomly from one dank, smoky coffee-house to another. The main fruit, flower and vegetable market of central London was situated in the piazza, but according to the journalist Ned Ward, even the flower-girls ‘stank so of brandy, strong drink and tobacco, that the former overcame the fragrance that arose from their sweet herbs and flowers’.
Covent Garden had become fashionable in the seventeenth century when Francis Russell, Duke of Bedford, commissioned Inigo Jones to design and build a church and piazza on land his family had owned since the Reformation (hence the name: ‘Covent’ was derived from ‘convent’), creating a residential area described by Bedford as ‘fit for the habitations of gentlemen and men of ability’. But by the eighteenth century, Covent Garden was known principally for its gaming- and whore-houses, rowdy taverns and coffee-houses filled with loose women; whether the beau monde had moved west out of distaste for their new neighbours, or whether the empty houses had been filled with disreputable characters simply because their previous tenants had left, is unclear.
Gaming-houses, like brothels, abounded in the piazza, with names like Pharaoh’s Table, called after the card game faro. Gambling was an eighteenth-century passion. In one night, Sir John Bland lost £32,000 at the hazard table. Colonel Charteris financed the brothels he owned with his gambling winnings, which he preferred to take in land than cash. Charteris was utterly unscrupulous, determined to win at any cost: he once nearly cheated the Duchess of Queensberry of £3,000 by placing her in front of a mirror in which he could see her cards. The gaming-room of White’s Chocolate House, which became White’s Club, was used by Hogarth in Scene VI of A Rake’s Progress. The club was destroyed by fire in 1733, and Hogarth shows the hold the cards had over the gamblers, so intent are they that they are unaware of the fire licking the walls. He depicts as well the relative egalitarianism of gambling: a highwayman sits, desolate, by the fire, and a usurer in Shylock’s mould skulks around ‘Old Manners’, the brother of the Duke of Rutland, who was one of the most successful gamesters of his generation.
People of all classes gambled over dice, cards, sport — anything with an undecided outcome. A man fell down outside White’s one day and inside, bets were taken on whether he was alive or dead; when a passer-by suggested he be bled, loud shouts erupted from inside. The outcome of the wager might be affected by this concern! Huge sums were placed on ridiculous competitions: a race to Tyburn of six chimney-sweeps mounted on asses, or women in hooped petticoats (a new fashion) racing one another. A thousand pounds was wagered on a competition between a Mr Gage and the Earl of Lichfield, that Gage’s chaise and pair would beat Lichfield’s chariot and four; Lichfield won. Lotteries, linked to loan or debt conversion, had been run by the government since 1694. Occasionally they were used by individuals or local authorities to raise funds for specific projects, for instance for Westminster Bridge, built in 1750.
The high life of Covent Garden — drinking, whoring, gambling and carousing — was an
ideal which attracted many young men like Hogarth’s Rake, but ultimately its rewards were hollow. Tom Rakewell ‘is able to find mistresses and men of business and dancing masters easily enough, but he finds no friends’.[68] He ends up alone, spent and barren, because he has sought happiness in a transitory world, where pleasure is the ultimate illusion and any hopes of true contentment are doomed to failure. The scene at White’s, where Tom plays on, oblivious to the fire blazing on the other side of the room, draws a parallel between Tom and Nero, fiddling while Rome burns, and society collapses and dissolves, eaten away from within by the vice inherent in its nature.[69] The morbid melancholia of the English was a noted national characteristic: suicide was known on the continent as hanging à l’anglaise.
Tom King’s Coffee House was the most famous Covent Garden establishment of its time. A ‘rude shed immediately beneath the portico of St Paul’s church’, it was ‘well known to all gentlemen to whom beds are unknown’.[70] Tom King, the owner, had attended Eton College as a boy. He and his wife, Moll, welcomed a variety of customers, treating everyone, be they lord, rake, flower-seller or pickpocket, as an equal. ‘Noblemen and the first beaux after leaving Court would go to her house in full dress with swords and in rich brocaded silk coats, and walked and conversed with every person.’[71] After Tom died in 1737, Moll carried on alone but two years later was convicted of keeping a ‘disorderly house’ — a whore-house in eighteenth-century euphemistic language — and retired to the country.
Coffee-houses and particularly taverns were primarily frequented by men. Ladies might go to chocolate-houses during the day, but only women careless of their reputations would go to taverns. Many doubled as whore-houses or, at the least, venues for soliciting, marked by subtle signals that would have been blatantly obvious to the initiated. The ‘Sign of the Star’ outside a coffee-house was said to indicate ‘every lewd purpose’. Cesar de Saussure discovered that many coffee-houses were also ‘Temples of Venus. You can easily recognize the latter because they frequently have as sign a woman’s arm or hand holding a coffee-pot.’ The evidence in court of one Susan Brockway shows how taverns might be used: