by Lucy Moore
This man took us to the tavern and offered us a crown apiece to strip ourselves naked, and show him postures. He gave Mary Gardner money to fetch a penny-worth of rods, for him to whip us across the room, and make us good girls; and then for us to whip him to make him a good boy: but we told him it was neither a proper time nor place for any such thing, for it was Sunday night, and others might over-look us in the room we were in.
Taverns were far more rough-and-ready than coffee-houses. Cesar de Saussure described them as full of ‘common people’ drinking heavily ‘because of the thickness and dampness of the air’. He was shocked that the English never seemed to drink water. Englishmen of all classes drank heavily, and took a great deal of pride in their ability to do so. To be considered a good drinker, and earn the respect of one’s peers, one had to be at least a ‘three-bottle’ (of wine) man; Sheridan and Pitt the Younger were both very highly rated for being reckoned six-bottle men. Viscount Bolingbroke, Walpole’s Secretary of State and Sally Salisbury’s lover, used to go to work in the morning straight from the dinner table, with a wet napkin wrapped around his head to sober him up. Sir Robert Walpole spent £1,500 a year on wine alone. William Hickey’s attitude towards drinking seems to have been fairly typical: ‘I was always ambitious of sitting out every man at the table when I presided.’[72]
In 1750, of the 12,000 quarters of wheat sold in London, 7,000 of them were converted into alcohol. Beer-drinking was seen as healthy and virtuous, while gin-drinking was seen as pernicious and damaging to society. The dichotomy between the effects of beer and of gin is shown by Hogarth in his prints Gin Lane and Beer Street. The beer drinkers are hale and hearty, their fat contented faces indicating their material satisfaction. The gin drinkers, on the other hand, are pinched and drawn, desperation etched clearly in the lines of their faces.
The Rose Tavern, on the corner of Drury Lane and Russell Street, was the background for the debauched tavern scene in Hogarth’s A Rake’s Progress, and was noted for the criminals who frequented it. The porter, Leathercoat, who also featured in Fielding’s play, The Covent Garden Tragedy, was a well-known eccentric: for the price of a drink, he would lie down in the street and let a carriage run over his chest — and stand up again unharmed. (He was dissected after his death, and the surgeons found his chest to have been of incredible muscular strength.) He stands at the rear of the print, carrying a pewter plate on which the girl undressing in the foreground is about to pose. The duel in which the Duke of Wharton and his opponent Lord Mohun were killed was arranged in the Rose. The area around the tavern was so noted for the unsavoury and dangerous characters that peopled it, that it was said that a man could not walk from the door of the Rose to the piazza, a distance of perhaps fifty yards, without twice venturing his life. It was in this area, among characters like these, that Jack Sheppard spent his formative adolescent years.
At twenty, Jack was a slight young man, only 5 ft. 4 in., with a deceptive strength and suppleness revealed only in his hands, which were large and capable but tapered like an artist’s. His face was pale and his large eyes dark; his mouth was wide and his smile disarming in its quick charm and innocent expression of honesty. He stuttered a little, not awkwardly but endearingly. In repose, he could be detached and watchful; but his expression was animated, and his wit made him popular in the taverns around Drury Lane.
The Black Lion, off Drury Lane, was a tavern, like many in the area, pervaded by an ‘atmosphere of uninhibited pleasure and haphazardly controlled violence’.[73] It was owned by Joseph Hynd, a button-mould maker (a trade coiners were often trained in), who introduced Jack to Elizabeth Lyon, ‘this She-Lyon’. Edgworth Bess, as she was known, was a blowsy Buttock-and-File who ‘lived a wicked and debauched life’.[74] Defoe ascribed the ‘foundation of his [Jack’s] ruin’ to Bess, ‘that vile strumpet’, of whom ‘our young carpenter’ was quickly enamoured. Jack also met Jonathan Wild at the Black Lion, and Joseph ‘Blueskin’ Blake, his future accomplice and companion.
Soon, Jack ‘had given himself up to the sensual pleasures of low life, drinking all day, and getting out to some impudent strumpet at night’.[75] Mr and Mrs Wood, with whom he had lived for over five years, became frustrated at his insubordination and disobedience. Like the young Jonathan Wild in Wolverhampton, Jack had become ‘weary of the yoke of servitude’.[76] He was restless and dissatisfied; he had learned his trade, and was good at it, but had two more years’ service before he was free to practise it. If Wood was not as talented a carpenter as Jack, he would have been unable to continue to keep him interested in his work. Thrill-seeking in the fleshpots of Drury Lane offered Jack the only challenge and excitement he could find. Mrs Wood set him a curfew, and if he was out any later she locked him out of the house; but the agile Sheppard had no trouble climbing up to his window and slipping unnoticed into his bed after long nights of excess.
Edgworth Bess soon became Jack’s mistress, but she continued to ply her old trade. In the spring of 1723 she took a man home with her and stole a ring from him. He had her arrested, and she was sent to St Giles’s Roundhouse, in Soho. As soon as he heard, Jack went straight there and forced the beadle, Mr Brown, to give him the keys so he could set her free. At about this time Sheppard began to steal. He stole two silver spoons while he was on a job for Mr Wood in the Rummer Tavern, Charing Cross, and was undetected. His confidence boosted, and encouraged by Bess and her friends, he became bolder and at the end of July 1723 stole a large bolt of fustian cloth from Mr Bains, a piece-broker in White Horse Yard; the next day, on the advice of Poll Maggot, another woman he knew from the Black Lion, he went back and stole a further £30 in cash which he gave to Poll.
Jack hid the fustian in his trunk at the Woods’ house, but his master, tipped off by the other apprentice who worked for him, searched Jack’s belongings and found the bolt. When Sheppard heard that Wood had found it, he broke into the house to steal the cloth back. Meanwhile, Wood informed Bains that he had found some fustian, and Bains, missing a piece of cloth of that description, agreed that Jack must have been the thief. Sheppard threatened Bains with a prosecution for scandal, alleging that he had been given the fustian by his mother, who had bought it for him in Spitalfields. Bains spoke to Jack’s mother who, to protect her son, insisted that his story was true, although she could not remember exactly where she had bought the cloth. Bains, frustrated, dropped the matter.
On 2 August Jack left Owen Wood for good, with only seven months of his seven-year indenture left. Fie moved first to Fulham, where he and Edgworth Bess lived together as man and wife at Parsons Green. Then he moved to the top end of Piccadilly, lodging in the house of a Mr Charles and working as a journeyman to a carpenter called Panton who lodged there as well. During this period, he took silver cutlery, gold rings, suits, linen and cash from his landlord, but was never formally accused of any crime. Throughout the winter of 1723-4, Jack continued his association with Bess, drinking and gambling away the money he stole. He also joined forces with his brother Tom, who had recently been burned on the hand for stealing carpenter’s tools from his master. The brothers robbed an alehouse in Southwark, and Jack let Tom keep the proceeds as well as lending him a further 40s. The goods were sold through William Field, one of Wild’s minions.
In February 1724 Tom was tried for robbing Mary Cook’s linen shop in Clare Market and, to save his neck, gave evidence against Jack and Bess, who had been his accomplices. Jonathan Wild took it upon himself to find this impudent young robber who had as yet refused to have anything to do with him directly. Jack, recounting his life story to Defoe while in Newgate, declared that he had never had any dealings with a thief-catcher:
I was indeed twice at a thief-catcher’s levee, and must confess the man treated me civilly; he complimented me on my successes, said he had heard that I had both a hand and a head admirably well-turned to business, and that I and my friends should always be welcome to him: but caring not for his acquaintance I never troubled him, nor had we any dealings together.[7
7]
Later, he was to condemn thief-takers roundly — and bitterly: ‘they hang by proxy, while we do it in person’.[78]
In April Wild sent James Sykes, alias ‘Hell-and-Fury’, to capture Jack. Hell-and-Fury Sykes had been a running footman to the notorious Duke of Wharton until 1720 and was one of the fastest and most celebrated athletes of his day; he also used his experience in one of England’s grandest ducal households to help train Wild’s Spruce Prigs. Playing on Jack’s love of games, Sykes challenged him to a game of skittles at a tavern near Seven Dials, and led him straight into the arms of a waiting magistrate.
Although skittles was relatively sedate, most eighteenth-century recreational activities were based on and glorified violence, uproar and cruelty (cf. Hogarth’s The First Stage of Cruelly). In 1663 Samuel Pepys described the atmosphere at a cockpit he visited as being pervaded with a ‘celestial spirit of anarchy and confusion’. Wrestling and boxing, known as the ‘British Art’, were popular at all levels of society. John Broughton, the famous pugilist, inventor of boxing gloves (or ‘mufflers’, as he called them) and founder of the Academy of Boxing, was blinded by a single blow between his eyes in a match in 1750 in which he had been backed to the tune of £10,000 by his patron, the Duke of Cumberland.
Women also participated in public fights. The London Journal of June 1722 carried the following advertisement:
I Elizabeth Wilkinson, of Clerkenwell, having had some words with Hannah Highfield and requiring satisfaction, do invite her to meet me on the stage and box with me for three guineas, each woman holding half-a-crown in each hand, and the first woman that drops her money to lose the battle.
This challenge is interesting because of the masculine, duelling overtones implicit in the wording. The women held coins in their hands to prevent them from scratching each other’s eyes out, ensuring they hit cleanly. Sword-play competitions were also popular, a form of eighteenth-century gladiatorial competition, with surgeons waiting on the sidelines to stitch up the wounded warriors and send them back into the fray. Ladies as well as men were onlookers.
Even football games could be savagely violent, lasting all day, with sides of up to a hundred people using any means at all to get the ball past their opponents’ goal-line. ‘It is a leather ball about as big as one’s head, filled with wind: this is kicked about from one to t’other in the streets, by him that can get at it, and that is all the art of it.’[79] It was a dangerous game to walk near, since the players took ‘a great deal of pleasure in breaking windows and coach glasses if they see any’.[80] Gay describes passing ‘the furies of the Foot-Ball War’ taking place in Covent Garden.
Bulls and dogs were baited viciously; in Pepys’s words, ‘a very rude and nasty pleasure’. There was a famous bear garden in Marylebone Fields, near Soho Square. Cock-fighting was a passion, involving elaborate training that could take years and highly specialized methods of looking after the cocks. Individual animals were famous for their victories. Cock-fighting slang is still used in modern English: words and phrases like ‘cocky’, ‘cock-sure’, ‘ruffle one’s feathers’, ‘well-heeled’ and ‘turn tail’ all derive from the terminology of cock-fighting. These recreations could cut across class lines because they were based on a meritocracy of specialized skills and esoteric knowledge: a lord and a labourer would meet as equals when cocks they had bred and trained fought each other. There was a ‘strange variety of people’ at cock-fights, all laying heavy bets. ‘Great wagers are laid; but I’m told, that a man may be damnably bubbled, if he is not very sharp.’[81] The Royal Cockpit was in Birdcage Walk, and there was another cockpit in a cellar in Drury Lane near the Black Lion.
Instead of his anticipated game of skittles with Hell-and-Fury Sykes, Jack was thrown into a cell on the top floor of St Giles’s Roundhouse, from where a few months before he had rescued Bess. Within three hours he had broken through the roof, his only tool an old razor, using the feather bed in his cell to muffle the sounds of masonry falling on to the floor as he bored through the ceiling. He lowered himself down the outside of the building with a blanket and sheet tied together, and lost himself in the crowd that had gathered, attracted by the sounds of falling tiles and the prospect of witnessing a gaol-break. Still wearing his irons, he tapped one of the throng on the shoulder as he pushed his way through the mob, and pointed up at the prison roof: ‘Look! Up there behind the chimney! Isn’t that him?’ The unsuspecting man shouted out, and Jack slipped away unnoticed as the crowd scanned the roof for any sign of him. He was pleased with his success and new-found notoriety: ‘I was well enough diverted with the adventure.’[82] Jack was indicted for the robbery in Clare Street, but avoided trial because he had escaped; his brother was tried for the same robbery in May, convicted and transported to America.
His afternoon in gaol had not filled Jack with any sense of trepidation about continuing his life of crime. In mid-May he and a friend, Benson, were walking through Leicester Fields when they saw a man arguing with a woman, holding a gold watch out in front of her which he was apparently accusing her of stealing. It was too good an opportunity to miss; Benson grabbed the watch, and he and Jack ran into the crowds. The cry was raised, and Jack was caught and taken to St Ann’s Roundhouse in Soho. Edgworth Bess visited him there the next morning, and was thrown into prison with him when it was found she had brought him the spike of a halberd as a tool. They were taken to New Prison, Clerkenwell, where they were recognized as man and wife, and allowed to share the same cell.
Visiting friends smuggled tools in to them, and Jack planned their escape. He sawed through his heavy iron fetters, and then set about the iron bar and nine-inch thick oak bar at the window. He tied their clothes and sheets together to form a rope as he had done when he escaped from St Giles’s Roundhouse, and first Bess and then Jack lowered themselves twenty-five feet out of the window. To their dismay, they were not free, but merely in the yard of the neighbouring Bridewell, or House of Correction. Using the locks and bolts of the gate for footholds, Jack, carrying Bess, scaled the Bridewell Yard’s twenty-two-foot wall and dropped down to safety on the other side.
This feat was hailed as the most miraculous escape in history. Jack’s determination, bravery and chivalrous treatment of his lover made him a hero as much as his insouciant disregard for incarceration. His achievement was doubly remarkable because while Jack was slim and small, Bess was a big, buxom woman; helping her out of the window and then over the wall had been a real challenge for Jack, Bess ‘being more corpulent than himself’.[83]
‘Like a dog to his vomit’,[84] Jack returned to the area around Wych Street. His fame was celebrated by his peers: in The Quaker’s Opera, a popular musical based on his life, a young boy approaches him and asks to be taken on as an apprentice in thievery. Jack replies, ‘Ours is not a trade, it is a calling.’ His company was hotly sought out by his peers. ‘Jack was now become so eminent, that there was not a prig in St Giles’s, but thought it an honour, as well as an advantage, to be admitted to his company.’[85]
Several weeks after his escape, he robbed a master tailor called William Barton who lodged in the house of Henry Carter, a mathematical-instrument maker living near St Clement’s Church. Carter’s apprentice, Anthony Lamb, and Charles Grace, a cooper who needed money for his ‘extravagant whore’, were Sheppard’s eager accomplices. They stole about £300 worth of cloth and cash; Jack, with a keen eye to his appearance, took a suit of Italian silk for his own use. Only Anthony Lamb was tried for the burglary; he was convicted and transported to America.
Lamb took advantage of the opportunities available in the New World to transform his fortunes. His son, John Lamb, learned his father’s trade of instrument-making and then went on to earn a comfortable living selling liquor in New York. He was one of the founders of the American radical group the Sons of Liberty, formed in 1765 during the first stirrings of nationhood, and was an activist for eleven years before America achieved her independence. After 1784, when peace was finally made, he r
emained an important politician.
John Lamb’s career shows the gradual change from old-fashioned flouting of authority, exemplified by Jack Sheppard’s life, to a more focused, active movement for reform. Sheppard railed against the bonds that restricted him, but had little awareness of the power of his example to others, and was unformed by any political education and indeed unconscious of his own latent insurgence. His resistance was manifested in a glorification, through his own life, of living outside society’s constraints. But Lamb was not content with mere defiance, and had the advantage of living in a time and place that allowed him contact with others who felt as he did; he and his companions were able to change the very fabric of their time.[86]
Although both Jack’s accomplices, his brother Tom and Anthony Lamb, had recently been arrested, he himself was still free. He began stealing with Joseph ‘Blueskin’ Blake, another acquaintance made at the Black Lion. Blueskin had had an ‘early inclination to roguery’; he had been involved with crime since his childhood. ‘Nothing pleased [Jonathan Wild] more than to see a child or youth of promising genius, and that such never wanted his encouragement.’[87] Blueskin was one of these promising youths who from an early age had been singled out by Wild. His nickname was derived ‘from his dark countenance’; but might also have been a neat play on words. One of his closest friends from childhood, another thief in Wild’s circle, was called William Blewitt — hence ‘Blew’-witt and ‘Blue’-skin — which would have been appreciated by the wits of the East End.