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

by Lucy Moore

  On the night before he died, he summoned Reverend Purney, the Ordinary, to his cell, and asked to receive the Sacrament. He was obviously in a state of panicked desperation. He asked the exact meaning of the biblical phrase, ‘Cursed is every one that hangeth on a tree.’ He inquired about the disposition of the soul when it was first separated from the body. He wondered where exactly the next world was situated. He admitted that he knew his remaining hours on earth should be devoted to religious contemplation and spiritual reckoning. Later that night he sent for the Ordinary again. ‘How,’ he asked, ‘did the noble Greeks and Romans, who slew themselves, come to be so glorious in history?’ Purney told him that heathens considered suicide cowardly, but that Christians were far more strongly opposed to it. Subdued, Wild replied he knew that suicide was sacrilegious.[217] But the necessity of proving his bravery — and the knowledge that he would not be able, sober and undrugged, to face his maker without fear — forced him to try to take his own life. Even the prospect of being buried at dead of night at a crossroads, to diffuse the evil emanating from a suicide’s corpse, did not deter him. In the small hours of the morning he took so large a dose of laudanum (opium dissolved in an alcohol solution) that his system, weakened by four days’ fasting, rejected it. Two fellow prisoners tried to rouse him by walking his slack body up and down in the cell. Wild was dripping with sweat, his eyes glazed, his head lolling on his shoulders. Finally he vomited violently, and sank into a coma.

  As Fielding caustically remarked describing the fictional Wild’s death at the gallows: ‘He must be a fool, who is ashamed of being hanged, who is not weak enough to be ashamed of having deserved it.’

  Chapter Sixteen – Hanging

  Still ‘stupefied and insensible’, Wild was carried to the prison chapel to hear the final service. Although earlier he had requested a closed carriage to take him to Tyburn, he was put into the usual open cart, seated between two chaplains. ‘At his coming into the cart at Newgate, they [the mob] set up the loudest shouts and huzzahs that ever was heard, which was continued all the way to the place of execution. A temper very uncommon, and indeed very unbecoming, on so melancholy an occasion,’ commented the Daily Journal. ‘Never was there seen so prodigious a concourse of people before, upon any occasion,’ reported Mist’s Weekly Journal. All along the procession route people lined the roads, shouting out curses and insults, pelting him with stones, handfuls of mud and dung, even rotten fruit, vegetables and eggs, and the carcasses of dead cats and dogs. Traditionally, spectators saved these objects for hanging days when they knew a villain was to die.

  Contrary to the general behaviour of the street in such cases, instead of compassionate expressions and a general cast of pity which ordinarily sits on the countenances of the people when they see the miserable objects of justice go to their execution, here nothing was heard but cursings and execrations, abhorring the crimes and the very name of the man, throwing stones and dirt at him all the way, and even at the place of execution.[218]

  No white-clad girls held bunches of flowers up to Jonathan’s cart as they had for Jack Sheppard; no defiant crowds celebrated his exploits. Hawkers sold ‘Invitations’ to Wild’s hanging, addressed to ‘all the thieves, whores, pickpockets, family felons, &c., in Great Britain and Ireland...’ Jonathan might have congratulated himself morbidly on the fact that ‘the famous Jack Sheppard had a tolerable number to attend his execution; but no more to be compared to the present, than a regiment to an army’.[219] But the turnout would have been cold comfort, for every face in the crowd looked on Wild with disgust and hatred. ‘In all that innumerable crowd, there was not one pitying eye to be seen, nor one compassionate word to be heard; but on the contrary, wherever he came, there was nothing but hollowing and huzzas, as if it had been upon a triumph.’[220]

  The size of the crowds that gathered at Tyburn on hanging days made individuals feel their actions would go unnoticed. Men and women, rendered anonymous by the throngs surrounding them, felt free to heckle the hangman or his victims, to hurl abuse at the dying men or the authorities that had condemned them. Being part of a crowd created the illusion of individual anonymity, like that felt by a rioting mob. This mass hysteria stimulated the release of pent-up feelings of frustration and fury, directed either at the government or its victims.

  Wild, who had once gloried in his successes at hanging days — ‘I must go and drink with the fellows I condemned last Sessions; they die tomorrow, and old friends should part like friends,’ says Wile, the character based on Wild in the 1728 play, The Quakers’ Opera —was humbled and humiliated before the jeering mob.

  I shall here take notice, that every execution day, Jonathan being mounted on horseback, he would in great triumph ride a little way before the criminals that were going to die, and at some taverns in the way call for half a pint of wine, telling the people about him, with the greatest exultation, and joy, imaginable, that some of his children were coming, they were just behind: so when he went deservedly to be hanged, several thieves went a little way before the cart, telling people, their father was coming, he’s just behind.[221]

  Jonathan recovered his senses a little during the interminable journey to Tyburn. Some observers thought he looked remorseful.

  As he passed by Holborn Bridge, being put in mind of the lace womans’ house [Mrs Steatham’s] upon whose account he was cast, he turned himself that way, and shook his head and hand with an air of sorrow, which motion the old woman returned, as was supposed, by way of forgiveness.[222]

  A few moments later, ‘he had his head broke [cut] by a stone thrown from a window, so that the blood ran down him; and other insults of a barbarous nature were offered to him’. Still only semi-conscious, Wild arrived at the gallows with his three companions. The hangman ‘turned off’ the two highwaymen, William Sperry and Robert Sanford, while Robert Harpham, a coiner, sang psalms as he waited to be hanged. Wild, dazed, joined mechanically in the singing. Harpham, meek and repentant, was the state’s ideal public executionee. Loudly and clearly, he desired the crowd to take his untimely and ignominious death as a warning, and stepped forward calmly to die. The mob, inflamed by the hangman’s decision to leave Wild until last, ‘threatened to knock him [the hangman] on the head if he did not immediately perform it [Wild’s hanging]’.[223] The executioner swiftly cut down Harpham’s body, and strung Wild up in his place. Because he was still heavily drugged, he died with no difficulty, wearing his nightshirt and wig.

  The first man to hang in a shroud, or nightdress, was the highwayman James Wright, whom Wild had brought to his death after he robbed the Lords Burlington and Bruce. The custom of wearing a shroud to be hanged was meant to indicate humility in the face of one’s impending judgement at the gates of Heaven. It underlined the fact that man brought nothing into this world at his birth, and took nothing out of it at his death. For highwaymen, whose lives had been devoted to avaricious gain, this reminder was particularly poignant.

  Another traditional costume worn by condemned men was a wedding suit. Hanging and marriage had long been linked in common slang. The terms for both were the same: to be hanged, and to be married, were to be ‘noozed’, or noosed; hanging days were known as ‘Hanging Matches’. These connections extended across the Channel: the guillotine, in French slang, was known as the Maiden. The other type of death in which wedding symbolism played a part in the eighteenth century was that of young, unmarried girls. Their corpses were dressed like brides, just as many criminals went to their deaths dressed as grooms. Both were seen by their friends and families as wasted lives, brought to untimely and unjust ends. Most criminals — over three-quarters of those hanged at Tyburn — were aged between twenty and thirty, cut down at the peak of their strength and fertility. At hanging days the connection with marriage was underlined by the presence of young girls dressed in white, handing bunches of flowers up to the condemned men as they were drawn through the crowds to the gallows. So too at the funerals of virgins did their attendants dress in white and ga
rland themselves with flowers.[224]

  He that is to be hanged, or otherwise executed, first takes care to get himself shaved, and handsomely dressed, either in mourning or in the dress of a bridegroom; this done, he set his friends at work to get him leave to be buried, and to carry his coffin with him, which is easily obtained. When his suit of clothes or nightgown, his gloves, hat, periwig, nosegay, coffin, flannel-dress for his corpse, and all those things are bought and prepared, the main point is taken care of, his mind is at peace, and then he thinks of his conscience...[225]

  While some men went to the gallows in a nightshirt, and some wearing their wedding suits, many others simply dressed in whatever finery they could manage. To die with a flourish, wearing a costume of glorious ostentation, was a final way of displaying defiance. Just as some felons wore white cockades to protest their innocence and their hostility to the authorities that had, in their eyes, unjustly condemned them, so others used the splendour and richness of their clothes to show their bravado and resistance.

  Sixteen-String Jack, alias John Rann, a highwayman hanged in 1774, was famous for his gorgeous clothes and the pride he took in his appearance. His nickname came from the eight silk ribbons he wore instead of the usual buckle at each knee, holding up his breeches; the first time he appeared in court his irons were tied up with blue ribbons. He was arrested seven times, and acquitted the first six times he was tried. At his seventh trial, for which he appeared in court ‘dressed in a new suit of pea-green clothes, his hat bound round with silver strings; he wore a ruffled shirt, and his behaviour evidenced the utmost unconcern’, he was convicted and condemned to death. The following Sunday, three days before his execution, he was allowed to invite seven women of his acquaintance — all prostitutes — to dine with him in his cell at Newgate; all, including Jack, ‘were remarkably cheerful’.[226] His insouciance was as greatly admired as his elegance: one was part of the other.

  Nathaniel Hawes was another highwayman to whom dying beautifully dressed was of overriding importance. He had informed on his partner, John James, to Jonathan Wild, and James was hanged on Hawes’s evidence. He himself was captured soon after by a man he was trying to rob; turning the tables on Hawes, the victim became the aggressor, and Hawes was taken ignominiously back to Newgate. He refused to plead at his trial because the judge would not give him back the stolen clothes he had been arrested in and which he wanted to wear at his execution. He translated the issue of his clothes into a moral debate:

  The court was formerly a place of justice, but now it is become a place of injustice. I doubt not that you (indicating judge and jury with a sweep of his hand) will receive a severer sentence than that you pronounce on me. And for my part I make no question of dying with the same resolution with which I have often beheld death and will leave the world with the same courage with which I have lived in it.

  The judge, shocked at this display of open contempt, sentenced Hawes to peine forte et dure, a method of torture used to force unrepentant defendants to plead, which was abolished in 1772.

  The prisoner shall be sent to the prison from whence he came, and put into a mean room, stopped from any light, and shall there be laid on the bare ground, without any litter, straw, or other covering, and without any garment about him, except for something to hide his privy members. He shall lie on his back, his head shall be covered and his feet be bare. One of his arms shall be drawn with a cord, to one side of the room, and the other to the other side; and his legs shall be served in the like manner. Then there shall be laid upon his body as much iron or stone as he can bear, or more. And the first day after, he shall have three morsels of barley bread, without any drink; and the second day, he shall be allowed to drink as much as he can, at three times, of the water that is next the prison door, except running water, without any bread; and this shall be his diet till he dies.

  Although Hawes replied grandly — ‘as I have lived with the character of the boldest fellow in my profession I am resolved to die with it and leave my memory to be admired by all the gentlemen of the road of succeeding ages’ — the prospect of peine forte et dure was awful. While some men, such as Giles Cory, accused of witchcraft in the Salem Witch Trials of 1698, held firm and refused to break their silence, dying after days of pressure and starvation, most capitulated after a short time. Despite his bluster, Hawes lasted only seven minutes under a relatively light weight of 250 lb. before he consented to plead — without his suit of clothes.

  How one reached the place of execution was also important. Wild’s request to be driven to Tyburn in a closed carriage was refused. He wanted to be enclosed, away from the prying, gloating eyes of his enemies, just as he had wanted to avoid exposure to the insulting taunts of his fellow prisoners at Newgate’s chapel. Jenny Diver, the most famous pickpocket of her generation, was allowed to drive to Tyburn in a private coach, attended by her clergyman. Some criminals, however, revelled in their celebrity as they rode to their deaths. Edward Burnworth and his gang of footpads threw pennies into the crowd, like processing royalty, as they were driven to the gallows at Kingston.

  While the crowd’s response was vital to the spirit of the condemned men as they were ‘turned off’, it also played a part in overseeing the procedure of the hanging. The spectators watched carefully for any abuses of authority by the officials performing the rituals. They made sure the dying man did not suffer unduly; that his dying words were listened to, whatever his views; and that his last requests were heard. A man unjustly convicted might have a collection taken up for the support of his family. Certain types of crime, however, attracted a violent response from the crowd: sexual crimes, particularly directed towards children, elicited deep disapproval; informers were always treated harshly. On the whole, though, the collective grief and shame many must have felt watching these spectacles of punishment and death were purged by their demonstrations of contempt for the system that had allowed them to happen. The mob’s insistence on the rights of the dying men, and the elaborate superstitions and rituals surrounding the execution and burial of criminals, was a way for the common people to assimilate and accept the constant drain of the finest and boldest of their number.

  Wild may not have been considered the finest or the boldest, but his friends were still concerned about the fate of his corpse. He was buried at dead of night, in secret, next to the body of his ‘wife’, the devout Elizabeth Mann, to whose memory he had remained loyal since her death. A few days later, his grave was opened up and his body stolen. There was no direct evidence of what happened to it, but a report in the Daily Journal on 15 June hazarded a guess.

  Last Sunday morning there was found upon Whitehall Shore, in St Margaret’s Parish, the skin, flesh, and entrails (without any bones) of a human body: the coroner and jury that sat upon it, ordered it to be buried, which was done on Tuesday last, in the Burial Ground for the Poor, and the surgeon who attended, gave it as his opinion, that it could be no other than the remains of the dissected body. It was observed, that the skin of the breast was hairy, from whence people conjecture it to be part of the renowned Jonathan Wild.

  If it was, indeed, Jonathan Wild, how horrified he would have been that his final resting-place was the Burial Ground for the Poor.

  In 1847, over a century after Wild’s death, a skeleton reputed to be that of Jonathan Wild was donated to the Royal College of Surgeons by one Dr Frederick Fowler in the wake of a flurry of public interest in Wild after the enormous popularity of plays and novels about Jack Sheppard since the publication of William Harrison Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard in 1837, and particularly the recent excavations of Wild’s headquarters at the Red Lion tavern in West Street. If, as the Daily Journal’s report suggests, Wild’s body had been excavated and anatomized just after he died, his skeleton might well have been kept by the doctor who had overseen the operation; it is more than likely that the doctor who kept it would also have kept a record of its identity.

  In 1802, the most famous phrenologist of the day, Mr Deville, carri
ed out an examination of a skull, unaware that it was that of Jonathan Wild. Thirty-eight years later, on 22 March 1840, his report was published in the Weekly Dispatch:

  This is the skull of an individual possessing some useful faculties for mechanical operation, going about and comprehending things readily; but he is a singular character, with a large portion of the brain in the region of propensities. And under disappointment of his own importance, pecuniary difficulties, or intoxication, he would be very likely to commit crime. He would be fond of offspring or children, but not a kind parent, as the mandate must be obeyed. He would be the associate of a female, and probably a married man, but liable to jealousy, being a doubter of the integrity of others towards himself; and while in this state of feeling, he would be liable to do injury to those offending him, and, if opposed, murder might be the result of such an organization. He would be conceited, self-willed and obstinate; and if opposed in his own views, his passions would run very high. He would, without much hesitation, appropriate to his own uses the property of others; but, in so doing, show some ingenuity and cunning, it being difficult of detection. He would, at times, manifest some feeling for religion and might follow some sect, and at times hold forth upon the subject; but I doubt much the integrity on it, being more to screen and cover the animal propensities. He would be a talker in his own society — a knowing and conceited individual. He has had some notions of music, and, having some command of words, would be likely to become the songster of his society — such as an organization preferring society where he could become the hero of a public-house party. From the character of the bones, it appears to be the skull of an elderly man, whom I consider as having had the power of becoming useful, but from the preponderance of the animal, I consider him an aged sinner.