Jonathan Wild was born in Wolverhampton, Staffordshire, in the early 1680s, the son of a wig-maker according to some accounts, while others say his father was a joiner. He served an apprenticeship as a buckle-maker and married while still a teenager. When aged about twenty-one Wild deserted his wife and child and moved to London. For a while he tried to make an honest albeit unpopular living as a ‘bumbailiff’ or legal enforcer of writs and summonses. Having already developed a taste for the good things of life, his outgoings exceeded his income and he eventually found himself in the Poultry or Wood Street Compter, where debtors and many other miscreants were housed. He spent four fruitful years in the Compter, meeting a host of influential underworld figures and gaining a thorough and practical knowledge of criminal activity. He carefully stored this information away for future use, becoming convinced that a man who had his wits about him and who knew the right people in London could make himself infinitely richer than if he was to ply an honest trade. In the Compter he became friendly with a prostitute called Mary Millner and, being released at about the same time, he became her pimp. For a time they also engaged in street robbery. Business was brisk and they soon had enough to buy an alehouse at Cripplegate in the City of London where Wild started up additionally as a ‘fence’ or receiver of stolen goods.
Wild went into partnership with Charles Hitchen, a corrupt City Marshal who doubled as a thief-taker and receiver of stolen goods. The government of the City of London was corrupt and venal and Hitchen had been able to buy the marshal’s job for the then very large sum of £700. This was in the confident expectancy that he would recoup his outlay many times over if he made the maximum use of the opportunities for peculation and graft that the office brought with it. Hitchen was particularly interested in selective street robbery and receiving such items as pocket books and private papers. These had little intrinsic value but may have been particularly treasured by their owners, because they might contain evidence of indiscretions which would therefore make their owners vulnerable to blackmail. The price of such documents was negotiable but when Hitchen had them and those who had been robbed urgently wanted them returned he was definitely well placed. In 1691 and 1706 Parliament had strengthened its powers against receivers who could now be branded, transported or even hanged. As a result, many receivers turned their attentions to other criminal activities. However, street robbery continued unstinted and thieves needed to dispose of the fruits of their labours. Those receivers who had the fortitude to remain in the trade were guaranteed plenty of lucrative business and Hitchen knew this. He was a receiver on a grand scale who controlled gangs totalling 2,000 members. Many of these were teenage boys and he had other interests in them because he was a promiscuous homosexual and regular client at a house of ill-repute known as ‘Mother Clap’s’ in Holborn. Hitchen’s business activities and sexual proclivities did not go unnoticed by Wild, who stored the information away for future use. The partnership lasted for nearly two years but Hitchen’s indiscretions disconcerted Wild, who was greatly relieved when they quarrelled and went their separate ways.
All thieves faced the problem of how to dispose of their stolen booty. If they took it to a shady pawnbroker they could only expect about a quarter of the value of any stolen item. Receivers were seen as untrustworthy and prepared to save their own skins at any cost. Wild started to exercise his mind on the thorny problem of how to bring about a better working relationship between thieves and receivers. Moll Cutpurse has already been considered (see Chapter Five) and just like her, Wild quickly realised that the best way of doing business was to sell stolen goods back to their original owners. Through advertisements and his many contacts Wild soon had people who had been robbed coming into his office, providing a full description of what had been stolen and then willingly paying him to recover their goods for them. He charged a consultation fee of 5s and, in most cases, half his estimate of the market value of the goods, which he was nearly always able to locate very quickly. Street thieves and highwaymen were only too happy to sell him what they had stolen because he always gave them a fair price. Wild was particularly interested in handling personal items such as pocket books, diaries, watches and trinkets because people were often prepared to pay far more than their actual value in order to secure their return.
What made Wild much more successful as a fence than Hitchen, a blustering bully, was that by comparison he exuded sweet reasonableness. He could be very heavy-handed with those who crossed him later on in his career, however. He kept detailed books of his transactions, which included the names of all those he dealt with. He trusted no one and he is supposed to have marked their names with either one or two crosses. One cross denoted that Wild had compiled enough evidence to have the person hanged. A second or double cross was placed against those who he had already or was going to dispose of. Some think that this is the origin of the phrase ‘double cross’.
Wild had an uncanny ability to remember faces and names and also the articles that had been negotiated, and he systematically retained this information for possible future use. It was logical to move on to controlling the thieves themselves and their operations. He divided London and its surrounding areas into clearly demarcated districts and assigned individuals or gangs to each. He tolerated no freelance activity by his associates, which is where his prodigious knowledge of their criminal activities as well as their foibles and weaknesses came in extremely useful. Wild was prepared to advance some by encouraging them to specialise in that type of thieving that they did best. Woe betide anyone working for him who became too greedy or the members of rival gangs because Wild was completely ruthless in his dealings with such people. He would go to the authorities and inform them about the criminal activities of those he wanted out of the way, using the information he had painstakingly built up about them. He would agree to act as a prosecution witness and would suborn other witnesses from among his associates whose testimony would see the prisoner at the very least convicted of a felony and therefore unable to testify in court against Wild in the future.
It is obvious that acting in this way, Wild made many enemies and he was assaulted with some frequency. He received two fractured skulls and nearly twenty other wounds. Although small of stature, he was strong and wiry and well able to give good account of himself. Even when temporarily overcome, he would remember his assailant’s appearance and character even if the latter were disguised. He would then find some way of settling accounts with him at a later date. He might do this by acting as a thief-taker. This was good business for Wild because he systematically used this to dispose of his enemies, and every time his action secured a conviction he received a reward for doing so. He was an egotistical man and he even went so far as to advertise his services as ‘Thief-Catcher General of Great Britain and Ireland’. He also strutted around carrying a baton with a crown on it as a symbol of his office. Wild was becoming exceptionally powerful and dangerous and nobody in London’s underworld could afford to offend him. He saw himself going up in the world and therefore parted from Mary and took up with a younger, more attractive woman called Molly and moved to a more prestigious address.
In 1718 Parliament made it a felony to solicit or accept a reward for the return of any stolen property unless information was given as to the identity of the thieves concerned. There is little doubt that this piece of legislation was aimed specifically at Wild and was eloquent testimony to his success as a receiver. His response was to abolish his 5s fee and rename his office ‘Enquiry Office for the Recovery of Lost and Stolen Property’. From then on Wild took no money when people came in to describe what they had had stolen. Instead he suggested to them that if they took a specified sum of money to a certain place at a certain time they were likely to find someone there who could restore their property to them. Business boomed. Wild opened branch offices in various parts of London and he even started an export–import business. This involved getting rid of unclaimed goods through Ostend and bringing back smuggled goods, and Wild even bought and fitted out a fine little sloop to assist him in this business. He had several warehouses full of stolen goods that had been plundered by his street robbers and burglars. In these warehouses he employed craftsmen making small alterations to the appearance of watches, jewellery, snuffboxes and other valuables prior to them being sent abroad for sale.
Wild went on to purchase a country seat and to imitate the lifestyle of a landed gentleman, complete with butler, liveried servants and a coach and four. However, such brazen behaviour could not last because Wild had made himself too many enemies both within the legal authorities and among the criminal fraternity. In May 1725, Londoners were shocked but elated to hear that Jonathan Wild had been arrested. He had gone to great lengths to try and render himself legally immune but the authorities had made careful preparations to trap him. He stood trial on two charges. The first was of stealing fifty yards of lace, valued at £40. The second was that he had eventually sold the lace back to its original owner without making any attempt to bring the thief concerned to justice. Clearly this was a test case, and if Wild got away with it he would certainly be completely untouchable in the future. Many other charges against Wild were prepared but not in the event used. He defended himself brilliantly in court and the first charge was dropped. However, he was found guilty of the second charge which infringed the 1718 Act designed with him in mind. He had committed a felony and he was sentenced to death. In vain he displayed the scars from the various injuries he had sustained while engaged in arresting members of the underworld. His plea in mitigation that his activities had led to the prosecution of seventy of London’s worst criminals was unsuccessful with judges determined to end his career.
London’s population, both the law-abiding and the criminal elements, rejoiced at this unexpected turn of events. At last Wild’s reign of terror was over and London prepared to celebrate his procession to Tyburn and his public execution. He nearly cheated the hangman and his hostile audience by taking a large dose of laudanum, but it was insufficient to kill him and so he was forced to run the gauntlet of a vicious torrent of verbal abuse and missiles from a London mob who used the occasion to display their hatred of him. He had no friends that day. A number of accounts of this procession and the actual execution exist but one claims that he at least managed to get something of his own back by picking the pocket of the Ordinary. At this time the Ordinary was a notorious drunkard named the Revd Thomas Purney, and the fact that Wild is supposed to have extracted a corkscrew from his pocket on their journey from Newgate to Tyburn adds authenticity to the story. Wild was buried at St Pancras’ Church but was swiftly exhumed because as an executed felon his body had been ordered by a school of anatomy to be used for demonstration purposes. The macabre mystery remains that although a wagon was ordered to take his body away to the school of anatomy, it never got there. The ultimate irony of Wild’s life must be that the receiver of this particular piece of stolen goods was never apprehended, nor indeed has the final resting place of his body ever been discovered.
Jonathan Wild was a repulsive character in many ways but for all that he was an intelligent and resourceful gangster, an opportunist who fully exploited the demonstrable weaknesses of the system for maintaining law and order at that time. He became the undisputed leader of London’s criminal world and it is possible that, just like the the Kray Brothers, he may actually have made the streets of London safer for ordinary citizens.
Another leading light in the pantheon of London’s master-criminals was Jack Sheppard (1702–24) who was prepared to turn his hand to a wide variety of criminal enterprises, including burglary, while specialising as a pickpocket, footpad and highwayman. He owes his fame, however, to his extraordinary skills as an escaplogist from prisons. As with the other criminal characters of this period, it is difficult to disentangle legend from fact. He was a Londoner born in Spitalfields, a vibrant, cosmopolitan, dangerous area on the eastern edge of the City of London. His parents were respectable folk who apprenticed him to a carpenter when he was fifteen. Sheppard could almost be the model for Tom Idle, the ‘Idle ’Prentice’ in William Hogarth’s highly moralistic but popular set of engravings entitled Industry and Idleness, published in 1747. Sheppard continued to work in the carpentry trade for four years but then took to carousing with disreputable companions at unsavoury venues such as The Black Lion in Drury Lane. The company to be found there included two questionable women with whom he established an immediate rapport. They were Elizabeth Lyon, also known as ‘Edgeworth Bess’, and her companion Poll Maggot. They were skilful pickpockets and took Sheppard under their wing, and they found that he quickly became adept at picking the pockets of all sorts of people on the streets of London. However, Sheppard was clearly ambitious because he soon graduated from picking pockets to picking locks, a trade in which the rewards were generally commensurate with the greater skills required.
Eventually Sheppard decided to give up any pretence of pursuing a honest living and he took to the road as a highwayman in the company of the experienced robber Joseph Blake, known as ‘Blueskin’. The latter had already carried out a number of commissions for Jonathan Wild and he introduced Sheppard to the master-criminal. It did not take long for Sheppard to establish something of a reputation for himself as a gifted highwayman and he was soon the leader of a gang of villainous ne’er-do-wells that included ‘Blueskin’ himself. They operated under Wild’s overall control, who was impressed by Sheppard because he seems to have given him considerably more latitude than he normally extended to those who worked for him. Gifted highway robber and footpad though he was, Sheppard owes his lasting fame in the annals of criminal history to his remarkable exploits as an escapologist. His first acquaintance with the inside of a prison was when he visited ‘Edgeworth Bess’ who had been detained while assisting the authorities with their enquiries regarding some missing property. Sheppard resented his ladyfriend’s incarceration and knocked out the warder, took his keys and coolly walked out of the building with Bess on his arm. This gained him an instant reputation for devil-maycare audacity and gallantry.
On another occasion Sheppard was strolling through the West End of London with a friend who took a sudden and irresistible liking to the expensive-looking watch sported by a passing gentleman. He tried to snatch the watch but was careless and, realising that he was not going to be able to take it, ran off instantly. Sheppard was surprisingly slow on the uptake and was arrested, for once justifiably protesting his innocence. He was placed in Newgate Prison when who should turn up on his first night but the faithful ‘Edgeworth Bess’. The authorities decided that they did not like the look of this demi-rep and so they promptly detained her as a probable accomplice of Sheppard’s. This is exactly what the couple wanted because it was assumed that they were man and wife and they were therefore placed in their own cell. This time ‘Blueskin’ came to their rescue and obtained entry to the gaol as a visitor, managing to pass a file to Sheppard who proved a maestro with this tool. As soon as he deemed it safe, he had his manacles off, followed by his fetters and then two bars were removed from the cell window. He faced a 30-ft drop into the courtyard below but this was nothing to the intrepid Sheppard. He ripped his blankets and sheets up and knotting them to make a rope, securely attached this to the one window bar still left intact. He descended, followed by Bess stripped to her underwear. Sheppard examined the gaol’s outer wall, which was about 22 ft high, but a gate provided convenient footholds and he and Bess duly made their escape.
Perhaps somewhat carried away by this daring escape, Sheppard now made a serious error of judgement. He and ‘Blueskin’ decided to pursue a little freelance activity and carried out a series of street robberies, passing their booty on to a small-time fence called Field, who offered them far better prices than Wild. The latter soon heard about this and he asked Field to come in and see him. This invitation was not one that could be ignored and Field was persuaded to turn King’s evidence, the result of which was that Sheppard and ‘Blueskin’ were arrested, placed in the dreaded Newgate Prison and soon after put on trial at the Old Bailey. They were found guilty and sentenced to death. Wild decided to visit Newgate to gloat at their downfall, but this nearly proved his undoing. ‘Blueskin’ approached him, spirited a knife from out of his sleeve and lunged with it at his tormentor’s throat, inflicting a very severe wound. For this deed, the date of execution was brought forward. Sheppard meanwhile was making his plans, once again involving the doughty ‘Edgeworth Bess’ and also Poll Maggot. They were allowed to visit him in gaol but kept apart from him by a hatch through which they could speak but not touch. Bess had secreted a file on her person and deftly manoeuvred it under the hatch with her foot. Poll kept talking to Sheppard while Bess used her wiles to keep the gaolers occupied. Poll and Bess eventually made their way home and Sheppard managed to follow a few days later.
Escapes from Newgate were rare enough to be sensational and his exploits gained Sheppard notoriety in the eyes of the authorities and enormous popularity with the populace at large. He decided to lie low in the countryside for a while but he soon drifted back to his old haunts and habits and was caught equipped for highway robbery on Finchley Common. He was returned to Newgate and this time the authorities, knowing what a slippery character he was, took no chances. They chained him to the floor and refused to allow him any visitors, with or without files. Sheppard was a high-class picklock, however, and he used a crooked nail to open the locks on his chains. He then managed to wriggle out of his handcuffs while still in fetters. He made his way up the only practical exit from the cell which was the chimney. Arriving at the top covered in soot, he climbed out and effected his escape via the roof. His small stature and wiry physique were of enormous help in these escapes. Perhaps continuing success had gone to his head because he decided to celebrate his hard-earned freedom in the company of his faithful friends, Bess and Poll. He dressed in his best finery and brazenly paraded through London in a coach, waving to cheering passers-by before entering an inn to wine and dine. Sheppard had now overreached himself and was quickly arrested, being so drunk as to be totally incapable of resistance.
Back inside Newgate yet again, Sheppard must have rued his vanity but at the same time he was probably flattered because his unusual skills gained official recognition. He was placed in a new set of restraining irons specifically designed for him. This time his luck had run out and Sheppard probably knew it. He continued to be the object of enormous interest and large numbers of visitors, many of them wealthy and female, braved Newgate’s noisome stench in order to make his acquaintance as he languished in the condemned cell. However, the warders knew all about his tricks by now and none of these visitors were allowed near him with as much as a toothpick let alone a crooked nail or a file. Such was his celebrity status that artists flocked to paint him, including the Royal Academician Sir James Thornhill. There were even painters who depicted the artists painting Sheppard. Portraits of him in the condemned cell show him to be a delicate, even somewhat effeminate-looking young man of fine features who apparently managed to be unfailingly polite and cheerful through what must have been a very trying time. Skeleton keys and files would really have been more welcome in his situation than all the earnest condolences and commiserations he received. Indeed he is alleged to have said, ‘A file is worth all the Bibles in the world.’ He was interviewed by Daniel Defoe, who was both a journalist and a Government spy. Defoe produced a somewhat imaginative biography of Sheppard which spawned as many as ten imitations of even more dubious veracity within a year of Sheppard’s death.
Somehow or other, the ever resourceful Sheppard managed to acquire a small penknife which he hoped would come in useful as he rode on the cart to Tyburn. If he had tried to escape, it is likely that the crowd would have united to assist him. However, it was not to be because he was frisked by a vigilant gaoler just before he left for his final journey on 16 November 1724. Vast crowds cheered him on his way. He met his death with courage and his remains were buried at St-Martins-in-the-Fields. He was only twenty-two years of age and observers in the crowd were surprised by his look of youthful innocence and vulnerability. In reality there was nothing even slightly upright about Sheppard. Candid accounts from those who knew him but were not selling stories to the press made it clear that he was short-tempered, violent when crossed and that he never displayed any remorse for his crimes. It cannot be denied that he was also intelligent and resourceful and gifted with extraordinary physical and technical skill.
Sheppard as well as being a popular icon was a symbol of the stresses prominent in society during the eighteenth century. He was raised in Spitalfields, perhaps the most intensive centre of industrial activity in Britain at that time, where he would have had first-hand experience of the dynamics and social effects of industrial capitalism in its early stages. He spent time in the workhouse in his childhood. This institution was becoming a major weapon of social control and it institutionalised the degradation and indignity that were heaped on many of the poorest and weakest victims of the economic and social changes taking place during this period. By breaking his indentures, Sheppard became that malevolent and pernicious being, the ‘idle apprentice’. ‘Idle’ meant more than simply lazy, it meant wanton refusal to conform. The establishment of an industrial society in Britain required men, women and children to work in noisy, dangerous factories and to reside in filthy, insanitary slums or austere, inhumane workhouses. Sheppard was idolised because he was not prepared to be treated in this way and because, for a while, he was able to evade or escape from whatever methods the authorities used to try to bring him to heel. The authorities were forced to make an example of Sheppard because he so publicly rejected the attitudes and behaviour required from a compliant working population.