The Masters of Bow Street (27 page)

In the strange mixture of war and peace in which all Europe seemed involved, hundreds of French footmen were imported to London, putting as many English counterparts out of work. A group of English footmen called a meeting to discuss action and, rumour of this leaking out, Furnival was ordered by the government to prevent it. His first step was simple: to deny them use of the room where they wanted to assemble.

Almost without warning, hundreds of Englishmen marched on Bow Street. Some bribed or fooled a servant to admit them and found Furnival alone in his downstairs office.

‘You allow us into the meeting room,’ one man said, ‘or you’ll die where you sit.’

Ruth, puzzled by the crowd outside, had gone down to see what was the matter, and went into the office. As the men swung around, fearful of an attack, Furnival snatched up two pistols and pushed past them to the door.

‘You go upstairs with the baby,’ he ordered Ruth. ‘Send Harris or any man you can find to summon troops and our men - but let our men not attack the mob by themselves. They are to protect the rear.’ He did not utter a word to the invaders, who, taken aback at the sight of the pistols, retreated to the hallway. Ruth safely out of sight, Furnival stood at the foot of the stairs, pistols in hand. The front door crashed in and dozens more of the footmen rushed into the hallway - but stopped at sight of his guns. Upstairs, the baby was crying; everything on the ground floor was wrecked, windows and furniture were smashed and documents were burned. John Furnival moved neither forward nor backward, but if any man drew near he levelled his guns.

Two and a half hours later, when he was at the point of exhaustion, troops arrived in Bow Street, and Furnival’s men, who had been keeping hundreds at bay, rushed to his support. Once the crisis was past, he felt once again pressures at his jaws and chest, and, breathing heavily, he groped for a chair, Ruth helping him.

He sat heaving for a while, and gradually recovered, saying when he could speak, ‘I confess I have never been more frightened. Has my hair turned white?’

‘Nothing but a distinguished grey,’ she assured him; and he blessed her for her cool head. ‘But mine will if you do not see a doctor.’

For once he conceded, ‘I will think of it.’

He was allowed little rest, even after that invasion of Bow Street.

Orders came to round up Roman Catholic priests who might be working for the Jacobites, and the rate of crime steadily increased. It was little consolation that the government accepted responsibility for the damage at Bow Street after the footmen’s riot and offered a hundred pounds in gold over and above all other rewards for the arrest and conviction of any street robber until May of 1745.

There could have been no greater incentive to the thief-taker; to those giving false evidence; to those prepared to condemn the innocent.

Pressed by Ruth, John at last saw a doctor, who advised him to take more rest and to eat less and gave him a medicine to take twice each day. From then on his attacks lessened in severity until he all but ignored them.

On little John’s fourth birthday in the blustery December of 1744, when a party was to be held to celebrate in the upstairs apartment at Bow Street and John was in court, a visitor came, different from any they had known before: a King’s Messenger, carrying a sealed message which he would hand only to John in person. The young clerk who had copied so many of Moffat’s appeals, and was now a married and family man, took a message into the court and John came out into his offices and then up the stairs. Ruth judged from his expression that he had been filled suddenly with hope that at last one of his pleas had been answered favourably, else why should a special envoy be sent? He broke the seal of the heavy envelope and straightened out a piece of parchmentlike paper with two folds. He began to read, and Ruth had never seen such hope or tension in him. The messenger watched with supercilious interest, until he was shocked - like Ruth - by the sudden laugh which burst from John Furnival’s lips, a laugh which went on and on and shook the walls, reminding Ruth vividly of the night when John had come back from Great Furnival Square and learned of the highwayman’s attack on Montmorency and the theft of Hooper’s gold and silver plate.

The envoy looked outraged, but before he could speak Furnival moved towards Ruth and held the missive so that she could read it.

Before she even began, Furnival gasped, ‘The King is rewarding me for my services to justice - he is making me a knight!
Sir
John Furnival, m’dear, how does that sound? Will the death sentence sound more pleasant from the mouth of
Sir
John, will the—’

‘Your pardon,’ the envoy interrupted coldly. ‘His Majesty is to hold a ceremony tomorrow at Westminster Palace which he has graciously invited you to attend to be dubbed Sir John. May I report to His Majesty that you will accept? Or shall I tell him you were so vastly amused that you could not make the decision easily?’

‘Oh, both,’ answered John Furnival. ‘Both, by all means! That I was vastly amused by the unexpected nature of the missive and humbly beg to accept. I will present myself tomorrow at Westminster Palace, if you will be good enough to tell me what time I should be there.’

‘At three o’clock, sir.’

‘And may I, as is the custom, have the company and support of my wife?’

‘As it please you,’ the envoy replied, supercilious again. He bowed stiffly and turned and went onto the landing where the young clerk was waiting to escort him.

The young clerk was at the Bow Street door, when the carriage returned from Westminster, and as he handed Ruth down he said in a clear voice, ‘Good afternoon, my lady.’

Ruth was so surprised that she slipped and would have fallen had the youth not supported her and if Tom Harris, standing by, hadn’t come to lend his weight. Upright again and looking quite beautiful, she breathed heavily, for the welcome had been a shock. They had not discussed it and until the moment when she had been called ‘my lady’ it had never really dawned on her that she would be known by the title. She caught a glimpse of John, smiling down at her, and felt sure he had deliberately not talked of it before the knighting to make sure that she would get the full effect of ‘my lady’ the first time it was used.

There was a boisterous party in the apartment, the other magistrates, clerks and officials coming to pay their respects, most of them wanting a word afterward with John Furnival the Fourth, who had been ‘banished’ to the cottage for the great occasion. At last, however, the visitors ceased coming and little John was brought back and put to bed, while soon afterward Ruth and John Furnival ate a simple meal, cooked exclusively for them, in ‘their’ room.

‘And now I am going to prove to you that Lady Furnival gets no more respect from Sir John than Mrs. Furnival used to get from plain John Furnival, Esquire,’ declared Furnival.

Had Ruth had any doubts before, she knew now that he was deeply pleased with the knighthood, although within a few days he would no doubt be sending off his protests again, and trying to find out whether the ‘Sir’ prefix would procure him a better hearing.

In August of 1745 the dreaded invasion of the Young Pretender began. Landing in Scotland to a rapturous reception he began his march of triumph south and was proclaimed King of Scotland in Edinburgh. As he took Derby there was panic in London; tens of thousands left the city; thousands besieged the Bank of England; even the King was advised to flee to Hanover. All this time Furnival maintained his work as magistrate and secret service leader, keeping Ruth and the baby in London.

‘The Prince will never get here,’ he would insist. ‘He’ll be turned back. The north will not support him.’

And the north, where the Prince’s great hopes had lain, watched as he passed by with his Highlanders and did not lift a finger to help; at the same time, in the Scottish Lowlands, loyalty had swung back to the Hanovers.

John Furnival had taken a night off duty so that he could give Ruth a rare treat, an evening at Drury Lane. Rebuilt only a few years after the fire which destroyed it, a light and lively play, written produced and acted by David Garrick, was being staged, and the evening was made the greater for Ruth because the King was in the Royal Box. Few saw the equerry who went to speak to him, but all saw the incredible sight of the portly sovereign climbing onto the stage, gesticulating wildly and shouting phrases in guttural English which no one could understand, then bursting out into German.

As his excitement increased and the audience and players began to wonder whether he had gone mad, an equerry joined him and announced clearly, ‘His Majesty has been advised of the complete and bloody defeat of the Jacobites at Culloden. He—’

His next words were lost in a roar of cheering, shouting and stamping, while only here and there appeared a pale, shocked face.

‘One danger over,’ Furnival said in the carriage as he and Ruth were driven home.

‘You mean you expect a bad winter of crime?’

‘You are a discerning woman,’ he declared.

Because of the preoccupation with the Jacobite rebellion, concentration on the criminals in London had been impossible for Furnival or anyone else, and crime during the winter of 1745 to 1746 had been the worst ever known.

But in some ways there was change for the better, as a number of the people to whom he had written over the years were persuaded by the worsening crime figures that an organised peace-keeping force in London would have made it much easier to search out the Jacobites. A slow, steady stream of support was developing, and almost two years to the day since the King’s accolade, Sir John Furnival, as active as ever at Bow Street, arranged for missives to be sent out to thirty gentlemen, including three peers and five Members of Parliament, to attend a meeting at the Printers’ Hall in the City to discuss ways and means of bringing more pressure on the government and the King. For the first time Ruth left her fourth child at the farm so that she could give her undivided attention to her husband. In one way she was puzzled, for now that the great opportunity was at hand and there seemed a prospect of receiving the support he needed, he was more on edge than he had ever been.

‘I know, Ruth, I know,’ he said when she remarked on it and asked if she could help. ‘So near and yet so far - is that the reason, I wonder? I have been working for this day for so many weary years that like you I can hardly believe it is real.’ A smile broke through his frown and he held her by the arms. ‘Now the boot is on the other foot! Ruth, will you remember, I wonder, the day I set out to bargain with my family? I had such high hopes then. I did not really see how in all reason they would refuse and yet I was frightened that they would. When the actual Sunday came I was nearly as much on edge as I am now. Am I a fool, do you think? Or have I been fooling myself?’

‘No man was ever less of a fool,’ she replied. ‘What you lack is faith in those you are going to meet.’ She stood over him as he sat back in his chair and went on gently: ‘You should rest tonight - with no exertion. No exertions of any kind, sir!’ Her eyes teased him. ‘I will go and get some lemon curd tarts; they are in the oven, warming.’

She went out of their apartment and was away for perhaps ten minutes. Everyone except the court officials and two retainers whom she did not know well had left to attend a fight between two famous pugilists at a big new amphitheatre near Tottenham Court Road. She preferred things as they were, for she felt an overwhelming desire to be alone with John that night, having a sense that he had great need of her.

When she returned, his head had lolled forward, chin on chest, as if he had fallen asleep, and she placed everything in position before going closer to him. If he were in too deep a sleep she would not wake him.

She caught her breath, for he looked so strange.

His lips and nose and part of his cheeks were blue in colour, his mouth drooped open, his eyes were neither open nor closed but a little of each. Ruth felt in that awful moment that he was dead, but she steeled herself to feel for his pulse and detected a rhythm; she could hear breathing deep in his chest, too. She straightened up and ran out of the room, calling ‘Tom, Tom!’ but it was another constable who came hurrying to her. ‘Get a doctor!’ she cried. ‘Doctor Anson if possible, but please hurry for a doctor!’

A youthful doctor, partner to elderly Anson, came within fifteen minutes, by which time the servants were in the room where John Furnival now lay on two chairs, more comfortable, while Ruth stood over him, bathing his forehead.

Soon the young doctor said with assurance, ‘I have no doubt, Lady Furnival, that your husband has suffered a major seizure of the heart. I would recommend constant care with the best possible trained assistance. The Royal Physician will come, I am sure, and I can recommend excellent women to care for him until such time as we can be sure he will recover. But I am hopeful, ma’am, most hopeful.’

‘Lady Furnival,’ the King’s physician said, two weeks later, ‘with care and constant attention your husband will live for many years, provided he can accept what is now, I fear, inevitable. His left side is paralysed, and he will not be able to walk. His will be a life of enforced retirement from public affairs and I would strongly recommend that the whole household move to St. Giles Farm. It will be a terrible blow to him, ma’am, and a great burden upon you, but I see no alternative.’

Quietly Ruth said, ‘It will be no burden, sir. If he can use his mind, I can be his arms and legs and can do whatever he wants of me. Is he able to understand what is going on about him now?’

‘Vaguely, I fear - but vaguely.’

‘Then we should have him taken to St. Giles before he recovers well enough to protest,’ she said, ‘and I will be grateful if you and Doctor Anson will make what medical arrangements are needed. I will call upon his brothers and get their permission to move permanently to St. Giles.’

She did not add that she would implore one of them, at least, to take up where John had been forced to stop.

‘Ruth,’ said Francis, standing beside his desk, ‘none of us can continue with the work he was doing because we do not believe in it sufficiently. But two things we can promise you. We shall never stand in the way of any man who follows him. And we shall forever regard you as one of ourselves because you are so much part of John.’