Tyburn: London's Fatal Tree (18 page)

There is hardly a criminal act which does not come within the provisions of the Black Act; offences against public order, against the administration of criminal justice, against property, against the person, malicious injuries to property of varying degree – all came under this statute and all were punishable by death. Thus the Act constituted in itself a complete and extremely severe criminal code… .

(Radzinowicz 1947: 77)

The initial victims of the Act were a group of deer-stealers from Hampshire who were also suspected of harbouring Jacobite sympathies. Seven of them were hanged at Tyburn on 4 December 1723. They realised that they were scapegoats. Why else, they asked, were they tried in London well away from a jury of their own Hampshire people who might have treated them with some sympathy? Their progress from Newgate and their deaths at Tyburn generated little interest. Clearly, those who turned out for Tyburn Fair had a preference for watching the demise of prisoners who had a local reputation.

One man with a lasting place in London’s folklore who died at Tyburn was Jack Sheppard (1702–24). He became a popular hero starring in innumerable broadsheets and ballads, although much of this material was exaggerated and distorted. A fairly unexceptional thief and burglar, his name would have been forgotten had it not been for his extraordinary skill as an escapologist. Born in Spitalfields, a tough cosmopolitan community and the centre of London’s weaving industry, at the age of fifteen he was apprenticed as a carpenter. The work lacked the excitement and glamour Sheppard craved but he was a quick learner and became highly skilled, not just as a carpenter but also as a locksmith. He drifted towards the criminal elements that frequented low drinking houses. In the Black Lion close to Drury Lane, he came under the tutelage of two experienced thieves, ‘Edgeworth Bess’ and Poll Maggot. Sheppard turned his back on carpentry and became a burglar and picklock. His fame, however, lay with his almost uncanny ability to get out of prison and the various other ingenious physical restraints into which he was placed.

Discovering that Edgeworth Bess was in St Giles’s Roundhouse pending inquiries by the authorities concerning some stolen property, he walked in, knocked out the warder, took his keys, released Bess and then coolly walked out with her on his arm. Such is the stuff of which legends are made! Sheppard’s brief but meteoric rise to fame had begun. Now with a price on his head, he was taken up by a constable in the notorious Seven Dials area and was deposited overnight in St Giles’s Roundhouse. He had secreted a razor with which he made a hole in the plaster and lathe ceiling. He got out on to the roof and escaped using an improvised rope. Soon afterwards he was wrongly arrested for the theft of a watch and placed in the New Prison, Clerkenwell. To his great delight Bess turned up and was promptly detained by the authorities who placed her in the same cell. They were soon visited by one Joseph Blake, known in criminal circles as ‘Blueskin’. He surreptitiously passed them a file which Sheppard used to remove his manacles, his fetters, two bars from the cell window, and Bess from her restraints. He made a knotted rope from blankets and sheets, attached it securely to the remaining window bar and with Bess stripped to her underwear, descended 30 feet into the courtyard below. After this, a climb of 22 feet to scale the outer wall was child’s play. They dropped into the street and fled.

Sheppard and ‘Blueskin’ rather unwisely decided to carry out some robberies and sell the booty to a receiver called Field. They did this in defiance of Jonathan Wild, the acknowledged underworld leader who soon heard about this freelance activity and could not possibly overlook it. He persuaded Field to turn king’s evidence. Sheppard and ‘Blueskin’ were arrested, tried at the Old Bailey and sentenced to death. They were then placed in Newgate awaiting execution. Edgeworth Bess accompanied by Poll Maggot soon turned up. The girls skilfully manoeuvred a file into Sheppard’s cell while simultaneously titillating the gaolers and diverting their attention. Their mission accomplished, Bess and Poll left and a few days later so did Sheppard – over the roof and down the wall. Sheppard was adored by the populace because escapes from Newgate were almost unheard of and these dare-devil exploits made the authorities look stupid.

Soon Sheppard was caught once more and returned to Newgate where the warders took the unusual step of chaining him to the floor. Under the circumstances, they also banned visitors. Somehow Sheppard, flattered by this special treatment, acquired a crooked nail and expertly opening the locks, wriggled out of his handcuffs and remaining fetters. This time he escaped from Newgate covered in soot and via a narrow flue. The hero’s welcome he received went to his head and he brazenly paraded around London with Bess on one arm and Poll on the other. The authorities arrested him as he sat carousing, much the worse for drink and revelling in the popular adulation. He was swiftly brought back through the now familiar gates of Newgate and placed in a set of restraining irons designed specifically for him. On looking at these, he must have realised that his luck was finally running out. However, he was a celebrity and many visitors, some of them very distinguished ones, came to assure him of their good wishes. Understandably, they were kept at a safe distance. However, just one file or even a crooked nail would have been more useful than all their well-intentioned felicitations. Somehow he managed to get hold of a sharp penknife but it was discovered by a vigilant gaoler. He also had a fall-back plan. He had arranged with associates to engage a surgeon at Tyburn in the hope that on being cut down, he could be whisked away and expertly resuscitated.

On 16 November 1724 Sheppard travelled in the customary cart from Newgate to Tyburn enjoying a triumphal progress. Rarely, if ever, did so many people turn out to cheer a condemned felon on his way and to shower him with posies of flowers. Revelling in the limelight, he smiled constantly and exchanged pleasantries and banter with friends and well-wishers in the crowd. Something must have struck him as funny because at one stage he burst out laughing. He stopped for a pint of mulled sack outside the City of Oxford tavern in Oxford Road, now Oxford Street, where the built-up area of London began to peter out and the route took on a semi-rural appearance. His posture continued to be brave but after Sheppard had been hanging for a quarter of an hour, a man described as a ‘soldier’ dashed through the crowds around the gallows, cut him down and made off with his slight body which still exhibited some signs of life. His accomplices set up a diversion so that his body could be whisked away to receive the urgent ministrations of the surgeon. However, in the excited crowd their cries were misunderstood and many onlookers thought that Sheppard’s body was being taken away to be subjected to the attentions of the hated anatomists at Surgeons’ Hall. A violent altercation broke out and if life had not been quite extinct before, it quickly became so as the body was seized, pulled about and fought over with well-meaning but misplaced zeal. One group of men succeeded in carrying the battered corpse off and taking it to the Barley Mow in Long Acre, Covent Garden. The rumour was that Sheppard’s corpse was indeed destined for the surgeons but had been placed in the tavern until the furore died down. Soon an extremely angry mob was surging around Long Acre. Few had any real idea of what was going on except that the body of their hero Sheppard was in one of the buildings close by. Brickbats were flung indiscriminately, windows were smashed and doors knocked down as people, with the capriciousness that is the hallmark of the mob, quickly forgot the cause of the excitement and embarked on an orgy of looting and destruction. The Riot Act was read and order restored with some difficulty. Late the same night, a coach with an armed guard took Sheppard’s mortal remains and interred them in the churchyard of St Martin-inthe-Fields. He was just twenty-two years of age.

The profession of thief-taker had effectively been created by the Act for Encouraging the Apprehending of Highwaymen, passed in 1692. England was then unique in Western Europe in having neither a public prosecutor nor a professional police force, relying instead on the cheaper expedient of leaving the enforcement of the law to private enterprise. Such a system encouraged common informers to bring offenders to justice with the incentive of cash rewards. ‘The Highwayman Act’ as it was called, offered a reward of £40 for the arrest and successful prosecution of any highwayman plus the useful bonus of his horse, harness, weapons and any other possessions unless these had been stolen. Those supplying the necessary evidence were also given a free pardon for any crimes they had committed. This ‘blood money’ attracted large numbers of criminals to thief-taking. The law was subsequently extended to include a wider range of crimes and sliding scales of payment were introduced, depending on the perceived seriousness of each particular crime. The dangers inherent in thief-taking were recognised because a thief-taker’s dependants were entitled to the reward if he was killed while attempting an arrest. It was obviously dangerous to tackle someone with a price on his head and there was a very real threat of revenge, little protection being offered to the thief-taker in what was basically a policeless state. Thief-takers enjoyed little popularity either with criminals or the law-abiding public.

The most notorious thief-taker was Jonathan Wild. Like Jack Sheppard, his story has often been told and again only an outline will be provided. Born at Wolverhampton in 1683, he became a buckle-maker. In about 1708 he moved to London and was soon placed in the Wood Street Compter for debt. Institutions like this were virtually academies of crime. Those who had embarked for the first time on crime as well as the most hardened recidivists mixed indiscriminately, swapping ideas and expertise. During the four years he spent there, Wild listened intently and made sure that he got to know those who might be useful to him in the future. His imprisonment was made easier to bear in the last few months because of the arrival of a prostitute named Mary Milliner. She became Wild’s mistress and was doubly useful because she had plenty of underworld contacts. They left prison together and set up home in modest premises in Covent Garden. At first Wild returned to the trade of buckle-making but he also acted as Mary’s ‘minder’ in a criminal partnership known as the ‘buttock-andtwang’. In simple terms, Mary lured men into dark alleys for stand-up sex. Her victims were vulnerable with their breeches around their ankles. While they were in the transports of lustful pleasure Wild found it a simple matter to rob them.

The partnership prospered and the couple took over a drinking house which was a well known ‘flash-house’ or resort of criminals. Soon Wild was buying items stolen by his customers, going on to combine the work of a receiver and a thief-taker. He opened an office and invited victims of theft and robbery to give him details of what they had had stolen. He then promised to try to locate the items and to bring the robbers to justice. The robbers themselves had probably already knocked at the back door of Wild’s premises and sold him the very same goods. He acted as a go-between, gaining an enviable reputation from the robbers for giving them a fair price and from the victims for his seemingly extraordinary ability to return their lost goods to them at a reasonable fee. This way he pleased everyone and prospered himself. However, Wild had further ambitions. He divided London and its environs into districts and allocated separate gangs to each of these. Any villain who crossed him risked being apprehended and framed with the assistance of witnesses who were Wild’s creatures. On conviction as felons they could not testify against Wild himself in any subsequent court case.

Wild was intelligent, ruthless and worldly. The rewards for bringing offenders to justice brought in useful income and helped him to consolidate his position in the underworld, eliminating possible rivals. Wild became London’s first ‘Napoleon of Crime’. He had an exceptionally retentive brain in which he stored information about all those active in the underworld. Favours done for him were never forgotten and he was very loyal to those who earned his respect. However, treachery was never overlooked. He was absolutely merciless. Eventually he came unstuck when Sir William Thompson, the Recorder of London, became Solicitor-General in 1717. He had the measure of Wild and was instrumental in securing an Act of Parliament which made it a capital offence to take a reward under the pretence of helping the owner to recover stolen goods. This piece of legislation was, with good reason, known as ‘Jonathan Wild’s Act’ because it was designed specifically with his activities in mind.

Initially Wild had little difficulty in finding ways around this legislation. However he overreached himself in 1723 when he decided to petition the Lord Mayor of the City of London with a view to being given the formal Freedom of the City. To back up this brazen submission, he explained that his efforts had resulted in the despatch of no less than sixty criminals to the gallows. Certainly, he had cleared some of the most notorious gangs from the streets of London and ironically was able to claim, like the Kray brothers many years later, that he had made the streets safer. Many of London’s wealthier citizens were impressed by his promotion of himself as a public benefactor and saw him as their only defence against the apparently inexorable rise in lawlessness. Had he not consistently restored their stolen property to them and at a very reasonable price? Did not accounts of the criminals he rounded up appear every week in the newspapers? However, Wild was eventually arrested under the terms of the new Act for procuring the return of some stolen lace, to the value of just £40. As with many others before and since, Wild found that public opinion was cruel and capricious. As one revelation followed another, he found that the public quickly moved from seeing him as their main hope against crime to believing him to be the major perpetrator of it and calling for his blood. Unluckily for him he found that Thompson was presiding as judge when his case came to court. Wild defended himself vigorously and ably but he was found guilty. With an air of vindictive relish Thompson sentenced him to death. He was hanged at Tyburn on 24 May 1725.