Thief-Taker Hangings Read online

  The

  Thief-Taker

  Hangings

  The

  Thief-Taker

  Hangings

  How Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Wild, and Jack Sheppard Captivated London and Created the Celebrity Criminal

  Aaron Skirboll

  For Hank

  Copyright © 2014 by Aaron Skirboll

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be addressed to Globe Pequot Press, Attn: Rights and Permissions Department, PO Box 480, Guilford, CT 06437.

  Lyons Press is an imprint of Globe Pequot Press.

  Project Editor: Lauren Brancato

  Layout: Melissa Evarts

  Text design: Sheryl P. Kober

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Skirboll, Aaron, author.

  The thief-taker hangings : how Daniel Defoe, Jonathan Wild, and Jack Sheppard captivated London and created scandal journalism / Aaron Skirboll.

  pages cm

  Summary: “Chronicles the invention of scandal journalism by Daniel Defoe, author of Robinson Crusoe” — Provided by publisher.

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-0-7627-9148-4 (hardback)

  1. Crime and the press—Great Britain—18th century. 2. Sensationalism in journalism—Great Britain—History—18th century. 3. Criminals—England—London—History—18th century. 4. Tabloid newspapers—Great Britain—History—18th century. 5. London (England)—Social conditions—18th century. 6. Defoe, Daniel, 1661?-1731. 7. Wild, Jonathan, 1682?-1725. 8. Sheppard, Jack, 1702-1724. I. Title.

  PN5124.C74S55 2014

  070.4'493649421—dc23

  2014018791

  eISBN 978-1-4930-1423-1 (eBook)

  The Annals of Criminal Jurisprudence . . . present tragedies of real life often heightened in their effect by the grossness of the injustice and the malignity of the prejudices which accompanied them. At the same time real culprits as original characters stand forward on the canvas of humanity as prominent objects for our special study.

  —Edmund Burke, Celebrated Trials and Remarkable Cases of Criminal Jurisprudence

  The introduction of detailed realism into English literature in the eighteenth century was like the introduction of electricity into machine technology.

  —Tom Wolfe, The New Journalism

  English Currency in the Eighteenth Century

  4 farthings = 1 penny

  12 pence (d.) = 1 shilling (s.)

  5 shillings = 1 crown

  6 shillings, 8 pence = 1 noble

  13 shillings, 4 pence = 1 mark

  20 shillings = 1 pound (£ or l.)

  1 pound, 1 shilling = 1 guinea (gold coin)

  Source: http://www.oldbaileyonline.org/static/Coinage.jsp

  Contents

  Copyright

  Introduction: A Brawling Back-Alley Bunch

  Prologue: The Triple Tree

  I The Dissenter

  II The Streets of London

  III Jonathan Wild Comes to the City

  IV The Review

  V The Marshal and the Buckle-Maker

  VI Thief-Catcher General of Great Britain and Ireland

  VII Jack Sheppard, Apprentice

  VIII The Regulator

  IX Crusoe and Flanders

  X The Black Lion

  XI Celebrity Gangbuster

  XII Cleverest of All

  XIII Wild Versus Sheppard

  XIV The Trial of Jack Sheppard

  XV Mr. Applebee’s Man

  XVI Blueskin’s Penknife

  XVII The Castle

  XVIII Forlorn at the Triple Tree

  XIX The Downfall of Jonathan Wild

  XX The Trial of Jonathan Wild

  XXI Hanging the Thief-Catcher

  XXII “To Deliver Myself from This Death of a Life”

  Epilogue: Legends

  Appendix: Canting Dictionary

  Acknowledgments

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

  Index

  Daniel Defoe

  Engraving by Michael Vandergucht after a portrait by Jeremiah Taverner

  Introduction

  A Brawling Back-Alley Bunch

  Perhaps the first true modern literary journalist: Daniel Defoe, whose 1725 tract on the criminal Jonathan Wild offers a prototype of the modern true-crime narrative.

  —Kevin Kerrane and Ben Yagoda, The Art of Fact

  Today criminal investigations rule the media. Once or twice each year, a trial transfixes the public, a new cause célèbre born seemingly each season. Spectators travel hours to courthouses; tickets to trials are distributed by lottery; and the term media circus, coined in the 1970s, comes into its own.

  If it bleeds, it leads—so goes the old journalistic saw. Readers and viewers can’t tear their eyes away from true crime stories, and the grislier the details, the better. But when did it all begin, this mixing of criminal and celebrity? Searching for the origin of the phenomenon took me back three centuries to the nascent years of the newspaper and across the Atlantic to London. In the middle of it all stood Daniel Defoe, a wily old newspaperman and the aging author of Robinson Crusoe, who battled for the scoop amid the muck and grime of the eighteenth century. His coverage of two men—Jonathan Wild, the chaser, and Jack Sheppard, the mark—enthralled a kingdom and birthed a genre.

  An eighteenth-century Al Capone, Jonathan Wild was the first man to organize crime for profit and the first criminal whose name everyone in the city knew. A burglar and a prison breaker, Jack Sheppard had much in common with John Dillinger. In late 1724, a manhunt for him grabbed the city’s attention like no other story and drove newspaper sales skyward. Sheppard the housebreaker ran, thief-taker Wild chased him, and reporter Defoe wrote about both.

  With Sheppard on the loose, the story evolved in real time, but nothing about the case was clear-cut, nor was it easy to know for whom to root. The grandeur of the once-popular hunter was fading, and the criminal was incorrigible and eminently quotable. In the middle of it all, we have a man known today primarily as a novelist, his skills as a journalist mostly forgotten. His colorful tales about the pair teemed with details, but as with nearly everything he wrote, his name was nowhere to be found, and in Sheppard’s case, Defoe wrote his account of the man’s deeds as if it were the thief’s autobiography, as he’d done with Robinson Crusoe and Moll Flanders.

  In 1724 and 1725, more than thirty unsigned pamphlets were published on Wild and Sheppard. Five of these tracts have been attributed to Defoe, and the British Library has cataloged them under his name. In the story ahead, I privileged only the two pamphlets that have met with near universal agreement on the attribution to Defoe: The True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild and A Narrative of All the Robberies, Escapes, &c. of John Sheppard. A third, The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard, was probably part of a group effort in which Defoe had a hand, among others.

  Entering the world of Defoe scholars with virgin eyes, I had no idea what awaited me. This is one brawling back-alley bunch of bibliophiles, many waging pissing matches to see who knows Daniel best. One camp of scholars charges another with corpus swelling, while the latter assails the former f
or deflating the number so as to remove works of lesser quality. In Defoe’s day, it was more the exception than the rule to put your name to pamphlets, so attribution makes for a thorny issue, and with over five hundred works credited to him, there’s no definitive universal agreement here. Nonetheless, the scholarly scrap proved entertaining. Among those who’ve studied the man, it’s a no-holds-barred, back-and-forth assault complete with name calling. Academic insults fly to and fro: “simpletons or rascals,” “lack of brains,” “a disaster.” Charges of canon forgery and “power moves” have been made, and as one set of authors answered a particular onslaught, they decided it would “look craven if we do not give him one or two back—though a ‘Forum’ may not really be the place for fist-fights.”

  To an outsider, for the most part, more of a consensus appears about the Wild and Sheppard pamphlets credited to Defoe than not. If only it weren’t for the Law Firm. That’s the collective nickname I have given to scholars P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens, who seem to want something close to DNA evidence before ascribing anything to Defoe. In their book, Defoe De-Attributions, they’ve called into question some 252 of the works in Defoe’s canon, including many of his criminal tracts. The vast majority of Defoe biographers and others who’ve studied the period have kept Defoe’s criminal pamphlets and his work at Applebee’s Original Weekly Journal under his name. As Maximillian Novak, who has studied Defoe for most of his life and penned the Defoe entry in the New Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature, noted of the author’s work at Applebee’s it “was an accepted fact by every Defoe scholar until 1997. In that year, P. N. Furbank and W. R. Owens published an essay with the title ‘The Myth of Defoe As Applebee’s Man.’ ”

  The Law Firm muddied the waters with doubt, and others have followed suit.

  However, even the Law Firm acknowledges that these pamphlets could be Defoe’s. They just don’t have the evidence to prove the 300-year-old pamphlets are his. Scholar Pat Rogers, who has studied and written on Defoe and many of his contemporaries, told me that these attribution questions dog Defoe far more than any other writer of the time. Not only did he write an incredibly large amount—signing practically none, or publishing under a pseudonym—but he did so on an equally dizzying array of topics.

  I have sided with the majority regarding the tracts on Wild and Sheppard, as well as Defoe’s tenure at Applebee’s. Dozens of men and women who have made a careful study of the man’s life and work have counted them his, which is good enough for me. Besides, instead of trying to prove that Defoe wrote these tracts on criminals, maybe it’s more fitting to leave it with a glint of doubt, as with all of his writings. After all, he never signed Robinson Crusoe or Moll Flanders either, and Roxana’s authorship didn’t fall to him until half a century after its publication. Three centuries have passed since the author’s death, and he remains shrouded in mystery, each year his life growing more so. His major works of fiction were all written in the first person, as true stories, while his nonfiction works read like novels.

  But then, that’s part of the attraction: The definitive biographies of two infamous criminals were written by a novelist. Picture an aging Defoe, near his life’s end, running around London between the gallows and Newgate Prison, where he met the inspiration for Moll Flanders, a writer mixing it up with thieves, murderers, and rogues of all inclination amid dirt, despair, and deprivation. That image stirred the London of the past back to life for me. Left with the choice of leaving Defoe out of the story—hemming and hawing over attribution bitchery—or moving forward with the majority, I chose the latter. Defoe and Mr. Applebee made the cut. When telling the stories of Wild and Sheppard, you have to include the best and most accurate tracts written by their contemporaries, and the British Library lists those under Defoe’s name.

  It’s also worth underscoring that this book isn’t a biography of Defoe. My intentions are far less noble. My aim is merely to entertain. Defoe had a vast collection of interests—economics, politics, religion, and trade among them—and I’ve touched on little to none of it. Only his criminal writings and the aspects of his life that related to crime in general—and, specifically, the careers of Wild and Sheppard—concerned me. For a full treatment of the man, pick up the biographies by Paula Backscheider or Maximillian Novak.

  I’m no scholar. Yet neither was Defoe. An unpolished outsider, he gained little respect from his peers. No one conferred on him the same prestige as the likes of Addison, Pope, or Steele. He warned of grammatical errors, and likewise, I can guarantee that, absent an editor’s hand, you’d find the pages ahead marked with similar mistakes. I’m also thankful to Lyons Press for a point of the upmost importance to this work: a firm deadline. After years of research, there’s always more. As Arthur Griffiths, a nineteenth-century prison inspector and author who wrote on Sheppard, remarked in the preface to The Chronicles of Newgate: “Now at the termination of my labours . . . I found at length that I must be satisfied with what I had instead of seeking for more.”

  Defoe said it best in his final days, in Augusta Triumphans, his tract on civic improvements: “As I am quick to conceive, I am eager to have done, unwilling to overwork a subject; I had rather leave part to the conception of the readers, than to tire them or myself with protracting a theme, as if, like a chancery man or a hackney author, I wrote by the sheet for hire. So let us have done with this topic and proceed to another.”

  Prologue

  The Triple Tree

  To close the scene of all his actions he

  Was brought from Newgate to the fatal tree;

  And there his life resigned, his race is run,

  And Tyburn ends what wickedness begun.

  —from “Jack Sheppard’s Three Fatal Stages,” 1724

  Flip through old books depicting the executions of eighteenth-century England, and chills will run down your spine. The Bell-Man, eerily dressed in black, lurks on the wall of St. Sepulchre’s churchyard like a prophet rising. The long white faces of the crowd stand out against the dull gray sky. Animals rummage for scrapings from the corpses hanging above. You can almost smell the stench of death in the air and hear the words coming from the Bell-Man’s lips: “All Good people pray heartily unto God for these poor sinners, who are now going to their death, for whom this great bell doth toll.”

  Today the location of the Tyburn gallows lies just off the Marble Arch at the southernmost point of the Marylebone district of London. The spot is marked not by a circular plaque or even an X, but by the spine of a triangle, symbol of the Tyburn Tree, otherwise known as the Triple Tree or the “Deadly Nevergreen.” In the eighteenth century, the gallows occupied a space on Edgware Road, near the northeast corner of Hyde Park, some two and a half miles west of London. More than 50,000 people were executed there. At the Triple Tree, criminals met their maker. Shakespeare wrote of the place in Love’s Labour’s Lost—“The shape of love’s Tyburn that hangs up simplicity”—while poet John Taylor later pondered the deadly tree some decades later:

  I understand the root of it is dry,

  It bears no leaf, no bloom, or no bud,

  The rain that makes it fructify is blood.

  Legal executions had taken place around the village of Tyburn for centuries, spread out across the countryside, beginning in 1196 with William Fitz Osbert, also known as “Longbeard,” a leader of an uprising by the poor. In 1571, the Tyburn Tree was constructed with its innovative triangular design: a wooden triangle laid horizontally atop three support legs. Its design efficiently allowed more hangings at one time, up to twenty-four simultaneously—eight from each beam of the triangle.

  Stephen Gardiner dressed in his death shroud makes his dying speech at Tyburn.

  from The Newgate Calendar

  On June 1, 1571, Dr. John Story became the first person to hang from the newfangled and quickly infamous triangular gallows. “Blessed John,” a Catholic condemned for high treason under
Queen Elizabeth I, was sentenced to be hanged, drawn, and quartered—that is, hanged almost to death, then disemboweled, beheaded, and cut into fours. A fire burned nearby to incinerate his entrails and spare body parts, but Blessed John didn’t go quietly. During the disembowelment, as “the executioner had cut him down and was ‘rifling among his bowels,’ the doctor arose and dealt him a shrewd blow on the head.” (In January 1661, King Charles II hanged the completely dead body of Oliver Cromwell there in a gruesome but effective act of revenge.)

  Executions by burning were falling out of favor toward the end of the 1600s—though a stake stood conveniently opposite the Triple Tree, just in case. Beheadings also declined with the 1686 death of cutter and hangman Jack Ketch, notorious for mangling his wards and needing additional hacks to perform his duties. As such, England moved into an era of simple hangings—simple, perhaps, but still ample.

  Nearly any infraction, including theft of as few as five shillings, could result in a trip to the gallows. Men died for stealing a single candlestick. For such petty larceny, men, women, and even children were dragged nearly three miles from Newgate Prison—the awful dungeon in London—up Holborn Hill, past St. Giles in the Fields, and out Oxford Street to the “fatal tree,” which stood in the middle of the roadway, an ever-present warning. Countrymen near and far knew the name, and a trip to Tyburn became known simply as “Going west.”

  Executions occasioned a great deal of fanfare at the time. Some criminals dressed extravagantly for the “Tyburn Fair,” while others were dragged practically naked, but either way great crowds always gathered to watch. A country gentleman wrote to his brother after his first viewing of a public execution: “The Sight has had an extraordinary Effect upon me, which is more owing to the unexpected Oddness of the Scene, than the affecting Concern which is unavoidable in a thinking Person, at a Spectacle so awful, and so interesting.”