Thief-Taker Hangings Page 3

  On Thursday, July 29, 1703, Defoe faced the mob at the Royal Exchange in Cornhill, the financial center of London, where he once had lived and owned a hosier business. It lay near where he grew up, so he was no stranger to the crowd. In the distance stood St. Michael’s, where his daughter, Mary, had been buried as an infant. Everywhere he looked, familiar scenes and faces greeted him. At noon, as rain drizzled down, Defoe took his first stand in the pillory.

  Normally located in a public square, a pillory consisted of a pair of wooden boards erected on a pole and comprised of three holes: one for the head, two for the arms. The structure stood on an elevated platform for better public viewing with a sign above the stocks detailing the crime committed. The criminal generally had to stand for an hour, sometimes more, bent over with head and hands placed through holes in the stocks. The device usually punished crimes of dishonesty or treachery. Spectator participation added to the proceedings. Onlookers roused into a frenzy targeted the prisoner with fruits and vegetables (usually rotten), eggs, rocks, animals (usually dead, sometimes live), or anything else on hand. Even school-aged children shelled whatever they could find at the convict. A hangman officiated and occasionally wiped debris from the criminal’s mouth or nose.

  Prisoners often exited the pillory bludgeoned and bloodied, and as Samuel Johnson once noted of those who had endured the punishment, “He could not mouth and strut as he used to, and after having been there, people are not very willing to ask a man to their tables who has stood in the pillory.” Anyone sentenced to the pillory also lost the right to vote.

  Defoe had transgressed against abstract authority, not a neighbor. It was a crime the masses could stand. But inside the pillory area, seditious libel didn’t hold such perquisites. Sedition often carried the additional punishment of floggings, branding of the face or tongue, or other mutilation, such as slitting the nose. Fog’s Weekly Journal captured the use of these punishments to great effect a few years later in their coverage of forger Japhet Cook, alias Sir Peter Springer, and his pillory experience.

  The time being near expired, he was sat on a chair in the pillory, when the hangman, dressed like a butcher, came to him, and with a knife like a gardener’s pruning-knife cut off his ears, and with a pair of scissors slit off both his nostrils, all which Cook bore with great patience; but at the searing with a red-hot iron of his right nostril the pain was so violent that he got up from his chair . . . he went from the pillory bleeding.

  No wonder Defoe pleaded feverishly with Nottingham and others for a pardon. He knew what physical harm a stint in the pillory could have, and he knew the damage it could cause to his reputation as a businessman and a writer. His letters to Nottingham showed him shaken, but as he entered the pillory near the Royal Exchange, he steadied.

  The crowd buoyed him, the people on his side. Lines from his poem “Hymn to the Pillory,” which he had dashed off and published while imprisoned, floated among the visitors drinking to his health. It was an unprecedented show. To his own great surprise, they regaled him as a hero and greeted him with applause. In yet another moment of irony, the pamphlet that had landed Defoe in shackles, “The Shortest Way,” was being hawked among the crowd in great numbers.

  For the next two days, in Cheapside then by Temple Bar, it was more of the same. He took his stand. Crowds gathered to show their support. In return, Defoe put on a brave face. He had risked his own life for what he believed and for the sake of others. Some dispute whether admirers tossed flowers at him instead of garbage, but his time in the pillory became an occasion of triumph. “No man in England but Defoe ever stood in the pillory and later rose to eminence among his fellow men,” writes Moore.

  Defoe returned to Newgate Prison none the worse for wear. Built in 1188, the ancient jail burned down in the Great Fire before being rebuilt in 1672. The new version remained a dirty, stinking, violent dungeon, however. Defoe paid at least twenty guineas to secure a place in the Press Yard, one of the better wards in the prison. There he took refuge in his writing, passing the time by taking down first-person accounts from Newgate’s cast of thieves, highwaymen, and pirates. With their adventurous tales ringing in his ear, he wrote new pamphlets and oversaw a collection of his already published works.

  He spent five months in jail, an ordeal that never left him. He recognized how firsthand experience altered perception and influenced narrative perspective. Interviewing subjects made the piece. That was the missing ingredient needed to paint a verbal picture. In Aspects of the Novel, E. M. Forster ponders Defoe’s time as a prisoner: “The author had some great experience himself while in Newgate. We do not know what it was, probably he himself did not know afterwards. . . . But something occurred to him in prison, and out of its vague, powerful emotion Moll and Roxana are born.”

  Defoe was released from prison in November 1703. In the meantime, other writers had taken potshots at him and left his reputation in tatters. In his absence, his factory had gone belly-up. The business had been earning Defoe the handsome dividend of around £700 yearly. It marked the second time that he’d gone bankrupt. (The first had landed him in debtors’ prison.)

  While in prison, he had received a brief and cryptic communication. “Pray, ask that gentleman what I can do for him,” came the message from Robert Harley, speaker of the House of Commons. Harley, the man who had initiated the hunt for Defoe in the first place, had interceded with the Queen and helped arrange for Defoe’s liberation. He had eyes on higher office and understood, more than other politicians at the time, the benefits of having friends and allies in the press. Over time, Harley had observed Defoe’s journalistic abilities and saw an opening of potential, for himself and the government. Perhaps Defoe nudged him into action when as a fugitive he’d written to Nottingham in conciliation and offered to serve the Queen “with my hand, my Pen, or my head.”

  Harley wrote the Earl of Godolphin to discuss his plan: “He is a very capable man, and if his fine be satisfied . . . he may do service, and this may perhaps engage him better than any other rewards, and keep him under the power of an obligation.”

  In a brilliant move, Harley not only rescued Defoe from prison but also restored much of his ruined finances. He also had taken care of Defoe’s wife and family during his imprisonment. Surely Defoe owed him a debt of gratitude for such efforts. In a May 12, 1704, letter, Defoe displayed his appreciation.

  I am your most humble petitioner, that you will please to abate me all those extasies and extravagancyes a necessary acknowledgement of your generous concern for me would lead me to. I can no more express myself, than I can forgett the obligation. . . . I humbly recognize as the first mover of your thoughts in my favor, will yet put an occasion into my hands, by faithfull, and usefull, application, to satisfye you, that I am the gratefullest wretch alive.

  Defoe never forgot the man who had secured his freedom from Newgate, nor did he disappoint his new benefactor, whether by producing pamphlets on behalf of Harley and the administration, or even working as a spy.

  In February 1704, with Harley’s backing, Defoe established one of the first newspapers in England. He named it the Review, and at the ripe old age of forty-three, Daniel Defoe became a reporter.

  “The Coffeehouse Mob”

  Frontispiece to Edward Ward’s Vulgus Brittanicus

  II

  The Streets of London

  The houses of old London are incrusted as thick with anecdotes, legends, and traditions as an old ship is with barnacles. Strange stories about strange men grow like moss in every crevice of the bricks.

  —Walter Thornbury and Edward Walford, Old and New London

  The Great Plague raged and festered from 1665 to 1666. The Great Fire ravaged London in 1666. The Great Storm hit in 1703. The city endured, the slums remained. Some neighborhoods rebuilt themselves, rich beside poor, stacked in, crowded. Because of government planning laws, it was more cost-efficient to build onto existing dwellings, extending a structure out, up, or even beneath the earth. Passageways snaked between edifices, and poor neighborhoods became warrens.

  London of the eighteenth century was nothing like the urban mecca it became. Outside the old city walls, in a matter of blocks, stacked tenements gave way to green fields dotted with cows. Despite those walls, little buffer existed between rural and urban. Cattle drives took place in the city. Animals and vermin scurried about. Smithfield had a massive sheep den, and the whole place reeked of barnyard. Fleet Ditch, which weaved through the city, offered a dumping spot for everything from offal to human excrement. The streets were just as filthy, full of sewage and garbage, both sometimes tossed from the upper windows of houses.

  The Thames overflowed with vessels that bumped into one another, a massive parking lot of ships. More than three hundred church spires, towering above the rest of the city, dotted the skyline, St. Paul’s Cathedral the tallest of all. Taverns, alehouses, and dram shops lined the streets. Among them, men, women, and children worked the streets, peddling fish, fruit, and vegetables. Beggars asked for alms, and street singers hawked their ballads.

  The population of London at the beginning of the century—­including Westminster and nearby villages like Stepney and Chelsea—hovered above 600,000, but population growth was stagnant to slow. Many people came from villages in the country, where they worked in agricultural jobs, to find work in the city. Women pursued jobs as domestics, while men targeted apprenticeships for skilled labor. Despite the influx, the population remained more or less stable because of the high infant mortality rate and, in general, a greater rate of deaths than births. When the city’s rural immigrants died, more took their place.

  Conditions proved “good for a few and bad for most,” as Patrick Pringle writes in Hue and Cry.

  While worshippers were thronging the churches, mothers were putting their babies out in the streets to die. For every beau in the coffee-house there were scores of people rotting in the gin-shops; for every lady in a toy-shop there were dozens of whores hiring out their undernourished bodies for the price of a loaf of bread. . . . For every pleasure thousands of pains, for every laugh a flood of tears.

  Newcomers packed into the low side of town and pushed the slums to their bursting points. “The city was seen as sucking in the healthy and devouring them,” wrote author Fergus Linnane. “London was pestilential.” When the new arrivals did find work, the low pay failed to keep them afloat, no matter how many hours a day they worked. They remained poor—and when the poor got desperate, they took to crime.

  William Johnson—a butcher from Northamptonshire, some seventy miles north of London—opened a shop in Newport Market, but business didn’t boom. He tried his hand as a corn chandler in Long Acre, then as a victualler running a public house. After some time at sea, he returned to London and became a thief. He robbed, was caught but pardoned, killed a prison turnkey, and then was executed. From butcher to thief to killer and dead—all in short order.

  Estimates put the number of criminals during this period in London at around 115,000. For those with coins in their pocket, the street was a treacherous place. They took their lives in their hands merely by going for a stroll, day or night. On a single trip, a pedestrian could get mugged twice, coming and going. Many who could afford a dinner out, did so armed. Ladies of stature carried blunderbusses, an early kind of shotgun.

  Few lights illuminated the streets, except along the chief roads or in the squares. The moon lit the rest, and without it darkness prevailed. Roads closer to the city fared better than elsewhere in England, but all were a mess, packed deep with snow and mud in winter and loose with thick swirling dust in summer. When it rained, ponds formed in the middle of the thoroughfares, stalling any semblance of easy passage. All of these conditions made for a pilferer’s delight. But in England’s age of capital punishment, a thief could pay with his or her life.

  From 1660 to 1750, the number of offenses punishable by death increased from 50 to 160, then to over 200 by century’s end. The Bloody Code, as the country’s system of law enforcement later came to be known, largely aimed to protect private property. Parliamentary legislation in 1706 ended the practice of invoking the benefit of clergy—by which first-time offenders could obtain leniency for minor crimes—and all but condemned anyone arrested for even the slightest infraction. Stealing a single teaspoon or even uprooting a sapling could result in a trip to the gallows.

  Despite this increase in felonies punishable by death, the number of hangings actually decreased from the preceding century. In many cases pardons prevented them. British law aimed at forestalling crime with the threat of death, leaving the final punishment to the discretion of court or king. Gibbets dotted the landscape around London to serve as warnings. But the sight of those structures, from which hung the rotting corpses of criminals, failed to inspire the desired effect. London had a strong stomach; death made little impression. Travelers passed these gruesome displays without a second thought. Beyond these visual deterrents, the city had little in place in the way of law enforcement. No police force existed, nor public prosecutors. If a person was robbed, it was up to him or her to prosecute. The laws were draconian and violence ever present.

  When “people of quality,” as they were known, ventured from their flawless estates and spotless manors, two worlds collided. On the way to church or the theater—through grimy streets and garbage-strewn environs—they mixed with the poor and the desperate. On many occasions the first to meet them as they traversed the London roads was the highwayman.

  The call of Stop, thief! rang out far and wide during this period, and often announced the handiwork of a thief with a black mask over his face and pistol in hand. It was the highwayman, the so-called gentleman of the road, who told his prey to “stand and deliver.” Only a small fraction of thieves lived in any kind of splendor, but at least highwaymen attempted to rob with style. Most hailed from respectable homes and had a higher social and educational standing than other thieving groups. Many highwaymen had fallen into bankruptcy or came to steal because of gaming debts. Henry Fielding called gambling “the school in which most highwaymen of great eminence have been bred.”

  Highway robbers worked in groups on horseback. One of the gangsters would stop a coach with pistol in one hand and hat in the other and politely inquire, “Your purse or your life?” The standard performance brimmed with apology and politeness, and the highwayman seldom lacked a handy excuse for why distress had driven him to rob. If met by a hard case, he fired a flintlock—a kind of pistol, the weapon of choice—into the air, which generally turned the situation around.

  English highwaymen tended not to point their pistols directly, nor did they fleece their victims dry. They left a mark with enough money to complete his journey, and they often returned sentimental possessions to their victims. In 1708, Jack Ovet took politeness too far when he fell in love with the young woman he had robbed aboard the Worcester stagecoach.

  “Madam, your charms have softened my temper,” Ovet said to her. “Cast not your eyes down, nor cover your face with those modest blushes; and believe me, what I have taken from necessity is only borrowed, and shall be honourably restored, if you will let me know where you may be found.”

  His temper may have softened, but it didn’t end well for Ovet. The thirty-two-year-old swung for his crimes later that year.

  The highwaymen of France, Spain, and Germany had a reputation for being coarse and cold-blooded. But even the English gentleman thief lost his temper if his demands went unmet. In Highwaymen, Christopher Hibbert shares some of the surprisingly vile lines spouted by spurned road robbers: “God damn you, you double-refined son of whores!” and “You sodomitical sons of bitches.” Those insults flew at men, but a bristling highwayman hardly eased up for the ladies, as evidenced by unpleasant remarks such as “You strumpetting whore’s abortion.”

  Most highway robberies took place in or around London due to the ample opportunities for shelter within the city’s passageways. Escape often lay just through the next street. As Fielding noted, “The whole appears as a vast wood or forest, in which a thief may harbour with as great security, as wilds beasts do in the deserts of Africa or Arabia.”

  The wretched roads only aided the highwayman’s cause. Coaches often got stuck, broke down, or lost a horse, leaving many immobilized on the roadway with highwaymen circling like vultures. It was hopeless for a stagecoach to try to outrun a man on horseback, either to escape or apprehend him. But sometimes a highwayman made the transaction simpler. If a thief spotted someone packing bags in the city, he might leave a note offering safe passage for a price: a few guineas, perchance a watch. A bribe perhaps, or, if you like, a financial passport or turnpike fee. A traveler was advised to have money in hand or be “knocked on the head for his poverty,” as one letter writer put it at the time.

  Once their ventures were complete, highwaymen could kick back at an assortment of taverns or similar businesses in and around London that acted as safe houses. There they mingled with their own or were met with indifference. The Blue Lion, the Bull and Pen, and the Dog and Duck all served as thieves’ dens. But highwaymen hardly monopolized the crime scene. The city abounded with footpads, pickpockets, housebreakers, prostitutes, and Mohocks.

  Footpads elicited more fear than any of the others. They didn’t ask or show politeness of any kind like their counterparts on horseback. They took what they wanted through force. Because they toiled on foot and a quick getaway wasn’t always possible, they were quick to kill potential witnesses. An outcry could put a damper on their plans. If they had to murder or maim an onlooker, so be it. Footpads often joined forces to work in pairs or gangs. They plied their trade within the city, on the lookout for well-dressed denizens in dark or isolated pockets of town. One threatened the mark with a pistol to the throat while his partner relieved the victim of his valuables.