The demand was no doubt fostered by the extraordinary prevalence of crime. Criminal records would probably be read with avidity at times when ruffianism was in the ascendant, and offences of the most heinous description were of daily occurrence. New crimes cropped up daily. The whole country was a prey to lawlessness and disorder. Outrages of all kinds, riots, robberies, murders, took place continually. None of the high-roads or bye-roads were safe by night or day. Horsemen in the open country, footpads in or near towns, laid wayfarers under contribution. Armed parties ranged the rural districts attacking country houses in force, driving off cattle and deer, and striking terror everywhere. The general turbulence often broke out into open disturbance. The Riot Act, which was a product of these times, was not passed before it was needed. Riots were frequent in town and country. The mob was easily roused, as when it broke open the house of the Provost Marshal Tooley in Holborn, “to whom they owed a grudge for impressing men to sell as recruits to Flanders.”[141] “They burnt his furniture in the street; many persons were killed and wounded in the affray.”[142] Now political parties, inflamed with rancorous spirit, created uproars in the “mug houses”; now mutinous soldiers violently protested against the coarse linen of their “Hanover” shirts; again the idle flunkies at a London theatre rose in revolt against new rules introduced by the management and produced a serious riot.[143] In the country gangs of ruffians disguised in female attire, the forerunners of Rebecca and her daughter, ran a muck against turnpike gates, demolishing all they found. There were smuggling riots, when armed crowds overpowered the custom’s officers and broke into warehouses sealed by the Crown; corn riots at periods of scarcity, when private granaries were forced and pillaged. A still worse crime prevailed—that of arson. I find in ‘Hardwicke’s Life’ reference to a proclamation offering a reward for the detection of those who sent threatening letters “to diverse persons in the citys of London, Westminster, Bristol, and Exeter, requiring them to deposit certain sums of money in particular places, and threatening to sett fire to their houses, and to burn and destroy them and their families in case of refusal, some of which threats have accordingly been carried into execution.”[144] Other threats were to murder unless a good sum were at once paid down. Thus Jepthah Big was tried in 1729 for writing two letters, demanding in one eighty-five guineas, in the other one hundred guineas from Nathaniel Newnham, “a fearful old man,” and threatening to murder both him and his wife unless he got the money. Jepthah Big was found guilty and sentenced to death.
The state of the metropolis was something frightful in the early decades of the eighteenth century. Such was the reckless daring of evil-doers that there was but little security for life and property. Wright, in his ‘Caricature History of the Georges,’ says of this period, “robbery was carried on to an extraordinary extent in the streets of London even by daylight. Housebreaking was of frequent occurrence by night, and every road leading to the metropolis was beset by bands of reckless highwaymen, who carried their depredations into the very heart of the town. Respectable women could not venture in the streets alone after nightfall, even in the city, without risk of being grossly outraged.” In 1720 ladies going to Court were escorted by servants armed with blunderbusses “to shoot at the rogues.” Wright gives a detailed account of five-and-twenty robberies perpetrated within three weeks in January and February of the year above mentioned. A few of the most daring cases may be quoted. Three highwaymen stopped a gentleman of the Prince’s household in Poland Street, and made the watchman throw away his lantern and stand quietly by while they robbed and ill-used their victim. Other highwaymen the same night fired at Colonel Montague’s carriage as it passed along Frith Street Soho, because the coachman refused to stand; and the Duchess of Montrose, coming from Court in her chair, was stopped by highwaymen near Bond Street. The mails going out and coming into London were seized and rifled. Post-boys, stage-coaches, every-body and everything that travelled were attacked. A great peer, the Duke of Chandos, was twice stopped during the period above mentioned, but he and his servants were too strong for the villains, some of whom they captured. People were robbed in Chelsea, in Cheapside, in White Conduit Fields, in Denmark Street, St. Giles. Wade, in his ‘British Chronology’, under the head of public calamities in 1729, classes with a sickly season, perpetual storms, and incessant rains, the dangerous condition of the cities of London and Westminster and their neighbourhoods, which “proceeded from the number of footpads and street-robbers, insomuch that there was no stirring out after dark for fear of mischief. These ruffians knocked people down and wounded them before they demanded their money.” Large rewards were offered for the apprehension of these offenders. Thief-catchers and informers were continually active, and the law did not hesitate to strike all upon whom it could lay its hands. Yet crime still nourished and increased year after year.
The Englishman’s house, and proverbially his castle, was no more secure then than now from burglarious inroads. House-breakers abounded, working in gangs with consummate skill and patience, hand and glove with servants past and present, associated with receivers, and especially with the drivers of night coaches. Half the hackney coachmen about this time were in league with thieves, being bribed by nocturnal depredators to wait about when a robbery was imminent, and until it was completed. Then, seizing the chance of watchmen being off their beat, these useful accomplices drove at once to the receiver with the “swag.”
Towards the middle of the century, Henry Fielding, the great novelist, and at that time acting magistrate for Westminster, wrote:[145] “I make no doubt but that the streets of this town and the roads leading to it will shortly be impassable without the utmost hazard; nor are we threatened with seeing less dangerous groups of rogues amongst us than those which the Italians call banditti....” Again, “If I am to be assaulted and pillaged and plundered, if I can neither sleep in my own house, nor walk the streets, nor travel in safety, is not my condition almost equally bad whether a licensed or an unlicensed rogue, a dragoon or a robber be the person who assaults and plunders me?” Those who set the law at defiance organized themselves into gangs, and co-operated in crime. Fielding tells us in the same work that nearly a hundred rogues were incorporated in one body, “have officers and a treasury, and have reduced theft and robbery into a regular system.” Among them were men who appeared in all disguises and mixed in all companies. The members of the society were not only versed in every art of cheating and thieving, but they were armed to evade the law, and if a prisoner could not be rescued, a prosecutor could be bribed, or some “rotten member of the law” forged a defence supported by false witnesses. This must have been perpetuated, for I find another reference later to the Thieves or Housebreaker’s Company which had regular books, kept clerks, opened accounts with members, and duly divided the profits. According to the confession of two of the gang who were executed on Kensington Common, they declared that their profits amounted on an average to £500 a year, and that one of them had put by £2000 in the stocks, which before his trial he made over to a friend to preserve it for his family. Another desperate gang, Wade says, were so audacious that they went to the houses of the peace officers, and made them beg pardon for endeavouring to do their duty, and promise not to molest them. They went further, and even attacked and wounded a “head borough” in St. John’s Street in about forty places, so that many of the threatened officers had to “lie in Bridewell for safety.”
In Harris’s ‘Life of Lord Hardwicke’ is a letter from the solicitor to the Treasury to Sir Philip Yorke, referring to “the gang of ruffians who are so notorious for their robberies, and have lately murdered Thomas Bull in Southwark, and wounded others. Their numbers daily increase, and now become so formidable that constables are intimidated by their threats and desperate behaviour from any endeavour to apprehend them.” One of these ruffians was described in the proclamation offering rewards for their apprehension as “above six feet high, black eyebrows, his teeth broke before;” another had a large scar under his chin.
Still worse was the “Resolution Club,” a numerous gang, regularly organized under stringent rules. It was one of their articles, that whoever resisted or attempted to fly when stopped should be instantly cut down and crippled. Any person who prosecuted, or appeared as evidence against a member of the club, should be marked down for vengeance. The members took an “infernal oath” to obey the rules, and if taken and sentenced to “die mute.” Another instance of the lawlessness of the times is to be seen in the desperate attack made by some forty ruffians on a watch-house in Moorfields, where an accomplice was kept a prisoner. They were armed with pistols, cutlasses, and other offensive weapons. The watchman was wounded, the prisoner rescued. After this the assailants demolished the watch-house, robbed the constables, “committed several unparalleled outrages, and went off in triumph.” The gang was too numerous to be quickly subdued, but most of the rioters were eventually apprehended, and it is satisfactory to learn that they were sentenced to imprisonment in Newgate for three, five, or seven years, according to the part they had played.
The contempt of the majesty of the law was not limited to the lower and dangerous classes. A gentleman’s maid-servant, having resisted the parish officers who had a distress warrant upon the gentleman’s house for unpaid rates, was committed by the magistrates to Newgate. “The gentleman,” by name William Frankland, on learning what had happened, armed himself with a brace of pistols, and went to the office where the justices were then sitting, and asked which of them had dared to commit his servant to prison? “Mr. Miller,” so runs the account, “smilingly replied, ‘I did,’ on which the gentleman fired one of his pistols and shot Mr. Miller in the side, but it is thought did not wound him mortally. He was instantly secured and committed to Newgate.” At the following Old Bailey sessions, he was tried under the Black Act, when he pleaded insanity. This did not avail him, and although the jury in convicting him strongly recommended him to mercy he was sentenced to death. Another case of still more flagrant contempt of court may fitly be introduced here. At the trial of a woman named Housden for coining at the Old Bailey in 1712, a man named Johnson, an ex-butcher and highwayman by profession, came into court and desired to speak to her. Mr. Spurling, the principal turnkey of Newgate, told him no person could be permitted to speak to the prisoner, whereupon Johnson drew out a pistol and shot Mr. Spurling dead upon the spot, the woman Housden loudly applauding his act. The court did not easily recover from its consternation, but presently the recorder suspended the trial of the woman for coining, and as soon as an indictment could be prepared, Johnson was arraigned for the murder, convicted, and then and there sentenced to death, the woman Housden being also sentenced at the same time as an accessory before and after the fact.
Various causes are given for this great prevalence of crime. The long and impoverishing wars of the early years of the century, which saddled us with the national debt, no doubt produced much distress, and drove thousands who could not or would not find honest work, into evil ways. Manners among the highest and the lowest were generally profligate. Innumerable places of public diversion, ridottos, balls, masquerades, tea-gardens, and wells, offered crowds a ready means for self-indulgence. Classes aped the habits of the classes above their own, and the love of luxurious gratification “reached to the dregs of the people,” says Fielding, “who, not being able by the fruits of honest labour to support the state which they affect, they disdain the wages to which their industry would entitle them, and abandoning themselves to idleness, the more simple and poor-spirited betake themselves to a state of starving and beggary, while those of more art and courage become thieves, sharpers, and robbers.”
Drunkenness was another terrible vice, even then more rampant and wildly excessive than in later years. While the aristocracy drank deep of Burgundy and port, and every roaring blade disdained all heel-taps, the masses fuddled and besotted themselves with gin. This last-named pernicious fluid was as cheap as dirt. A gin-shop actually had on its sign the notice, “Drunk for 1d.; dead drunk for 2d.; clean straw for nothing,” which Hogarth introduced into his caricature of Gin Lane. No pencil could paint, no pen describe the scenes of hideous debauchery hourly enacted in the dens and purlieus of the town. Legislation was powerless to restrain the popular craving. The Gin Act, passed in 1736 amidst the execrations of the mob, which sought to vent its rage upon Sir Joseph Jekyll, the chief promoter of the Bill, was generally evaded. The much-loved poisonous spirit was still retailed under fictitious names, such as Sangree, Tow Row, the Makeshift, and King Theodore of Corsica. It was prescribed as a medicine for cholic to be taken two or three times a day. Numberless tumults arose out of the prohibition to retail spirituous liquors, and so openly was the law defied, that twelve thousand persons were convicted within two years of having sold them illegally in London. Informers were promptly bought off or intimidated, magistrates “through fear or corruption” would not convict, and the Act was repealed in the hope that more moderate duty and stricter enforcement of the law would benefit the revenue and yet lessen consumption. The first was undoubtedly affected, but hardly the latter. Fielding, writing nearly ten years after the repeal of the Act, says that he has reason to believe that “gin is the principal sustenance (if it may be so called) of more than a hundred thousand people in the metropolis,” and he attributed to it most of the crimes committed by the wretches with whom he had to deal. “The intoxicating draught itself disqualifies them from any honest means to acquire it, at the same time that it removes sense of fear and shame, and emboldens them to commit every wicked and desperate enterprise.”
The passion for gaming, again, “the school in which most highwaymen of great eminence have been bred,”[146] was a fruitful source of immoral degeneracy. Every one gambled. In the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ for 1731 there is the following entry: “At night their majesties played for the benefit of the groom porter, and the king (George II.) and queen each won several hundreds, and the Duke of Grafton several thousands of pounds.” His Majesty’s lieges followed his illustrious example, and all manner of games of chance with cards or dice, such as hazard, Pharoah, basset, roly-poly, were the universal diversion in clubs, public places, and private gatherings. The law had thundered, but to no purpose, against “this destructive vice,” inflicting fines on those who indulged in it, declaring securities won at play void, with other penalties, yet gaming throve and flourished. It was fostered and encouraged by innumerable hells, which the law in vain strove to put down. Nightly raids were made upon them. In the same number of the ‘Gentleman’s Magazine’ as that just quoted it is recorded that “the High Constable of Holborn searched a notorious gaming-house behind Gray’s Inn Road; but the gamesters were fled, only the keeper was arrested and bound over for £200.” Again, I find in Wade’s ‘Chronology’ that “Justice Fielding, having received information of a rendezvous of gamesters in the Strand, procured a strong party of the Guards, who seized forty-five of the tables, which they broke to pieces, and carried the gamesters before the justice.... Under each of the broken tables were observed two iron rollers and two private springs, which those who were in the secret could touch and stop the turning whenever they had flats to deal with.” No wonder these establishments throve. They were systematically organized, and administered by duly appointed officers. There was the commissioner who checked the week’s accounts and pocketed the takings; a director to superintend the room; an operator to deal the cards, and four to five croupiers, who watched the cards and gathered in the money of the Bank. Besides these there were “puffs,” who had money given them to decoy people to play; a clerk and a squib, who were spies upon the straight dealings of the puffs; a flasher to swear how often the bank was stripped; a dunner to recover sums lost; a waiter to snuff candles and fill in the wine; and an attorney or “Newgate solicitor.” A flash captain was kept to fight gentlemen who were peevish about losing their money at the door was a porter, “generally a soldier of the foot guards,”[147] who admitted visitors after satisfying himself that they were of the right sort. The porter had aides-de-camp and assistants—an “orderly man,” who patrolled the street and gave notice of the approaching constables; a “runner,” who watched for the meetings of the justices and brought intelligence of the constables being out; and a host of linkboys, coachmen, chairmen, drawers to assist, with common-bail affidavit men, ruffians, bravos, and assassins for any odd job that might turn up requiring physical strength.