Diminution in certain kinds of crime—Fewer street robberies because people carried less cash about them—Corresponding increase in cases of fraud, forgeries, jewel and bullion robberies—Great commercial frauds—Offences against the person confined to murder and manslaughter, the character of which remained much the same—Another crime, that of attempt upon the sovereign—Other forms of treason—The Cato Street conspiracy—Thistlewood’s history—Discovery of the plot—The conspirators’ plan—How defeated—Their trial at the Old Bailey—The informer Edwards—Their sentence and execution—Attacks on the sovereign—Oxford fires at Queen Victoria—His attempt due to a craze for notoriety—“Young England”—Francis—Bean—Mr. Pate—Celebrated frauds and forgeries—Fauntleroy—The last execution for forgery—Captain Montgomery—Joseph Hunton the Quaker—Richard Gifford—Maynard—Sir Robert Peel’s bill to amend forgery laws—The Forgery Act—Latest cases of abduction—E. Gibbon Wakefield and Miss Turner—Big “jobs,” burglaries and other robberies, still perpetrated—Howard robs Mr. Mullay—Strange assault upon Mr. Gee—Thieves prosper through connivance of fences and receivers—Ikey Solomons—His escape from custody—He leaves the country, but returns, and is eventually sentenced to transportation—Large robbery of the Custom House—While still undiscovered, robbery of diamonds at the Custom House Quay—Leads to detection of both—The gold-dust robbery in 1839—How discovered—Done by Jews, who cheat each other all round—A few of the most remarkable murders of this epoch—Thurtell, Hunt, and Probert kill Mr. Weare—Burke and Hall—Their imitators, Bishop and Williams, in London, murder an Italian boy and sell the body—Greenacre and Mrs. Gale murder Hannah Brown—Horrible means of disposing of the corpse—Detection, trial, and sentence.
IN chapter two of the present volume I brought down the record of crime to the second decade of the present century. I propose now to continue the subject, and to devote a couple of chapters to criminal occurrences of a more recent date, only premising that as accounts become more voluminous I shall be compelled to deal with fewer cases, taking in preference those which are typical and invested with peculiar interest. It is somewhat remarkable that a marked change soon comes over the Calendar. Certain crimes, those against the person especially, diminished gradually. They became less easy or remunerative. Police protection was better and more effective; the streets of London were well lighted, the suburbs were more populous and regularly patrolled. People, too, were getting into the habit of carrying but little cash about them, and no valuables but their watches or personal jewellery. Street robberies offered fewer inducements to depredators, and evil-doers were compelled to adopt other methods of preying upon their fellows. This led to a rapid and marked increase in all kinds of fraud; and prominent in the criminal annals of Newgate in these later years will be found numerous remarkable instances of this class of offence—forgeries committed systematically, and for long periods, as in the case of Fauntleroy, to cover enormous defalcations; the fabrication of deeds, wills, and false securities for the purpose of misappropriating funds or feloniously obtaining cash; thefts of bullion, bank-notes, specie, and gold-dust, planned with consummate ingenuity, eluding the keenest vigilance, and carried out with reckless daring; jewel-boxes cleverly stolen under the very noses of owners or care-takers. As time passed, the extraordinary extension of all commercial operations led to many entirely novel and often gigantic financial frauds. The credulity of investors, the unscrupulous dishonesty of bankers, the slackness of supervision over wholly irresponsible agents, produced many terrible monetary catastrophes, and lodged men like Cole, Robson, and Redpath in Newgate.
While the varying conditions of social life thus brought about many changes in the character of offences against property, those against the person became more and more limited to the most heinous, or those which menaced or destroyed life. There was no increase in murder or manslaughter; the number of such crimes remained pretty constant proportionately to population. Nor did the methods by which they were perpetrated greatly vary from those in times past. The causes also continued much the same. Passion, revenge, cupidity, sudden ebullitions of homicidal rage, the cold-blooded, calculating atrocity born of self-interest, were still the irresistible incentives to kill. The brutal ferocity of the wild beast once aroused, the same means, the same weapons were employed to do the dreadful deed, the same and happily often futile precautions taken to conceal the crime. Pegsworth, and Greenacre, and Daniel Good merely reproduced types that had gone before, and that have since reappeared. Esther Hibner was as inhuman in her ill-usage of the parish apprentice she killed as Martha Brownrigg had been. Thurtell and Hunt followed in the footsteps of Billings, Wood, and Catherine Hayes. Courvoisier might have lived a century earlier. Hocker was found upon the scene of his crime, irresistibly attracted thither, as was Theodore Gardelle. Now and again there seemed to be a recurrence of a murder epidemic, as there had been before; as in the year 1849, a year memorable for the Rush murders at Norwich, the Gleeson Wilson murder at Liverpool, that of the Mannings in London, and of many more. Men like Mobbs, the miscreant known as “General Haynau” on account of his blood-thirstiness, still murdered their wives; or like Cannon the chimney-sweeper, who savagely killed the policeman.
A not altogether new crime, however, akin to murder, although happily never passing beyond dastardly attempts, cropped up in these times, and was often frequently repeated within a short interval. The present Queen very soon after her accession became the victim of the most cowardly and unmanly outrages, and the attempted murder of the sovereign by Oxford in 1840 was followed in the very next year by those of Francis and of Bean in two consecutive months, while in 1850 Her Majesty was the victim of another outrage at the hands of one Pate. These crimes had their origin too often in the disordered brains of lunatics at large, like Captain Goode. Their perpetrators were charged with high treason, but met with merciful clemency as irresponsible beings. But at various dates treason more distinct and tangible came to the front: attempts to levy war against the State. The well-known Cato Street conspiracy, which grew out of disturbed social conditions after the last French war, amidst general distress, and when the people were beginning to agitate for a larger share of political power, was among the earliest, and to some extent the most desperate, of these. Its ringleaders, Thistlewood and the rest, were after capture honoured by committal as State prisoners to the Tower, but they came one and all to Newgate for trial at the Old Bailey, and remained there after conviction till they were hanged. Later on, the Chartists agitated persistently for the concession embraced in the so-called People’s Charter, many of which are by this time actually, and by more legitimate efforts, engrafted upon our Constitution. But the Chartists sought their ends by riot and rebellion, and gained only imprisonment for their pains. Some five hundred in all were arrested, but as only three of these were lodged in Newgate, I shall not recur to them in my narrative.
The Cato Street conspiracy would have been simply ridiculous but for the recklessness of the desperadoes who planned it. That some thirty or more needy men should hope to revolutionize England is a sufficient proof of the absurdity of their attempt. But they proceeded in all seriousness, and would have shrunk from no outrage or atrocity in furtherance of their foolhardy enterprise. The massacre of the whole of the Cabinet Ministers at one stroke was to be followed by an attack upon “the old man and the old woman,” as they styled the Mansion House and the Bank of England. At the former the “Provisional Government” was to be established, which under Thistlewood as dictator was to rule the nation, by first handing over its capital to fire and pillage. This Thistlewood had seen many vicissitudes throughout his strange, adventurous career. The son of a respectable Lincolnshire farmer, he became a militia officer, and married a woman with £10,000, in which, however, she had only a life interest. She died early, and Thistlewood, left to his own resources, followed the profession of arms, first in the British service, and then in that of the French revolutionary Government. It was during this period that he was said to have imbibed his revolutionary ideas. Returning to England, he found himself rich in a small landed property, which he presently sold to a man who became bankrupt before he had paid over the purchase money. After this he tried farming, but failed. He married again and came to London, where he soon became notorious as a reckless gambler and a politician holding the most extreme views. In this way he formed the acquaintance of Watson and others, with whom he was arraigned for treasonable practices, and imprisoned. On his release he sent a challenge to Lord Sidmouth, the Home Secretary, and was again arrested and imprisoned. On his second release, goaded by his fancied wrongs, he began to plot a dark and dreadful revenge, and thus the conspiracy in which he was the prime mover took shape, and came to a head.
The Government obtained early and full information of the nefarious scheme. One of the conspirators, by name Edwards, made a voluntary confession to Sir Herbert Taylor one morning at Windsor; after which Thistlewood and his accomplices were closely watched, and measures taken to arrest them when their plans were so far developed that no doubt could remain as to their guilt. The day appointed for the murder and rising actually arrived before the authorities interfered. It was the day on which Lord Harrowby was to entertain his colleagues at dinner in Grosvenor Square. The occasion was considered excellent by the conspirators for disposal of the whole Cabinet at one blow, and it was arranged that one of their number should knock at Lord Harrowby’s door on the pretence of leaving a parcel, and that when it was opened the whole band should rush in. While a few secured the servants, the rest were to fall upon Lord Harrowby and his guests. Hand-grenades were to be thrown into the dining-room, and during the noise and confusion the assassination of the ministers was to be completed, the heads of Lord Castlereagh and Lord
