"Such is my Dependence on the Goodness of your Grace, that before my Gout will permit me to pay my Duty to you personally, and to acknowledge your last kind Favour to me, I have the Presumption to solicite your Grace again. The Business of a Justice of Peace for Westminster is very inconsiderable without the Addition of that for the County of Middlesex. And without this Addition I cannot completely serve the Government in that office. But this unfortunately requires a Qualification which I want. Now there is a House belonging to your Grace, which stands in Bedford St., of 70l. a year value. This hath been long untenanted, and will I am informed, require about 300l. to put in Repair. If your Grace would have the Goodness to let me have a Lease of this House, with some other Tenement worth 30l. a year, for 21 years, it would be a complete Qualification. I will give the full Worth for this lease, according to the valuation which any Person your Grace shall be pleased to appoint sets upon it. The only favour I beg of your Grace is, that I be permitted to pay the Money in two years, at four equal half-yearly Payments. As I shall repair the House as soon as possible, it will be in Reality an Improvement of that small Part of your Grace's estate, and will be certain to make my Fortune.
"Mr Butcher will acquaint your Grace more fully than perhaps I have been able to do; and if Your Grace thinks proper to refer it to him, I and mine will be eternally bound to pray for your Grace tho I sincerely hope you will not lose a Farthing by doing so vast a service to,
"My Lord your Grace's
"Most obliged most obed' humble servant
"H. [Ffielding]." [3]
It seems probable that the Duke found better means of helping wit and genius, than by the leasing of the dilapidated tenement in Bedford Street. At any rate a month later, on January 11, we find Fielding duly swearing to an estate as consisting of "several Leasehold Messuages or Tenements Lying or being in the several parishes of St Paul Covent Garden, St Martin in the ffields, St Giles in the ffields, and St Georges Bloomsbury ... now in the possession or occupation of [my] Tennants or Undertennants, for and during the Term of Twenty one years of the clear yearly value of £100...." This statement, which is preserved in the Middlesex Records, is followed by Fielding's signature, appended to an oath that his qualification to serve as a Justice of the Peace for the county is as above [described]. [4]
On the day following this sworn statement, January 12, 1749, his oaths were received as a Justice of the Peace for [Middlesex]. [5] But even this did not satisfy all the requirements of those days of doctrinal inquisitions and Jacobite risings. The certificate may still be seen among the Middlesex Records, duly certified by Charles Tough, Minister of the Parish and Church of St Pauls, Covent Garden, and 'Sworn in Court,' that "Henry Fielding Esq. on Sunday the 26th day of March, 1749, did receive the Sacrament of the Lord's Supper in ye Parish Church aforesaid, immediately after Divine Service and Sermon, according to the usage of the Church of [England]." [6] And among the same archives the dusty Oath Roll is preserved, bearing, under date of April 5, 1749, the signature of Henry ffielding to a declaration of disbelief in the doctrine of Transubstantiation; a comprehensive oath of faithful service to King George and abjuration of King James; an oath directed against the power of the Holy See; and an oath of true allegiance to King George. All which oaths and declarations, it appears from the endorsement of the Roll, were taken immediately after the administration of Holy Communion, as attested by two credible [witnesses]. [7]
It is with this second Commission in the Peace that we enter on the last five years of Fielding's crowded life, years full of that valiant struggle with eighteenth century crime to which the health of the great novelist was ultimately sacrificed. For no magistrate ever fulfilled more faithfully, or at greater personal cost, the first obligation of his Oath, "Ye shall swear that as Justice of Peace ... ye shall do equall right to the Poor and to the Rich, after your Cunning Witt and Power and after the Laws and Customes of the Realm...." And Fielding brought to his new post something more than a zealous discharge of the daily and nightly duties of an eighteenth century police magistrate. His genius and his patriotism found opportunity in the squalid Bow Street Court-room for advocating reforms as yet untouched by the slow hand of the professional philanthropist. The names of those reformers, of the men and women who swept away the pestilential horrors of eighteenth century prisons, of the statesmen who abolished laws that hung a man for stealing a handkerchief, and destroyed the public gallows that gave the mob their Tyburn holiday, of the creators of our temperance legislation, of our poor-law system, of our model dwellings,--all these are held high in honour. Because Henry Fielding was above all things a great creative genius his wise and strenuous efforts to raise social conditions, and to eradicate social sores, have been unduly forgotten.
"Whatever he desired, he desired ardently," says Murphy. We soon have evidence of Justice Henry Fielding's ardent desire to cleanse London from some of the crying evils of his time. Of these evils none pressed more cruelly on the honest citizens than the prevalence and brutality of street robberies. To the well-protected Englishman of to-day the London of 1750 would seem a nightmare of lawlessness. Thieves, as Fielding tells us, attacked their victims with loaded pistols, beat them with bludgeons and hacked them with cutlasses; and as to the murderers of the period, he has recorded how he himself was engaged on five different murders, all committed by different gangs of street robbers within the space of one week. The exploit of one such gang may be quoted, from a newspaper paragraph of the first month of Fielding's administration at Bow Street. "On Friday evening," says the General Advertiser for January 23, 1749, "about twenty fellows arm'd with Pistols, Cutlasses, Hangers, &c. went to the Gatehouse and one of them knocking at the Door, it was no sooner open'd than they all rush'd in, and struck and desperately wounded the Turnkey, and all that oppos'd them, and in Triumph carried off the Fellow who pick'd General Sinclaire's pocket of his watch as he was going into Leicester House." Surely, cries the indignant newspaper, "this instance of Daring Impudence must rouse every Person of Property to assemble and consult means for their own Security at least; for if Goals can be forc'd in this manner, private Houses can make but little resistance against such Gangs of Villains as at present infest this Great Metropolis." It was admitted that the numbers and arms of street robbers rendered it ordinarily impossible to arrest them in the act; and Fielding tells us how "Officers of Justice have owned to me that they have passed by [men] with Warrants in their Pockets against them without daring to apprehend them; and indeed they could not be blamed for not exposing themselves to sure Destruction: For it is a melancholy Truth, that at this very Day a Rogue no sooner gives the Alarm within certain Purlieus, than twenty or thirty armed Villains are found ready to come to his Assistance." And the new Justice found no effectual means at his disposal for coping with what he very aptly calls the enslaved condition of Londoners, assaulted, pillaged, and plundered; unable to sleep in their own houses, or to walk the streets, or to travel in safety. There were the Watch, who, we learn from Amelia were "chosen out of those poor old decrepid People, who are from their Want of bodily Strength rendered incapable of getting a Livelihood by Work. These Men, armed only with a Pole, which some of them are scarce able to lift, are to secure the Persons and Houses of his Majesty's Subjects from the Attacks of Gangs of young, bold, stout, desperate and well-armed Villains.... If the poor old Fellows should run away from such Enemies, no one I think can wonder, unless he should wonder that they are able even to make their [Escape]." [8] These lineal descendants of Dogberry were supplemented by constables who it appears had to apply to the military when called upon to cope with the mere suppression of a gaming-house; and by "Thief-catchers," individuals so popularly odious that "the Thief-catcher is in Danger of worse Treatment from the Populace than the Thief." While the law was thus handicapped, the thief, on his side, had the advantage of the irregular buildings and the immense number of lanes, alleys, courts, and bye-places of London and Westminster, which, says Fielding, "had they been intended for the very purpose of concealment, they could scarce have been better contrived. Upon such a view the whole appears as a vast Wood or Forest, in which a Thief may harbour with as great Security as Wild Beasts do in the Desarts of Africa or Arabia." Also the thief's organisation was excellent: "there are at this Time," Fielding observes, "a great Gang of Rogues whose Number falls little short of a Hundred, who are incorporated in one Body, have Officers and a Treasury; and have reduced Theft and Robbery into a regular System." Further, he could generally bribe or deter the prosecutor. And in a last resource "rotten Members of the Law" forged his defence, and abundant false witnesses supported it. An illuminating example of the methods employed by our Georgian ancestors towards "deterring" prosecution occurs in a smuggling case of 1748, perpetrated shortly before Fielding first took office. A party of smugglers caught a custom-house officer and a shoemaker on their way to give evidence. The officer had 'every joint of him' broken; and after other torture, the description of which is more suitable for eighteenth century pages than our own, was dispatched. The less fortunate shoemaker was hung by the middle over a dry well, and left there. Several days afterwards the smugglers, returning and hearing him groan, cut the rope, let him drop to the bottom, and threw in logs and stones to cover him. And it was not only from the common thief that the Londoner of 1750 suffered. That fine flower of eighteenth century lawlessness, the gentleman of the road, carried his audacities into the heart of the Town itself. "I was sitting in my own dining-room on Sunday night," writes Horace Walpole, to a friend, "the clock had not struck eleven, when I heard a loud cry of 'stop thief!' A highwayman had attacked a postchaise in Piccadilly: the fellow was pursued, rode over the watchman, almost killed him, and escaped."
It was into a conflict with this epidemic of crime that Fielding, at forty-three, and with already broken health, flung his energies, to such purpose that in these last five years of his life it is but too easy to forget the creator of Joseph Andrews, of Tom Jones, and of Amelia, in his last 'ardent desire,' as ardently pursued, to purify the sorely diseased body politic. His method of attack was twofold. He dealt vigorously with the individual criminal; and he sought to remove some of the causes by which those criminals were engendered. The individual attack is, for the most part, but sordid reading. Thus from a fragment of the Westminster Committment Books, preserved with the Middlesex Records, we may see how in January and February of this year 1749 'Henry Fielding Esq.' committed to the New Prison such cases as:
| Thomas Thrupp | for riot |
| Thomas Trinder | for burglary |
| T. Chamberlain and Terence Fitz Patrick | for assault |
| C. O'Neal | for assaulting two Watchmen |
| Mary Hughes and Caterine Edmonds | for assault and beating |
| John Smithson | for exercising the art of pattenmaker without having been brought up thereto for seven years |
| Cornelius York | for filing guineas |
| Christo Kelsey | for ill fame |
| Bryan Park | for assault |