Even after sentence Wild hoped that he would be freed. As a circumstance in his favour he mentioned that he had himself handed over forty criminals to justice. This did him no good, but incensed the populace against him. While awaiting execution he took laudanum in his cell with the hope of suicide, and was still under its influence on arriving at Tyburn. The hangman told him to prepare himself, and left him sitting in the cart. But the mob became so unmanageable at the delay, that the hangman was obliged hurriedly to carry out his office. Jonathan Wild was executed 25th May 1725, and was buried at two o’clock the next morning at St. Pancras Churchyard, but his body was afterwards removed for dissection.
The London Journal, Saturday, 29th May 1725, says:
“Never was there a greater crowd assembled on any occasion, than to see this unhappy Person; and so outrageous were the Mob in their Joy to behold him on the Road to the Gallows, who had been the cause of sending so many thither, that they huzza’d him along to the Triple Tree, and show’d a Temper very uncommon on such a melancholy Occasion, for they threw Stones at him; with some of which his head was broke, and the two malefactors, Sperry and Sandford, between whom he sate in the Cart, were hurt: Nay, even in his last moments they did not cease their insults.”
Other adventurers who paid the penalty to outraged justice at Tyburn were Henry Simms, who declared he had swallowed the rings he had stolen “wrapped in the skin of a duck’s leg, well buttered”; “Sixteen String Jack,” or more correctly, John Rann; Jack Hall, the chimney-sweeper; John Smith, who, waiting about at Paddington hoping to steal something, felt his heart fail him when he saw the gallows at Tyburn, but his accomplice kept him to his purpose; and Kingsmill, Perin, and Fairall, the smugglers. Perin was ordered only to be hanged and afterwards buried, and Kingsmill and Fairall to be hung in chains,—a gruesome adjunct to that sentence being that the bodies first received a coating of black pitch. Perin was saying to his companions that he lamented their cases, when Fairall smilingly replied:
“We shall be hanging in the sweet air, when you are rotting in your grave.”
These gangs of highwaymen, footpads, burglars, and common thieves had a curious dialect of their own, a few words of which and their equivalents may be taken from the vocabulary given in the Tyburn Chronicle:
| The Rumbo or Whit | Newgate. |
| The Spinning Ken | Bridewell. |
| The Dancers | Stairs. |
| The Mount | London Bridge. |
| The Glaze | The Window. |
| A Ken | House. |
| A Bridle-Call | A Highwayman. |
| A Cruiser | Beggar. |
| The Cull gigs | The man looks. |
| Pops | Pistols. |
| A Glim | Candle. |
| Darbies | Fetters. |
| To be Topped or Scragged | Hanged. |
| Feeders | A Bit or Truff. |
| A Peter | Purse. |
| A Jacob | Ladder. |
| A Rum Fam | Ring. |
| A Tumbler | Cart. |
| A Rattler | Coach. |
| Ridge | Gold. |
| Wedge | Silver. |
| The Tatler is up | The moon shines. |
| A Twang | A Bully. |
The highwayman struck at big game, and persons of the highest “quality”—to adopt the phrase of the day—did not consider it in any way derogatory to display the keenest interest in him. The darling of the lower orders needed only a dashing exploit or two to his credit, and a hair’s-breadth escape from the armed men sent to track him down, to make him equally the darling of the drawing-room. Fine ladies went to see him in chains at Newgate, often to condole with him, and give him money. Horace Walpole grows quite enthusiastic over MᶜLean, a former grocer of Welbeck Street, who took to the road, and in the course of his depredations relieved Walpole of his watch and sword. The circumstances of the robbery are told in the Gentleman’s Magazine of 1749:
“The Hon. Horatio Walpole, brother to the Earl of Orford, who was robbed by two men on the 7th (of Nov.) in Hyde Park, when a pistol going off shot through the coach, and scorched his face, received a letter from the robbers, intimating their concern for the accident, and their apprehension of the consequences at that time; and that, if he would send, to a place named, a person would be there to deliver his watch, sword, and coachman’s watch, if he would, on his honour, send 40 guineas in less than an hour to the same place, with threats of destruction if he did not. But he did not comply, though he afterwards offered 20, the sum they fell to in a second letter.”