Жонатан Уайлд: Заң мен қылмыс арасындағы XVIII ғасырлық алаяқ

18th century English criminal

Jonathan Wild, also spelled Wilde (1682 or 1683 – 24 May 1725), was a London underworld figure notable for operating on both sides of the law, posing as a public spirited vigilante entitled the "Thief Taker General". He simultaneously ran a significant criminal empire, and used his crimefighting role to remove rivals and launder the proceeds of his own crimes. Wild exploited a strong public demand for action during a major 18th century crime wave in the absence of any effective police force in London. As a powerful gang leader himself, he became a master manipulator of legal systems, collecting the rewards offered for valuables which he had stolen himself, bribing prison guards to release his colleagues, and blackmailing any who crossed him. Wild was consulted on crime by the government due to his apparently remarkable prowess in locating stolen items and those who had stolen them. Wild was responsible for the arrest and execution of Jack Sheppard, a petty thief and burglar who had won the public's affection as a lovable rogue. However, Wild's duplicity became known and his men began to give evidence against him. After a suicide attempt, he was hanged at Tyburn before a massive crowd. Since his death, Wild has been featured in novels, poems and plays, some of them noting parallels between Wild and the contemporaneous Prime Minister Walpole, known as "The Great Corrupter".

Crime had risen dramatically in London beginning in 1680, and property crime, in particular, rose sharply as London grew in importance as a commercial hub. In 1712 Charles Hitchen, Wild's forerunner and future rival as thief taker, said that he personally knew 2,000 people in London who made their living solely by theft. In 1711, Hitchen had obtained public office as the City's Under Marshal, effectively its top policeman, paying £700 (£700.0 in 1711 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years in ) for the appointment. He abused his office, however, by practising extortion on an extravagant scale, both from thieves and from their potential victims. He would accept bribes to let thieves out of jail, selectively arrest criminals, and coerce sexual services from molly houses. Hitchen's testimony about the rise of crime was given during an investigation of these activities by the London Board of Aldermen, who suspended him from the Under Marshal position in 1713. In around 1713, Wild was approached by Hitchen to become one of his assistants in thief taking, a profitable activity on account of the £40 reward (£40.0 in 1713 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years in ) paid by the government for catching a felon. Wild may have become known to Hitchen's associates, known as his "Mathematicians", during his lengthy stay in Wood Street Compter; certainly one, William Field, later worked for Wild. Hitchen attempted to further combat Wild with a pamphlet entitled The Regulator, which was his characterization of Wild, but Hitchen's prior suspensions from duties and the shocking (at that time) charge of homosexuality virtually eliminated him as a threat to Wild. Wild held a virtual monopoly on crime in London, and legends arose surrounding his management of his "empire." One held that he kept records of all thieves in his employ, and when they had outlived their usefulness he would sell them to the gallows for the £40 reward. This supposed system inspired a fake or folk etymology of the phrase "double cross": it was alleged that, when a thief vexed Wild in some way, he put a cross by the thief's name; a second cross condemned the man to be sold to the Crown for hanging. (This story is contradicted by the fact that the noun "double cross" did not enter English usage until 1834.) Wild publicly presented an heroic face. In 1718 he called himself "Thief Taker General of Great Britain and Ireland". By his testimony, over sixty thieves were sent to the gallows. His "finding" of lost merchandise was private, but his efforts at finding thieves were public. Wild's office in the Old Bailey was a busy spot. Victims of crime would come by, even before announcing their losses, and discover that Wild's agents had "found" the missing items, and Wild would offer to help find the criminals for an extra fee. However, while fictional treatments made use of the device, it is not known whether or not Wild ever actually turned in one of his own gang for a private fee. In 1720, Wild's fame was such that the Privy Council consulted with him on methods of controlling crime. His recommendation was, unsurprisingly, that the rewards for evidence against thieves be raised. Indeed, the reward for capturing a thief went from £40 to £140 within the year, amounting to a significant pay increase for Wild. There is some evidence that Wild was favoured, or at least ignored, by the Whig politicians and opposed by the Tory politicians. In 1718, a Tory group had succeeded in having the laws against receiving stolen property tightened, primarily with Wild's activities in mind. Ironically, these laws had the opposite intended effect of strengthening Wild's hand, for it made it more difficult for thieves to fence their goods except through Wild. Wild's battles with thieves made excellent press. Wild himself would approach the papers with accounts of his derring do, and the papers passed these on to a concerned public. Thus, in the summer of 1724, the papers carried accounts of Wild's heroic efforts in collecting twenty one members of the Carrick Gang (with an £800 reward — approximately £800.0 in 1724 is equivalent to about <calculated amount> in recent years in ). When one of the members of the gang was released, Wild pursued him and had him arrested on "further information". To the public, this seemed like a relentless defence of order. In reality, it was gang warfare disguised as a national service. When Wild solicited for a finder's fee, he usually held all the power in the transaction. For example, David Nokes quotes (based on Howson) the following advertisement from the Daily Post in 1724 in his edition of Henry Fielding's The Life and Death of Jonathan Wild, the Great:

The advertisement is extortion. The "notes of hand" (agreements of debt) means signatures, so Wild already knows the name of the notebook's owner. Furthermore, Wild tells the owner through the ad that he knows what its owner was doing at the time, since the Fountain Tavern was a brothel. The real purpose of the ad is to threaten the owner with announcing his visit to a bordello, either to the debtors or the public, and it even names a price for silence (a guinea, or one pound and one shilling).

By 1724, London political life was experiencing a crisis of public confidence. The South Sea Bubble had burst four years earlier, and the public was growing restive about corruption. Authority figures were beginning to be viewed with scepticism. In April 1724, the most famous housebreaker of the era, Jack Sheppard, was apprehended by one of Wild's men, James "Hell and Fury" Sykes, for a burglary Sheppard had committed in Clare Market on 5 February. Sheppard had worked with Wild in the past, though he had struck out on his own. Consequently, as with other arrests, Wild's interests in saving the public from Sheppard were personal. Sheppard was imprisoned in St Giles's Roundhouse, but escaped within three hours. On 19 May, Wild again had Sheppard arrested for pickpocketing, and this time he was put in St. Ann's Roundhouse in Soho, where he was visited by Elizabeth "Edgworth Bess" Lyon the next day; she too was locked up with him and, being recognised as man and wife, they were sent to the New Prison at Clerkenwell. They both escaped on 25 May. In July, Field informed Wild about Sheppard, so Wild sought for Lyon on 22 July and plied her with drinks at Temple Bar until she betrayed Sheppard. The following day, Wild sent another one of his men, Quilt Arnold, and had Sheppard arrested a third time and put into Newgate Prison to await trial. On 13 August Sheppard was tried on three charges of burglary, but was acquitted of the first two due to lack of evidence. However, Wild, along with Field and William Kneebone, Sheppard's former master, presented evidence against him on the final charge of the burglary of Kneebone's house on 12 July; Sheppard was convicted, sentenced to death, and put in the condemned hold of Newgate Prison. On the night that the death warrant arrived, 31 August, Sheppard once again escaped. By this point, he was a working class hero for apprentices (being a cockney apprentice in love, non violent, and handsome). On 9 September, Sheppard avoided capture by Wild's men, but he was caught for a fourth time by a posse from Newgate as he hid out on Finchley Common. Sheppard was returned to Newgate and placed in the most secure room of the prison. Further, Sheppard was put in shackles and chained to the floor. Meanwhile, on 9 October, Wild and his men arrested Joseph "Blueskin" Blake, a highwayman and Sheppard's partner in crime. On 15 October, Blueskin was tried for the same act of burglary committed on 12 July, with Wild, Field, and his men giving evidence. Their accounts were not consistent with the evidence given at Sheppard's trial, but Blueskin was convicted and sentenced to death anyway. After the trial, Blueskin pleaded with Wild in the courtroom to have his death sentence commuted to transportation (since he had worked with Wild before), but Wild refused. Enraged, Blueskin attempted to murder Wild, slashing his throat with a pocketknife and causing an uproar. Wild collapsed and was taken to a surgeon for treatment. Taking advantage of the disturbance that spread to Newgate next door and continued into the night, Sheppard escaped yet again on 16 October. He had broken the chains, padlocks, and six iron barred doors. This escape astonished everyone, and Daniel Defoe, working as a journalist, wrote an account. In the early morning on 1 November, Sheppard was found for a fifth and final time by a constable and arrested. This time, he was placed in the centre of Newgate, where he could be observed at all times, and loaded with three hundred pounds of iron weights. He was so celebrated that the gaolers charged high society visitors to see him, and James Thornhill painted his portrait. On 11 November, Blueskin was hanged. Five days later, Sheppard was similarly hanged at Tyburn. Wild did not attend either of the executions, as he was confined to his bed for several weeks while the injury to his throat was healing. Wild's inability to control Sheppard, and his injuries at the hands of Blueskin, combined with a change of public sentiment regarding authority figures, led to his downfall. As he recuperated from his injury, his control over his criminal gang also slipped, and he became despised. After his recovery, Wild used violence to perform a jailbreak for one of his gang members. Being searched for, he went into hiding for several weeks and returned to business when he thought the affair had blown over. On 6 February 1725, Wild was summoned to Leicester House, where he failed to recover a gold watch for one of his attendants because of the jailbreak and the incident with Blueskin at the Old Bailey.

On 15 February, Wild and Arnold were arrested for the jailbreak. Wild was placed in Newgate, where he continued to attempt to run his business. In the illustration from the True Effigy (top of page), Wild is pictured in Newgate, still with notebook in hand to account for goods coming in and going out of his office. Evidence was presented against Wild for the violent jailbreak and for having stolen jewels during the previous August's installation of Knights of the Garter. The public's mood had shifted; they supported the average man and resented authority figures. Wild's trial occurred at the same time as that of the Lord Chancellor, Lord Thomas Parker, 1st Earl of Macclesfield, for taking £100,000 in bribes. With the changing tide, it appeared at last to Wild's gang that their leader would not escape and they began to come forward. Slowly, gang members began to turn evidence on him, until all of his activities, including his grand scheme of running and then hanging thieves, became known. Additionally, evidence was offered as to Wild's frequent bribery of public officers. Wild's final trial occurred at the Old Bailey on 15 May. He was tried on two indictments of privately stealing of lace from Catherine Statham (a lace seller who had visited him in prison on 10 March) at Holborn on 22 January. He was acquitted of the first charge, but with Statham's evidence presented against him on the second charge, he was convicted and sentenced to death. Terrified, Wild asked for a reprieve but was refused. He could not eat or go to church, and suffered from insanity and gout. On the morning of his execution, in fear of death, Wild attempted suicide by drinking a large dose of laudanum, but because he was weakened by fasting, he vomited violently and sank into a coma from which he would not awaken. When he was taken to the gallows at Tyburn on 24 May 1725, Defoe said that the crowd was far larger than any they had seen before and that, instead of any celebration or commiseration with the condemned,

Wild's hanging was a great event, and tickets were sold in advance for the best vantage points (see the reproduction of the gallows ticket). Even in a year with a great many macabre spectacles, Wild drew an especially large and boisterous crowd. Eighteen year old Henry Fielding was in attendance. Wild was accompanied by William Sperry and the two Roberts: Sanford and Harpham; three of the four prisoners who had been condemned to die with Wild a few days before. Because he was heavily drugged, Wild was the last to die after the three of them, without any difficulty that had happened at Sheppard's execution. The hangman, Richard Arnet, had been a guest at Wild's wedding. In the dead of night, Wild's body was buried in secret at the churchyard of St Pancras Old Church next to Elizabeth Mann, his third wife and one of his many lovers (who had died in about 1718), as he had wished. His burial was only temporary. In the 18th century, autopsies and dissections were performed on the most notorious criminals, and consequently Wild's body was exhumed and sold to the Royal College of Surgeons for dissection. His skeletal remains are on public display in the Royal College's Hunterian Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

In 1969, James Clavell's screenplay for the film Where's Jack? told the story of Jack Shepherd (Tommy Steele) with Wild (Stanley Baker) being depicted as a suave and sinister criminal mastermind. Songwriter Jimmy Webb describes Wild's life and subsequent hanging in the 1977 song "Highwayman". A 1985 recording by the country music supergroup The Highwaymen entered the Hot Country Songs Billboard chart on 18 May 1985, rising to number 1, and spending 20 weeks total on the chart. Webb had a dream that he was a highwayman, which initially inspired the writing of the song. The first verse describes the life of a character who, like Wild, was executed in "the spring of twenty five":
In the 1999 film Plunkett & Macleane, Wild was the inspiration for the film's antagonist; the psychopathic Thief Taker General Chance, played by Ken Stott.