Jonathan Wild Totally Explained

Everything about Jonathan Wild totally explained

Jonathan Wild (baptised 6 May 1683 – 24 May 1725) was perhaps the most famous criminal of London — and possibly Great Britain — during the 18th century, both because of his own actions and the uses novelists, playwrights, and political satirists made of them. He invented a scheme which allowed him to run one of the most successful gangs of thieves of the era, all the while appearing to be the nation's leading policeman. He manipulated the press and the nation's fears to become the most loved public figure of the 1720s; this love turned to hatred when his villainy was exposed. After his death, he became a symbol of corruption and hypocrisy.

Life

Though his exact birth date is unknown, Wild was born in Wolverhampton in either 1682 or 1683 as the first of five children in a poor family. He was baptised in the local St Peter's church. His father, John Wild, was a carpenter, and his mother sold herbs and fruits in the local market. At that time, Wolverhampton was the second-largest city in Staffordshire, with a population of around 6,000, many involved in iron-working and related trades.
   Wild attended the Free School in St John's Lane, and was apprenticed to a local buckle-maker. He married and had a son, but came to London in 1704 as a servant. After being dismissed by his master, he returned to Wolverhampton, before coming back to London in 1708. London was by far the largest city in England, with a population of around 600,000, of whom around 70,000 lived within the ancient city walls of the City of London.
   Little is known of Wild's first two years in London, but he was arrested for debt in March 1710, and sent to Wood Street Counter, one of the debtor's prisons in the City of London. The prisons were notoriously corrupt, with gaolers demanding a bribe, or "garnish", for any minor comfort. Wild became popular, running errands for the gaolers and eventually earning enough to repay his original debts and the cost of being imprisoned, and even lend money to other prisoners. He received "the liberty of the gate", meaning that he was allowed out at night to aid in the arrest of thieves. There, he met one Mary Milliner (or Mary Mollineaux), a prostitute who began to teach Wild criminal ways and, according to Daniel Defoe, "brought him into her own gang, whether of thieves or whores, or of both, isn't much material." He was also introduced to a wide range of London's criminal underclass. With his new skills and contacts, Wild was released in 1712 under an Act of Parliament passed earlier that year for the relief of insolvent debtors.
   Upon release, Wild began to live with Mary Milliner as her husband in Lewkenor's Land (now Macklin Street) in Covent Garden,

Wild's public career

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 for the appointment. He abused his office, however, by practising extortion on an extravagant scale, both from thieves and from their potential victims. Hitchen would accept bribes to let thieves out of jail, selectively arrest criminals, and coerce sexual services from molly houses. His 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 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. Sheppard had worked with Wild in the past, though he'd 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 recognized 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 he 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; and 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 escaped. By this point, Sheppard 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, and Sheppard was placed in the most secure room of Newgate. 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 sentence commuted from hanging to transportation (since he'd worked with Wild before), but Wild refused. Enraged, Blueskin attempted to murder Wild, slashing his throat in the process and causing an uproar, and 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 in early 16 October. Sheppard 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, Sheppard 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 executed at Tyburn. Wild missed out on the execution while he was confined to his bed for several weeks and his throat was recovering.
   During the pursuit of Sheppard, Wild appeared as much to disadvantage in the press as Sheppard did to advantage. Wild was now despised. When, after his recovery, Wild used violence to perform a jail break for one of his gang members, he was being sought out and went into hiding for several weeks, and returned to business when he thought the affair had blown over. On 6 February 1725, he was summoned to Leicester house, where he failed to recover a gold watch for one of his attendants because of the jail break and the incident with Blueskin at the Old Bailey.

Arrest, trial and execution

On 15 February Wild and Quilt Arnold were arrested for helping one of his men in a 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 wouldn't 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 Steatham (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 Steatham'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 couldn't eat or go to church, and suffered from insanity and gout. On the morning of his execution, in fear of death, he attempted suicide by drinking a large dose of laudanum, but because he was weakened by fasting, he vomited violently and sank into a coma that he wouldn't awaken from.
   When Wild was taken to the gallows at Tyburn on 24 May 1725, Daniel Defoe said that the crowd was far larger than any they'd 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. 18-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, he was the last to die after the three of them, without any difficulty that had happened at Sheppard's execution.
   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'd 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 skeleton remains on public display in the Royal College's Hunterian Museum in Lincoln's Inn Fields.

Literary treatments

Jonathan Wild is famous today not so much for setting the example for organized crime as for the uses satirists made of his story.
   When Wild was hanged, the papers were filled with accounts of his life, collections of his sayings, farewell speeches, and the like. Daniel Defoe wrote one narrative for Applebee's Journal in May and then had published True and Genuine Account of the Life and Actions of the Late Jonathan Wild in June 1725. This work competed with another that claimed to have excerpts from Wild's diaries. The illustration above is from the frontispiece to the "True Effigy of Mr. Jonathan Wild," a companion piece to one of the pamphlets purporting to offer the thief-taker's biography.
   Criminal biography was already an existing genre. These works were popular then, as now, because they could offer a touching account of need, a fall from innocence, sex, violence, and then repentance or a tearful end. Public fascination with the dark side of human nature, and with the causes of evil, has never waned, and the market for mass produced accounts was large.
   By 1701 there had been a Lives of the Gamesters (often appended to Charles Cotton's The Compleat Gamester), about notorious gamblers. In 1714 Captain Alexander Smith had written the best-selling Complete Lives of the Most Notorious Highwaymen. Defoe himself was no stranger to this market: his Moll Flanders was published in 1722. Further, he had, by 1725, written both a History and a Narrative of the life of Jack Sheppard (see above). Moll Flanders may be based on the life of one Moll King, who lived with Mary Mollineaux/Milliner, Wild's first mistress.
   What differs about the case of Jonathan Wild is that it wasn't simply a crime story. Parallels between Wild and Robert Walpole were instantly drawn, especially by the Tory authors of the day. Mist's Weekly Journal (one of the more rough-speaking Tory journals) drew a parallel between the figures in May 1725, when the hanging was still in the news.
   The parallel is most important for John Gay's The Beggar's Opera in 1728. The main story of the Beggar's Opera focuses on the episodes between Wild and Sheppard. In the opera, the character of Peachum stands in for Wild (who stands in for Walpole), while the figure of Macheath stands in for Sheppard (who stands in for Wild and/or the chief officers of the South Sea Company). Robert Walpole himself saw and enjoyed Beggar's Opera without realizing that he was its intended target. Once he did realize it, he banned the sequel opera, Polly, without staging. This prompted Gay to write to a friend, "For writing in the cause of virtue and against the fashionable vices, I've become the most hated man in England almost."
   In 1742, Robert Walpole lost his position of power in the House of Commons. He was created a peer and moved to the House of Lords, from where he still directed the Whig majority in Commons for years. In 1743, Henry Fielding's The History of the Life of the Late Mr Jonathan Wild the Great appeared in the third volume of Miscellanies.
   Fielding is merciless in his attack on Walpole. In his work, Wild stands in for Walpole directly, and, in particular, he invokes the Walpolean language of the "Great Man". Walpole had come to be described by both the Whig and then, satirically, by the Tory political writers as the "Great Man", and Fielding has his Wild constantly striving, with stupid violence, to be "Great". "Greatness," according to Fielding, is only attained by mounting to the top stair (of the gallows). Fielding's satire also consistently attacks the Whig party by having Wild choose, among all the thieves cant terms (several lexicons of which were printed with the Lives of Wild in 1725), "" to refer to the profession of burglary. Fielding suggests that Wild becoming a Great Prig was the same as Walpole becoming a Great Whig: theft and the Whig party were never so directly linked.
   The figures of Peachum and Macheath were picked up by Bertolt Brecht for his updating of Gay's opera as The Threepenny Opera. The Sheppard character, Macheath, is the "hero" of the song Mack the Knife.
   In Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes novel, The Valley of Fear, the arch-villain Professor Moriarty is referred to as a latter-day Jonathan Wild by Holmes:
David Liss novel A Conspiracy of Paper, ISBN 0-8041-1912-0. Jonathan Wild is also the title character in the 2005–2006 Phantom stories "Jonathan Wild: King of Thieves" and "Jonathan Wild: Double Cross".

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