In the account James Flindall laid before the jurors, the Aldersgate Street conflagration had very nearly miscarried for want of an ember. Two pipes had already shattered along the way. The last went cold as William Jobbins passed the portal of the Red Lion, and went out yet again at the foot of the ladder. Through an aperture in the ancient gate, James Flindall handed the pipe back to Edward Lowe, who blew it into life once more. Jobbins then laid hold of a ladder left standing hard by the loft, mounted with matches in hand, and fired the combustibles secreted amid the clover. He climbed down, and the three confederates reunited in the dead of night between the 15th and 16th of May 1790, as the flames took hold of the tenements along Aldersgate Street.
Their design, according to Flindall, was by no means confined to fire-raising. Amid the tumult, they meant to force their way into the dwellings and carry off whatever lay within their reach. As the inhabitants started from their beds and neighbours flocked into the street, Lowe made his way into the house of Francis Gilding, a cabinet-maker, and emerged with a nest of drawers. He bore the stolen furniture upon his head, bearing it away to a hiding-place; a blanket cast over it masked its contents. Some hours later, Flindall was himself apprehended with these very drawers upon his head. In Flindall’s narrative, the blaze had merely paved the way for pillage.
The trial of Edward Lowe and William Jobbins came on at the Old Bailey following the destruction by fire of Gilding’s house and outbuildings. Flindall stood as the crown’s principal witness. His Majesty’s pardon, extended to him, was read aloud to the court: he had shared in the contrivance, stood convicted under a prior indictment, and now gave evidence under the shield of royal mercy. The bench and jury were thus called upon to hear a man who rehearsed, with damning precision, deeds in which he freely confessed to having borne a hand.
He fixed the first overture on Wednesday, May 12, at Lowe’s lodgings in Hartshorn Court. Jobbins had reportedly marked out two houses in Aldersgate Street—those of Gilding and Berry—as ripe for the venture. The object, Flindall swore, was to profit by the general confusion to strip the inhabitants of their goods. On the morrow, Flindall repaired with Timothy Barnard to the back yard of the Red Lion, which communicated with Carthusian Street. A waggon was there unlading clover into a loft hard by Gilding’s shop. Barnard pronounced the premises admirably suited: clover-hay, being looser and less compacted than meadow-hay, would kindle with great swiftness.
The preparations stretched across several days. Flindall related how he mingled spirits of turpentine with rags and paper, stowing the mixture within a glove beside a parcel of matches. They made a first essay upon a joiner’s and printer’s workshop in Shoe Lane, but the flame failed to take. They proceeded thence to the stables of one Nash, a coachmaker in Moorfields; there again, the combustibles died out. During this interval, Flindall recounted prowling by night with Lowe and Jobbins upon the plunder, though without success. On another venture, Lowe had carried in his pocket two picklocks to force a stable-door hard by Gilding’s premises. Two patrolmen came upon them unawares and lodged both men in the watch-house. On the following morning, they were conducted to the homes of their respective fathers.
On Saturday evening, Flindall fell in again with Lowe and Jobbins. Mrs Lowe furnished them with turpentine, rags, matches, and resinous wood. They made their way to the Nag’s Head in Aldersgate Street, where they drank several pints of beer and gin. The publican, Benjamin Williams, refused to serve them further after closing his bar. A stranger, who had been drinking there, went out with them. According to Flindall, all four turned their steps toward the back yard of the Red Lion, their pipes lit to serve as linstocks for the matches. After repeated difficulties in kindling the weed, Jobbins at last gained the loft.
The fire spread swiftly to the adjacent tenements. William Kyme, who lay asleep at the Red Lion, was roused by the watchman about one in the morning. He beheld the loft in flames directly above his flour-warehouse and sought to secure his property. Having descended to fetch a candle, he returned to his bedchamber. Lowe and Flindall stepped into the room shortly after and offered their assistance. Kyme denounced them as thieves, yet nevertheless suffered them to shift his iron chest out of harm’s way. He thereafter forbade them from laying a hand upon his bed or his other effects. The conflagration had transformed an emergency into an occasion, and the men who tendered their succour were the very ones he held in suspicion.
At Gilding’s house, Thomas Burgin, a servant, perceived bundles of linen being lowered or thrown from an upper window. Lowe told him that he was himself in Gilding’s service and that Burgin had no business with the sheets. Burgin recognized the falsehood: he was himself in the cabinet-maker’s employ. Amid the depositions, this brief exchange linked Lowe’s presence within a burning house to the carrying off of its inmates’ goods. Flindall recounted further that he had borne away a case of silver spoons from Gilding’s dining-room, which he subsequently concealed at Lowe’s. A portion of these spoons was later disposed of by Mrs Lowe to Joseph Samuel, a clothes-dealer, for the sum of three pounds fifteen shillings.
Samuel contributed another telling recollection to the proceedings. Following Lowe’s release from custody, the prisoner had come to him, urging him to make away with the spoons connected to the fire. He expressed dread lest Flindall should peach upon him, and thereupon confessed that he, Flindall, “and the rest” had fired the houses in Aldersgate Street. He added that he had narrowly escaped the flames by leaping through a window, having entered one of the dwellings to plunder it. This confession, recounted by the receiver of the stolen goods, came not from an approver turning King’s evidence, but from a tradesman in whom Lowe had placed his confidence.
The remaining testimonies did not chime with mechanical perfection with Flindall’s narrative. James Edwards remembered seeing Jobbins at the Nag’s Head with a pipe, yet could not say whether he had seen him depart. Williams, the publican, recollected Lowe and Flindall leaving about half-past twelve; he could not affirm that Jobbins had set foot in his house. Harry Moray identified Jobbins at the fire between half-past one and two o’clock.
The defence of Jobbins rested chiefly upon his father. John Jobbins testified that he had observed his son writing a chronicle on Saturday afternoon, and had subsequently sent him to fetch a parcel expected from Gloucester. The young man returned shortly after midnight, compounded some pills for a visitor, and then lay down beside his father. Less than half an hour later, the cry of fire startled them awake. The son rose to go and see the spectacle, notwithstanding his father’s admonition.
It was this second return that embarrassed the witness. He had watched the blaze from the casement, deeming it to be fifty, sixty, or a hundred yards distant, and had then gone back to sleep. How could he establish with certainty the hour at which his son had rejoined him? He could not, for he had failed to consult his watch. He ended by specifying that the young man had awakened him on getting back into bed, pointing out the direction of Aldersgate Street. The father depicted a son who compounded medicines and stepped out merely to view a fire; the prosecution sought in that unmeasured slumber the interval during which he might well have set it.
Jobbins was nineteen years of age. His father described him as a young man of liberal education, bred at St Paul’s School and instructed in surgery. He compounded medicines and was given to writing; he had even gone to sea under the name of George Burne. His father was aware of his departure, yet claimed to have known nothing of this assumed name until a letter arrived demanding money. These circumstances did not overthrow Flindall’s evidence, but they held up a very different likeness of the young man in the dock from the cant sobriquet of the “little doctor” employed by his associates. Lowe’s father, for his part, deposed that he had employed his son throughout the week and paid him his wages on Saturday evening. He believed his work was done upon his return, though he acknowledged he had not inspected it.
Following the summing up of the evidence, the defence raised an exception, urging that the indictment had failed to describe the situation of the house or prove the parish in which it lay. The court overruled the objection: several witnesses had laid the premises in Aldersgate Street, and the jury was competent to determine the parish. The jury pronounced Lowe and Jobbins guilty. The Recorder, in passing sentence, enlarged upon the enormity of kindling a fire by night in a populous city for the purpose of drawing the inhabitants from their beds and plundering their dwellings. Borrow records that the Recorder pronounced sentence of death, bidding them prepare for their dissolution.
A note in the compilation records that they were executed on November 20, 1790. An inscription fixed upon a rebuilt house affirmed that the fire had consumed several tenements and caused upwards of forty thousand pounds in damages. That sum belongs to the memorial inscription recorded by Borrow; the depositions of the witnesses, for their part, preserve the very gestures of that night: the clay pipe passed through the hole in the gate, the rungs of the ladder mounted toward the loft, the iron chest dragged across the floor, and the nest of drawers borne away beneath a blanket.