In Bury Street, the surveillance commenced before the thieves had so much as crossed the threshold. An informant warned Constable Reid that a gang was plotting the burglary of Mrs. Martin’s house, at Number 4, St. James’s. The account published by Pelham in 1887 attributes to the servant-girl, Mary Wakelin, the intelligence that rendered the undertaking possible; yet one must refrain from endorsing the contemptuous judgment whereby the ancient narrator explains her conduct. He transmits to us a retrospective chronicle, not the complete verbatim minutes of the court.
According to the opening of the chapter, John Clayton had encountered Mary at the public-house whither she went to fetch her mistress’s beer. He represented himself as a trunk-maker, claimed to lodge in Oxford Street, and knew Mrs. Martin to be frequently abroad of an evening. By dint of repeated visits, he obtained the promise of an interview in the kitchen during a theatrical performance. Pelham makes this supposed attachment the conduit through which Clayton learned the habits of the household. This initial version establishes the taproom as the scene of their first conversation.
Mary’s testimony at the Old Bailey offers a different beginning. She deposed that she had made Clayton’s acquaintance eight or ten days prior to the first of January, when he came to the house and she answered the door. He gave his name as Wilson and stated that he brought a letter for Mrs. Martin, the name by which her mistress was known. A night or two thereafter, he tossed sundry articles down into the area; Mrs. Martin sent Mary on an errand, and Clayton, whom she encountered outside, invited her to drink. They walked out together following his persistent entreaties. Mary saw him subsequently in the street, and thereafter frequently; she declared that she had never set eyes on Jenkins until the evening of January the first. The introductory narrative and this deposition do not, therefore, assign the same setting to their initial encounter. Nothing warrants fusing them into a single scene.
The informant, whom the text designates by the cant term of “nose,” remains unnamed. Reid belonged to Perry’s patrol. The officers obtained permission to occupy a room directly opposite Mrs. Martin’s dwelling, from which vantage they could keep watch upon the door. Thither they returned night after night, while Clayton sought an entrance and the mistress, detained by indisposition, kept to her chambers. Pelham records that at a first rendezvous appointed for a Monday, four men and two women presented themselves; Clayton detached himself from their company and knocked at the door. Mrs. Martin’s presence inside thwarted the design. Another appointment was fixed, but the watchers beheld at first only the two young people sharing a glass of gin and then parting company.
On the Wednesday, when Mrs. Martin finally departed for the playhouse in company with two friends, Mary went out for a few minutes and returned upon Clayton’s arm. They parleyed at the door before stepping within. A quarter of an hour later, Clayton emerged, only to reappear some five minutes afterward accompanied by another man. Mary opened the door upon his return. She appeared to deny admittance to his companion; Clayton forced the door, and the stranger rushed headlong into the house. The officers, already observing, soon heard the three voices raised within the kitchen.
Through a keyhole and amid the din of the house, they gathered that the two men were dragging Mary upstairs against her will. She was crying aloud: “Lord have mercy upon me! What shall I do?” One of the ruffians threatened to blow her brains out if she persisted in her cries, leveling a pistol at her head. The officers heard doors being forced. Shortly thereafter, one of the intruders went below to fetch the kitchen poker; other doors yielded in their turn.
The chronicle relates that, when the constables no longer heard Mary’s cries, they feared she had been murdered, and prepared to force the street door with a crowbar. At that juncture, she cried out that it was her mistress, made a sudden movement, wrenched herself free, and fled down the stairs with the robbers at her heels. They reached the passage at the very moment the constables burst in. The text affords no further clarification as to whom the exclamation referred, nor what Mary imagined she saw; it records solely the sudden movement whereby she liberated herself and the simultaneous arrival of the peace officers.
Clayton and his confederate appeared desirous of walking out as though nothing had occurred. Perry and Reid seized them. Both resisted with great violence, as Pelham describes, but were eventually overpowered. The man apprehended alongside Clayton was identified at the trial as William Jenkins; the narrative makes no mention of the fate of those who had come previously, nor does it establish that the four men and two women observed at the first gathering were all present at the break-in.
The search yielded diverse articles. Clayton carried a large clasp-knife and a counterfeit dollar piece. Upon Jenkins, the officers discovered a pistol, two bad pieces of coin, and other effects. Within the house, they found property gathered together ready for removal. Several rooms and closets had been broken open, and the men were on the point of forcing an iron chest when they were interrupted. The design had thus left material traces upon the doors, the locks, and the displaced chattels; the account nowhere indicates that Mary was an accomplice to the burglary. The vantage of the officers also exposes the limitations of their narrative: stationed at first in the house across the street, they observed from a distance; subsequently, they heard voices through walls and peered through the aperture of a keyhole. They do not, therefore, deliver a scene taken in at a single glance, but rather a sequence of signs, noises, and interventions, the joints of which the chapter reconstructs without affording us the official minutes of the examinations.
At the Old Bailey sessions, which Pelham dates to January 15 without reiterating the year in that sentence, Mary Wakelin gave evidence. She recounted the man who had presented himself under the name of Wilson, the pretended letter, the meetings, and the liquor. She swore she had never seen Jenkins until the evening of January the first. Her deposition outlines the overtures that preceded the housebreaking and circumscribes her knowledge of Jenkins; it does not, of itself, corroborate every detail of the watch which Pelham sets forth in his opening pages. The account reproduces neither the complete cross-examination, nor the speeches of counsel, nor the directions to the jury.
The jury pronounced Clayton and Jenkins guilty; both were sentenced to death. Pelham records that the sentence was carried into execution before the Debtor’s Door at Newgate on February 19, 1812, at the customary hour and with the usual solemnities. Clayton was twenty-eight years of age, Jenkins thirty-five. The date of the burglary—the first of January—and that of the trial—January the fifteenth—bear no explicit year in the passage. It is the execution of February 1812 which permits the inference that the narrative concerns the early weeks of that year; this deduction must not be confounded with a court date substantiated by an independent register.
The final paragraph attributes to Clayton, once their irons had been struck off, certain words addressed to Jenkins: he is said to have termed the moment an awful one, exhorted him to meet death with fortitude, acknowledged the justice of their sentence, and expressed the wish that their fate might warn other young men against evil company. These utterances, likewise, reach us solely through the retrospective compilation. The door in Bury Street had yielded to intimidation; then the constables had broken in before the spoils could be carried away. What the chapter preserves with the greatest certainty is the capture of two men and the verdict that followed, while the first meeting and several particulars of the intrusion remain divided between conflicting accounts.