London had found a man of whom it demanded two incompatible things: that he be kept under lock and key for the peace of its inhabitants, and that he break out for their entertainment. Hitherto, Jack Sheppard had answered the second demand with admirable punctuality. In the course of the year 1724, his keepers had watched this diminutive thief return with a regularity that might have comforted them, had it not been necessary, each time, to begin by losing him.
His name now ran faster than his heels. In the alehouses and at shop doors, men recounted the walls he had scaled and the irons he had vanquished; the chapbooks promised at last to lay bare the secret of his prodigies. The customer purchased a felon and carried home an extraordinary craftsman. It was convenient to forget that the hands so nimble at unlocking gaols had first learned their trade by forcing the dwellings of others.
The Labour of the Hands
John Sheppard was born in 1702, in the east of London. Deprived of his father in infancy, he was placed out, and subsequently bound apprentice to a carpenter named Wood. The early chronicles are agreed upon his dexterity. Long before becoming a figure upon whom the populace would confer the quasi-miraculous gift of passing through solid stone, he had learned that timber yields differently according to the grain, and that any mortise or tenon may be deciphered by him who studies it with patience.
Let us imagine him before a door requiring repair. His master points to an uneven play, a fatigued timber, a flaw unperceived by the householder. The boy listens less to the client’s complaint than his eye and fingers trace what yet holds fast. That very glance would serve him later to seek out what must give way. There is no grim fatality inherent in the craft: thousands of honest workmen keep our houses upright. In Sheppard’s hands, a useful art became the instrument for violating the very trust that had admitted him across the threshold.
He frequented Elizabeth Lyon, known to the town as Edgworth Bess, alongside divers men engaged in housebreaking. The contemporary scribblers found in this commerce an easy explanation that spared them the labour of seeking another: a woman had undone a promising lad. One may well acknowledge Bess’s weight in his fortunes without laying upon her head the whole burden of his choices. Sheppard quitted his indenture before his term was run and threw himself into burglary. The dry goods, the coin, the stolen apparel all had living owners; the rogue’s rising fame did not render their losses imaginary.
A robbery committed at the shop of a draper afforded his early biographers a telling circumstance. Having displaced the iron bars of a casement, Sheppard is said to have set them back in their sockets, so cleanly that a poor female lodger fell under suspicion. Thus did technical mastery leave in its wake a defenceless woman forced to clear her name. The anecdote comes from a contemporary pamphlet, not from our own witness; yet it reminds us of what the romantic lore of jail-breaking so easily conceals: the cleverness of one man may well prove the ruin of another.
To Break Out Is Not Enough
In the spring of 1724, an information laid against him caused his arrest. Confined at St Giles’s Roundhouse, he contrived to reach the open air. A few weeks later, detained anew, this time in the New Prison, he broke out with Bess on the night of the 25th of May. The printed relations describe the pierced window, the descent by means of bedlinen, and the unforeseen impediment awaiting them below: they had alighted within the outer ward of yet another gaol.
Let us pause upon this halt—far more human than all the precise dimensions of iron bars so neatly catalogued by the pamphleteers. They had just staked their lives to touch the ground; yet the ground gained still belonged to the turnkeys. In the scene as we imagine it, Bess raises her eyes, then looks upon Jack. No triumph is won while the final wall remains. They must set forth again, weighed down by the fatigue already spent, and unable to ask fortune to believe a second time in what had seemed impossible the first.
They got clear. What the magistrates accounted an outrage against authority became, in the talk of the taverns, a victory over gravity itself. Yet a liberty won at such a cost offered neither a safe lodging nor an honest livelihood. Sheppard returned to his old companions, his familiar haunts, and the hazards that attended them. The great world was a stranger to him; his own narrow world knew precisely where he was to be found.
The burglary committed at the house of William Kneebone, a woollen-draper, brought him under sentence of death in August. This time, flight was no longer a mere evasion of the bar: it must cut short the road to the gallows. Toward the close of that month, assisted by female visitors, he slipped out of Newgate. By September he was retaken. The lustre of his name grew with every escape, even as the fetters forged to hold him grew heavier.
The Gaol Become a Spectacle
He was lodged in a strong-room designated as the Castle. Bilboes, chains, sleepless watch: his keepers resolved to impart to this fresh confinement the finality that had been wanting in the former. The curious, for their part, flocked thither to view the man capable of undoing their handiwork. Sheppard was exhibited in his irons like some marvel of nature that authority had taken the precaution of riveting to the stone floor.
On the 15th of October, he slipped his bonds once more. The route traced in the early tracts leads from his chamber through diverse wards of the prison, thence up to the leads and down into an adjoining house. These narratives marshal the obstacles in so happy a succession that one might fancy oneself reading the prompt-book of a theatre arranged for its star. They were penned to entertain, to sell, and to astonish; the speeches attributed to the fugitive are no true record of his voice. The escape itself, however, was real.
In our evocation of that night, the young man lingers a moment upon the heights, after such vast labour spent in climbing. The street is there at last, near at hand yet unreached. Wayfarers move along it without suspecting that they perform with ease what has cost him hours of blood and sweat. It remains for him to climb down, to traverse inhabited chambers, to pass within earshot of sleepers whose senses the faintest creak might transform into sentinels. The peril has changed its nature: it resides no longer in cold iron, but in the startled glance of a stranger.
The chronicles have him enter the neighbouring house and lie concealed until its inmates ceased their stirrings before venturing into the street. The tale possesses a dramatic truth that explains its enduring fortune: after vanquishing locks and bars, Sheppard had to stake his life upon an ordinary latch and upon a servant who did not turn his head. All his cunning might have foundered before a civil question.
He succeeded. And yet, instead of leaving London behind him, London drew him back into its vortex. A man whose escapes were on every tongue might still pass unrecognised in a crowd; but it was far harder for him to renounce the only quarters where he knew how to live. The ancient relations differ concerning his designs, his motives, and the words he uttered. We know only that he lingered near those who knew him.
The Last Door
Toward the close of October, he was apprehended once more, being heavily disguised in liquor. The contrast between the two scenes struck the chroniclers with force: on the one hand, the prodigy who dismantled Newgate; on the other, a wretch incapable of putting his liberty to good use. The irony made easy copy. Yet it ought not to serve as an exhaustive key to a life whose substance reaches us chiefly through those who had an interest in rendering it an exemplary moral tale.
The curious thronged about the prisoner again. One might admire his address, pity his youth, wish that some high intercession might save him, and then go home to dinner. None of these sentiments could turn a key. On the 10th of November, he was brought to the bar of the King’s Bench; his execution was appointed for the following Monday. He had no longer to contest an indictment, but to undergo the consequence of a sentence already recorded.
On the 16th of November 1724, Sheppard was hanged at Tyburn, aged twenty-two years. The legends of a concealed penknife and of desperate schemes to bleed and revive him after the drop prolong, in the chapbooks, the lingering hope of yet another deliverance. They tell us something of the public imagination; they alter not the event. He died. The selfsame readers who had bought the broadsheets of his escapes could now purchase the dying speech of his end.
A door well mended remains, as a rule, anonymous. A prison gate broken open suffices to bestow a name upon its author. Out of that difference, London fashioned an immense renown, of which Sheppard tasted the fruits for but a few brief months. The boy who knew how things held together had never discovered how to keep his own life beyond the reach of the men who hunted him. Then the printers took up the work: they knew how to hold fast to Jack, and how to set him free with every fresh edition.