One had to step inside a prison to recover one’s lace. Katherine Stetham went there bearing ten guineas, for the man confined behind those stone walls had sent word that he could return her merchandise. In the London spring of 1725, Jonathan Wild was thus continuing his commerce from within Newgate. The setting had altered; his patrons still knew precisely where to seek him out.
The shopkeeper handed the coin to the porter presented to her. The man stepped out, returned with a box, and nearly all the lace reappeared. Wild claimed nothing for his own hand. He professed utter disinterestedness, spoke of his enemies, and asked only for her prayers. The transaction bore all the outward marks of an act of grace performed by an unfortunate gentleman. Yet it was to lead him directly to the gallows.
The Oracle of the Deprived
Long before this encounter, Wild had grasped an essential paradox of larceny: an article stolen from a person often retains far greater value for its original owner than for any casual buyer on the market. A pocket-watch may always be sold; yet the personal papers accompanying it, the family tokens, the ledgers vital to commerce will scarcely ever find a more desperate bidder than their rightful master. It was enough, then, to direct the lost property back to the one who had been stripped of it, compelling him to pay for the journey home.
A native of Wolverhampton, Wild had earned his bread as a buckle-maker before coming up to London. An imprisonment for debt brought him into company with thieves and with Mary Milliner, whose mastery of the underworld subsequently underpinned his ventures. Their lodging in Cock Alley soon became an established point of call. Thither plunder was carried; thither men came in search of an accommodation. Wild made it his art to exploit the intelligence that each scoundrel held against his fellows.
He had also allied himself with Charles Hitchen, a City Marshal whose extortions eventually came under heavy censure. Their partnership broke asunder, and their reciprocal recriminations were aired in print. Yet while the two men wrangled publicly over their respective claims to honesty, victims went on searching for their lost goods. Wild offered them something far more immediately seductive than a public quarrel: the prospect of laying eyes once more upon what had been torn from them.
He took down descriptions, made people wait, and let fall the scent of a promising track. A reward might help; a handsomer reward would help still more. The party presently holding the goods had to be handled with great tender care, he would intimate, lest he take fright and destroy them altogether. The victim, already despoiled of his property, discovered that he was now in danger of losing even the privilege of buying it back.
The Patron and His Thieves
Wild did not sustain himself by restitutions alone. He had offenders seized, contributed to their conviction, and presented himself before the world as a vital auxiliary of public justice. Such industry won him a formidable standing among the respectable citizens he received, but it gave him an absolute and terrifying mastery over the criminal classes. A man who knew the cellar where you lay concealed could protect you; he could just as easily guide the constables to drag you out.
Early chronicles depict a brutal dividing line between those confederates who submitted to his terms and those who dared resist them. The former fed his trade; the latter served to burnish his renown as a thief-taker general. With every arrest he could claim to his credit, his threats grew more terrifyingly credible. A recalcitrant rogue had not merely to dread a rival in the trade; he had to dread seeing his former broker ascend the witness stand to swear away his life.
Wild maintained his warehouses, his network of correspondents, and a sloop to convey out of England any plunder too dangerous or distinctive to be returned on domestic soil. He displayed all the outward insignia of a gentleman of consequence in the capital. In 1724, he even petitioned the Corporation of London to recognise his public services by granting him the Freedom of the City. He had learned the art of presenting as a civic virtue a sovereign power of which he alone dictated the rules.
Yet this empire had its perils. Joseph Blake, known to the world as Blueskin, slashed his throat with a pocket-knife within the very precincts of the Old Bailey. Wild survived the wound. His name retained its terror, but his authority over the wretches he employed or pursued could never rest upon an unshakeable submission. The witnesses he kept under his thumb were privy to his secrets as well.
A Missing Box in Holborn
On the twenty-second day of January, 1725, a man and a woman appeared in Katherine Stetham’s shop. They asked to look over some lace, found fault with what was produced, and requested further patterns. The shopkeeper stepped upstairs to fetch another box, leaving her daughter behind the counter. The visitors departed without making a purchase. A short while later, she discovered the loss of a tin box containing lace which she valued at fifty pounds.
She sought out Wild from the very first evenings following the theft. Failing to find him, she had an advertisement published offering a reward of fifteen guineas, promising that no questions would be asked. That clause betrayed her single purpose: she wished to regain her goods before demanding any reckoning from the culprits. The notice yielded nothing. She returned once more to the man to whom half of London carried such grievances.
He took down the description of the suspects, promised to make enquiry, and bade her call again. Soon she offered more: twenty guineas, twenty-five if need be. Wild urged her to have patience. According to the printed testimony, he claimed he could sow discord between the thieves who held the lace and turn their division to advantage to retrieve it at an easier rate. He possessed the rare art of dressing delay in the guise of thrift.
In our reconstruction of these visits, the shopkeeper pauses before naming a higher sum. She had already paid for the stock she was now striving to purchase anew; every increase in the ransom ate into the fruits of her honest labour. Wild could well afford to wait. She, meanwhile, had a shop to keep above water. The silence between them did not carry the same cost for both.
On the fifteenth of February, Wild was arrested for his part in the rescue of Johnson, the master of his vessel, who had been wrested from custody during a riot near the waterside. Fresh charges began to accumulate against him. Yet Katherine was still without her lace, and Newgate did not break off their dealings. On the tenth of March, she received the summons that brought her to the prison gates, carrying ten guineas in her purse.
A Service Rendered Before Witnesses
Wild handed her a written paper indicating where the goods were to be found. Being unable to read, she passed it to the porter who had been called. The money traversed the very same hands. The box that returned was not the tin casket that had been carried off; yet it contained the goods, lacking only a single piece. Katherine asked what she owed the prisoner for his trouble. He replied that he would take nothing for himself, adding that he still hoped to recover the missing remnant, and perhaps even restore her money and bring the felon to book.
His entire defence hung upon this neat severance: other hands received the gold; he merely performed an act of charity. She had not witnessed his compact with the robbers. But she had seen what he orchestrated from his cell, and she could declare it under oath.
At his trial on the fifteenth of May, two indictments were preferred against him. The first alleged complicity in the felony itself. Henry Kelly and Margaret Murphy bore witness against Wild, swearing they had acted on his orders and delivered the plunder to him. The defence countered by contrasting the precise wording of the charge with the part assigned to him by the witnesses: he was not the party who had physically carried the box from the shop. The jury returned a verdict of Not Guilty upon the theft.
Yet this acquittal did not deliver him. A specific statute struck at any person who took money or reward, directly or indirectly, under pretence of helping any person to stolen goods, without apprehending the felon and causing him to be brought to trial. The second indictment concerned the ten guineas and the delivery effected within Newgate. The shopkeeper recounted the passage of the coin and the return of the box. What had seemed an operation cleanly separated from Wild’s person collapsed into a single transaction of which he had governed every move.
His counsel still sought to dispute the construction of the statute, but the Court remained unmoved. Wild was found guilty and received sentence of death. The man who had long made the lives of thieves depend upon their subservience had been brought down by the ordinary engine of his trade.
A Road Beyond His Choosing
To the end, he hoped that his past services and the grandees to whom he had restored property might procure him the King’s mercy. He caused a printed list to be handed about, detailing the dozens of felons brought to justice through his agency; he still demanded that society weigh what he had performed for the public peace against the offence laid to his charge. No respite came to stay the execution.
On the eve of his departure, he sought to cheat the gallows with a dose of laudanum. Contemporary accounts describe him appearing thereafter dazed, languid, and supported by his fellow prisoners. On the twenty-fourth of May, 1725, he was set in the cart for Tyburn. The rabble pelted him with mud and stones, heaping curses upon his head. At the fatal tree, his lingering prayers exhausted the temper of the spectators; shouts rose from the press, urging the hangman to dispatch his business without further delay.
He was hanged that day. His body, interred in the churchyard of Saint Pancras, was disinterred a few nights later, according to the early narratives. Even the grave would not keep him long. The populace he had trained to dance upon his promises had nothing more to wait for; the last voices that rose around his cart belonged to a crowd that would grant no further adjournment.