As Smith rose to bear witness, John Symmonds must have recognized the court’s arrangement all too well, having once observed it from the opposite side of the bar: one man walking free, another pinioned between turnkeys, and, flowing from the first to the second, that peculiar swagger born of finding a culprit more readily traded than oneself. One needed no great learning in the law to comprehend the bargain. Symmonds had once given up his comrades; now a comrade had come forward to speak of him.
He went also by the name of Spanish Jack. Aliases had dogging his steps less faithfully than his misfortunes, all the way from Alicante to the alehouses of England, and each appeared to suit whichever man it was in his interest to become. Bli Gonzalez in the chronicles of his youth, John Symmonds among his newer intimates: such variety proved no guilt, yet it provided readers of his life with a tidy moral convenience of which peaceable men are exceeding fond. They might flatter themselves that, in shifting his name, he had foreshadowed the very end they already knew awaited him.
The Sailor Out of War
The Newgate Calendar awards him parents who intended him for the Church. The son preferred the sea. Between these callings, however, there lay a common feature: both taught a man to commit himself to powers over whose intentions he held no sway. The youth drifted from vessel to vessel, came to know the Levant, sailed under diverse colours, and at length discovered in privateering an occupation far better attuned to his hopes than the rigours of a seminary.
Peace overturned this comfortable arrangement. The crews that had been mustered were cast adrift; the men, however, retained their appetites, and not infrequently their vices. Symmonds made for the coasts of Kent and Sussex, where the contraband trade promised handsome gains to any hand able to run a boat ashore without drawing the revenue’s eye. The leap from lawful prize to clandestine cargo might well appear a trifling distinction to a man who staked his life in either trade; his Majesty’s magistrates, however, held far more rigid views upon the matter.
In London, the gold soon slipped away. The mariner spoke grandly of prize shares due to him, obtained credit on the strength of them, and lived for a time upon monies whose tale he had told long before laying hands upon them. It is an exceedingly common talent, that of making expected income appear nearly as respectable as a fortune in hand. It ceases to feed a fellow only when his creditors begin to encounter one another in the street.
Then came the robberies. The old chronicle lays his prowling about Stepney, in company with associates whose names he was soon to impart to justice. Recognized at Rag Fair by a man claiming to be his victim, Symmonds found few paths remaining by which to extricate himself. He chose the one that ran directly over the necks of his fellows.
The Market Price of a Comrade
The thief-takers to whom he addressed himself bore scant resemblance to our modern, salaried constabulary. The apprehension of a felon carried blood-money, and this reward keenly engaged men whose civic virtue did not go unrequited. In the Calendar’s relation, Macdaniel’s crew, acting on Symmonds’s intelligence, laid a trap for his companions whilst they were gathered over drink. Two made good their escape through the casements; three remained fast.
Mandevile, Holmes, and Newton were launched into eternity at Tyburn in October 1751, following a trial in which Symmonds testified against them. The sailor had successfully effected his crossing. That very guilt which had made him liable to the rope became, once enlisted in the service of the Crown, prized knowledge. He could name the men, describe their haunts, and lay bare their meetings. The selfsame intimacy that would have hanged him had now become his salvation and his stock-in-trade.
The old chronicle lends a singularly dark hue to what followed. It asserts that the blood-money amounted to four hundred and twenty pounds, of which a paltry ten fell to the informer’s share. It adds that his patrons kept him under close watch, made him pay dearly for his keep, and finally turned him loose with scarcely a shilling in his pocket. Their design, so the narrator affirms, was to hound him into fresh criminal acquaintance, thereby harvesting further captures for the gallows. We possess no means of reading their hearts with such unyielding certainty; yet the ledger of that division suffices to prove that Symmonds was never admitted as their equal.
He had sold what he knew. Once the three men were cold in their graves, his recollections ceased to fetch a price.
A Hazard Declined
The Calendar next brings him into the company of two ruffians bent upon a murderous design. A young woman with whom he then cohabited is said to have dissuaded him from accompanying them. This solitary detail, which the chronicler preserves without ever naming her, throws open a narrow casement upon that dark existence: someone had endeavoured to hold him back, and, for once, had prevailed.
The narrative records little of the gratitude one might reasonably anticipate. Upon learning of the rich plunder taken in the deed, Symmonds is said to have bitterly upbraided his mistress for having cheated him of his share. There is no need to invent his oaths to feel the cruelty of such an exchange. She fancied she had saved his neck; he was reckoning up lost guineas. The two shared the same bedchamber, yet dwelt already in different worlds.
London was becoming an unwholesome town for a man known equally well to common cutpurses and to the runners who hunted them down. He took himself off to Rochester. Perhaps he fancied that in shifting his ground he might restore some shred of credit to his name; the record remains mute upon the point. It chronicles merely a fresh confederacy with one Smith, a visit to a public-house where punch was called for, and the vanishing of a silver tankard.
After so many flags, such bluster of promised prizes, betrayed accomplices, and disputed blood-money, there was something pitiful in the theft. This petty larceny opened no new horizons; it served merely to furnish the court with an exhibit.
The Other Side of the Bar
Symmonds was seized on the morrow. Smith took the stand for the prosecution. The machinery of the law, on this occasion, had no need of the former informer’s aid: it was grinding him down instead. He must have perceived then that the indulgences tendered to King’s evidence carried no lingering gratitude toward those who had once profited by them.
The Calendar places his execution at Maidstone on the 18th of April, 1756. It concludes, according to the pious convention of the day, with the condemned man’s contrition and his parting exhortation to the gathered multitude. Such moralizing formulas held an established place in the traffic of criminal broadsheets; they afforded a tidy close to a narrative wherein almost every passage revealed, on the contrary, an unholy entanglement of venal interests.
Yet there remains one tableau that cannot be so tidily dismissed. Three men had been delivered to Tyburn upon Symmonds’s word; a few years later, another man’s oath helped to bring him to the tree. The final witness had invented nothing new. He had merely stepped into the place left vacant.
As for the woman who had once stayed his hand from joining the cutthroats, history preserves no memory of her fate. She vanishes before the closing page, having performed the sole act in this entire history to which no price-tag was ever affixed.