WHEN Jonathan Wild and the Count La Ruse, in Fielding's narrative, took a
hand at cards, Jonathan picked his opponent's pocket, though he knew it
was empty, while the Count, from sheer force of habit, stacked the cards,
though Wild had not a farthing to lose. And if in his uncultured youth the
great man stooped to prig with his own hand, he was early cured of the
weakness: so that Fielding's picture of the hero taking a bottle-screw
from the Ordinary's pocket in the very moment of death is entirely
fanciful. For 'this Machiavel of Thieves,' as a contemporary styled him,
left others to accomplish what his ingenuity had planned. His was the high
policy of theft. If he lived on terms of familiar intimacy with the
mill-kens, the bridle-culls, the buttock-and-files of London, he was none
the less the friend and minister of justice. He enjoyed the freedom of
Newgate and the Old Bailey. He came and went as he liked: he packed
juries, he procured bail, he manufactured evidence; and there was scarce
an assize or a sessions passed but he slew his man.
The world knew him for a robber, yet could not refuse his brilliant
service. At the Poultry Counter, you are told, he laid the foundations of
his future greatness, and to the Poultry Counter he was committed for some
trifling debt ere he had fully served his apprenticeship to the art and
mystery of buckle-making. There he learned his craft, and at his
enlargement he was able forthwith to commence thief-catcher. His plan was
conceived with an effrontery that was nothing less than genius. On the one
side he was the factor, or rather the tyrant, of the cross-coves: on the
other he was the trusted agent of justice, the benefactor of the outraged
and the plundered. Among his earliest exploits was the recovery of the
Countess of G—d—n's chair, impudently carried off when her
ladyship had but just alighted; and the courage wherewith he brought to
justice the murderers of one Mrs. Knap, who had been slain for some
trifling booty, established his reputation as upon a rock. He at once
advertised himself in the public prints as Thief-Catcher General of Great
Britain and Ireland, and proceeded to send to the gallows every scoundrel
that dared dispute his position.
His opportunities of gain were infinite. Even if he did not organise the
robbery which his cunning was presently to discover, he had spies in every
hole and corner to set him on the felon's track. Nor did he leave a single
enterprise to chance: 'He divided the city and suburbs into wards or
divisions, and appointed the persons who were to attend each ward, and
kept them strictly to their duty.' If a subordinate dared to disobey or to
shrink from murder, Jonathan hanged him at the next assize, and happily
for him he had not a single confederate whose neck he might not put in the
halter when he chose. Thus he preserved the union and the fidelity of his
gang, punishing by judicial murder the smallest insubordination, the
faintest suspicion of rivalry. Even when he had shut his victim up in
Newgate, he did not leave him so long as there was a chance of blackmail.
He would make the most generous offers of evidence and defence to every
thief that had a stiver left him. But whether or not he kept his bargain—that
depended upon policy and inclination. On one occasion, when he had brought
a friend to the Old Bailey, and relented at the last moment, he kept the
prosecutor drunk from the noble motive of self-interest, until the case
was over. And so esteemed was he of the officers of the law that even this
interference did but procure a reprimand.
His meanest action marked him out from his fellows, but it was not until
he habitually pillaged the treasures he afterwards restored to their
grateful owners for a handsome consideration, that his art reached the
highest point of excellence. The event was managed by him with amazing
adroitness from beginning to end.
It was he who discovered the wealth and habit of the victim; it was he who
posted the thief and seized the plunder, giving a paltry commission to his
hirelings for the trouble; it was he who kept whatever valuables were lost
in the transaction; and as he was the servant of the Court, discovery or
inconvenience was impossible. Surely the Machiavel of Thieves is justified
of his title. He was known to all the rich and titled folk in town; and if
he was generally able to give them back their stolen valuables at
something more than double their value, he treated his clients with a most
proper insolence. When Lady M—n was unlucky enough to lose a silver
buckle at Windsor, she asked Wild to recover it, and offered the hero
twenty pounds for his trouble. 'Zounds, Madam,' says he, 'you offer
nothing. It cost the gentleman who took it forty pounds for his coach,
equipage, and other expenses to Windsor.' His impudence increased with
success, and in the geniality of his cups he was wont to boast his amazing
rogueries: 'hinting not without vanity at the poor Understandings of the
Greatest Part of Mankind, and his own Superior Cunning.'
In fifteen years he claimed £10,000 for his dividend of recovered
plunderings, and who shall estimate the moneys which flowed to his
treasury from blackmail and the robberies of his gang? So brisk became his
trade in jewels and the precious metals that he opened relations with
Holland, and was master of a fleet. His splendour increased with wealth:
he carried a silver-mounted sword, and a footman tramped at his heels.
'His table was very splendid,' says a biographer: 'he seldom dining under
five Dishes, the Reversions whereof were generally charitably bestow'd on
the Commonside felons.' At his second marriage with Mrs. Mary D—n,
the hempen widow of Scull D—n, his humour was most happily
expressed: he distributed white ribbons among the turnkeys, he gave the
Ordinary gloves and favours, he sent the prisoners of Newgate several
ankers of brandy for punch. 'Twas a fitting complaisance, since his
fortune was drawn from Newgate, and since he was destined himself, a few
years later, to drink punch—'a liquor nowhere spoken against in the
Scriptures'—with the same Ordinary whom he thus magnificently
decorated. Endowed with considerable courage, for a while he had the
prudence to save his skin, and despite his bravado he was known on
occasion to yield a plundered treasure to an accomplice who set a pistol
to his head. But it is certain that the accomplice died at Tyburn for his
pains, and on equal terms Jonathan was resolute with the best. On the
trail he was savage as a wild beast. When he arrested James Wright for a
robbery committed upon the persons of the Earl of B—l—n and
the Lord Bruce, he held on to the victim's chin by his teeth—an
exploit which reminds you of the illustrious Tiger Roche.
Even in his lifetime he was generously styled the Great. The scourge of
London, he betrayed and destroyed every man that ever dared to live upon
terms of friendship with him. It was Jonathan that made Blueskin a thief,
and Jonathan screened his creature from justice only so long as clemency
seemed profitable. At the first hint of disobedience Blueskin was
committed to Newgate. When he had stood his trial, and was being taken to
the Condemned Hole, he beckoned to Wild as though to a conference, and cut
his throat with a penknife. The assembled rogues and turnkeys thought
their Jonathan dead at last, and rejoiced exceedingly therein. Straightway
the poet of Newgate's Garland leaped into verse:
But Jonathan recovered, and Molly, his wife, was destined a second time to
win the conspicuous honour that belongs to a hempen widow.
As his career drew to its appointed close, Fortune withheld her smiles.
'People got so peery,' complained the great man, 'that ingenious men were
put to dreadful shifts.' And then, highest tribute to his greatness, an
Act of Parliament was passed which made it a capital offence 'for a prig
to steal with the hands of other people'; and in the increase of public
vigilance his undoing became certain. On the 2nd of January, 1725, a day
not easy to forget, a creature of Wild's spoke with fifty yards of lace,
worth £40, at his Captain's bidding, and Wild, having otherwise disposed
of the plunder, was charged on the 10th of March that he 'did feloniously
receive of Katharine Stetham ten guineas on account and under colour of
helping the said Katharine Stetham to the said lace again, and did not
then, nor any time since, discover or apprehend, or cause to be
apprehended and brought to Justice, the persons that committed the said
felony.' Thus runs the indictment, and, to the inexpressible relief of
lesser men, Jonathan Wild was condemned to the gallows.
Thereupon he had serious thoughts of 'putting his house in order'; with an
ironical smile he demanded an explanation of the text: 'Cursed is every
one that hangeth on a tree'; but, presently reflecting that 'his Time was
but short in this World, he improved it to the best advantage in Eating,
Drinking, Swearing, Cursing, and talking to his Visitants.' For all his
bragging, drink alone preserved his courage: 'he was very restless in the
Condemned Hole,' though 'he gave little or no attention to the condemned
Sermon which the purblind Ordinary preached before him,' and which was, in
Fielding's immortal phrase, 'unto the Greeks foolishness.' But in the
moment of death his distinction returned to him. He tried, and failed, to
kill himself; and his progress to the nubbing cheat was a triumph of
execration. He reached Tyburn through a howling mob, and died to a yell of
universal joy.
The Ordinary has left a record so precious and so lying, that it must
needs be quoted at length. The great Thief-Catcher's confession is a
masterpiece of comfort, and is so far removed from the truth as completely
to justify Fielding's incomparable creation. 'Finding there was no room
for mercy (and how could I expect mercy, who never showed any)'—thus
does the devil dodger dishonour our Jonathan's memory!—'as soon as I
came into the Condemned Hole, I began to think of making a preparation for
my soul. . . . To part with my wife, my dear Molly, is so great an
Affliction to me, that it touches me to the Quick, and is like Daggers
entering into my Heart.' How tame the Ordinary's falsehood to the
brilliant invention of Fielding, who makes Jonathan kick his Tishy in the
very shadow of the Tree! And the Reverend Gentleman gains in unction as he
goes: 'In the Cart they all kneeled down to prayers and seemed very
penitent; the Ordinary used all the means imaginable to make them think of
another World, and after singing a penitential Psalm, they cry'd Lord
Jesus Christ receive our Souls, the cart drew away and they were all
turned off. This is as good an account as can be given by me.' Poor
Ordinary! If he was modest, he was also untruthful, and you are certain
that it was not thus the hero met his death.
Even had Fielding never written his masterpiece, Jonathan Wild would still
have been surnamed 'The Great.' For scarce a chap-book appeared in the
year of Jonathan's death that did not expose the only right and true view
of his character. 'His business,' says one hack of prison literature, 'at
all times was to put a false gloss upon things, and to make fools of
mankind.' Another precisely formulates the theory of greatness insisted
upon by Fielding with so lavish an irony and so masterly a wit. While it
is certain that The History of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild is as noble a
piece of irony as literature can show, while for the qualities of wit and
candour it is equal to its motive, it is likewise true that therein you
meet the indubitable Jonathan Wild. It is an entertainment to compare the
chap-books of the time with the reasoned, finished work of art: not in any
spirit of pedantry—since accuracy in these matters is of small
account, but with intent to show how doubly fortunate Fielding was in his
genius and in his material. Of course the writer rejoiced in the aid of
imagination and eloquence; of course he embellished his picture with such
inspirations as Miss Laetitia and the Count; of course he preserves from
the first page to the last the highest level of unrivalled irony. But the
sketch was there before him, and a lawyer's clerk had treated Jonathan in
a vein of heroism within a few weeks of his death. And since a plain
statement is never so true as fiction, Fielding's romance is still more
credible, still convinces with an easier effort, than the serious and
pedestrian records of contemporaries. Nor can you return to its pages
without realising that, so far from being 'the evolution of a purely
intellectual conception,' Jonathan Wild is a magnificently idealised and
ironical portrait of a great man.
