FOUR
The laws are turnstiles; only made to stop people who walk on foot, and not to interrupt those who drive through them in their coaches.
(Henry Fielding, Rape upon Rape, 1729)
A justice and his clerk is now little more than a blind man and his dog. The profound ignorance of the former, together with the canine impudence and rapacity of the latter, will but rarely be found wanting. The justice is as much dependent on his clerk for superior insight and guidance as the blind fellow is on his cur. Add to this that the offer of a crust will secure the conductors of either to drag their masters into a kennel.
(William Shenstone, poet and essayist, 1794, on the conduct of magistrates’ courts at the time)
MEDIEVAL ENGLAND
In 1188, when Newgate prison first appears in the records, the system for identifying and detaining criminals owed much to the practices of Anglo-Saxon England. All males aged 12 or over, except noblemen, their servants and clergyman, were members of a tithing or group of ten families headed by a tithingman or chief pledge, whose office, after the Norman conquest, developed into that of parish constable. Each member of the group was responsible for identifying and apprehending any other member who had committed a crime. The tithings were themselves collected into hundreds. Twice a year, at each hundred, the king’s officer, the Sheriff of the county, would hold a ‘view of frankpledge’ at which he would check that each man was correctly allocated to a tithing and would then preside while each tithingman gave an account of the misdeeds of members of his tithing. Following the Assize of Clarendon (1166) presentations involving serious crimes were made to a grand jury whose task was to decide whether there was enough evidence for the case to proceed to a trial, which might take place before a local baronial court or, from the time of Henry II, before the king’s justices.1 This arrangement continued until 1933 when grand juries were abolished by the Lord Chancellor, Lord Birkenhead and the prima facie case was made instead to magistrates. (Grand juries are still used for their original purpose in the United States of America.) Presentation of less serious matters, such as failure to serve in parish offices or to maintain the highways, were made to Justices of the Peace in petty sessions. In this way groups of citizens policed their own communities, though it was supplemented by the process of ‘hue and cry’. This could be invoked by the Sheriff under his ‘posse comitatus’ (literally power of the county, the origin of the term ‘Sheriff’s posse’) whereby the Sheriff was authorised to call upon his fellow citizens to pursue and detain a fleeing felon. The Sheriff was also responsible for ensuring that gaols were built to hold prisoners awaiting trial and that proper provision was made for holding the king’s courts. From the late twelfth century the work of the Sheriff was supplemented by Keepers of the Peace, later known as Justices of the Peace from the Act of that name passed in 1361. Their task was to identify, arrest, try and sentence people whom they knew to be ne’er-do-wells, particularly vagabonds. Their role thus combined the offices of policeman, judge and jury for minor offences not tried by the royal courts.
Separate arrangements were made for certain localities, among them London, where the fragmented and mobile nature of the population, including many foreign merchants, made tithings and hundreds hard to manage. In 1285 statutes created six watchmen for each of the City’s twenty-four wards and required each Alderman to ‘make diligent Enquiry’ into crimes committed in his ward. The Mayor, Sheriffs and Aldermen were responsible for presenting offenders to the royal courts or, in the case of minor offences, for trying and sentencing them under their own authority. The gates of the City were to be closed between sunset and sunrise each day. Offenders included suspicious people (generally speaking, strangers) who were found walking in the City after the curfew had been sounded at St Martin’s Le Grand. During the Tudor period London saw the creation of the post of Provost Marshal, later known as City Marshal. This officer was responsible for policing the City of London and was, in effect, the predecessor of the Commissioner of the City of London Police Force which, to this day, remains independent of the Metropolitan Police.
In 1663 a further Act created the City watchmen known as ‘Charleys’ after the monarch, Charles II, who was on the throne at the time. Each ward would have a constable responsible for his ward with authority over the Charleys. The constables were technically volunteers, though many of them accepted the post with the greatest reluctance and some of them paid substitutes to do the work for them. In 1598 the men of the Hundred of Cranbrook, in Kent, were indicted at the assizes for electing as constable William Sheafe whom they knew to be ‘an infirm man incapable of discharging the office’.2 Most constables received no payment beyond some share of fines – a practice which itself encouraged corruption. The Charleys themselves, whose job was mostly concerned with patrolling the streets during the hours of darkness, were much derided. They were ill-paid and often the products of the workhouse, taking the post of watchman to escape those grim institutions. Each was equipped with a cloak, a lantern, a staff and a wooden rattle to summon help in the unlikely event of his attempting to apprehend a criminal. A post resembling a sentry box was also provided. In Westminster and other parishes outside the Square Mile the service they offered improved after 1735. From that date a series of Night Watch Acts enabled local vestries to levy rates for the purpose of increasing the numbers and quality of the watchmen. The parishes of St James and Marylebone were particularly noted for the efficiency of their watchmen whom they recruited from the ranks of the old soldiers at the Chelsea Hospital. These grizzled veterans ensured that casual thieves plied their trade elsewhere in the capital.
In addition to these measures, attempts were made to persuade criminals to betray their accomplices through announcements which were placed in the press to the effect that ‘those among the suspected who will deliver themselves up to justice, constitute themselves prisoners, denounce their accomplices and give evidence against them will be pardoned’.3 A further incentive to informants was the offer of a Tyburn Ticket, which exempted the holder from parish offices (including that of constable). Tyburn Tickets could themselves be sold to those unfortunate enough to be elected to such offices. These informants offered the beginnings of a remedy against gangs and others who violated the King’s peace, but there was no effective process by which prosecutions could be raised against criminals who had robbed or otherwise injured private citizens. In such cases the injured party had to incur the risks and costs of bringing a prosecution himself so the late seventeenth century witnessed the growth of associations for the prosecution of felons. Those who subscribed to these organisations could call upon them to institute proceedings against offenders: in effect they were insurance policies. In 1767 the London Society for Prosecuting Felons, Forgers etc. was formed with the advice of Sir John Fielding who, with his half-brother Henry, was responsible for the next major development in the process of policing London, a development associated with their work at Bow Street Magistrates’ Court in Covent Garden. In the earlier years of the eighteenth century less orthodox methods of catching criminals were employed.
THE CAREER OF JONATHAN WILD
The absence of an effective system for identifying and catching criminals left a gap in the judicial system which was more acute after the end of the War of Spanish Succession in 1714. Following the Peace of Utrecht of that year, the demobilisation of Marlborough’s armies released tens of thousands of former soldiers with no means of support except as footpads (muggers) or highwaymen. Charles Hitchin, City Under-Marshal, told the Court of Aldermen at this time that he knew of 2,000 citizens who lived by thieving4 and the Prime Minister, Robert Walpole, complained that ‘one is forced to travel, even at noon, as if one is going into battle’. One of the consequences of this outbreak of lawlessness was the creation of the Bloody Code (see Chapter Three), but another was the emergence of the ‘thief-taker’ of whom the most notorious was Jonathan Wild. He made such a deep and unfavourable impression upon Henry Fielding that the author wrote an account of his career, History of the Life of Jonathan Wild the Great, published in 1775. ‘Great’ in this context was ironically defined by Fielding as ‘greatness consists in bringing all manner of mischief on mankind and goodness in removing it from them’ – a reference to Wild’s technique of organising robberies and then profiting from reward money when the stolen goods were returned.
Jonathan Wild was born in Wolverhampton in about 1689 and apprenticed to a buckle-maker. He left his employment and appears also to have abandoned his wife and child, in order to go to London where he soon ran into debt and was imprisoned. This experience introduced him to the criminal underworld and, in particular, to one Mary Milliner, who was described as ‘a common street-walker’. After his release Wild took a house near St Giles’, Cripplegate, on the present site of the Barbican, and set himself up as an intermediary between the victims and culprits of crime. He had realised that thieves could obtain only a fraction of the value of the property they sold from pawnbrokers and others who acted as fences, whereas the original owners were often prepared to pay more for their return. Upon learning, from one of his underworld contacts, that an item of value had been stolen, Wild would approach the victim, inform him that an ‘honest broker’ of his acquaintance had come into possession of such an item, and offer to put them in touch with each other ‘provided that nobody is brought into trouble and the broker has something in consideration of his care’.5 The property having been returned to its grateful owner, Wild then collected a share of the spoils from the ‘honest broker’. In this way he ensured that at no stage in the transaction did he either own the stolen merchandise or collect money directly from the victim. His hands were thereby kept clean.
As his reputation grew Jonathan Wild became bolder. He began to advertise his services and invited victims of crime to visit him in his ‘Office for the Recovery of Lost and Stolen Property’ and on occasion placed advertisements in newspapers such as the following in the Daily Courant on 20 May 1714:
Lost on 19 March last, out of a Compting House in Durham Court, a Day Book, of no use to anyone but the owner … Whoever will bring them to Mr Jonathan Wild over against Cripplegate Church shall have a Guinea Reward and no Questions asked.6
CHARLES HITCHIN AND THE SODOMITISH ACADEMY
Wild’s success soon attracted the attention of another who was engaged in the same dubious trade. Charles Hitchin, referred to above, was the City Under-Marshal, an office which Hitchin had purchased in 1712 for £700 with his wife’s dowry. This investment he recovered by restoring stolen property to its owners, as Wild was doing, and also by claiming reward money for providing evidence under the Highwaymen Act of 1699, which offered £40 for information which led to a conviction. Hitchin complained to Wild that the latter was charging too little commission for his services, thereby undercutting the market, so the two briefly went into partnership in 1713. There was, however, no honour among these thieves who soon fell out over the spoils. Hitchin published a pamphlet describing Wild as ‘king of the gypsies, king among the thieves and lying-master-general of England’, to which Wild replied with an even more offensive publication entitled ‘An Answer to a Late Insolent Libel with a Diverting Scene of a Sodomitish Academy’, drawing attention to the Under-Marshal’s deviant sexual tastes. The ‘academy’ concerned was located in Holborn and was kept by a madam whose name appears genuinely to have been Mother Clap.
After this dispute the two men went their separate ways, but the brief collaboration may have given Wild the idea of profiting from his underworld contacts in two ways: by returning stolen property and by claiming reward money for betraying the thieves who were working for him. Thus, in 1714 Wild secured the arrest of a group of thieves who had broken into the Banqueting House in Whitehall. The first member of the gang, Elizabeth Chance, was hanged and Wild then employed a technique from which he was to profit on many occasions: persuading other gang members to inform on one another in the hope of escaping the noose themselves while helping Wild to collect rewards. When necessary, Wild could himself direct his associates to carry out thefts from which reward money could later be earned. He acquired a semi-official status at this time, calling himself Thief-taker General and executing writs, as in 1719 when the Lord Chief Justice issued him with a warrant for the arrest of two highwaymen – an enterprise which required him to travel as far as Oxfordshire to make the arrests. A further source of profit at this time was a smuggling operation between the east coast and the Low Countries through which he disposed of unclaimed ‘lost property’ in exchange for contraband goods. Jonathan Wild could by this time be described as a prosperous businessman. One authority has estimated that Wild’s earnings amounted to £25,000 – an unimaginably large sum for the period.7
HOSTILITY AND CONVICTION
By 1715 Wild was sufficiently well-to-do to be able to move to premises belonging to a Mrs Seagoe opposite the Old Bailey. His thief-taking business now began to overshadow his property recovery enterprise, but he also offered advice to criminals awaiting trial, advising them how to plead and helping them to establish alibis in return for payment or future service – an unorthodox version of a duty solicitor.8 However, when it was more profitable to turn in the criminals he did not hesitate to become a guardian of the law. In the early 1720s he claimed to have broken up four London gangs and such was his reputation among the criminal community that he began to surround himself with bodyguards as well as recruiting his own people to assist him in making arrests and establishing a network of offices in cities and ports beyond London – something approaching a national enterprise. As his employees, he particularly favoured criminals who had returned, illegally, from transportation. These people, if found by the authorities, were liable to be hanged, which ensured their loyalty to Wild and further guaranteed that they would not give evidence against him in the event of his being prosecuted. He helped to secure the arrest of Jack Sheppard whose associate, Joseph ‘Blueskin’ Blake, earned himself much popularity by attempting to cut off Wild’s head and throw it to the crowds outside the Old Bailey. This venture failed, but it was a sign of the hostility that Wild’s activities had aroused – a hostility that would eventually cost him his life.
Wild was eventually arrested in February 1725 by the High Constable of Holborn. His arrest appears to have arisen from a falling-out among thieves. He was charged with, among other crimes, heading a ‘corporation of thieves’ and acting as an intermediary to dispose of stolen goods. The most telling indictment was that:9
He has often sold human blood, by procuring false evidence to swear persons into facts they were not guilty of, sometimes to prevent them being evidence against himself and at other times for the sake of the great reward given by the Government.
One of those who gave evidence against him was William Field, a friend of the Under-Marshal Charles Hitchin whom Wild had insulted. The web of deceit and betrayal that characterised the criminal justice system is further illustrated by the fact that William Field had, the previous year, betrayed Jack Sheppard to Wild.10 On the morning of his trial at the Old Bailey Wild distributed a list of seventy-five criminals who had been hanged or transported as a result of his activities, Jack Sheppard being one of them. When this failed to prevent his conviction Wild wrote to the Earl of Dartmouth pleading for him to intervene with George I for a reprieve in view of his work as a thief-taker and when that failed he addressed a petition directly to the King from his quarters in Newgate:
I do firmly resolve to relinquish my wicked Ways and to detest all such who persevere therein, as a Testimony of which I have a List ready to show to whom such Your Majesty shall appoint to see it.
This craven attempt to save his own skin by betraying yet more of his associates was unsuccessful, as was his final despairing attempt to escape the gallows by swallowing a large quantity of laudanum, an opium-based painkiller which normally, in a large dose, would bring about death or insensibility. In Wild’s case the size of the dose, on an empty stomach, appears to have made him sick so the laudanum did not have the desired effect. Henry Fielding, in his fictional account, observed that ‘the fruit of hemp seed [the rope] and not the spirit of poppy seed [laudanum] was to overcome him’. Wild therefore had to face the fury of the Tyburn mob while fully conscious.
Even by the standards of the time, Wild’s last journey, from Newgate to Tyburn, on 24 May 1725, was witnessed by a particularly merciless crowd who remembered his role in the demise of the popular hero Jack Sheppard. Sheppard himself, referring to Wild and his like, had declared that, ‘They hang by proxy while we do it fairly in person’.11 Wild’s dual role as grass and bent copper was no more popular then than later and an enterprising publisher printed a mock invitation to the event:
To all the Thieves, Whores, Pickpockets,
Family felons etc. in Great Britain & Ireland.
Gentlemen and Ladies you are hereby
desired to accompany your worthy Friend
the pious Mr J……. W… from his
seat at Whittington’s College to the Triple
Tree where he’s to make his last exit.
An account published in Mist’s Weekly Journal four days after the event stated that, ‘In all that numerous crowd there was not one pitying eye to be found, or compassionate word heard; but on the contrary all the way he went nothing but hollowing and huzzas, as if it had been a triumph, particularly when he was turned off [hanged]’. His corpse was removed and sent to the Royal College of Surgeons where the skeleton remains in the Hunterian Museum.
Jonathan Wild is not a character who attracts sympathy, but it is worth reflecting on the fact that, following the death of this rather unsatisfactory policeman, there was a significant drop in the number of thieves brought to justice. He combined the offices of policeman, informant, solicitor and pioneer in the field of organised crime. More than twenty years passed before the Fielding brothers introduced a more satisfactory method of detecting criminals.
HENRY FIELDING
In his early years, Henry Fielding (1707–54) gave no reason to suppose that he would become the most celebrated magistrate ever to occupy the famous Bow Street Magistrates’ Court. Indeed it seemed more likely that any appearance in a magistrates’ court was likely to be in the dock rather than on the bench. He was born at Sharpham Park, near Glastonbury in Somerset, in 1707. His mother, Sarah Gould, was descended from prosperous gentry, her father serving as a judge of the King’s Bench. Henry’s father Edmund (who spelt his name Feilding) was a professional soldier who served in the Duke of Marlborough’s campaigns against Louis XIV and eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant-general. Edmund was descended from earls, dukes, gamblers and a bigamist.12 His younger sister Sarah (1710–68) was born when Henry was 3 years old. She became a notable author herself and a close friend of Henry’s rival and fellow novelist Samuel Richardson.
In 1718, when Henry was 11, his mother died and his father sent him to Eton where he was a contemporary of William Pitt the Elder, George Lyttleton and Thomas Arne, all of whom were to play some part in his later life. While he was at Eton Henry’s father remarried, his new bride being a Catholic. The union produced Henry Fielding’s half-brother John who, though blind in later life, joined Henry on the Bow Street bench and continued the work of reforming the magistracy which was begun by Henry. The remarriage also provoked a family feud when Henry’s maternal grandmother, Lady Gould, accused her son-in-law of many heinous acts, including bringing Henry up as a papist and giving him small beer instead of good strong ale. The case dragged on for years in the Chancery Court and Lady Gould eventually gained custody.
In 1725, upon leaving Eton, Henry’s next experience of the law occurred when he attempted to abduct an heiress named Sarah Andrew. He ran away with her to Lyme Regis, was beaten up by toughs hired for the purpose by the girl’s enraged guardian and taken before the mayor of the town who, as the local magistrate, bound him over to keep the peace.13 This early experience of the judiciary may help to account for the hostility that he showed towards it in his literary works. Henry then made his way to London and soon started to make a name for himself as a playwright. The first play, Love in Several Masques, based on the Lyme Regis escapade, was performed in 1728 at Drury Lane. This was followed by a period of seventeen months studying humane letters (classics) at the University of Leiden in the Netherlands, after which he returned to London and resumed his career as a dramatist.
The following year saw the production of Fielding’s Rape upon Rape: or the Justice Caught in his own Trap, the first of more than a score of biting satires on contemporary life, politics and the legal system which attracted the attention, and the wrath, of the government headed by Sir Robert Walpole, Britain’s first Prime Minister. The play contains the character of Justice Squeezum, a notably corrupt magistrate with a taste for young prostitutes to whom he offered ‘protection’ in return for their favours. Justice Squeezum also earned a good living by despatching constables to arrest honest citizens and then extorting from them bail release fees. This was a common practice at the time among justices who regarded their status as an opportunity to earn a dishonest living, the bail release fee amounting to 1s.14 Act II of the play contains the notable advice that ‘the laws are turnstiles; only made to stop people who walk on foot, and not to interrupt those who drive through them in their coaches’.15 In 1730 a performance was raided by constables in a crude attempt at censorship by Walpole’s government. Fielding’s barbs were aimed not only at Justices of the Peace, but at all levels of the legal profession. In a later play, Don Quixote, one character explains that ‘twelve lawyers make not one honest man’.
POLITICAL SATIRE IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY
At this time political satire was a marked feature of the London Theatre thanks to the works of a group of Tory writers who called themselves the Scriblerus Club, or Scriblerians, and mounted attacks on Walpole’s long period of office (1721–42) under the early Hanoverians. The group included Alexander Pope, Jonathan Swift, William Congreve and John Gay. Walpole was held to represent the Whig interests of great landowners, concerned above all with maintaining peace so that they could devote themselves to making money and keeping taxes low. In 1726, Gulliver’s Travels had satirised the world of Hanoverian politics while John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, produced at the Covent Garden Playhouse in 1728, compared Walpole with the notorious Jonathan Wild himself.16 In 1733 the government had prosecuted John Harper, proprietor of the Haymarket Theatre, under the 1714 Vagrancy Act, taking advantage of the fact that the Act enabled actors to be classed as vagrants. The defence argued that, as the freeholder of a substantial property, the theatre, Harper was clearly not a vagrant. They further argued that he was unsuitable for the normal penalty for vagrancy, hard labour, because ‘he being so corpulent, it is not possible for him either to labour, or to wander a great deal’.17In 1737 Walpole passed the Theatrical Licensing Act, which made the Lord Chamberlain responsible for issuing licences to theatres and for licensing plays before they could be staged. The office survived until 1968, but its immediate effect was to end Fielding’s career as a playwright. He evaded the regulations for a while by running a puppet theatre in Panton Street, Haymarket, to which admission was free, the profits coming from the sale of tea, coffee and chocolate.
The year 1742 was a very important one for Henry Fielding. In February the government of Walpole fell and Fielding found himself faced with an administration to which he was more sympathetic and which soon came to include his Eton friends George Lyttleton and William Pitt. Within weeks of the change of government there appeared Fielding’s novel Joseph Andrews. Less well known than the later Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews is similar in that it tells the story of two ingenuous people undertaking a journey in which they are treated with disdain by the prosperous and offered selfless help by those worse off than themselves. It contains the notably unsympathetic character Lady Booby, who is advised to have an irritating critic committed to prison on the order of a compliant magistrate. She is reassured that in gaol the critic will be ‘either starved or ate up by vermin in a month’s time’. Fielding sold the copyright to the publisher for £183 and thus failed to obtain the full benefit from a novel which sold 6,500 copies in its first year and was translated into French shortly afterwards. Later the same year he resumed his role as a playwright with a one-act ballad, Miss Lucy in Town, written in collaboration with Fielding’s friend the actor David Garrick and Thomas Arne, better known as the composer of Rule Britannia. Another brush with the law occurred the same year when Fielding had judgment entered against him in the Court of Common Pleas in respect of a debt of £200 incurred by a friend of Fielding for which he had acted as guarantor. The debt was paid by a man named Ralph Allen whom Fielding had befriended. Allen had made a fortune from managing and developing the postal service and for many years until Fielding’s death the writer was a guest at Allen’s house near Bath.
BONNIE PRINCE CHARLIE AND THE 45 REBELLION
In 1745 the country was alarmed by Bonnie Prince Charlie’s attempt to overthrow the Hanoverian monarchy. Fielding’s support for the government was expressed in his periodical, The True Patriot, which supported in the struggle the administrations which succeeded Walpole’s. It included lurid accounts of the consequences of a Jacobite victory, with Protestants burned at the stake, the heroic Admiral Vernon executed at Tyburn and bishoprics given to Jesuits. Fielding also applauded the young Middle Temple lawyers for forming a militia to resist the Jacobites, Fielding himself being unable to join their ranks because of gout from which he now suffered continuously.
In 1748 Fielding’s most celebrated novel, Tom Jones, was published with its more sympathetic, if eccentric magistrate in the form of the erratic squire Western. Western however, did not altogether escape Fielding’s strictures. At one point in the novel the squire is dissuaded from sending his sister’s maid to prison for cheek when his clerk reminds him that he ‘already had two informations [i.e. complaints] exhibited against him in the King’s Bench’. Ten thousand copies were sold in the first nine months after publication and it was soon translated into French, German and Dutch. Fielding, always short of cash, sold the copyright for £600. The publisher made at least ten times that figure. Along with Joseph Andrews and Fielding’s later novel Amelia (1751), it set the pattern for plot, character and contemporary references that influenced later novels in England and, later, those of Continental writers.
COVENT GARDEN
Fielding’s support for the government did not pass unrewarded. In 1747 he was appointed Justice of the Peace on the Middlesex Bench, followed by appointment to the Westminster Bench a year later. He became its chairman shortly afterwards and adopted the title ‘first magistrate for Westminster’. The Middlesex and Westminster benches administered justice throughout much of the Metropolis north of the Thames outside the square mile of the City of London itself, which remained the province of the Lord Mayor. In 1748 Fielding moved into a house in Bow Street, Covent Garden, which was to become the most celebrated magistrates’ court in the world. Fielding was already familiar with the area because of the large number of theatres it contained. Fielding’s new home had previously belonged to Thomas De Veil (1689–1746), a soldier of fortune of French ancestry who had served in Marlborough’s armies and been appointed Justice of the Peace for Middlesex and Westminster in 1729. At this time there was much corruption among Middlesex justices, partly because it was difficult to find people of suitable status and quality to do the work. It therefore attracted ‘basket justices’ and ‘trading justices’ like Fielding’s creation Squeezum. The expression ‘basket justices’ referred to their habit of carrying baskets for the gifts they solicited. The phrase ‘trading justice’ indicated the attitude which inspired two Justices of the Peace of the time to open a grocer’s shop in the red-light district of Covent Garden from which they supplied provisions at exorbitant prices to brothel-keepers in return for turning a blind eye to their activities. Another justice, known as Sax, recently released from a debtors’ prison, was observed hanging around alehouses in Wapping, peddling affidavits for cash. In 1796 Grose’sDictionary of Vulgar Terms defined trading justices as ‘broken mechanics, discharged footmen and other low fellows smuggled into the Commission of the Peace who subsist by fomenting disputes, granting warrants and otherwise retailing justice’. Jonathan Swift suggested that much crime was actually, by predatory magistrates. In his essay A Project for the Advancement of Religion and the Reformation of Manners (1709) he had written:18
Such men are often put into the Commission of the Peace whose interest it is that virtue should be utterly banished from among us; who maintain, or at least enrich, themselves by encouraging the grossest Immoralities; to whom all the Bawds of the Ward pay Contribution for Shelter and Protection from the Laws. Thus these worthy Magistrates, instead of lessening Enormities, are the occasion of just twice as much Debauchery as there would be without them. For Infamous Women are forced upon doubling their work and Industry to answer double charges of paying the Justice and supporting themselves.
CORRUPTION
There was no shortage of evidence to support such charges of corruption. A single magistrate at this time was authorised to levy a fine of 1s upon anyone he heard uttering an oath. The money was supposed to be paid into the funds for poor relief, but in 1719 the Westminster Bench uncovered the case of one magistrate who had levied such fines to a value of 30s and pocketed the proceeds.19
The poet William Shenstone commented in the late eighteenth century on the corrupt relationship between magistrates and their clerks, or legal advisers:
A justice and his clerk is now little more than a blind man and his dog. The profound ignorance of the former, together with the canine impudence and rapacity of the latter, will but rarely be found wanting. The justice is as much dependent on his clerk for superior insight and guidance as the blind fellow is on his cur. Add to this that the offer of a crust will secure the conductors of either to drag their masters into a kennel.
One justice, faced with the prospect of a debtors’ prison, had himself appointed Envoy Extraordinary to the Kingdom of Bavaria so that he could claim diplomatic immunity.20 The expression ‘as corrupt as a Middlesex Justice’ was recorded as common usage by one eighteenth-century writer.21 The Gentleman’s Magazine published a letter describing the methods employed by one trading justice at this time:22
I have known a Trading Justice boast that he grants no less than forty warrants a week, makes them all special that the fees may be double and contrives to bind the parties over to the [Quarter] Sessions for the sake of unbinding them again as an Act of Grace, taking only ten shillings for his trouble.
Other magistrates showed zeal of a different kind. The poor laws of the eighteenth century made parishes responsible for the upkeep of resident paupers, the poor rate being levied by the magistrates. Magistrates therefore tried to ensure that paupers were either excluded altogether from the parishes for which they were responsible or were returned to their places of birth or residence. In 1718, a clergyman of charitable disposition at Chislehurst, in Kent, invited some pauper children from London to his church, preached a sermon for them and invited the congregation to contribute to a collection for the children. At this point two magistrates, fearing that the children would become a permanent charge upon the parish, intervened to try to prevent the collection from being taken. Having failed they then attempted to seize the collection plate, engaged in fisticuffs and ordered the congregation ‘to disperse, under pain of being guilty of a riot’. In the words of Daniel Defoe, who chronicled the unhappy incident, ‘if there was a riot, it was occasioned by the two Justices’.23
A flattering contemporary account of De Veil’s life, possibly written by De Veil himself, described such characters as:24
Low, needy and mercenary fools who subsist on their commissions. They are hated and dreaded by the common people who fancy they have greater powers than they really have … they are as much afraid of being carried before his worship as the people ofParis fear the Bastille or the inhabitants of Lisbon the Inquisition [his italics].
De Veil established his office in Bow Street in 1740 on the site of the former magistrates’ court where a plaque records the fact that he was the first holder of the office of Chief Metropolitan Magistrate. In 1738 he had been appointed to the sinecure of Inspector General of Imports and Exports at a salary of £500 with £250 for his clerk, thus placing his office on a permanent basis as long as he lived and making him, in effect, the first stipendiary (professional, paid) magistrate. He enjoyed such success in reducing corruption and improving standards of justice that he attracted assassins. The first attempt on his life occurred in 1734 when he was stabbed by a fellow Justice of the Peace, named Webster, whom De Veil had reported to the Lord Chancellor for corruption. For this injury De Veil received ‘compensation’ of £250 from the Secret Service fund, a source which was to be used repeatedly over the following years. The second attempt on his life occurred the following year when a gang of robbers whom he had been attempting to bring to justice was convicted of attempting to murder him. One of them was a solicitor.
His unpopularity was not confined to the criminal classes. He was also responsible for the brutal suppression of a strike by Covent Garden footmen who were complaining about their pay and conditions of service. He was knighted for his services as a magistrate in 1744. De Veil’s record was not without blemish. A contemporary account suggested that he was ‘friendly’ to young prostitutes whom he ‘interviewed’ in a private closet.25 He died a year before Henry Fielding took over as chief magistrate at Bow Street. His body was removed from his Bow Street home early in the morning to escape the attention of his many enemies.
HENRY FIELDING IN BOW STREET
De Veil had made a start, but in 1748, when Fielding moved into De Veil’s former house, close to the site of the present magistrates’ court, corruption was still rife. On Clerkenwell Green ‘Justice Shops’ run by trading justices dispensed alehouse licences, affidavits, groceries and building materials. They employed ‘barkers’ to solicit business for them, with some success. The Covent Garden area itself was noted for its population of prostitutes and thieves. One of the most enterprising, the pickpocket Mary Young, had a pair of false hands and arms which she folded across her lap while sitting in pews. Her real hands were used to relieve her neighbours of their possessions.26 The area also contained many actors with whom Fielding was familiar through his work as a playwright, these being regarded by the government as little better than the criminals. The warren-like character of the area made it easy for criminals to vanish from the scenes of their crimes. In Fielding’s words ‘The whole city appears as a vast wood or forest in which the thief may hide in as great security as wild beasts do in Arabia and Africa.’27
When he took office Fielding reviewed the resources at his disposal for law enforcement. The most numerous were the 300 Charleys paid 1s a night to patrol the streets. Fielding described them as ‘poor old decrepit people’. Then there were the constables, referred to above: reluctant volunteers who were responsible for overseeing the Charleys. Fielding continued for a time to make use of the heirs of Jonathan Wild, thief-takers such as the notorious McDaniel gang who earned handsome rewards by setting up robberies and then claiming rewards for recovering property and incriminating culprits. In 1753, when another dispute among thieves resulted in murder the ringleader, Stephen McDaniel was given the lenient sentence of seven years’ imprisonment and to be pilloried twice. He was, however, spared the worst consequences of the pillory when he was protected by the keeper of Newgate and a City sheriff, which suggests a degree of official connivance at his activities.28
Fielding inherited eighty constables, of whom he thought he could trust six. One of these was Saunders Welch, who had been born in the workhouse in Aylesbury in 1710 and had become a prosperous grocer in Holborn and friend of Dr Samuel Johnson. In 1746 he became High Constable of Holborn, an office which required him to accompany criminals to the gallows in Tyburn. He shared Fielding’s views on the measures necessary to restore order and wrote a number of pamphlets on the causes of crime and measures to prevent or detect them. They bore portentous titles such as A Letter upon the Subject of Robbers, Causes and Prevention of Crime (1753), but as a former resident of the workhouse he was not unsympathetic to the problems of the poor. At a dinner with Dr Samuel Johnson and the gardener Capability Brown in October 1773 Boswell records Welch as upbraiding his fellow guests for suggesting that begging was a lucrative occupation. He told them that more than 1,000 died of hunger each year in the capital and that ‘what we are told about the great sums got by begging is not true: the trade is overstocked’, a comment that still resonates two centuries later.29 Fielding described Welch as ‘one of the best officers who was ever concerned in the execution of justice’. Welch himself became a magistrate in 1755.
Welch wrote a booklet entitled Observations on the Office of Constable with Cautions for the Safe Execution of that Duty etc., which is an instruction manual for those entering upon this hazardous task. Much of it would make a modern constable smile. The introduction explains that his purpose is ‘to collect what may be useful for a body of men who perform a very troublesome task and to save them, if possible, from those enemies to their power; I mean low solicitors who are for ever preying upon their ignorance or rashness’. Having thus declared his position vis-à-vis the legal profession, he advises his constables against becoming involved in ‘ale house quarrels’ and to exercise great care if asked to execute a warrant against ‘a person of fashion’. Discretion suggests that such warrants should be returned to the magistrate. On the other hand swearing invoked a penalty of 5s for a gentleman, but only 1s for a labourer. Traffic control was a concern, particularly ‘Carmen riding upon their carts and the brickmakers in their wagons going full tilt in the streets of this town’, the penalty for each being 10s. He inveighed against ‘the barbarous custom of cock-throwing’ (?!) and explained that ‘a different conduct is necessary’ when intervening in quarrels among ‘neighbours of credit and fortune’ than when dealing with similar disputes among vagabonds. Above all, ‘let your demeanour to the magistrates in general be respectful’.30
ORIGINS OF THE BOW STREET RUNNERS
The six trustworthy constables, led by Welch, formed the core of Fielding’s band of thief-takers who were later to develop into the famous Bow Street Runners, predecessors of the Metropolitan Police. Welch and his band were paid from reward money obtained from recovering property and gaining convictions. Welch himself became a Justice of the Peace in 1755. In Fielding’s own words, ‘I had the most eager desire of demolishing gangs of villains and cut-throats, so I had a set of thief-takers enlisted in my service, all men known, approved, faithful and intrepid.’
Fielding himself was paid, like De Veil before him, from the Secret Service fund and was thus relieved of the temptation to appropriate bribes and fines as many of his predecessors had done. The payment was probably £200 a year. In his last work Fielding referred to the income derived by some magistrates from court fees and fines:31
A predecessor of mine used to boast that he made a thousand pounds a year in his office … I had reduced an income of about five hundred pounds a year of the dirtiest money upon earth to little more than three hundred pounds, a considerable proportion of which remained with my clerk.
One of Fielding’s first acts was to invite victims of crime to approach him for redress. In December 1748 he committed for trial a sailor who had been accused of assault and placed an advertisement in the St James’s Evening Post inviting any citizens who had been attacked by sailors to ‘give themselves the trouble of resorting to the Prison in order to view him’. The outcome of this early, if unconventional, example of an ‘identity parade’ is not recorded but one can say with confidence that the unfortunate sailor’s defence counsel would have had no difficulty in finding fault with the process by the standards of later centuries. In February 1749 Fielding inserted an advertisement in the General Advertiser, which proclaimed, ‘All persons who shall for the future suffer by robbers, burglars etc. are desired immediately to bring or send the best description they can to Henry Fielding Esq.,’ at his office in Covent Garden. Three years later he founded the Covent Garden Journal, a weekly publication specifically for this purpose.
In June 1749 two sailors were arrested after wrecking a brothel where, they claimed, they had been robbed. The following day 400 of their fellow mariners rioted in protest, wrecking a pub in the Strand, The Star, and prompting Fielding to call upon troops to assist him. The mob was dispersed from around the smouldering wreckage of The Star and one culprit was hanged. In 1751 Fielding published An Enquiry into the Causes of the Late Increase of Robbers,32 which drew attention to the fact that, since the end of the War of the Austrian Succession in 1748, 54,000 men had been discharged from the army and navy, most of them being now penniless and unemployed. However, he found other, more censorious reasons for lawlessness, including ‘the vast torrent of luxury which of late years hath poured itself into this nation’ citing also the vice of ‘drunkenness, a second consequence of Luxury among the Vulgar’. Fielding’s Enquiry is believed to have inspired the celebrated engraving Gin Lane by his friend William Hogarth, depicting the consequences of drunkenness and vice. Fielding applauded a statute of Henry VIII which prohibited ‘the lower sort of people’ from playing numerous games, including bowls and football. This was a widely held view at the time. A contemporary of Fielding’s and fellow barrister of the Middle Temple, Theodore Barlow, described the measures prescribed by this statute to stop people enjoying themselves.33
Games for Diversion among the lower people tend greatly to make them idle and as such the Laws have provided against them. Every Justice may, from Time to Time, enter into any common House or Place where any are playing at Dice, Cards, Bowls, Quoits, Shove-Groat, Tennis, Football or other unlawful game new Invented, may arrest the Keepers of such places and imprison them.
Fielding particularly disapproved of gaming and on 1 February 1751 sent eighty soldiers, bayonets fixed, to close a gaming house where forty-five people were arrested. One is left wondering how he expected energetic, unemployed ex-military personnel to spend their enforced leisure time. He did have some rather strange ideas for creating jobs. He argued that wages of skilled workers should be kept high to retain their services, while wages for others should be held down to reduce prices. On the other hand, he did not think that runaway servants should be branded on the forehead by order of two magistrates. Fielding argued against the practice of advertising a reward for the return of stolen property, suggesting that this encouraged robberies, and the following year, 1752, the practice was banned. He also believed that minor offenders should have less severe punishments and should, where possible, be kept out of prison so that they could ‘be kept apart from the felons and not sent to Newgate as they are now … the first theft will often prove the last’.
It was at this time that Fielding described Newgate as ‘a prototype of Hell’, reflecting not only his judgement on the suffering inflicted upon its inmates, but also its corrupting influence. Fielding also argued that evidence of previous criminal behaviour should be introduced as evidence at a trial. Both of these views were rejected at the time, though the debate on them has been renewed in the twenty-first century. Finally, he argued against the widespread use of the death sentence, which could be imposed for offences as trivial as the theft of goods worth 5s. He advocated the more widespread use of transportation instead. He particularly opposed public executions since he argued that the spectacles were conducted in an unseemly party atmosphere in which the condemned criminals attracted sympathy and were presented in an almost heroic light.
In August 1753 Fielding was summoned to see the Duke of Newcastle, soon to be Prime Minster, who asked him ‘to demolish the reigning gangs’ who were terrorising the Covent Garden area. Fielding proposed the recruitment of a special force of ex-constables to pursue criminals. He secured an advance of £200 from the Privy Council. Seven of the culprits were captured after a ferocious battle which involved breaking into their den and in December 1753 the Public Advertiser reported that ‘since the apprehending of the Great Gang of Cut-Throats, not a dangerous blow, shot or wound has been given either in roads or streets’. In Fielding’s words ‘this hellish society were almost utterly extirpated’.34
By this time Fielding was exhausted, suffering from, dropsy, gout, asthma, years of overwork and possibly tuberculosis. For two years he had walked with the aid of crutches. In June 1754 he left England for Lisbon, having been advised by his doctor that the milder climate would be good for his health. He chronicled his last days in his Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon,35 which also contains reflections on his life and work. He died on 8 October and is buried in that city.
BLIND JOHN FIELDING
In 1750 his half-brother, John Fielding, had moved into Henry’s house in Bow Street and had been appointed to join him on the Westminster and Middlesex benches. John had been blind since 1740 as a result of an accident sustained while serving in the Royal Navy. In February 1749 he and Henry had founded a business, the Universal Register Office, on the corner of Castle Street and the Strand. It was an employment agency, but it also sold a quack medicine, known as Glastonbury Water, which claimed to be a cure for asthma and tuberculosis, though it did nothing to relieve Henry’s sufferings from those conditions. John’s zeal as a magistrate, if anything, exceeded that of Henry. On 14 October 1754, following the death of his brother, he inserted in the Public Advertiser a notice which invited victims of crime to inform John Fielding who would ‘immediately despatch a set of brave fellows in pursuit, who have long been engaged for such purposes, on a quarter of an hour’s notice. This became a regular feature of John Fielding’s campaign against crime and in 1755 it was followed by his treatise entitled A Plan for Preventing Robberies Within Twenty Miles of London,36 an ambitious scheme involving extensive patrols on foot and on horseback, which did not become fully effective until fifty years after John’s death. In the meantime, he instituted eight-man mounted patrols in Westminster, paying each man 4s a night. Foot patrols were paid 2s 6d a night and led by a Bow Street Runner, as the constables were now called. He paid his regular Bow Street Runners 11s 6d a week and encouraged them to supplement this income with reward money from victims of crime who had recovered their possessions – an orthodox version of Jonathan Wild’s methods. Fielding and Welch continued to be paid from the Secret Service fund. The Runners at this time enjoyed no official status, though Fielding did issue them with batons which carried a gilt crown to symbolise the authority which, strictly, they did not have. It is the ancestor of the police truncheon. The Runners’ finest hour came in 1820 when twelve of them scaled a ladder to enter a hayloft in Cato Street where, with much violence, they arrested the Cato Street conspirators who had planned to murder the government and seize the Bank of England.
John Fielding was particularly unsympathetic to the successors of Jonathan Wild who organised crimes and then informed on the perpetrators. In 1756 four such thief-takers were convicted of inducing others to commit robberies for the purpose of informing on them. They were placed in the pillory where two of them died. Grasses were no more popular in the eighteenth century than they are today. His measures against the unsophisticated criminals who had frequented Covent Garden were so successful that many of them left town for less well-protected communities. In 1772, therefore, he began to publish The Weekly or Extraordinary Pursuit, which sent to country Justices of the Peace details of crimes and of the criminals who had fled from London. This was the first attempt to establish any kind of national intelligence service on criminal activities. Its name was changed to The Hue and Cry and in 1883 responsibility for its publication was assumsed by the Metropolitan Police under the title The Police Gazette. It continues to be published.
The Cato Street Conspiracy: a plot hatched by a group of radicals and named after the Marylebone Street where they met to prepare their plan to murder much of the cabinet at dinner in Grosvenor Square in February 1820. The heads of prominent members of the cabinet would then be impaled on poles and paraded about London, thereby inciting a revolution which would overthrow the government in favour of one committed to the egalitarian ideas of Thomas Spence who, before his death in 1814, had advocated the division of land equally between the population of Great Britain. The leader was a man called Arthur Thistlewood, but the plan was betrayed to the authorities and by the time the conspirators arrived at their rendezvous a Bow Street magistrate, Richard Birnie, was waiting for them with George Ruthven, a government spy and the twelve Bow Street Runners. One of the runners was killed by Thistlewood, but all the conspirators were eventually arrested and two of them agreed to give evidence against the others. According to The Observer, the Cato Street building became an object of macabre interest and was visited by thousands of people. Five of the conspirators, including Thistlewood, were executed at Newgate on 1 May 1820 and five were sentenced to transportation for life.
John Fielding’s work had its lighter moments. In 1764 he received a complaint from the jilted fiancée of the notorious libertine Giacomo Casanova who, the unhappy girl claimed, had promised to marry her before she let him have his wicked way. Fielding interviewed Casanova who spoke flatteringly of the magistrate’s excellent command of Italian. The two parted on amicable terms. Casanova was unpunished (though the brief spell that he spent in Newgate made a deep impression on him)37 and the disappointed girl remained single.
John Fielding was not without vanity. In 1761 he suggested to the Prime Minister, the Duke of Newcastle, that he deserved a knighthood and this was duly awarded. Nor was he wanting in charity. He recognised the problems posed by homeless orphans who had little choice but to descend into criminality. This was the era of Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital and John Fielding made his own contribution to the welfare of these unfortunate waifs. He helped to found a charity which prepared homeless boys for service in the Royal Navy and two homes in Lambeth for girls. The orphan asylum trained girls for domestic service and the Magdalen Hospital was a home for girls who wished to escape their life of prostitution.
Thomas Coram’s Foundling Hospital: Thomas Coram (c. 1668–1751) was a sea captain from Lyme Regis in Dorset who was a pioneer in the development of trade between Britain and the colonies in North America and Canada. He retired with a modest fortune and devoted himself to raising money to provide homes for abandoned children whose small bodies he had seen rotting in the streets near his home on Rotherhithe. He spent eighteen years (1721–39) lobbying and gained the support of both men and women among the aristocracy. Finally, on 17 October 1739, George II granted a charter for ‘an Hospital for the Reception, Maintenance and Proper Education of such cast off Children and Foundlings as may be brought to it’. The Foundling Hospital attracted the support of many prominent citizens, including painters who donated works to raise funds, notably William Hogarth, Joshua Reynolds, Godfrey Kneller and Thomas Gainsborough. Handel gave an annual performance of The Messiah for the same purpose. The hospital acquired premises in Coram Fields, Holborn (close to the later site of Great Ormond Street Hospital) where mothers could leave their unwanted children in a basket. The Foundling Hospital moved to Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire in 1935 and remained in use until 1951 when the practice of fostering replaced the need for such a home. The Berkhamsted building is now Ashlyns School and the original Holborn site is the home of the Foundling Museum and Coram Fields, the only park in London which an adult may not enter unless accompanied by a child. The Thomas Coram Foundation remains active in child welfare work.
THE AFTERMATH
A severe test of the peacekeeping system arose in 1780. As John Fielding lay on his deathbed a renegade aristocrat, Lord George Gordon, led a rioting mob in an orgy of anti-Catholic violence which for eight days in June of that year wrecked property, killed 300 citizens and brought the business of government to a standstill. One of the most prominent casualties was the partially rebuilt Newgate prison which was burned to the ground and looted.38 Order was eventually restored by a full-scale military operation and the rioters were taken before courts martial rather than the civil courts. Much of the blame for the disorder fell unjustly on Fielding’s successor, Sir John Hawkins, who had tried to contain the disturbance with inadequate resources. He was succeeded by William Mainwaring, MP, a banker who returned to the old, corrupt ways, placing his friends and family in positions of influence and profit. The problems of corruption were thus not entirely banished. In 1780, the year of John Fielding’s death, the great Parliamentarian Edmund Burke declared that, ‘The Justices of Middlesex were generally the scum of the earth – carpenters, brickmakers and shoemakers; some of whom were notoriously men of such infamous character that they were unworthy of any employ whatsoever.’ The quotations that open this chapter, written in 1729 and 1794, reflect the continuing corruption in provincial courts.
Henry Fielding is remembered chiefly as an early exponent of the English novel whose depiction of life in eighteenth-century England was as sharp and unflinching as that of his friend and contemporary Hogarth. But Henry and John Fielding had brought about an irrevocable change in public expectations of the office of Justice of the Peace as exercised in London. Never again would corruption be regarded as an inevitable accompaniment of the office. In the words of a recent historian of the period, ‘Between them they made the name Fielding synonymous with peacekeeping for a generation of Londoners’.39 They thereby set a pattern for the administration of justice in London and eventually elsewhere, which survives and flourishes in the twenty-first century.
THE METROPOLITAN POLICE
The work of the Fieldings was both appreciated and perpetuated, but many obstacles remained before a reasonably effective system of policing could be established. In 1785 the government introduced a Bill to extend throughout the metropolis a system of paid commissioners who would supervise a professional police force throughout the capital. The Bill failed because the Lord Mayor objected to any infringement of his jurisdiction within the square mile of the City of London itself and the Justices of the Peace, who had traditionally supervised policing, saw the commissioners as a threat to their authority.40 In 1792 the government managed to secure the passage of a private member’s bill proposing a more restricted measure. The Middlesex Justices Act established throughout the metropolis seven other ‘public offices’ modelled on Bow Street. One of them was south of the river, in Southwark, though the City itself was excluded. Each office had three stipendiary magistrates, paid £400 a year, and six constables, paid 12s a week. Great Marlborough Street Magistrates’ Court survived into the 21st century and is now a luxury hotel. The buildings and personnel were funded by the Home Secretary, but Bow Street continued to be paid for from the Secret Service fund and the Bow Street office remained the personal property of the chief magistrate until this anomaly was removed in 1842. By 1835 there were thirty stipendiary magistrates in London, all barristers, and in the meantime the system had been extended to other communities, Manchester being the first in 1813. The title stipendiary magistrate was retained until the twenty-first century when it was replaced by the designation district judge.
In 1795 a merchant and stipendiary magistrate, Patrick Colquhoun (1745–1820) who was a follower of the Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham (1748–1832) estimated that over 100,000 people in London (more than 15 per cent of the population) lived largely on the proceeds of crime. He wrote a Treatise on the Police of the Metropolis, which advocated a national police service. This and all subsequent attempts to establish a national service were successfully opposed despite the advocacy of such influential figures as Bentham himself and the great social reformer Edwin Chadwick (1800–90). However, Colquhoun’s campaigning did bear fruit in 1798 in the creation, by a group of dockland merchants, of the private Thames River Police to protect their tempting and vulnerable premises from theft. The Thames River Police is thus the world’s oldest surviving police service.
Further improvements slowly followed. In 1805 Bow Street horse patrols were instituted, following the model advocated by John Fielding exactly fifty years earlier in his 1755 Plan for Preventing Robberies Within Twenty Miles of London. Bow Street mounted patrols operated as far out as Kent, Essex and Surrey, and the mounted officers, who were mostly concerned with apprehending highwaymen, were issued with firearms, a pattern that was not followed elsewhere in Britain until more than a century and a half had passed. Ten years later the Home Secretary, Viscount Sidmouth, who was concerned about corruption among Bow Street Runners appointed an officer to supervise their activities. The officer himself continued to report to the magistrates.
In 1829 the Home Secretary, Sir Robert Peel, finally secured the Act which created the Metropolitan Police. The new force owed much to Peel’s former post as Chief Secretary for Ireland when he had set up the Royal Irish Constabulary to prevent civil disorder. The passage of the 1829 Act was only achieved by agreeing to accommodate a number of powerful interests. The City itself remained independent of the Metropolitan Police and acquired its own separate force ten years later which it retains. The Bow Street Runners, together with the forces associated with the other seven ‘public offices’ remained independent, under the control of their local magistrates, until 1839, when they were absorbed into the new force. The Thames River Police remained independent until the same date when it, too, became part of the Metropolitan Police and in 1836 the Bow Street horse patrols became the Mounted Police Division of the Metropolitan Police, losing their firearms in the process. Five years earlier the first special constables were introduced – laymen with the uniform and authority of a regular constable, but working as volunteers.
The creation of the Metropolitan Police represented a decisive break with the past. On Saturday 26 September 1829 the recruits to the new force paraded in the grounds of the Foundling Hospital, Holborn, and were issued with their uniforms. The following Tuesday, at 6 p.m., they set out on their new beats. The old system of Charleys and reluctant ward constables was replaced by 3,000 ‘guinea a week’ constables in their blue coats, blue trousers and top hats. They were supervised by two commissioners who reported to the Home Secretary. One was Charles Rowan, a former soldier who had fought at Waterloo, and the other was Richard Mayne, a barrister, both of whom were sworn in as magistrates. The new force was not universally popular and on Guy Fawkes night, 1830, the two commissioners were burned in effigy.41
Many of the new constables were ex-soldiers, but their uniform had been chosen to emphasise the unmilitary character of the new force in a nation with a long-standing suspicion of standing armies – a distinction further emphasised by the decision to equip the conCatching stables with truncheons rather than firearms. Inspectors were allowed to carry pocket pistols. Three weeks training was given before launching the constables on an arduous routine of fourteen-hour days. This may account for the rapid turnover in the members of the new force. Of more than 3,000 recruits in 1829–30 three-quarters had left or been dismissed after four years. The constables’ truncheons were an emblem of their authority. They were encircled by a band of copper at one end engraved with the letters WR representing the authority of the monarch (William IV) who came to the throne in 1830. These features of their equipment account for the nicknames ‘coppers’ and ‘Old Bill’, while the alternative ‘Bobbies’ owes its origin to the Home Secretary himself, Robert Peel. The headquarters of the new force was in Whitehall Place whose rear entrance, Scotland Yard, gave its name to the building. A few Charleys survived the advent of the new force, one being photographed in his box in Brixton Road in about 1870.
In 1835 and 1856 Acts of Parliament required boroughs to establish their own policing arrangements and the Metropolitan Police provided a model for the city, borough and county forces that swiftly followed, under the control of local authorities. Some were very small. The borough of Southwold, in Suffolk, had its own police force consisting of one constable. Detectives were introduced in the 1840s, an effective inspection regime in 1856 and in 1861 the blue lamp was installed outside police stations to give them a distinct identity. An exception was made for the police station in Bow Street to accommodate the sensibilities of Queen Victoria whose visits to the Opera House were not to be spoilt by recollections of the Blue Room at Windsor in which Prince Albert had died. Bow Street had a white lamp. In 1883 the Special Branch was formed (originally called the Special Irish Branch) to deal with terrorism and in the 1890s the Metropolitan Police began to experiment with fingerprinting, though it did not fully adopt the technique until 1901, as Newgate was about to be demolished. Formal training schemes for officers began at about the same time.
None of these developments would have been foreseen by Henry or John Fielding, let alone by Jonathan Wild. Yet it remains true that the work of the playwright and his blind half-brother in establishing a reasonably honest system of detecting and punishing crime in the eighteenth century created a pattern which was later followed in London, Britain and throughout much of the world.
POSTSCRIPT
Patterns of criminal behaviour in the nineteenth century reflected changes in society and bear some strange resemblances to those of the later centuries. Burglary and murder peaked in the 1860s, but then declined, while major frauds became a more prominent feature of criminal behaviour as large business enterprises such as railways offered richer prizes to the devious. George Hudson (1800–71), the ‘railway king’, lost his fortune as a result of dishonesty, but was able to retire discreetly to the Continent in 1854 on a modest annuity. Three years later Leopold Redpath, an officer of the Great Northern Railway, was sentenced to transportation to Australia for embezzling £170,000, which had been set aside by his employers to invest in the new Metropolitan underground railway from Paddington to the City – a project that was consequently delayed for six years. In 1904 Whitaker Wright (1845–1904) was convicted of defrauding investors to the tune of £5 million in connection with the construction of the Bakerloo Line and sentenced to seven years’ penal servitude. A few minutes later he collapsed in the Law Courts, dead from a cyanide capsule he had been carrying. Such echoes of the twentieth century were heard again in the 1890s when the first instances of football hooliganism were recorded along with a spectacular brawl in the Old Kent Road which occurred on the August bank holiday, 1898. Many of the participants were drunk. Plus ça change!