It was the most spectacular public occasion of the year.
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| Wild: honest as the day is long |
On 24 May, 1725, Jonathan Wild, Britain’s most notorious criminal was to be executed. Many thousands were expected to attend.
So great were the numbers that the event was ticketed. Ominously, many of those making their way to Tyburn - the execution site - were carrying rocks and stones.
There was good reason for the anger of the crowds: for more than 15 years, Jonathan Wild and his gang of thieves had terrorized London’s streets, mugging, robbing and stealing anything they could lay their hands on.
But it was not this that had made Wild so hated. Rather, it was the discovery that he had duped everyone into believing he had been on the side of the law - a self-appointed policeman working hard to apprehend criminals.
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| Wild busy hunting thieves |
It was a brilliant con-trick and it worked for years. By the mid-1720s, Wild had amassed a fortune from his duplicity.
His method was as ingenious as it was simple. He ran a large gang of thieves who stole on his behalf. He would take the stolen goods and wait for the theft to be announced in the local news-sheets.
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| Georgian London: make mine a large gin |
He would then announce that his ‘thief takers’ had recovered he stolen items and they were returned to their rightful owners on payment of a large reward.
Wild was quick to point out that he was not selling stolen goods - which was illegal - but merely returning them to their owners.
He soon had a virtual monopoly on organised crime. He was celebrated in news-sheets and ballads, not as a common criminal but as an honest thief-taker.
Wild did much to promote this view of himself. Whenever his employed thieves became troublesome, he simply sold them to the gallows. This enabled him to further increase his fortune.
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| Wild's execution ticket |
By 1718, Wild was calling himself ‘Thief Taker General of Great Britain and Ireland’. He claimed he had sent 60 thieves to the gallows.
Parliament certainly believed him to be honest. He was even given an office in the Old Bailey.
In 1720, the Privy Council consulted Wild on methods of controlling crime. Wild's recommendation was, unsurprisingly, that the rewards be raised for those who caught thieves. His advice was followed: the reward went from 40 to 140 pounds in a single year.
It's staggering that no one realised Wild was a sham. Nor did they realise that he had a complete control on the capital’s crime.
In the end, it was a fellow criminal who brought about his downfall.
When Wild’s men arrested the infamous housebreaker, Jack Sheppard, they found they'd overstepped the mark. Sheppard knew all about Wild’s racket and - condemned to death - had nothing to lose by blowing the whistle. When the thieves of London realised that his career was over, they, too turned against him.
The public were outraged at having been duped for so long. Wild was arrested and sent to Newgate Prison.
Wild was terrified when he learned he'd been condemned to death. On the morning of his execution, he tried to take his own life by drinking laudanum. But it merely made him vomit and fall into a coma.
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| Eternal celebrity: who said crime doesn't pay? |
When he recovered consciousness, he was taken to the gallows at Tyburn. Immense crowds gathered to jeer him and watch him be hanged. Someone threw a rock at his head, causing a large gash. Soon, others also began hurling rocks and stones until blood was streaming down his face.
‘There was nothing but hollowing and huzzas,
as if it had been upon a triumph,’ wrote Daniel Defoe, who was among the crowd.
He died calmly, probably because he was so drugged, and was buried next to his third wife. But his corpse was soon exhumed in order that surgical experiments could be conducted on it.
His skeleton was eventually sold to the Royal College of Surgeons and later put on display at the Royal College’s Hunterian Museum.
It remains there to this day as a warning that crime can pay - but not forever.
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