Jack Sheppard
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Image:Jack Sheppard.jpg Jack Sheppard (December 1702–16 November 1724) was a notorious English robber, burglar and thief of early 18th century London. Jack was arrested five times in 1724, but escaped four times, bringing him a degree of public notoriety in his brief criminal career. Ultimately convicted and hanged at Tyburn, he was as renowned for his attempts to escape justice as for his crimes. His repeated arrests were part of the downfall of the notorious "Thief-Taker General" (and thief) Jonathan Wild.
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Early life
A carpenter's son, John Sheppard (better known in life as Jack Sheppard, even "Gentleman Jack" or "Jack the Lad") was born in White's Row, in London's Spitalfields, in 1702. His father died while Sheppard was young and the boy worked as a servant to one William Kneebone in 1714. John and his older brother, Thomas, had received some elementary schooling at Mr. Garrett's school, Mr. Kneebone took care to increase Jack's education and apprenticed him to a carpenter in Drury Lane. He served five years of his apprenticeship, but in 1722 a Mr. Joseph Hayne, who had a shop near the carpentry shop, opened a tavern called the Black Lion ale house, and he encouraged the apprentices to attend. According to Sheppard's 'autobiography' (compiled for Applebee's Original Weekly Journal, probably by Daniel Defoe, at his hanging), Sheppard had been an innocent until going to the tavern and there beginning an attachment to strong drink and the affections of Elizabeth Lyon, a prostitute, that together would be his ruin. Lyon encouraged him to steal, and his first recorded theft was in 1722, when he engaged in petty shoplifting to steal two silver spoons while on an errand for his master.
Arrests and escapes
Sheppard quit the employ of his master in 1723, although he continued to work as a journeyman carpenter. He augmented his legitimate wages through theft, often stealing goods from the houses where he was employed. He was not suspected of the crimes, and progressed to burglary, falling in with criminals in Jonathan Wild's gang.
The first arrest occurred after a burglary that he committed with his brother, Thomas, and his mistress, Elizabeth Lyon in February of 1724. On April 24th, Thomas was caught, and he informed on Jack. This accounted for the first warrant against Sheppard. When he arranged to meet one James Sykes (known as "Hell and Fury") at a public house, Skyes betrayed Sheppard to a constable to gather the reward for giving information (£40). Sheppard was imprisoned in St Giles Roundhouse but escaped within three hours by sawing through a timber ceiling and lowering himself to the ground with a rope fashioned from bedclothes.
He was arrested on the same warrant a few weeks later, caught in the act of picking a pocket in Liecester Fields (near present-day Leicester Square). Detained overnight in St Ann's Roundhouse, he was sent to "New prison" in Clerkenwell and then sent to the Newgate prison ward, where he was imprisoned with Elizabeth Lyon (known as "Edgeworth Bess" and also Elizabeth Sheppard); she was taken to be his wife, so they were confined in the same room. They escaped the following day by filing through their manacles, making a hole in the wall, and using their knotted bed-clothes to descend to ground level. They then clambered over the 22-foot high prison gate to freedom.
Sheppard's thieving abilities were admired by Jonathan Wild, but Wild demanded that Sheppard give over his stolen goods to Wild to fence and to take the greater profits in, and Sheppard refused. Sheppard worked briefly as a highwayman on the Hampstead Road with Joseph "Blueskin" Blake, and then he returned to burglaries. He burglarized his former master, William Kneebone, and Wild began to seek Sheppard's arrest. Some months after his second arrest, Sheppard was betrayed to Wild by his fence, and arrested a third time in Rosemary Lane on 24 July. He was convicted of the burglary of Kneebone's house at the Old Bailey on 14 August and sentenced to death. On 31 August, the night before the death warrant was due to arrive, Sheppard escaped from Newgate a second time by cutting a spike from a window used when talking to visitors. His slight build enabled him to climb through the resulting gap in the grille.
By this point, Sheppard was a working class hero (being a cockney, non-violent, and handsome). Caught again on 10 September, hiding out in Finchley, Sheppard was confined to a strong-room in Newgate known as the 'Castle', handcuffed, clapped in leg irons, and chained to a metal staple in the floor. His fame had increased with each escape, and he was visited in prison by the great, the good and the curious. Meanwhile, "Blueskin" Blake was also caught by Wild and convicted, and Elizabeth Lyon was captured in September.
Sheppard escaped from Newgate for the third time on 17 October, using a small nail that he found in his cell to unlock his handcuffs and chains. Still encumbered by his leg irons, he attempted to climb up the chimney, but his path was blocked by an iron bar set into the brickwork. He removed the bar and used it to break through a ceiling into an unused room above the 'Castle', and then into the prison chapel, then to the roof of Newgate, 60 feet (20 m) above the ground. He went back down to his cell to get a blanket, then back to the ceiling, and then he used the blanket to reach the roof of a nearby house owned by William Bird, a turner. He then broke into Turner's house and went down the stairs and out into the street without waking the occupants. His arm irons were recovered in the rooms of Catherine Cook, another of Sheppard's mistresses. The leg irons remained in place for several days until Sheppard persuaded a shoemaker to accept 20 shillings to remove them, telling him that Sheppard had escaped from Bridewell Prison, having been imprisoned there for failing to support a - non-existant - bastard son. This escape astonished everyone, and Daniel Defoe, working as a journalist, wrote an account.
Sheppard's final period of liberty lasted just two weeks. He broke into a pawnbroker's business on the night of October 29, 1724 and took his proceeds to a brandy shop. He was re-arrested a final time on 2 November, blind drunk. This time, Sheppard was placed in the centre of Newgate, where he could be observed at all times, and loaded with three hundred pounds of iron weights. He was so celebrated that the gaolers charged high society visitors to see him, and James Thornhill painted his portrait. Despite several prominent people sending a petition to the King, begging for his sentence of death to be commuted to transportation, the court confirmed its sentence on 10 November, the day after Blueskin was hanged.
Execution
The following Monday, 16 November, Sheppard was taken to the gallows at Tyburn to be hanged. He planned one more escape, but a pen-knife, intended to cut the ropes binding him on the way to the gallows, was found by a prison warder shortly before he left Newgate for the last time.
A joyous procession passed through the streets of London, as much as anything a celebration of Sheppard's life, and attended by crowds of up to 200,000 (one third of London's population). His slight build had aided his previous prison escapes, but it condemned him to a slow death of strangulation by the hangman's noose. His body was cut down and buried in the churchyard of St Martin's-in-the-Fields the same day to prevent dissection.
Legacy
There was a spectacular public reaction to Sheppard's exploits. He was even cited (favorably) as an example from the pulpit, and newspapers, pamphlets, broadsheets, and ballads were all devoted to going over his amazing exploits. Further, his story was adapted to the stage almost immediately. Harlequin Sheppard by one John Thurmond ran at Theatre Royal, Drury Lane a month after Sheppard's hanging. An unacted but published The Prison-Breaker was turned into The Quaker's Opera (in imitation of John Gay's The Beggar's Opera) and performed at Bartholomew Fair in 1725 and 1728. Around 1840, Sheppard's tale was revived. William Harrison Ainsworth wrote a novel entitled Jack Sheppard, with illustrations by George Cruikshank. The novel made Sheppard out as a swashbuckling hero, and censors were alarmed at the possibility that young people would emulate his behavior. There was, therefore, a ban, at least in London, on licensing any plays with "Jack Sheppard" in the title for forty years. The Sheppard story has been revived in the 20th century.
Sheppard's exploits were recalled in (among other places):
- a narrative of his life, published in 1724 by John Applebee
- Harlequin Shepperd, a pantomime by Thurmond, performed in Drury Lane in December 1724
- as the figure of Macheath in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera (1728) and The Threepenny Opera of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (1929)
- Industry and Idleness, a series of 12 engravings by William Hogarth (1747)
- Jack Sheppard the House-breaker (1825), a melodrama by W.T. Moncrieff
- Jack Sheppard, a novel by William Harrison Ainsworth (1839) (later the same year adapted into a successful play by John Buckstone) (free at Project Gutenberg) [1]
- Little Jack Sheppard, an operatta with libretto by Henry Pottinger Stephens and William Yardley, and score by Meyer Lutz (1885)
- silent movies, The Hairbreadth Escape of Jack Sheppard (1900) [2] and Jack Sheppard (1923) [3]
- The Road to Tyburn, Christopher Hibbert (1957), (2001 Penguin reprint: ISBN 0141390239)
- a British costume drama, Where's Jack?, directed by James Clavell, with Tommy Steele in the title role (1969)
- a book The Thieves' Opera by Lucy Moore (1999), ISBN 0151003645
- an unrealised film project of FilmFour in 2000, Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. Tobey Maguire and Harvey Keitel were slated for the main parts; Benjamin Ross, who would have been director, wrote the screenplay with John Preston.
- Invitation to a Hanging, a 2002 television drama[4]
- a novel by Neal Stephenson, The Baroque Cycle (2003, 2004), in which the character Jack Shaftoe was partly inspired by events from the life of Jack Sheppard.
References
- Howson, Gerald. Thief-Taker General: Jonathan Wild and the Emergence of Crime and Corruption as a Way of Life in Eighteenth-Century England. New Brunswick, NJ and Oxford, UK: 1970. ISBN 0887380328
- Sugden, Philip. "John Sheppard" in Matthew, H.C.G. and Brian Harrison, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. vol. 50, 261-263. London: OUP, 2004.