Jack Sheppard
John 'Sheppard, nicknamed "Honest Jack", "Gentleman Jack" or "Jack the Lad'", was an English criminal who became notorious in early 18th-century London.
Born into a poor family, he was apprenticed as a carpenter, but began committing theft and burglary in 1723 with little more than a year of his training to complete. He was arrested and imprisoned five times in 1724, but escaped four times from prison, making him notorious, though popular with the poorer classes. Ultimately, he was caught, convicted, and hanged at Tyburn, ending his brief criminal career after less than two years. The inability of the notorious "Thief-Taker General" Jonathan Wild to control Sheppard, and injuries suffered by Wild at the hands of Sheppard's colleague Joseph "Blueskin" Blake, resulted in Wild's demise as a criminal boss.
Sheppard was as renowned for his attempts to escape from prison as he was for his crimes. An autobiographical "Narrative", thought to have been ghostwritten by Daniel Defoe, was sold at his execution, quickly followed by popular plays. The character of Macheath in John Gay's The Beggar's Opera was based on Sheppard, keeping him well known for more than 100 years. He returned to the public consciousness around 1840, when William Harrison Ainsworth wrote a novel entitled Jack Sheppard, with illustrations by George Cruikshank. The popularity of his tale, and the fear that others would be drawn to emulate his behaviour, caused the authorities to refuse to license any plays in London with "Jack Sheppard" in the title for forty years.
Early life
Sheppard was born in White's Row, in London's Spitalfields. He was baptised on 5 March, the day after he was born, at St Dunstan's, Stepney, suggesting a fear of infant mortality by his parents, perhaps because the newborn was weak or sickly. His parents named him after an older brother, John, who had died before Sheppard's birth. In life, he was better known as "Gentleman Jack" or "Jack the Lad". He had a second brother, Thomas, and a younger sister, Mary. Their father, a carpenter, died while Sheppard was young, and his sister died two years later.Unable to support her family without her husband's income, Sheppard's mother sent him to Mr Garrett's School, a workhouse near St Helen's Bishopsgate, when he was six years old. Sheppard was sent out as a parish apprentice to a cane-chair maker, taking a settlement of 20 shillings, but his new master soon died. He was sent out to a second cane-chair maker, but Sheppard was treated badly. Finally, when Sheppard was 10 years old, he went to work as a shop-boy for William Kneebone, a wool draper with a shop on the Strand. Sheppard's mother had been working for Kneebone since her husband's death. Kneebone taught Sheppard to read and write and apprenticed him to a carpenter, Owen Wood, in Wych Street, off Drury Lane in Covent Garden. Sheppard signed his seven-year indenture on 2 April 1717.
By 1722, Sheppard was showing great promise as a carpenter. Aged 20, he was a small man, only and lightly built, but deceptively strong. He had a pale face with large, dark eyes, a wide mouth and a quick smile. Despite a slight stutter, his wit made him popular in the taverns of Drury Lane. He served five unblemished years of his apprenticeship but then began to become involved with crime.
Joseph Hayne, a button-moulder who owned a shop nearby, also managed a tavern named the Black Lion off Drury Lane, which he encouraged the local apprentices to frequent. The Black Lion was visited by criminals such as Joseph "Blueskin" Blake, Sheppard's future partner in crime, and self-proclaimed "Thief-Taker General" Jonathan Wild, secretly the boss of a criminal gang which operated across London and later Sheppard's implacable enemy.
According to Sheppard's autobiography, he had been an innocent until going to Hayne's tavern, but there began a preference for strong drink and the affections of Elizabeth Lyon, a prostitute also known as Edgworth Bess from her place of birth at Edgeworth in Middlesex. In his History, Defoe records that Bess was "a main lodestone in attracting of him up to this Eminence of Guilt". Such, Sheppard claimed, was the source of his later ruin. Peter Linebaugh offers a more politicised version: that Sheppard's sudden transformation was a liberation from the dull drudgery of indentured labour and that he progressed from pious servitude to self-confident rebellion and Levelling.
Criminal career
Sheppard began habitually drinking and whoring. Inevitably, his carpentry suffered, and he became disobedient to his master. With Lyon's encouragement, Sheppard began criminal activity in order to augment his legitimate wages. His first recorded theft was in Spring 1723, when he engaged in petty shoplifting, stealing two silver spoons while on an errand for his master to the Rummer Tavern in Charing Cross. Sheppard's misdeeds were undetected, and he progressed to larger crimes, often stealing goods from the houses where he was working. Finally, he quit the employ of his master on 2 August 1723, with less than two years of his apprenticeship left, although he continued to work as a journeyman carpenter. He was not suspected of the crimes, and progressed to burglary, in company with criminals in Jonathan Wild's gang.He relocated to Fulham, living as husband and wife with Lyon at Parsons Green, before relocating to Piccadilly. When Lyon was arrested and imprisoned at St Giles's Roundhouse, the beadle, a Mr Brown, refused to let Sheppard visit, so he broke in and took her away.
Arrested and escaped twice
Sheppard was first arrested after a burglary he committed with his brother, Tom, and his mistress, Lyon, in Clare Market on 5 February 1724. Tom, also a carpenter, had already been convicted once for stealing tools from his master the previous autumn and burned in the hand. Tom was arrested again on 24 April 1724. Afraid that he would be hanged this time, Tom informed on Jack, and a warrant was issued for Jack's arrest.Jonathan Wild was aware of Sheppard's thefts, as Sheppard had fenced some stolen goods through one of Wild's men, William Field. Wild asked another of his men, James Sykes to challenge Sheppard to a game of skittles at Redgate's public house near Seven Dials. Sykes betrayed Sheppard to a Mr Price, a constable from the parish of St Giles, to gather the usual £40 reward for giving information resulting in the conviction of a felon. The magistrate, Justice Parry, had Sheppard imprisoned overnight on the top floor of St Giles's Roundhouse pending further questioning, but Sheppard escaped within three hours by breaking through the timber ceiling and lowering himself to the ground with a rope fashioned from bedclothes. Still wearing irons, Sheppard coolly joined the crowd that had been attracted by the sounds of his breaking out. He distracted their attention by pointing to the shadows on the roof and shouting that he could see the escapee, and then swiftly departed.
File:Print, book-illustration .jpg|thumb|Jack used a rope of knotted bedclothes to lower Bess during their escape from the New Prison in Clerkenwell.
On 19 May 1724, Sheppard was arrested for a second time, caught in the act of picking a pocket in Leicester Fields. He was detained overnight in St Ann's Roundhouse in Soho and visited there the next day by Lyon; she was recognised as his wife and locked in a cell with him. They appeared before Justice Walters, who sent them to the New Prison in Clerkenwell, but they escaped from their cell, known as the Newgate Ward, within a matter of days. By 25 May, Whitsun Monday, Sheppard and Lyon had filed through their manacles; they removed a bar from the window and used their knotted bed-clothes to descend to ground level. Finding themselves in the yard of the neighbouring Bridewell, they clambered over the 22-foot-high prison gate to freedom. This feat was widely publicised, not least because Sheppard was only a small man, and Lyon was a large, buxom woman.
Third arrest, trial, and third escape
Sheppard's thieving abilities were admired by Jonathan Wild. Wild demanded that Sheppard surrender his stolen goods for Wild to fence, and so take the greater profits, but Sheppard refused. He began to work with Joseph "Blueskin" Blake, and they burgled Sheppard's former master, William Kneebone, on Sunday 12 July 1724. Wild could not permit Sheppard to continue outside his control and began to seek Sheppard's arrest. Unfortunately for Sheppard, his fence, William Field, was one of Wild's men. After Sheppard had a brief foray with Blueskin as highwaymen on the Hampstead Road on Sunday 19 July and Monday 20 July, Field informed on Sheppard to Wild. Wild believed Lyon would know Sheppard's whereabouts, so he plied her with drinks at a brandy shop near Temple Bar until she betrayed him. Sheppard was arrested a third time at Blueskin's mother's brandy shop in Rosemary Lane, east of the Tower of London, on 23 July by Wild's henchman, Quilt Arnold.Sheppard was imprisoned in Newgate Prison pending his trial at the next Assize of oyer and terminer. He was prosecuted on three charges of theft at the Old Bailey, but was acquitted on the first two due to lack of evidence. Kneebone, Wild and Field gave evidence against him on the third charge, the burglary of Kneebone's house. He was convicted on 12 August, the case "being plainly prov'd", and sentenced to death. On Monday 31 August, the very day when the death warrant arrived from the court in Windsor setting Friday 4 September as the date for his execution, Sheppard escaped. Having loosened an iron bar in a window used when talking to visitors, he was visited by Lyon and Poll Maggott, who distracted the guards while he removed the bar. His slight build enabled him to climb through the resulting gap in the grille, and he was smuggled out of Newgate in women's clothing that his visitors had brought him. He took a coach to Blackfriars Stairs, a boat up the River Thames to the horse ferry in Westminster, near the warehouse where he hid his stolen goods, and completed his escape.