A Criminal History of Mankind (65 page)

This explains why, when James I called his first parliament in 1604, he found himself faced with a houseful of respectful but strong-minded individuals, determined to stand by their rights. And the new religious Puritanism was not the expression of a grim and joyless morality; it was an assertion of religious individualism, a defiant rejection of both Bloody Mary’s Catholicism
and
Queen Elizabeth’s new Anglican church, which looked like Catholicism with an English accent. We find the new spirit in John Milton’s ‘masque’
Comus
, presented in 1634, in which the wicked enchanter Comus tries to seduce a girl lost in the forest. One of her two brothers - searching for her - makes a long speech about chastity, and about how a noble idea enters

The unpolluted temple of the mind,

And turns it by degrees to the soul’s essence,

Till all be made immortal...

and the second brother exclaims:

How charming is divine Philosophy!

Not harsh and crabbed as dull fools suppose,

But musical as is Apollo’s lute.

The girl, naturally, defeats the sorcerer’s wicked designs without the slightest effort - so easily that the contest seems unfair. But Milton is not being merely ‘moral’; he had discovered that ideas can be as bracing as a cold wind, and that the individual’s conscience is the most powerful weapon he possesses.

The English enjoyed their Puritanism; it tasted of freedom
. The Pilgrim’s Progress
(1678) expressed this new sense of individual responsibility. ‘Do you see yonder shining light? He said, I think I do. Then said the Evangelist, Keep that light in your eye, and go up directly thereto...’

So when King Charles assured his people that God had made him king, and that in obeying him they would be obeying God, they replied that they had their own shining light, and cut off his head. When King James II tried to reintroduce Catholicism twenty years later, they sent an invitation to the Protestant William of Orange to come and take his throne.

We find it hard to understand why the English responded with such enthusiasm to this rather joyless religion of Puritanism. The answer is simple. When a man possesses any kind of deep inner conviction, he is happy; what is more, his happiness is founded on a rock. When he lacks conviction, he is a drifting ship without a rudder. It is impossible to study human criminality for long without realising that it is a history of rudderless ships.

A few years before William of Orange invaded England, a certain Professor Sylvius of Leyden invented a new medicine which he called genéva, from the French word geniévre. It was made of cheap alcohol - distilled from corn mash - but given a sharp and pleasant flavouring with berries of the geniévre - or juniper. It was sold in small bottles in chemists’ shops, and the Dutch soon realised that geneva was as potent as good brandy, and far cheaper. When William and Mary installed themselves on James’s throne in 1688, their countrymen began to export the new drink to England. Since England was quarrelling with France, and was therefore reluctant to buy French brandy, geneva - or gin - quickly became the national drink. Because of the brandy embargo, a law was passed permitting anyone to distill his own drink, and the English soon improved on the Dutch original, distilling an even cheaper grade of corn mash, and producing a powerful spirit that would now be called moonshine. (It is also probably a safe bet that this was when someone discovered that beer could be distilled to produce whisky.) Gin shops opened all over England - one London street had six of them.

Queen Elizabeth’s subjects had drunk sherry (Falstaff’s ‘sack’), beer and wine, which were cheap - wine cost fourpence a quart. Then James I had succeeded in raising some of the money parliament refused to grant him by taxing various commodities, including wine and sherry, so that the English working man of the seventeenth century could only afford beer. By 1688, the English working classes were alcohol-starved. The consumption of gin rose steadily, from half a million gallons around 1690 to three and a half million by 1727 and - by the middle of the century - to nineteen million gallons.

The result was a crime wave. Many gin shops carried the notice; ‘Drunk for a penny, dead drunk for twopence, clean straw for nothing.’ Crimes to obtain money for gin became as common as crimes to obtain money for drugs in our own society. Theft became so common that, in 1699, a particularly savage act was passed that made almost any theft punishable by hanging, provided the goods were worth more than five shillings. At the same time, anyone who helped to secure the apprehension of a thief could obtain various tax exemptions and rewards. The measures were desperate; but so was the situation. Quite suddenly, England was virtually in a state of war with criminals. The diarist Narcissus Luttrell mentions an endless series of highway robberies and similar crimes. On one Saturday in 1693, a highwayman named Whitney had been arrested after resisting for an hour, and another highwayman was arrested in St Martin’s Church. A gang of seven broke into Lady Reresby’s house in Gerard Street, tied her and her family up and then rifled the house. Three coaches were robbed coming from Epsom, and three rowdies had caused an affray in Holborn, broken windows and run a watchman through with a sword, leaving it in his body. The invasion of houses by robber gangs had become as common as it was before the Black Death. A few years later, the famous robber Dick Turpin - whose exploits were far less romantic than his legend - led a gang that specialised in breaking into country houses, torturing the householders to force them to disclose valuables and raping any maids. Turpin’s fame rested on the flamboyant manner of his death, bowing and waving to the mob from his cart, and finally voluntarily leaping from the gallows ladder.

All this makes an interesting contrast with crime in the age of Queen Elizabeth. It had been just as widespread, but far less serious. London was then full of thieves and confidence men (known as ‘cony catchers’, a cony being a rabbit). The thieves used to meet once a week in the house of their leader, who also happened to be the brother-in-law of the hangman; there, like an alderman’s meeting, they discussed ‘prospects’ and exchanged information. In contemporary descriptions (Robert Greene wrote several pamphlets about it), the London criminal scene in the time of Elizabeth sounds rather like Damon Runyan’s New York, deplorable but fairly good-natured. A century later, this had changed. Highwaymen infested the country roads, burglars operated in the towns, and women and children appeared as frequently in the courts as men. Children were trained as pickpockets, and were also sent out to earn gin money by prostitution - the novelist Henry Fielding, who became a magistrate in 1740, wrote of the large number of children ‘eaten up with the foul distemper’. The government’s reaction was to execute almost every offender who appeared in court. In 1722, a gang of Hampshire poachers had murdered a keeper who had interrupted them; they had blackened their faces so as to be less visible in the dark. Landowners in the Waltham area (where it took place) were so alarmed that the government was prevailed upon to pass an act - the ‘Waltham Black Act’ - which enabled almost any poacher to be hanged. (If the act had been in existence when Shakespeare was arrested for poaching from Sir Thomas Lucy, his works would have remained unwritten.) The act included a list of more than three hundred other offences - including catching rabbits - for which a man could be hanged.

Yet these measures had no effect on the rising crime rate. It could hardly be expected to when a large proportion of the population was permanently drunk. Henry Fielding reckoned that a hundred thousand people in London alone lived mainly on gin. Another observer stood outside a gin palace for three hours one evening and counted 1,411 people going in and out. These ‘palaces’ usually consisted of a shed, full of barrels of gin; the customers merely came to buy a pennyworth of gin, which explains the enormous number. Whole families, including, father, mother and children then sat on the pavement and drank themselves unconscious; with gin at a penny at quart, it was not difficult. The artist William Hogarth engraved two famous pictures, ‘Beer Street’ and ‘Gin Lane’, to expose the evil. In Beer Street, a lot of jolly-looking men and women are drinking outside a tavern and obviously engaging in intelligent political discussion (there is a copy of the king’s speech on the table). In Gin Lane, a drunken mother allows her baby to fall out of her arms into the area below, a madman impales a baby on a spit, and a man who has hanged himself can be seen through the window of a garret. Fielding remarked that the gin ‘disqualifies them from any honest means to acquire it, at the same time that it removes sense of fear and shame and emboldens them to commit every wicked and dangerous enterprise.’ The result was that pickpockets who had once relied on skill and light fingers now knocked down their victims with bludgeons in broad daylight. The novelist Horace Walpole was shot in the face by a highwayman in Hyde Park in 1752.

Punishments, both in England and on the continent, had always been barbarous; now they became sadistic. The sentence of being hanged, drawn and quartered was usually reserved for political criminals, although it might be applied to some particularly violent robber. The victim was dragged to the place of execution behind a cart; he was then half-hanged, and his bowels were torn out while he was still alive and burned in front of him. After this the body was cut into four pieces. Female criminals were often burned alive, because it was regarded as more ‘decent’ than allowing them to risk exposing their private parts as they swung from a rope. (In this respect our ancestors were remarkably prudish.) But it was common for women - as well as men - to be stripped to the waist before being whipped through the streets to the pillory or gallows. After the 1699 act, thieves were branded on one cheek to make their offence public knowledge - this was probably regarded as an act of clemency, since most thieves were hanged. Prisoners accused of offences that involved speech - perhaps preaching false religious doctrines - would have a hole bored through the tongue as they were held in the pillory. A confidence man named Japhet Crook was sentenced to have both ears cut off and his nose slit open then seared with a red hot iron; the hangman, known as ‘Laughing Jack’ Hooper, cut off both ears from behind with a sharp knife and held them aloft for the crowd to see, then cut open Crook’s nostrils with scissors; however, when he applied the red hot iron to the bleeding nose, Crook leapt out of his chair so violently that Hooper - who was a kindly man - decided not to carry out the rest of the punishment. On the Continent, sentences were even crueller; red hot pincers were used to tear out the tongues of blasphemers. A madman called Damiens, who tried - rather half heartedly - to stab Louis XV of France in 1757, was executed by being literally ‘quartered’. He was carried to the execution because his legs had been smashed with sledgehammers. His chest was torn open with red hot pincers, and lead poured into the wounds. Then his hands and feet were tied to four dray horses, which were whipped off in opposite directions. They were not strong enough to tear off his arms and legs, so more horses were brought; even so, the executioner had to partly sever the arms and legs before they could be pulled off. Damiens remained conscious until he had only one arm left - during the early part of the proceedings he looked on with apparent curiosity - and his hair turned white during the course of the execution.

But then, punishment was intended as a public spectacle. The underlying notion was to deter; in fact, it seems to have had the effect of making the spectators sadistic. This was perhaps an extreme example of the ‘xenophobic’ reaction discussed in an earlier chapter. The English had always been inclined to treat foreigners as an object of mirth - in 1592 the duke of Wiirtemburg noted that London crowds ‘scoff and laugh’ at foreigners and are likely to turn nasty if the foreigner shows any sign of being offended. At public spectacles, the criminal became the despised ‘foreigner’. When placed in the stocks or pillory, he was likely to be pelted with stones and dead cats until he died. A woman named Barbara Spencer was sentenced to be burnt alive for coining in 1721; at the stake she wanted to say her prayers, but the mob wanted to get on with the entertainment and booed and threw things at her as she tried to pray; she had still not succeeded in saying her prayers when the hangman applied a torch to the faggots. Days when notable public executions were held at London’s main gallows - Tyburn, at Hyde Park corner - were usually public holidays. They became known as ‘gallows days’, which in turn became ‘gala days’. On the day when James Whitney - the highwayman who resisted capture for an hour - was taken to Tyburn, he was one of eight men who were sentenced to hang simultaneously on the triangular shaped scaffold that had been erected in the time of Queen Elizabeth. (The older type, consisting of two uprights and a cross bar, was less efficient in that it would only hang one or two at a time.) Only seven men were hanged on that occasion; Whitney was reprieved at the last moment for offering to betray his accomplices. Whitney was lucky enough to be popular; he was driven back through a cheering crowd with the rope still round his neck. But he was hanged a week later, having told all he knew.