A Criminal History of Mankind (66 page)

In 1735, it struck a bookseller named John Osborn that the lively interest excited by criminals could be turned to his advantage, and he issued three volumes of
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals
. Pamphlets about famous criminals had been popular since the time of the Elizabethans; but they usually concerned people in the upper ranks of society and dealt with only one case at a time. By the time of Osborn, most criminals were ordinary highwaymen, footpads, housebreakers and pirates. But he recognised that the public had an insatiable appetite for the details of the lives of the people they loved to see hanged. Almost every one of the Lives, two hundred or so cases, begins with a moral preamble: ‘It is an observation that must be obvious to all my readers, that few who addict themselves to robbing and stealing ever continue long in the practice of those crimes before they are overtaken by Justice...’, and so on. And this was not because Osborn felt the need to justify himself in publishing tales of crime. It was because he recognised that his readers enjoyed congratulating themselves that they were not in the hands of the law. The pleasure of watching an execution was based on the feeling that you were in the crowd, not on the gallows. The public of Henry Fielding’s day had very little imagination, very little capacity to identify itself with another person’s suffering. This is why one of the popular entertainments was going to ‘Bedlam’ to laugh and jeer at the mad people. It would take another century before novelists like Dickens could persuade people to enjoy putting themselves in the place of the ‘unfortunates’ of society.

The most striking thing about Osborn’s
Lives of the Criminals
is the utterly commonplace nature of most of the crimes, and their curious lack of
personal
interest. We live in an age of personalities, of gossip columns, of ‘people in the news’. It is true that ninety-five per cent of the crimes that now take place in London or New York are commonplace and ‘impersonal’. But the remaining five per cent help to fill scandal sheets with titillating details. We are accustomed to crimes having a strong ‘individual’ interest, the element that makes them suitable for film or television treatment. In Osborn, not even one per cent of the crimes would be suitable for dramatic treatment.

One of the few possible exceptions is the case of Catherine Hayes, a housewife who conspired with her two lovers to murder her husband, a retired moneylender. They lived in lodgings not far from the Tyburn gallows, and Catherine’s relations with her husband were poor - she declared that he was pathologically mean, which is probably true. A young tailor named Thomas Billings came to the house and became her lover while her husband was away on business. Soon afterwards, a man named Thomas Wood moved in and also became her lover. She offered to share her husband’s fortune of fifteen hundred pounds - a vast sum for those days - with her lovers if they would help her get rid of John Hayes. They did this one evening in 1725, after all four of them had drunk bottle after bottle of wine between them. (They were rich enough to drink wine, not gin.) One of the lovers hit Hayes with a hatchet and fractured his skull. The next problem was to get the body to the river. Catherine suggested that they cut off the head, so that if they were forced to abandon the corpse en route, it would be unrecognisable. With a great deal of retching, the two men sawed off the head with a carving knife, leaving the headless body to bleed into a pail. Then the two men walked down to the river and tossed the head in. It landed on mud — the tide was out. The following day, they dismembered the corpse, put it into a trunk, and threw it into a nearby pond under cover of darkness.

Meanwhile, the head had been found in the mud, and the parish officers of Westminster decided to put it on public exhibition to try to discover its identity; the blood was washed off, the hair neatly combed, and the head set on a pole in St Margaret’s churchyard. One apprentice immediately recognised it and rushed off to inform Catherine Hayes. She told him sternly that her husband was in bed and that he would get into trouble if he spread such reports. When the head began to decay, it was placed in a jar of spirits and exhibited to anyone who was interested. Inevitably, someone reported his suspicions to the law; when the officers arrived, Catherine Hayes was in bed with Billings. Both swore stoutly that they were innocent; when Catherine was shown the head, she - kissed it passionately and shed tears, still insisting she had no idea how her husband had died. Then Wood was arrested and confessed everything. The two men were sentenced to be hanged. Catherine was sentenced to be burned, since her crime was ‘petty treason’ - the husband being regarded as the lord and master. She screamed all the way back to prison. When she was tied to the stake, the hangman tried to strangle her as an act of mercy, but the flames burned his hands and he had to jump back; it took three hours for the body to be consumed.

The outstanding feature of the case is the personality of Catherine Hayes; there is a distinct resemblance to Marie de Brinvilliers. But unlike Marie, she was no aristocrat; she was the daughter of poor parents and had become a military trollop - the collective mistress of several officers - then a maidservant on a farm. It is clear she was a nymphomaniac, and that her dissatisfaction with her husband was basically sexual. He certainly knew that Billings was her lover, but made no objection, probably glad to see someone else taking on a share of the work. Both lovers were many years her junior - she was thirty-five, and they seem to have been teenagers. Any number of parallel cases could be cited from the twentieth century; but in the first half of the eighteenth century, she is unique: a woman who wanted something badly - to live openly with two lovers - and who was willing to commit murder to get it. She was, in fact, as much a criminal product of the individualism that produced
The Pilgrim’s Progress
as Caligula was a criminal product of the individualism that built ancient Rome. She seems to exemplify one of the ‘laws’ that has emerged during the course of this study: that the genius of each age produces its own characteristic type of criminality.

FROM INDIVIDUALISM TO REBELLION

In the year that Catherine Hayes and her husband moved to London - 1719 - the literary sensation was a work called
The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner
. Its author is an interesting example of the relationship between genius and criminality.

Daniel Foe was born in London in 1660, the son of a butcher of St Giles, Cripplegate. His family were ‘dissenters’, that is, nonconformists who disagreed with Catholicism and Protestantism. Foe was so much a dissenter that in 1683, at the age of twenty-three, he enraged his fellow dissenters by publishing a pamphlet in which he said the Turks had no business besieging Vienna (as they were now doing under the leadership of Kara Mustapha), and that he hoped they wouldn’t succeed, even if the Viennese were Catholics. In 1685, Foe was involved in the Duke of Monmouth’s rebellion against James II and was lucky to avoid being condemned to death by the sadistic Judge Jeffreys. He married well - the lady brought him a dowry of £3,700 - set up in business as a wholesaler of stockings, and made a quick fortune. Extravagance and bad management led to bankruptcy, and he was forced to flee from his creditors. He went to Bristol, where he became known as ‘the Sunday Dentleman’, that being the only day he dared to venture out of his lodgings without fear of arrest. By this time, William of Orange was on the throne of England. ‘Dutch Billy’ was not a popular king; he was a lonely, introverted man who seemed to have a knack of getting himself disliked. The poet Dryden was offered a large sum of money to dedicate his translation of Virgil’s Aeneid to the king, but preferred to issue it without a dedication. But Daniel Foe saw his chance and offered his services to the government as a pamphleteer. The first result was a tract, issued in 1694, defending the unpopular war with France, which William was losing, ‘and serving King William and Queen Mary and acknowledging their Right’. William, whose popularity was lower than usual because of the treacherous massacre of the MacDonalds at Glencoe, was glad of a supporter, and Foe was given a profitable government post. He also took advantage of the new fashion for Dutch tiles to start a tile factory at Tilbury, and was finally able to pay off all his creditors.

In 1701, Foe issued a poem called
The True Born Englishman
, which enjoyed enormous success; its argument was that it was unfair to abuse Dutch Billy for being a foreigner, since all Englishmen are a compound of nationalities - Celts, Saxons, Vikings, Normans and Picts. Unfortunately, William of Orange died in the following year, and Foe found himself temporarily without a patron.

In
The True Born Englishman
he sneers at people who pretend their family came over with William the Conqueror. But shortly thereafter he began signing himself D. Foe, then De Foe, then Daniel De Foe. When he next came to public notice, a year later, he was Daniel Defoe. The occasion was a pamphlet called
The Shortest Way With Dissenters
, although this was not actually signed. Under William of Orange, dissenters had been allowed to hold public office, provided they were willing to pay occasional lip-service to Anglicanism. After the king’s death, reactionaries - known as ‘high fliers’ because of their high principles - began to demand that dissenters should be banned from public office. Oddly enough, Defoe agreed with the high fliers; he thought the kind of dissenters who were willing to compromise were a poor lot. His pamphlet satirised the high fliers by suggesting that all dissenters should be banished or hanged. It was rather as if an American liberal wrote a book suggesting that all negroes should be sent back to Africa, and that those who refused to go should be burned alive, and signed it with the name of some well-known reactionary. Many high fliers were taken in and greeted the pamphlet with enthusiasm - one clergyman said he valued it above all books except the Bible, and prayed that Queen Anne would carry out its suggestions. The dissenters were at first terrified - haunted by visions of being burnt at the stake. Then it leaked out that this was one of Defoe’s hard-hitting jokes, and everyone was furious. Parliament issued a warrant for Defoe’s arrest on a charge of libelling the high fliers by making them out to be bloodthirsty maniacs. Defoe went into hiding and tried to apologise, but it was no good; he had to give himself up. In July 1703, he was sentenced to stand in the pillory for three days and to be detained during the queen’s pleasure.

It was, in fact, his best stroke of luck so far. Overnight, he became a popular hero. The crowds who gathered at the pillory shouted ‘Good old Dan’ and threw bunches of flowers. There would be nothing like it for another fifty years, when John Wilkes would find himself a popular hero through a similar accident.

Defoe was then confined in Newgate for a year, where he mingled with pickpockets and footpads - accumulating material for future novels - and continued to write pamphlets. He was now so popular that no government could silence him. He started his first newspaper in jail - it was called
The Review
and was full of political commentary, lively interviews with thieves and murderers, and gossip about current scandals. He was becoming a power with his pen.

He obtained his freedom by approaching the Lord Treasurer with a scheme that was worthy of Machiavelli. He suggested that the government needed a network of informers to point out potential critics and enemies: in short, an army of spies. The Lord Treasurer was just the man to approach with such a sinister idea; Robert Harley was a born schemer, a man of whom a contemporary wrote: ‘He loved tricks, even where not necessary, but from an inward satisfaction he took in applauding his own cunning. If any man was ever born under the necessity of being a knave, he was.’ It is a description that applies equally well to Defoe.

The result was that Queen Anne was prevailed upon to release Defoe from prison, and Defoe proceeded to travel the country and build up a network of agents. It would hardly be an exaggeration to call him the father of the police state. He laid down the basic rules for spying. Each agent had to appear to be an ordinary citizen; every one had to be unknown to the others. The aim was unobtrusive thought-control of the people of England. And the scheme was amazingly successful - in fact, Defoe’s network became the foundation of the British Secret Service. And he quickly established its value by playing a significant part in the union of England and Scotland into one country called Great Britain. The English liked the idea; the Scots were dubious. Defoe went off to Scotland in 1706, with half a dozen plausible cover stories - that he was a ship-builder, a wool merchant, a fish merchant, and so on. He became intimate with various government ministers in Scotland, and quietly influenced opinion. In May 1707, Scotland and England became Great Britain, and Defoe returned home well satisfied.

In 1710, the Whig (i.e. Liberal) government fell; Defoe, who had made his reputation as a fighter for liberal principles, quickly switched sides, declaring, with his usual glibness, that he cared more for his country than for party prejudice. But in 1714, Harley - who had become an alcoholic - was dismissed; Queen Anne died a few days later, and a Whig administration came into power under George I. Defoe was thrown into prison, and although he obtained his freedom, he was soon back in jail again on a charge of libelling the Earl of Anglesey. Once again, he offered his services as a spy. And the Whigs, who knew his abilities, decided that a discredited Tory might make an excellent spy - particularly if everyone assumed he was still in disgrace. He might, as an ‘enemy’ of the government, find out what their opponents were planning. And at the moment, their opponents were not the Tories so much as the Jacobites -supporters of the house of Stuart. Under the guise of a government opponent, Defoe gained the confidence of various anti-government newspapers, and was soon using his Machiavellian skills to suppress anything the government disliked.