PAST CRIMESwas tried and convicted for the same burglary. This man,‘Blueskin’Blake,
attacked Wild in court, inflicting a knife wound in the thieftaker’s throat.
Wild had to be taken for treatment by a surgeon, and during the disturbance,
Sheppard managed to escape once again, even though he had been chained to
the floor. Unhappily for him, he was recaptured a fortnight afterwards, and
imprisoned with 300lbs weight of iron chains and shackles. Daniel Defoe
wrote about him, his portrait was painted by a noted artist of the day, and
upperclass society flocked to visit the prison to see him in his cell. A few days
later he was hanged at Tyburn, having become a London celebrity.
Public opinion began to turn against Wild, and early in 1724 he was arrested
for attempting to break one of his gang out of gaol. He carried on with his
business even while in Newgate, and evidence was brought that he had stolen
jewellery during the previous year’s ceremony for the Knights of the Garter.
One at a time, his gang began to give evidence of his crimes and methods. In
the end, it was the theft of some pieces of lace from a woman called Catherine
Statham that eventually saw him convicted and sentenced to death.
He attempted suicide before the hanging, but failed. Daniel Defoe has given
a detailed account of the hanging on 24 May 1725, commenting on the vast
crowd, many of whom had bought advance tickets for the best viewing places
(Plate 8). Three other men were hanged that day before Wild, who had taken
laudanum and was unconscious, was strung up. Buried temporarily, his body
was later removed and sold to the Royal College of Surgeons for dissection
purposes. His skeleton was preserved and is still on view in the Hunterian
Museum in Lincoln’s Inn Fields. A detailed account of some of Wild’s
dealings may be found in the pages of the Newgate calendar.^1
The Newgate Calendar^2
The socalled‘Bloody Code’that enacted laws demanding the death penalty
for over 200 different offences was intended to deter people from crime, but it
failed. Indeed, the most famous British executioner, Albert Pierrepoint, was to
say in his twentiethcentury memoirs, that even he did not believe that the
death penalty had any effect on crime levels. It was also the case that many
cases were commuted, so that only a third of the death penalties given out
were actually performed. Nevertheless, during the eighteenth century, more
people were hanged in London than in most European cities (Figure 26). In
three years during the 1770s, there were 139 executions in London, compared
with just thirtytwo in Paris.^3 Eventually, the public began to lose their taste
for watching the spectacle of people dying, especially when the condemned
were guilty of only petty crimes.