they noted that the court intended ‘to consider further of his Cause, being an
old Offender though a young man’.^29
In the event he was released,^30 and went back to breaking into houses. He was
again caught and indicted of a very large burglary within a few months, again
acquitted,^31 and obviously took up his old practices, for he was named in a royal
proclamation in October 1690 as one of a gang of robbers and burglars who was
being urgently sought by the authorities.^32 Perhaps he lay low for a while, but
early in 1692 —in what appears to be the conclusion of his overt criminal career—
he was arrested for breaking into the house of Henry de Nassau-Overkirk, the
king’s cousin and his master of the horse. On this occasion St Leger was granted
a free pardon in return for being ‘instrumental’ in discovering his accomplices:
that is, he betrayed his former colleagues to save his life.^33
St Leger may have agreed to rather more than that in return for his pardon.
Instead of returning to robbery and burglary, in a way that was all too familiar,
and eventually ending his young life on the gallows at Tyburn, he turned thief-
taker, putting to use his knowledge of the world of gangs and of men on the run
of which he had been so much a part. It is impossible to discover why he took up
that safer option. All we know is that he subsequently appeared in dozens of
court documents—in depositions and recognizances, in the witness lists on in-
dictments, in reward certificates, in the correspondence of the Mint—testifying
against and prosecuting a range of accused offenders. My evidence is based
mainly on the records of the London courts, but it is clear that he was active else-
where too, and there is good reason to believe that if one could recover the court
records of every English county over the next decade or more, he would appear
regularly all over the country as an agent of authority and a major earner of
reward money—and perhaps more darkly as the recipient of money paid by
those he agreed not to prosecute.
This was obviously a dangerous life. To the extent that men like St Leger were
perceived to be ‘informers’, turning in let us say illegal alehouse keepers or others
who contravened some economic regulation that only troubled a small section of
those in authority, he would be disliked by a very broad section of the public; it is
unclear whether that same public would have disliked his more specific thief-
taking—catching robbers, for example, or even coiners and clippers, whose activ-
ities were regarded with some ambivalence by the public.^34 To the extent that he
went after reasonably well-organized gangs of thieves or coiners, he could expect
some more pointed opposition. And it is no doubt for this reason that such thief-
takers as he became, like members of criminal gangs, tended to work in pairs or
234 Detection and Prosecution
(^29) OBSP, August 1689 (St Leger); January 1690 (St Leger).
(^30) Perhaps speeded by his petition to the king in March 1690 claiming to have been found guilty on
the evidence of a convicted felon. The petition was referred to the attorney-general (CSPD 1689 – 90 ,
p. 528 ).
(^31) OBSP,June 1690 (St Leger). (^32) Jor 51 , fos. 107 – 9.
(^33) CSPD 1691 – 2 , p. 110. (^34) Gaskill, Crime and Mentalities, chs 4 – 5.