Savary, on assuming the reins of office, found himself in a serious dilemma. He could hardly have anticipated that Fouché would make his task easy for him, but the result was even worse than he had expected. He had been weak enough to allow Fouché three weeks to clear out of the Ministry, and his wily predecessor had made the best use of his time to burn and destroy every paper of consequence that he possessed. When he finally handed over his charge, he produced one meagre document alone—an abusive memorandum, two years old, inveighing against the exiled House of Bourbon. Every other paper had disappeared. He was no less malicious with regard to the secret staff of the office. The only persons he presented to the new chief were a few low-class spies whom he had never largely trusted; and although Savary raised some of them to higher functions he was still deprived of the assistance of the superior agents upon whom Fouché had so greatly relied. Savary solved this difficulty cleverly. He found in his office a registry of addresses for the use of the messengers who delivered letters. This registry was kept by his clerks, and, not wishing to let them into his design, he took the registry one night into his private study and copied out the whole list himself. He found many names he little expected; names which, as he has said, he would have expected sooner to find in China than in this catalogue. Many addresses had, however, no indication but a single initial, and he guessed—no doubt rightly—that these probably related to the most important agents of all.

Having thus gained the addresses, Savary proceeded to summon each person to his presence by a letter written in the third person, and transmitted by his office messengers. He never mentioned the hour of the interview, but was careful never to send for two people on the same day. His secret agents came as requested, generally towards evening, and before they were ushered in Savary took the precaution to inquire from his groom of the chambers whether they came often to see Monsieur Fouché. The servant had almost invariably seen them before, and could give many interesting particulars about them. Thus Savary knew how to receive them; to be warm or cold in his welcome as he heard how they had been treated by his predecessor. He dealt in much the same way with the persons known only under an initial. He wrote also to them at their addresses, and sent the letters by confidential clerks who were known personally to the concierges of the houses where the agents resided. The Parisian concierge was as much an inquisitive busybody in those days as now; curious about his lodgers’ correspondence, and knowing exactly to whom he should deliver a letter with the initial address. It required only a little adroitness to put a name to these hitherto unknown people when they called in person at his office. It sometimes happened that more than one person having the same initial resided in the same house. If the concierge made the mistake of handing two letters to one individual, Savary, when he called, explained that his clerks had inadvertently written to him twice. In every case the letter of summons contained a request that the letter might be brought to the office as a passport to introduction. Savary adopted another method of making the acquaintance of the secret personnel. He ordered his cashier to inform him whenever a secret agent called for his salary. At first, being suspicious of the new régime, very few persons came, but the second and third month self-interest prevailed; people turned up, merely to inquire, as they said, and were invariably passed on to see the chief. Savary took the visit as a matter of course, discussing business, and often increasing voluntarily their rates of payment. By this means he not only re-established his connection, but greatly extended it.

Savary’s system of espionage was even more searching and comprehensive than Fouché’s, and before long earned him the sobriquet of the “Sheik of Spies.” He had a whole army at his disposal—the gossips and gobe-mouches of the clubs, the cabmen and street porters, the workmen in the suburbs. When fashionable Paris migrated to their country houses for the summer and early autumn, Savary followed them with his spies, whom he found among their servants, letter-carriers, even their guests. He also reversed the process, and actually employed masters to spy on their servants, obliging every householder to transmit a report to the police of every change in their establishments, and of the conduct of the persons employed. He essayed also to make valets spy on those whom they served, so that a man became less than ever a hero to his valet.

It followed, naturally, that Savary was the most hated of all the tyrants who wielded the power of the police prefecture. He spared no one; he bullied the priests; he increased the rigours of the wretched prisoners of war at Bitche and Verdun; and exercised such an irritating, vexatious, ill-natured surveillance over the whole town, over every class—political, social, and criminal—that he was soon universally hated. He was a stupid man, eaten up with vanity and self-importance; extremely jealous of his authority, and ever on the look out to vindicate it if he thought it assailed. Never perhaps did more inflated, unjustifiable pride precede a more humiliating fall. Savary’s pretensions as a police officer were utterly shipwrecked by the conspiracy of General Malet, a semi-madman, who succeeded in shaking Napoleon’s throne to its very foundations and making his military Police Minister supremely ridiculous.

This General Malet was a born conspirator. He had done little as a soldier, but had been concerned in several plots against Napoleon, for the last of which he had been cast into the prison of La Force. During his seclusion he worked out the details of a new conspiracy, based upon the most daring and yet simplest design. He meant to take advantage of the emperor’s absence from Paris, and, announcing his death, declare a Provisional Government, backed by the troops, of whom he would boldly take command. It all fell out as he had planned, and, but for one trifling accident, the plot would have been entirely successful. Paris at the moment he rose was weakly governed. Cambacères represented the emperor; Savary held the police, but, in spite of his espionage, knew nothing of Malet, and little of the real state of Paris below the surface; Pasquier, prefect of police, was an admirable administrator, but not a man of action. The garrison of Paris was composed mainly of raw levies, for all the best troops were away with Napoleon in Russia, and the commandant of the place, General Hullin, was a sturdy soldier—no more: a mere child outside the profession of arms.

Malet had influence with Fouché, through which, before that Minister’s disgrace, he had obtained his transfer from La Force to a “Maison de Santé” in the Faubourg St. Antoine. In this half asylum, half place of detention, the inmates were suffered to come and go on parole, to associate freely with one another, and to receive any visitors they pleased from outside. In this convenient retreat, which sheltered other irreconcilable spirits, Malet soon matured his plot. His chief confederate—the only one, indeed, he fully trusted—was a certain Abbé Lafone, a man of great audacity and determination, who had already been mixed up in Royalist plots against the empire. The two kept their own counsel, alive to the danger of treachery and betrayal in taking others into their full confidence; but Malet could command the services of two generals, Guidal and Laborie, with whom he had been intimate at La Force, but who never knew the whole aim and extent of the conspiracy.

About 8 p.m. on the 23rd of October, 1812, Malet and the Abbé left the Faubourg St. Antoine, and Malet, now in full uniform, appeared at the gates of the neighbouring barracks, where he announced the news, received by special courier, of the emperor’s death, produced a resolution from the Senate proclaiming a Provisional Government, and investing him with the supreme command of the troops. Under his orders, officers were despatched with strong detachments to occupy the principal parts of the city, the barriers, the quays, the Prefecture, the Place Royal, and other open squares. Another party was sent to the prison of La Force to extract Generals Laborie and Guidal, the first of whom, when he joined Malet, was despatched to the prefecture and thence to the Ministry of Police, to seize both the préfet and Savary and carry them off to gaol. Guidal was to support Laborie. Malet himself, with another body of troops, proceeded to the Place Vendôme, the military headquarters of Paris, and proposed to make the Commandant Hullin his prisoner.

The arrest of the heads of the police was accomplished without the slightest difficulty about 8 a.m. on the 24th of October, and they were transported under escort to La Force. (Savary ever afterwards was nicknamed the Duc de la Force.) Malet meanwhile had roused General Hullin, to whom he presented his false credentials. As the general passed into an adjoining room to examine them, Malet fired a pistol at him and “dropped” him. Then the Adjutant-General Dorcet interposed, and, seizing his papers, instantly detected the forgery. Malet was on the point of shooting him also, when a staff-officer rushed up from behind, and, backed by a handful of his guard, easily overpowered Malet. From that moment the attempt collapsed. The Police Minister and the préfet were released from prison; the conspirators were arrested. Yet for a few hours Malet had been master of Paris.

Napoleon was furiously angry with everyone, and loaded the police in particular with abuse. He did not, however, remove Savary from his office, for he knew he could still trust him, and this was no time to lose the services of a devoted friend. The insecurity of his whole position had been clearly manifested. One man, a prisoner, had, by his own inventive audacity, succeeded in suborning or imposing upon superior officers and securing the assistance of large bodies of troops, in forcing prison doors, arresting Ministers and high officials, and seizing the reins of power. No one had stood against him; the powers wielded by authority were null and void; chance alone, a mere accident, had spoilt the enterprise.

Fouché Again.

At the restoration of the Bourbons the police organisation was revised, but still left in much the same hands—ex-Napoleonists, such as Beugnot and Bourrienne, who were director-general and prefect respectively. The latter distinguished himself by a fruitless attempt to arrest his old enemy Fouché, who was living quietly in Paris, holding aloof from affairs as he had done through the closing days of the Empire. Fouché escaped from the police officers by climbing over his garden wall, and then went into hiding. He was thus thrown back into the ranks of the Imperialists, and, on the return from Elba, was at once nominated to his old office of chief of police, where he made himself extremely useful to Napoleon. But he played a double part, as usual; had friends in both camps, and, after giving the emperor much valuable information as to the movements of the Allies before Waterloo, went over to the victors after the battle. Fouché was extraordinarily busy in shaping events at the final downfall of Napoleon, and he was one of the first to approach Wellington with suggestions as to the emperor’s disposal. He seems to have gained the Duke’s goodwill, and Wellington urged Louis XVIII. to appoint him afresh, as the person who could be best trusted to maintain public order, to the directorship of the police. Fouché had many friends in high places; he had also the knack of seeming to be indispensable. It was a severe blow to the king that Fouché should be forced upon him. When the order of appointment was placed before him for signature, he glanced at it, and let it lie upon the table, and the pen slipped from his hand; he long sat buried in sad thought before he could rouse himself to open relations with the man who had been hitherto the implacable foe of his family.

Fouché gained his point; but where all knew, all watched, and none trusted him, he needed all his sang froid, all his tact, to hold his position. But in his long career of conspiracy and change he had learnt the lesson of dissimulation and self-restraint. Yet he was still the focus and centre of intrigue, to whom everyone flocked—his old associates, once his friends and now his hardly concealed enemies; the men who had been his enemies and were now on the surface his friends. His antechamber showed the most mixed assemblage. “He went among them, from one to the other, speaking with the same ease as though he had the same thing to say to all. How often have I seen him creeping away from the window where he had been talking apart with some old comrade—Thibaudeau, for example, the ancient revolutionist—on the most friendly, confidential terms, to join us, a party of royalists, about an affair concerning the king. A little later Fouché inserted Thibaudeau’s name in the list of the proscribed.”[11]

Fouché has been very differently judged by his contemporaries. Some thought him an acute and penetrating observer, with a profound insight into character; knowing his epoch, the men and matters appertaining to it, intimately and by heart. Others, like Bourrienne, despised and condemned him. “I know no man,” says the latter, “who has passed through such an eventful period, who has taken part in so many convulsions, who so barely escaped disgrace and was yet loaded with honours.” The keynote of his character, thought Bourrienne, was great levity and inconstancy of mind. Yet he carried out his schemes, planned with mathematical exactitude, with the utmost precision. He had an insinuating manner; could seem to speak freely when he was only drawing others on. A retentive memory and a great grasp of facts enabled him to hold his own with many masters, and turn most things to his own advantage. He did not long survive the Restoration, and died at Trieste in 1820, leaving behind him a very considerable fortune.

CHAPTER VI.

EARLY POLICE (continued): ENGLAND.

IF a century or more ago France and other Continental countries were generally over-policed, England, as a free country, long refused to surrender its liberties. Until quite recent years there was no organised provision for public safety, for the maintenance of good order, the prevention of crime, or the pursuit of law-breakers. Good citizens co-operated in self-defence; the office of constable was incumbent upon all, but evaded by many on payment of substitutes. One of the earliest efforts to establish a systematic police was the statute 13th Edward I. (1285), made for the maintenance of peace in the city of London. This ancient statute was known as that of Watch and Ward, and it recognised the above principle that the inhabitants of every district must combine for their own protection. It recites how “many evils, as murders, robberies, and manslaughters,

have been committed by night and by day, and people have been beaten and evilly entreated”; it is enjoined that “none be so hardy as to be found going or wandering about the streets of the city with sword or buckler after curfew tolled at St. Martin’s Le Grand.” It goes on to say that any such should be taken by the keepers of the peace and be put in the place of confinement appointed for such offenders, to be dealt with as the custom is, and punished if the offence is proved. This Act further prescribed that as such persons sought shelter “in taverns more than elsewhere, lying in wait and watching their time to do mischief,” no tavern might be allowed to remain open “for sale of ale or wine” after the tolling of curfew. Many smaller matters were dealt with so as to ensure the peace of the city. It was enacted that, “forasmuch as fools who delight in mischief do learn to fence with buckler,” no school to teach the art of fencing should be allowed within the city. Again, many pains and penalties were imposed on foreigners who sought shelter and refuge in England “by reason of banishment out of their own country, or who, for great offence, have fled therefrom.” Such persons were forbidden to become innkeepers, “unless they have good report from the parts whence they cometh, or find safe pledges.” That these persons were a source of trouble is pretty plain from the language of the Act, which tells how “some nothing do but run up and down through the streets more by night than by day, and are well attired in clothing and array, and have their food of delicate meats and costly; neither do they use any craft or merchandise, nor have they lands and tenements whereof to live, nor any friend to find them; and through such persons many perils do often happen in the city, and many evils, and some of them are found openly offending, as in robberies, breaking of houses by night, murders, and other evil deeds.”

Another police Act, as it may be called, was that of 27th Elizabeth (1585) for the good government of the city and borough of Westminster, which had been recently enlarged. “The people thereof being greatly increased, and being for the most part without trade or industry, and many of them wholly given to vice and idleness,” and a power to correct them not being sufficient in law, the Dean of Westminster and the High Steward were given greater authority. They were entitled to examine and punish “all matters of incontinences, common scolds, and common annoyances, and to commit to prison all who offended against the peace.” Certain ordinances were made by this Act for regulating the domestic life of the city of Westminster; the bakers and the brewers, the colliers, wood-mongers, and bargemen were put under strict rule; no person was suffered to forestall or “regrate” the markets so as to increase the price of victuals by buying them up beforehand; the cooks and the tavern-keepers were kept separate: no man might sell ale and keep a cookshop at the same time; the lighting of the city was imposed upon the victuallers and tavern-keepers, who were ordered to keep one convenient lanthorn at their street doors from six p.m. until nine a.m. next morning, “except when the moon shall shine and give light.” Rogues and sturdy beggars were forbidden to wander in the streets under pain of immediate arrest. Many other strict regulations were made for the health and sanitation of the burgesses, such as the scavenging and cleansing of the streets, the punishment of butchers, poulterers, and fishmongers who might sell unwholesome food, the strict segregation of persons infected with the plague. It is interesting to note that Sir William Cecil, the great Lord Burleigh, was the first High Steward of Westminster, and that the regulations above quoted were introduced by him.

These Acts remained in force for many centuries, although the powers entrusted to the High Steward fell into great disuse. But in the 10th George II. (1737) the Elizabethan Act was re-enacted and its powers enlarged. This was an Act for well-ordering and regulating a night watch in the city—“a matter of very great importance for the preservation of the persons and properties of the inhabitants, and very necessary to prevent fires, murders, burglaries, robberies, and other outrages and disorders.” It had been found that all such precautions were utterly neglected, and now the Common Council of the city was authorised to create a night watch and levy rates to pay it. The instructions for this night watch were issued through the constables of wards and precincts, the old constitutional authority, who were expected to see them observed. But the night-watchmen could act in the absence of the constable when keeping watch and ward, and were enjoined to apprehend all night-walkers, malefactors, rogues, vagabonds, and disorderly persons whom they found disturbing the public peace, or whom they suspected of evil designs.

Forty years later another Act was passed, 14th George III. (1777), which again enlarged and, in a measure, superseded the last-mentioned Act. It is much more detailed, prescribing the actual number of watchmen, their wages, and how they are to be “armed and accommodated,” which means that they were to carry rattles and staves and lanterns; it details minutely the watchman’s duty: how he is to proclaim the time of the night or morning “loudly and as audibly as he can”; he is to see that all doors are safe and well secured; he is to prevent “to the utmost of his power all murders, burglaries, robberies, and affraies; he is to apprehend all loose, idle, and disorderly persons, and deliver them to the constable or headborough of the night at the watch-houses.” It may be stated at once that this Act, however excellent in intention and carefully designed, greatly failed in execution. The watchmen often proved unworthy of their trust, and it is recorded by that eminent

police magistrate, Mr. Colquhoun, “that no small portion of those very men who are paid for protecting the public are not only instruments of oppression in many instances, by extorting money most unwarrantably, but are frequently accessories in aiding and abetting or concealing the commission of crimes which it is their duty to detect and suppress.” It is but fair to add that Sir John Fielding, who was examined in 1772 as to the numerous burglaries committed in the metropolis, stated that the watch was insufficient, “that their duty was too hard and their pay too small.”

Beyond question the state of the metropolis, and, indeed, of the country at large, at the end of the eighteenth century was deplorable. Robbery and theft from houses and on the highway had been reduced to a regular system. Opportunities were sought, intelligence obtained, plans prepared with the utmost skill and patience. Houses to be forced were previously reconnoitred, and watched for days and weeks in advance. The modern burglar could have taught the old depredator little that he did not know. Again, the gentleman of the road—the bold highwayman—used infinite pains in seeking out his prey. He had his spies in every quarter, among all classes, and the earliest certain intelligence of travellers worth stopping when carrying money and other valuables; he could count upon the cordial support of publicans and ostlers, who helped him in his attack and covered his retreat. The footpads who infested the streets were quite as daring; it was unsafe to cross open spaces, even in the heart of the town, after dark. These lesser thieves, so adroit in picking pockets by day, used actual violence by night. The country was continually ravaged by other depredators: horse and cattle stealers, thieves who laid hands upon every kind of agricultural produce. The farmers’ fields were constantly plundered of their crops, fruit and vegetables were carried off, even the ears of wheat were cut from their stalks in the open day. It was estimated that one and a half million bushels were annually stolen in this way. The thieves boldly took their plunder to the millers to be ground, and the millers, although aware that fields and barns had been recently robbed, did not dare object, lest their mills should be burnt over their heads.

GAMBLING.

No doubt the general level of morality was low. Gambling of all kinds had increased enormously. There were gaming-houses and lottery offices everywhere. Faro banks and E. O. tables, and places where hazard, roulette, and rouge-et-noir could be played, had multiplied exceedingly. Six gaming-houses were kept in one street near the Haymarket, mostly by prize-fighters, and persons stood at the doors inviting passers-by to enter and play. Besides these, there were subscription clubs of presumably a higher class, and even ladies’ gaming-houses. The public lotteries were also a fruitful source of crime, not only in the stimulus they gave to speculation, but in their direct encouragement of fraud. A special class of swindlers was created—the lottery insurers, the sharpers who pretended to help the lottery players against loss by insuring the amount of their stakes. Offices for fraudulent lottery insurance existed all over the town. It was estimated that there were 400 of them, supporting 2,000 agents and clerks, and 7,500 “morocco men,” as they were called—the canvassers who went from door to door soliciting insurances, which they entered in a book covered with red morocco leather. It was said that these unlicensed offices obtained premiums of nearly two millions of money when the English and Irish lotteries were being drawn, on which they made a profit of from 15 to 25 per cent. It was proved by calculating the chances that they were some 33 per cent. in favour of the insurers. Even in those days the principle of profiting by the gambling spirit of the public was strongly condemned, but lotteries survived until 1826, since when the law has dealt severely with any specious attempts to reintroduce them under other names.

RIVER THIEVES.

At this time the plunder of merchandise and naval stores in the River Thames had reached gigantic proportions. Previous to the establishment of the Thames river police in 1798 the commerce of the country, all the operations of merchants and shipowners, were grievously injured by these wholesale depredations, which amounted at a moderate computation to quite half a million per annum. There were, first of all, the river pirates, who boarded unprotected ships in the stream. One gang of them actually weighed a ship’s anchor, hoisted it into their boat with a complete new cable, and rowed away with their spoil. These villains hung about vessels newly arrived and cut away anything within reach—cordage, spars, bags of cargo. They generally went armed, and were prepared to fight for what they seized. There were the “heavy horsemen and the light horsemen,” the “game watermen,” the “game lightermen,” the “mudlarks and the scuffle-hunters,” each of them following a particular line of their own. Some of these, with the connivance of watchmen or without, would cut lighters adrift and lead them to remote places where they could be pillaged and their contents carried away. Cargoes of coal, Russian tallow, hemp, and ashes were often secured in this way. The “light horsemen” did a large business in the spillings, drainings, and sweepings of sugar, coffee, and rum; these gleanings were greatly increased by fraudulent devices, and were carried off with the connivance of the mates, who shared in the profit. The “heavy horsemen” were smuggled on board to steal whatever they could find—coffee, cocoa, pimento, ginger, and so forth, which they carried on shore concealed about their persons in pouches and pockets under their clothes. The

“game watermen” worked by quickly receiving what was handed to them when cargoes were being discharged, and this they conveyed at once to some secret place; the “game lightermen” were of the same class, who used their lighters to conceal stolen parcels of goods which they could afterwards dispose of.

A clever trick is told of one of these thieves, who long did a big business in purloining oil. A merchant who imported great quantities was astonished at the constant deficiency in the amounts landed, far more than could be explained by ordinary leakage. He determined to attend at the wharf when the lighters arrived, and he saw that in one of them all the casks had been stowed with their bungs downwards. He waited until the lighter was unloaded, and then, visiting her, found the hold full of oil. This the lightermen impudently claimed as their perquisite; but the merchant refused to entertain the idea, and, having sent for casks, filled nine of them with the leakage. Still dissatisfied, he ordered the deck to be taken up, and found between the timbers of the lighter enough to fill five casks more. No doubt this robbery had been long practised.

“Mudlarks” were only small fry who hung about the stern quarters of ships at low water to receive and carry on shore any pickings they might secure. The “scuffle-hunters” resorted in large numbers to the wharves where goods were discharged, and laid hands upon any plunder they could find, chiefly the contents of broken packets, for which they fought and “scuffled.”

Before leaving this branch of depredation mention must be made of the plunder levied on his Majesty’s Dockyards, the Naval Victualling and Ordnance Stores, which were perpetually pillaged, as were the warships, transports, and lighters in the Thames, Medway, Solent, and Dart. Over and above the peculations of employees, the frauds and embezzlements in surveys, certificates, and accounts, there was nearly wholesale pillage in such articles as cordage, canvas, hinges, bolts, nails, timber, paint, pitch, casks, beef, pork, biscuit, and indeed all kinds of stores. No definite figures are at hand giving the value of these robberies, but they must have reached an enormous total.

“Fences.”

The extensive robberies described above were, no doubt, greatly facilitated by the many means that existed for the disposal of the stolen goods. Never did the nefarious trade of the “receiver” flourish so widely as then. This, the most mischievous class of criminal, without whom the thief would find his calling hazardous and unproductive, was extraordinarily numerous at this period. There were several thousands in the Metropolis alone, a few of them no more than careless, asking no questions about the property brought to them for purchase, but the bulk of them distinctly criminal, who bought goods well knowing them to be stolen. Many had been thieves themselves, but had found “receiving” a less hazardous and more profitable trade; they followed ostensibly some reputable calling—kept coalsheds, potato warehouses, and chandler’s shops—some were publicans, others dealt in secondhand furniture, old clothes, old iron, and rags, or were workers and refiners of gold and silver. These were the rank and file, the retailers, so to speak, who passed on what was brought to them to the wholesale “receivers,” of whom at that time there were some fifty or sixty, opulent people many of them, commanding plenty of capital. These high-class operators had their crucibles and their furnaces always ready for melting down plate; they had extensive connections beyond sea for the disposal of valuables, especially of jewels, which were taken from their settings to prevent recognition.

These great “fences”—the cant name for “receivers”—worked as large and lucrative a business as do any of their successors to-day. A wide connection was the first essential. Often enough the thieves arranged with the “receivers” before they entered upon any new job, and thus the latter kept touch with the operators, who gladly parted with their plunder at easy prices, being unable to dispose of it alone. It was a first principle with the “receiver” that the goods he purchased should not be recognisable, and until all marks and means of identification were removed he would not admit them into his house. He would not even discuss terms until the thieves had taken this precaution. Various methods were employed. In linen and cloth goods the head and fag-ends were cut off, and occasionally the list and selvedge, if they were peculiar. The marks on the soles of boots and shoes were obliterated by hot irons, and the linings, if necessary, removed. Gold watches were sent off to agents in large towns or on the Continent, their outward appearance having first been changed; the works of one were placed in the case of another. Where the proceeds of the robbery were banknotes, or property whose identity could not be destroyed, they were sent off to a distance to foreign marts, and all traces of them lost. It was essential that the “receiver” on a large scale should have an army of agents and co-partners—persons following the same nefarious traffic, who could be trusted, for their own sakes, to be cautious in their proceedings.

COINERS.

The general crime of this period was enormously increased by the extensive fabrication of false money. Coining was extraordinarily prevalent, and a wide, far-reaching system had been created for distributing and uttering the counterfeits, not only at home but on the Continent. All England, all Europe, was literally deluged with false money, the largest proportion of which was manufactured in this country. Not only was the current coinage of the realm admirably counterfeited—guineas, half-guineas, crowns, half-crowns, shillings, sixpences, and coppers, but the coiners could turn out all kinds of foreign money—louis d’ors, Spanish dollars, sequins, pagodas, and the rest, so cleverly imitated as almost to defy detection. So prosperous was the business that as many as forty or fifty private mints were constantly at work in London and various country towns fabricating false money; as many as 120 workpeople were engaged, and the names of some 650 known coiners were registered at the Royal Mint. There was a steady demand for the base coin; it went off so fast that the manufacturers seldom had any stock on hand. As soon as it was finished it was sent off, here, there, and everywhere, by every kind of conveyance. Not a coach nor a carrier left London without a parcel of bad money consigned to country agents. It was known that one agent alone had placed five hundred pounds’ worth with country buyers in a single week. Some idea of the profits may be gathered from the fact that Indian pagodas, worth 8s., could be manufactured for 1½d. apiece; and that the middleman who bought them at 5s. a dozen retailed them at from 2s. 3d. to 5s. each. The counterfeiting of gold coins was the least common, owing to the expense of the process and the necessary admixture of at least a portion of the precious metal. It was different with silver. It was stated that two persons alone could manufacture between two and three hundred pounds’ worth (nominal value) of spurious silver in six days. There were five kinds of base silver, known in the trade as flats, plated goods, plain goods, castings, and “pig things.” The first were cut out of flattened plates of a material part silver, part copper; the second were of copper only, silvered over; the third were of copper, turned out of a lathe and polished; the fourth were of white metal, cast in a mould; the “pig things” were the refuse of the rest converted into sixpences. Copper coins were also manufactured largely out of base metal.

Frauds on the currency were not limited to counterfeiting the coinage. Banknotes were systematically forged, although the penalty was death. This crime had been greatly stimulated by the suspension of specie payments and the issue of paper money. The Bank of England had been thus saved at a great financial crisis, when its reserve in cash and bullion had shrunk to little more than a million, and it had issued notes for values of less than five pounds. Note forgery at once increased to a serious extent, and as the Bank was implacable, insisting on rigorous prosecution, great numbers of capital convictions followed. The most minute and elaborate provisions existed, prescribing the heaviest penalties not only for the actual manufacture and uttering, but for the mere possession of banknote paper, plates, or engraving tools. The infliction of the extreme sentence did not check the crime. Detection, too, was most difficult. The public could not distinguish between true and false notes. Bank officials were sometimes deceived, and clerks at the counter were known to accept bad paper, yet refuse payment of what was genuine. Some account will be given on a later page of Charles Price, commonly called “Old Patch,” from his favourite disguise of a patch on one eye. He was a most extraordinarily successful forger of banknotes, who did all but the negotiation of them himself: he made his paper with the correct watermark, engraved his plates, and prepared his own ink. He had several homes, many aliases, used many disguises, and employed an army of agents and assistants, some of them his wives (for he was a noted bigamist), to put off the notes.

The Fieldings.

An early and commendable attempt had been made in the middle of the eighteenth century to grapple with this all-prevailing, all-consuming crime. When Henry Fielding, the immortal novelist, was appointed a Middlesex magistrate towards the close of his somewhat tempestuous career, he strove hard to check disorders, waging unceasing warfare against evil-doers and introducing a well-planned system of prevention and pursuit. Although in failing

health, he laboured incessantly. He often sat on the bench for sixteen hours out of the twenty-four, returning to Bow Street after a long day’s work to resume it from seven p.m. till midnight. He did a great public service in devising and executing a plan for the extirpation of robbers, although the benefit was but temporary. This was in 1753, when the whole town seemed at the mercy of the depredators. The Duke of Newcastle, at that time Secretary of State, sent for Fielding, who unfolded a scheme whereby, if £600 were placed at his disposal, he engaged to effect a cure. After his first advance from the Treasury he was able to report that “the whole gang of cut-throats was entirely dispersed, seven of them were in actual custody, and the rest driven, some out of the town, the rest out of the kingdom.” He had nearly killed himself in the effort. “Though my health was reduced to the last extremity ... I had the satisfaction of finding ... that the hellish society was almost entirely extirpated”; that, instead of “reading about murders and street robberies in the newspapers every morning,” they had altogether ceased. His plan had not cost the Government more than £300, and “had actually suppressed the evil for a time.”

It was only for a brief space, however; and his brother, blind Sir John Fielding, who succeeded him at Bow Street, frankly confessed that new gangs had sprung up in place of those recently dispersed. But he bravely set himself to combat the evil, and adopted his brother’s methods. He first grappled with the street robbers, and in less than three months had brought nine of them to the gallows. Next he dealt with the highwaymen infesting the road near London, “so that scarce one escaped.” The housebreakers, lead-stealers, shoplifters, and all the small fry of pickpockets and petty larcenists were increasingly harried and in a large measure suppressed. He organised a scheme for protecting the suburbs, by which the residents subscribed to meet the expense of transmitting immediate news to Bow Street by mounted messengers, with full particulars of articles stolen, and the description of the robber; the same messenger was to give information at the turnpikes and public-houses en route, and thus a hue and cry could be raised and the offender would probably soon be captured. At the same time a notice would be inserted in the Public Advertiser warning tavern-keepers, stable-keepers, and pawnbrokers, the first against harbouring rogues, the second against hiring out horses to the persons described, the third against purchasing goods which were the proceeds of a robbery.

Sir John Fielding (he was knighted in 1760) was a most active and energetic magistrate, and he was such a constant terror to evil-doers that his life was often threatened. There were few crimes reported in which he did not take a personal interest, promptly visiting the spot, taking information, and setting his officers on the track. When Lord Harrington’s house was robbed of some three thousand pounds’ worth of jewellery, Sir John repaired thither

at once, remaining in the house all day and the greater part of the night. It was the same in cases of highway robbery, murder, or riot. Everyone caught red-handed was taken before him, and his court was much frequented by great people to hear the examination of persons charged with serious crimes—such as Dr. Dodd, Hackman, who murdered Miss Reay, the brother-forgers the Perreaus, and Sarah Meteyard, who killed her parish apprentice by abominable cruelty. One well-known nobleman, “a great patron of the arts,” given also to visiting Newgate in disguise in order to stare at the convicts under sentence of death, would constantly take his seat on the bench.

Sir John Fielding’s appearance in court and manner of conducting business have been graphically described by the Rev. Dr. Somerville of Jedburgh. He speaks in his diary of Sir John’s “singular adroitness. He had a bandage over his eyes, and held a little switch or rod in his hand, waving it before him as he descended from the bench. The sagacity he discovered in the questions he put to the witnesses, and the marked and successful attention, as I conceived, not only to the words but to the accents and tones of the speaker, supplied the advantage which is usually rendered by the eye; and his arrangement of the questions, leading to the detection of concealed facts, impressed me with the highest respect for his singular ability as a police magistrate.”

Sir John Fielding was undoubtedly the originator of the horse patrol, which was found a most useful check on highway robbery. But it was not permanently established by him, and we find him beseeching the Secretary of State to continue it for a short time longer “as a temporary but necessary step in order to complete that which was being so happily begun.” He was satisfied from “the amazing good effects produced by this patrol that outrages would in future be put down by a little further assistance of the kind.” This patrol was reintroduced by the chief magistrate of Bow Street about 1805, either Sir Richard Ford or Sir Nathaniel Conant. It was a very efficient force, recruited entirely from old cavalry soldiers, who were dressed in uniform, well armed, and well mounted. They wore a blue coat with brass buttons, a scarlet waistcoat, blue trousers and boots, and they carried sword and pistols. Their duties were to patrol the neighbourhood of London in a circuit of from five to ten miles out, beginning at five or seven p.m. and ending at midnight. It was their custom to call aloud to all horsemen and carriages they met, “Bow Street patrol!” They arrested all known offenders whom they might find, and promptly followed up the perpetrators of any robbery that came under their notice. Very marked and satisfactory