The Hawkins Gang - when a butler goes to the bad

In September 1720 John Hawkins, smuggler and highwayman, rode to Oxford. The total of his criminality was to deface a picture in the Bodleian Library.  This is an oddment in a tale on theft, violence and living proof there is no honour amongst thieves.  It is the tale of the Butler gone to the bad.

A pamphlet was issued soon after Hawkins' execution [1]

While the 1710s is known as the Golden Age of Piracy. Increasing wealth and mobility, coupled with inadequate law enforcement at sea - coupled with the desire for some unethical redistribution of wealth was matched in the English Countryside and tempted some to take part in it.

 

Our story begins in 1718.  Sir Dennis Dutry was on the up. As a wealthy director of the East India Company, his cash had recently been consolidated with a baronetcy.  [2]  He employed, as butler, a certain John Hawkins [3], who was 24 and had two gambling problems. The first was he seemed to be addicted to it. The second was he wasn’t very good at it and stole a quantity of silver plate from his master to pay for his habit. This was not a path that would end well. Hawkins was suspected and discharged without a reference.  The former butler bought a horse and a pair of pistols and took to the road to earn a dishonest crust.

 

According to the Post Office would later be terribly keen to catch him, Hawkins was a ‘very fat man, of a fair complexion, pretty handsome but somewhat chub fac’d about five foot ten inches high, wears most commonly a cinnamon colour’d cloth coat, or a dark frock.’ [4]

The solo highwayman faces problems which are solved by having accomplices. Hawkins took up with a certain Ryley, Comferford, Reeves and Irishman Captain James Lennard. Lennard combined robbery with Jacobitism and smuggled men out to the foreign run ‘Irish Brigades’ on behalf of the cause. [5]  The gang prospered for a while on Bagshot and Hounslow Heaths but Hawkins seemed to have gambled it away and Lennard was arrested for his part in the 1719 Jacobite Rebellion.  Hawkins was arrested for attempting to rescue Lennard but was discharged.  It may well have been that Hawkins dobbed in Lennard in exchange for his subsequent release. [6]  The gang was, however, done for, when Cumberford and Reeves were executed after a robbery near Guildford. Ryley was transported.

Gambling brought Hawkins into contact with Ralph Wilson, a Yorkshire law student, articled to a solicitor in Chancery. They appear to have robbed a coach and Hawkins was arrested but got off the charge. Wilson returned home to Whitby for a year but then returned to his studies, his gaming and his partnership with Hawkins. 

Hawkins formed a new gang, consisting of himself, his brother Will - who had been captaining a smuggling vessel, Wilson, some others unnamed and a certain Pocock. Things did not go well. Pocock was arrested, turned King’s Evidence and a chap called Ralphson, who had been minding the ill gotten gains hot footed it to the Netherlands never to be heard of again. The rest of the gang fled to Wales and Ireland.

Undeterred by these setbacks Hawkins returned to form a third gang. He recruited a Ludgate Hill barber called James Wright and Ralph Wilson returned to the fold.  In 1720 the gang committed two or three robberies a week, sometimes lurking five miles from London, sometimes riding into the City to attack the South Sea Company’s speculators as their sedan chairs left Exchange Alley.

Photo by Mike Hill

Amongst the victims of the Hawkins Gang were the Earl of Burlington, Lord Bruce, Crown Advocate Sir David Dalrymple and General Evans.  Hawkins shot and killed Evan’s footman. On one August night they robbed a coach in Chancery Lane, another in Lincoln’s Inn Field and a third belonging to Lord Westmoreland. Westmorland summoned the Watch, who poured fire into the gang but were dispersed by a pistol-shot over their heads.

Honour and straight dealing accountancy among thieves is rare and the Hawkins gang were not a shining example. Hawkins pretended to have fenced Lord Bruce’s sapphire ring for £6 and gave Wright £3 as his share. He later sold it in Holland for £40. Wilson was an easy touch. He always needed money to gamble with and then lost it quickly.

The gang robbed Sir David Dalrymple of three pounds, a snuff box and pocket book.  Dalrymple went to Jonathan Wild, the famed thief taker and runner of criminals and offered a reward of sixty pounds for the return of the book.  Hawkins decided to go to Holland to sell their loot. It was agreed to meet up at the Queen’s Head Tavern on Tower Hill. Wright had gone to recover Lord Bruce’s watch, which he had pawned. Sending a boy ahead to see if all was well, Hawkins learnt that Wright had been arrested by Jonathan Wild. [7]  Will Hawkins and Wright were caught but Wilson and Jack Hawkins escaped. 

Photo by Mike Hill. No artworks were harmed in the making of this work

It was around this time, for reasons unknown, the gang went to Oxford, visited the Bodleian Library and defaced a painting for reasons as yet known to History.  £100 reward was offered for the capture of the vandals. This was after a tailor of Whiggish principles had been arrested because, well, he looked the sort of person who may have done it.

After his moment of artistic criticism, Hawkins finally got to Holland, where he sold the booty. During this time he considered joining forces with Louis Dominique Bourguignon aka Cartouche, but opted against it.  This proved a wise move as soon after Cartouche was caught and his gang done to death or sent to the galleys.

Ralph Wilson does have a life that was aching for William Horgarth to immortalise in a morality print. When his father died he inherited the estate, sold it for £350 and then gambled most of it away.  The remnant was lent to the Hawkins brothers to buy new horses. 

It was time to get the gang back for one last mission. Hawkins brought Wilson back, unwillingly according to Wilson, from Yorkshire and Wright was replaced by a ‘stout, brisk man’ from Lincolnshire called George Simpson. [8] Not all was well. Will Hawkins and Ralph Wilson fell out, Hawkins feeling Wilson was just not very good at highwaymanship - or gambling for that matter. He called him the ‘first porter to the gang.’  The full description of Wilson’s perceived failures allows us to see the national and xenophobic stereotypes of the error, and wonder what word r__sh was, being more scandalous than buggery.  Wilson was described as having:

‘Great an affection for anything that is r__sch as a Welshman has for toasted cheese, a Scotsman for BonnyClabber, a Spaniard for a patched cloak, an Italian for buggery, a Dutchman for butter, a Frenchman for the pox.’  The gang now lived in a safe house, a dram shop, near the walls of London, sharing the proceeds of their spectacular number of robbers with the owner. 

In Wilson’s own words ‘we harassed most of the morning stage-coaches in England. One morning, we robb’d the Worcester, the Gloucester, the Cirencester, the Bristol, and the Oxford coaches all together. Next morning the Chichester and Ipswich, and perhaps the third morning the Portsmouth coach. We were constant customers to the Bury coach. I think we touch’d it ten times.’

Not all robberies were successful. On 2nd September Will Hawkin and new recruit, Butler Fox, followed the Cirencester coach through Hyde Park Turnpike and held it up at Knightsbridge. The haul consisted of a mere 25 shillings and a corkscrew. Not downhearted they then intercepted the Huntigdon Coach on Mount Hill and gained one and a half guineas, 6lb chocolate, 16 yards of fustian, 3 yards of blue cloth, ½ lb tea, a nightgown, a periwig, two Holland-linen shirts, Risby’s Miscellanies and the last two volumes of Pope’s Homer, as well as a set of pewter buttons. [9]

Fortune was turning against the gang, although, to be honest, it had never been their boon companion. During one robbery Hawkins was wounded by an unexpected blunderbus. Heavy rain kept them indoors and when the weather turned their horses were ill and could not leave the stable. Forced to rob on foot, they went to Hyde Park - where Wilson managed to shoot himself in the hand.  Word came that Jonathon Wild was offering a big reward for them and the gang left the capital for a while.

Will Hawkins was arrested when the shirts he was trying to fence were recognised and he was arrested. Will then turned evidence on Wilson, Simpson, Fox and even his own brother, John, to the thief taker.

While the romantic image of the Highway is of the distressed cavalier, Hawkins and his latest recruit, George Simpson, had come from Domestic Middle Management,  Simpson had been a bailiff in Lincolnshire, Under Butler to Lord Castlemain then served as a footman for several gentlemen. The gang committed fifty robberies in the autumn of 1721, amongst which they attacked the Bristol Mail -twice. The Post Office was vexed and offered a £200 reward. It seems to have worked as the gang were arrested in a tavern near the Old Bailey.

The Hawkins boys and Simpson offered to turn King’s Evidence but Wilson go there first and spilled the beans. Amongst the beans were that he definitely wasn’t there when they cut the tongue out of a woman who protested, or raped any of the women or treated the men cruelly. Apparently he was a poor unfortunate.

John Hawkins was put on trial at the Old Bailey on 10th May 1722. [10] Evidence was extensive. Hawkins called a character witness, Henry Hunt, a stock jobber, who claimed he’d lent money to Hawkins who always paid it back honourably.   The court recalled ‘Hawkins then call'd several Witnesses to his manner of Living, who depos'd, that he was born at Staines, and a few Years ago was a Livery Servant to Sir Dennis Dutry ; after which he traded to France and Holland, in Wine, Brandy, Etc.’  It was no good.  ‘The prisoners insisted on their on their Innocence; but the Evidence being positive, and fortified by many concurrent Circumstances, the Jury found them both guilty of the Indictment.’ George Simpson was also sentenced to death. [11]

The end was nigh.  The Newcastle Courant noted a smith had been sent to Newgate to measure Hawkins and Simpson for iron-work as they were to be hung in chains and John had slipped him half a crown, hoping he would make them easy as he had a long journey. [12]  True crime always sells and soon after the same paper was advertising a book recording Hawkins and Simpson’s crimes. [13]

Hawkins ended up at Tyburn on 21st May 1722. Their bodies ended up on Hounslow Heath gibbeted as an example to others. It didn’t work as on 21st July The Newcastle Courant reported the Bristol Mail had been robbed near the place where the bodies were hanging. [14]

Notes

[1]  A full and impartial account of all the robberies committed by John Hawkins, George Sympson, ... and their companions.  1722  

https://archive.org/details/bim_eighteenth-century_a-full-and-impartial-acc_wilson-ralph-highwayma_1722_2/mode/2up

[2]  Dutry was of Huguenot stock. He’d been born in Amsterdam and was naturalised as an English subject in 1691. Four years later he married Mary Reneen.  He appears as a benefactor of St Thomas’ Hospital in 1714 and died, childless, in 1728. He was buried in St Peter le Poer.

[3] John Hawkins was born in Staines and lived as a waiter in the Red Lion, Brentford, before becoming a gentleman’s servant.    Richard Norton, The Georgian Underworld https://rictornorton.co.uk/gu08.htm 

[4] P.172 Thief-Taker General : Jonathan Wild and the emergence of crime and corruption as a way of life in eighteenth-century England by Gerald Howson,1985. 

[5]  P.165  Dangerous Merchandise: Smuggling, Jacobitism, and Commercial Culture in

Southeast England, 1690-1760 by Paul Monod   Journal of British Studies. Vol. 30, No. 2 April 1991.

[6] P.172 Howson

[7] P.173 Howson.  The stories of the arrest vary. One has it that Wild had already told the barman of the Queen’s Head he was after the Hawkins Gang and having been tipped off, Wild struck. On Wild’s arrival Wright drew his pistols, Wild jumped Wright and gripped Wright’s chin between his teeth before three assistants subdued Wright.

[8] P.178 Howson

[9] P.179 Howson

[10]  https://www.oldbaileyonline.org/record/t17220510-3?text=Jack%20Hawkins 

[11] P.10 Stamford Mercury 17th May 1722

[12] p.8 The Newcastle Weekly Courant 26th May 1722

[13] p.3 The Newcastle Weekly Courant 31st May 1722

[14] p.4 The Newcastle Weekly Courant 21st July 1722