And then, wonderfully if not miraculously, he escaped again. Somehow he managed to slip his hands through his handcuffs, and with a small nail managed to loose one of the links in the chains about his legs; like some “posture master” from Bartholomew Fair he then squeezed through the great chains which held him. With a piece of this broken chain he worked out a transverse bar from the chimney and climbed upwards into the “Red Room,” “whose door had not been unbolted for seven years.” With a nail he freed its bolt in seven minutes and got into a passage which led to the chapel; then with a spike from one of the interior railings he opened four other doors which were all locked and bolted from the other side. On opening the final door he found himself on the outside of the prison, with the roofs of the city below him. Then he remembered his blanket. He had left it in his cell. He returned all the way to the “Stone Castle,” through the chapel and down the chimney, in order to retrieve it. He returned to the outer air and, with the blanket spiked to the stone wall, slid down quietly.
Over the next few days, he disguised himself as a beggar and as a butcher, the two most familiar London types, while the streets around him were filled with ballads and broadsides proclaiming his latest escape. In the disguise of a foot porter he visited the printer of those “Last Dying Speeches” which, as he knew or guessed, would accompany his own journey to the scaffold. He robbed a pawn-broker in Drury Lane and, with the proceeds, bought a fashionable suit and a silver sword; then he hired a coach and, with that innate sense of theatre which never seemed to desert him, he drove through the arch of Newgate itself before visiting the taverns and ale-houses of the vicinity. Recaptured on that evening, two weeks after his escape, he was taken back to the prison from which he had effected such a remarkable exit, and constantly watched; when he was led to the court where the punishment of death was again pronounced, he was surrounded by “the most numerous Croud of People that ever was seen in London.” He was sentenced to be hanged within a week. There were reports that he would break away at Little Turnmill along Holborn-and on the road to Tyburn a penknife was taken from him-but there was to be no reprieve from what Peter Linebaugh has called his “final escape.”
It is an intensely private as well as a very public London story. We may infer that his youthful experience in the workhouse of Bishopsgate prompted his obsessive desire for escape, while it is likely that he somehow acquired his extraordinary skills while working as a carpenter’s apprentice; certainly he would have learned the uses of files and chisels while practising upon wood. He was a violent and dishonest man, but his series of escapes from Newgate transformed the atmosphere of the city, where the prevailing mood became one of genuine collaborative excitement. To escape from the most visible and oppressive symbol of authority-that “black cloud” which pursued Boswell-was in a sense to be freed from all the restraints of the ordinary world. We might then equate the experience of the prison with the experience of the city itself. It is indeed a familiar and often an accurate analogy, and the history of Jack Sheppard suggests another aspect of it. He hardly ever left London, even with the opportunity and indeed the pressing necessity of doing so; after three days “on the run” in Northamptonshire, for example, he rode back to the city. After his penultimate escape from Newgate he returned to Spitalfields, where he had spent his earliest days. After his final escape he was determined to remain in London, despite the pleas of his family. He was in that sense a true Londoner who could not or would not operate outside his own territory.
He possessed other urban characteristics. After his escapes he disguised himself as a variety of tradesmen, and generally behaved in a thoroughly dramatic fashion. To ride in a coach through Newgate was a mark of theatrical genius. He was profane to the point of being irreligious, while his violence against the propertied interests was not inconsistent with the egalitarianism of the “mob.” After one of his escapes a pamphleteer declaimed: “Woe to the Shopkeepers, and woe to the Dealers in Ware, for the roaring Lion is abroad.” So Jack became an intrinsic part of London mythology, his exploits celebrated in ballads and verses and dramas and fiction.
