DAVID HAGGART was born at Canonmills, with no richer birthright than
thievish fingers and a left hand of surpassing activity. The son of a
gamekeeper, he grew up a long-legged, red-headed callant, lurking in the
sombre shadow of the Cowgate, or like the young Sir Walter, championing
the Auld Town against the New on the slopes of Arthur's Seat. Kipping was
his early sin; but the sportsman's instinct, born of his father's trade,
was so strong within him, that he pinched a fighting cock before he was
breeched, and risked the noose for horse-stealing when marbles should have
engrossed his boyish fancy. Turbulent and lawless, he bitterly resented
the intolerable restraint of a tranquil life, and, at last, in the hope of
a larger liberty, he enlisted for a drummer in the Norfolk Militia,
stationed at the moment in Edinburgh Castle. A brief, insubordinate year,
misspent in his country's service, proved him hopeless of discipline: he
claimed his discharge, and henceforth he was free to follow the one craft
for which nature and his own ambition had moulded him.
Like Chatterton, like Rimbaud, Haggart came into the full possession of
his talent while still a child. A Barrington of fourteen, he knew every
turn and twist of his craft, before he escaped from school. His youthful
necessities were munificently supplied by facile depredation, and the only
hindrance to immediate riches was his ignorance of flash kens where he
might fence his plunder. Meanwhile he painted his soul black with
wickedness. Such hours as he could snatch from the profitable conduct of
his trade he devoted to the austere debauchery of Leith or the Golden
Acre. Though he knew not the seduction of whisky, he missed never a dance
nor a raffle, joining the frolics of prigs and callets in complete
forgetfulness of the shorter catechism. In vain the kirk compared him to a
'bottle in the smoke'; in vain the minister whispered of hell and the
gallows; his heart hardened, as his fingers grew agile, and when, at
sixteen, he left his father's house for a sporting life, he had not his
equal in the three kingdoms for cunning and courage.
His first accomplice was Barney M'Guire, who—until a fourteen
stretch sent him to Botany Bay—played Clytus to David's Alexander,
and it was at Portobello Races that their brilliant partnership began.
Hitherto Haggart had worked by stealth; he had tracked his booty under the
cloud of night. Now was the moment to prove his prowess in the eye of day,
to break with a past which he already deemed ignoble. His heart leaped
with the occasion: he tackled his adventure with the hot-head energy of a
new member, big with his maiden speech. The victim was chosen in an
instant: a backer, whose good fortune had broken the bookmakers. There was
no thief on the course who did not wait, in hungry appetence, the
sportsman's descent from the stand; yet the novice outstripped them all.
'I got the first dive at his keek-cloy,' he writes in his simple, heroic
style, 'and was so eager on my prey, that I pulled out the pocket along
with the money, and nearly upset the gentleman.' A steady brain saved him
from the consequence of an o'erbuoyant enthusiasm. The notes were passed
to Barney in a flash, and when the sportsman turned upon his assailant,
Haggart's hands were empty.
Thereupon followed an infinite series of brilliant exploits. With Barney
to aid, he plundered the Border like a reiver. He stripped the yeomen of
Tweedside with a ferocity which should have avenged the disgrace of
Flodden. More than once he ransacked Ecclefechan, though it is unlikely
that he emptied the lean pocket of Thomas Carlyle. There was not a gaff
from Newcastle to the Tay which he did not haunt with sedulous
perseverance; nor was he confronted with failure, until his figure became
a universal terror. His common method was to price a horse, and while the
dealer showed Barney the animal's teeth, Haggart would slip under the
uplifted arm, and ease the blockhead of his blunt. Arrogant in his skill,
delighted with his manifold triumphs, Haggart led a life of unbroken
prosperity under the brisk air of heaven, and, despite the risk of his
profession, he remained two years a stranger to poverty and imprisonment.
His worst mishap was to slip his forks into an empty pocket, or to
encounter in his cups a milvadering horse-dealer; but his joys were free
and frank, while he exulted in his success with a boyish glee. 'I was
never happier in all my life than when I fingered all this money,' he
exclaims when he had captured the comfortable prize of two hundred pounds.
And then he would make merry at Newcastle or York, forgetting the knowing
ones for a while, going abroad in white cape and tops, and flicking his
leg like a gentleman with a dandy whip. But at last Barney and a wayward
ambition persuaded him to desert his proper craft for the greater hazard
of cracking a crib, and thus he was involved in his ultimate ruin. He
incurred and he deserved the untoward fate of those who overlook their
talents' limitation; and when this master of pickpockets followed Barney
through the window of a secluded house upon the York Road, he might
already have felt the noose tightening at his neck. The immediate reward
of this bungled attack was thirty pounds, but two days later he was
committed with Barney to the Durham Assizes, where he exchanged the
obscurity of the perfect craftsman for the notoriety of the dangerous
gaol-bird.
For the moment, however, he recovered his freedom: breaking prison, he
straightway conveyed a fiddlestick to his comrade, and in a twinkling was
at Newcastle again, picking up purses well lined with gold, and robbing
the bumpkins of their scouts and chats. But the time of security was
overpast. Marked and suspicious, he began to fear the solitude of the
country; he left the horse-fair for the city, and sought in the
budging-kens of Edinburgh the secrecy impossible on the hill-side. A
clumsy experiment in shop-lifting doubled his danger, and more than once
he saw the inside of the police-office. Henceforth, he was free of the
family; he loafed in the Shirra-Brae; he knew the flash houses of Leith
and the Grassmarket. With Jean Johnston, the blowen of his choice, he
smeared his hands with the squalor of petty theft, and the drunken
recklessness wherewith he swaggered it abroad hastened his approaching
downfall.
With a perpetual anxiety to avoid the nippers his artistry dwindled. The
left hand, invincible on the Cheviots, seemed no better than a bunch of
thumbs in the narrow ways of Edinburgh; and after innumerable
misadventures Haggart was safely lodged in Dumfries gaol. No sooner was he
locked within his cell than his restless brain planned a generous escape.
He would win liberty for his fellows as well as for himself, and after a
brief council a murderous plot was framed and executed. A stone slung in a
handkerchief sent Morrin, the gaoler, to sleep; the keys found on him
opened the massy doors; and Haggart was free with a reward set upon his
head. The shock of the enterprise restored his magnanimity. Never did he
display a finer bravery than in this spirited race for his life, and
though three counties were aroused he doubled and ducked to such purpose
that he outstripped John Richardson himself with all his bloodhounds, and
two days later marched into Carlisle disguised in the stolen rags of a
potato-bogle.
During the few months that remained to him of life he embarked upon a
veritable Odyssey: he scoured Scotland from the Border to St. Andrews, and
finally contrived a journey oversea to Ireland, where he made the name of
Daniel O'Brien a terror to well-doers. Insolent and careless, he lurched
from prison to prison; now it was Armagh that held him, now Downpatrick,
until at last he was thrust on a general charge of vagabondage and
ill-company into Kilmainham, which has since harboured many a less valiant
adventurer than David Haggart. Here the culminating disgrace overtook him:
he was detected in the prison yard by his ancient enemy, John Richardson,
of Dumfries, who dragged him back to Scotland heavily shackled and charged
with murder. So nimble had he proved himself in extrication, that his
captors secured him with pitiless severity; round his waist he carried an
iron belt, whereto were padlocked the chains, clanking at his wrists and
ankles. Thus tortured and helpless, he was fed 'like a sucking turkey in
Bedlam'; but his sorrows vanished, and his dying courage revived at sight
of the torchlight procession, which set forth from Dumfries to greet his
return.
His coach was hustled by a mob, thousands strong, eager to catch sight of
Haggart the Murderer, and though the spot where he slew Morrin was like
fire beneath his passing feet, he carried to his cell a heart and a brain
aflame with gratified vanity. His guilt being patent, reprieve was as
hopeless as acquittal, and after the assured condemnation he spent his
last few days with what profit he might in religious and literary
exercises. He composed a memoir, which is a model of its kind; so
diligently did he make his soul, that he could appear on the scaffold in a
chastened spirit of prayerful gratitude; and, being an eminent scoundrel,
he seemed a proper subject for the ministrations of Mr. George Combe.
'That is the one thing I did not know before,' he confessed with an
engaging modesty, when his bumps were squeezed, and yet he was more than a
match for the amiable phrenologist, whose ignorance of mankind persuaded
him to believe that an illiterate felon could know himself and analyse his
character.
His character escaped his critics as it escaped himself. Time was when
George Borrow, that other picaroon, surprised the youthful David, thinking
of Willie Wallace upon the Castle Rock, and Lavengro's romantic memory
transformed the raw-boned pickpocket into a monumental hero, who lacked
nothing save a vast theatre to produce a vast effect. He was a Tamerlane,
robbed of his opportunity; a valiant warrior, who looked in vain for a
battlefield; a marauder who climbed the scaffold not for the magnitude,
but for the littleness of his sins. Thus Borrow, in complete
misunderstanding of the rascal's qualities.
Now, Haggart's ambition was as circumscribed as his ability. He died, as
he was born, an expert cly-faker, whose achievements in sleight of hand
are as yet unparalleled. Had the world been one vast breast pocket his
fish-hook fingers would have turned it inside out. But it was not his to
mount a throne, or overthrow a dynasty. 'My forks,' he boasted, 'are
equally long, and they never fail me.' That is at once the reason and the
justification of his triumph. Born with a consummate artistry tingling at
his finger-tips, how should he escape the compulsion of a glorious
destiny? Without fumbling or failure he discovered the single craft for
which fortune had framed him, and he pursued it with a courage and an
industry which gave him not a kingdom, but fame and booty, exceeding even
his greedy aspiration. No Tamerlane he, questing for a continent, but
David Haggart, the man with the long forks, happy if he snatched his
neighbour's purse.
Before all things he respected the profession which his left hand made
inevitable, and which he pursued with unconquerable pride. Nor in his
inspired youth was plunder his sole ambition: he cultivated the garden of
his style with the natural zeal of the artist; he frowned upon the bungler
with a lofty contempt. His materials were simplicity itself: his forks,
which were always with him, and another's well-filled pocket, since,
sensible of danger, he cared not to risk his neck for a purse that did not
contain so much as would 'sweeten a grawler.' At its best, his method was
always witty—that is the single word which will characterise it—witty
as a piece of Heine's prose, and as dangerous. He would run over a man's
pockets while he spoke with him, returning what he chose to discard
without the lightest breath of suspicion. 'A good workman,' his
contemporaries called him; and they thought it a shame for him to be idle.
Moreover, he did not blunder unconsciously upon his triumph; he tackled
the trade in so fine a spirit of analysis that he might have been the very
Aristotle of his science. 'The keek-cloy,' he wrote, in his hints to young
sportsmen, 'is easily picked. If the notes are in the long fold just tip
them the forks; but if there is a purse or open money in the case, you
must link it.' The breast-pocket, on the other hand, is a severer test.
'Picking the suck is sometimes a kittle job,' again the philosopher
speaks. 'If the coat is buttoned it must be opened by slipping past. Then
bring the lil down between the flap of the coat and the body, keeping your
spare arm across your man's breast, and so slip it to a comrade; then
abuse the fellow for jostling you.'
Not only did he master the tradition of thievery; he vaunted his
originality with the familiar complacence of the scoundrel. Forgetting
that it was by burglary that he was undone, he explains for his public
glorification that he was wont to enter the houses of Leith by forcing the
small window above the outer door. This artifice, his vanity grumbles, is
now common; but he would have all the world understand that it was his own
invention, and he murmurs with the pedantry of the convicted criminal that
it is now set forth for the better protection of honest citizens. No less
admirable in his own eyes was that other artifice which induced him to
conceal such notes as he managed to filch in the collar of his coat. Thus
he eluded the vigilance of the police, which searched its prey in those
days with a sorry lack of cunning. In truth, Haggart's wits were as nimble
as his fingers, and he seldom failed to render a profitable account of his
talents. He beguiled one of his sojourns in gaol by manufacturing tinder
wherewith to light the prisoners' pipes, and it is not astonishing that he
won a general popularity. In Ireland, when the constables would take him
for a Scot, he answered in high Tipperary, and saved his skin for a while
by a brogue which would not have shamed a modern patriot. But quick as
were his wits, his vanity always outstripped them, and no hero ever
bragged of his achievements with a louder effrontery.
Thus he celebrated his downfall in a ballad that has the true Newgate
ring, and verily in his own eyes he was a hero who carried to the scaffold
a dauntless spirit unstained by treachery.
He believed himself an adept in all the arts; as a squire of dames he held
himself peerless, and he assured the ineffable Combe, who recorded his
flippant utterance with a credulous respect, that he had sacrificed
hecatombs of innocent virgins to his importunate lust. Prose and verse
trickled with equal facility from his pen, and his biography is a
masterpiece. Written in the pedlar's French as it was misspoken in the
hells of Edinburgh, it is a narrative of uncommon simplicity and
directness, marred now and again by such superfluous reflections as are
the natural result of thievish sentimentality. He tells his tale without
paraphrase or adornment, and the worthy Writer to the Signet, who prepared
the work for the Press, would have asked three times the space to record
one-half the adventures. 'I sunk upon it with my forks and brought it with
me'; 'We obtained thirty-three pounds by this affair'—is there not
the stalwart flavour of the epic in these plain, unvarnished sentences?
His other accomplishments are pallid in the light of his brilliant left
hand. Once, at Derry—he attended a cock-fight, and beguiled an
interval by emptying the pockets of a lucky bookmaker. An expert, who
watched the exploit in admiration, could not withhold a compliment. 'You
are the Switcher,' he exclaimed; 'some take all, but you leave nothing.'
And it is as the Switcher that Haggart keeps his memory green.
