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.
Now all you ramblers in mourning go,
For the prince of ramblers is lying low,
And all you maidens that love the game,
Put on your mourning veils again.
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.