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are playing at Dice, Cards, Bowls, Quoits, Shove-Groat, Tennis, Football or other unlawful game new Invented, may arrest the Keepers of such places and imprison them.
     
    Fielding particularly disapproved of gaming and on 1 February 1751 sent eighty soldiers, bayonets fixed, to close a gaming house where forty-five people were arrested. One is left wondering how he expected energetic, unemployed ex-military personnel to spend their enforced leisure time. He did have some rather strange ideas for creating jobs. He argued that wages of skilled workers should be kept high to retain their services, while wages for others should be held down to reduce prices. On the other hand, he did not think that runaway servants should be branded on the forehead by order of two magistrates. Fielding argued against the practice of advertising a reward for the return of stolen property, suggesting that this encouraged robberies, and the following year, 1752, the practice was banned. He also believed that minor offenders should have less severe punishments and should, where possible, be kept out of prison so that they could ‘be kept apart from the felons and not sent to Newgate as they are now … the first theft will often prove the last’.
    It was at this time that Fielding described Newgate as ‘a prototype of Hell’, reflecting not only his judgement on the suffering inflicted upon its inmates, but also its corrupting influence. Fielding also argued that evidence of previous criminal behaviour should be introduced as evidence at a trial. Both of these views were rejected at the time, though the debate on them has been renewed in the twenty-first century. Finally, he argued against the widespread use of the death sentence, which could be imposed for offences as trivial as the theft of goods worth 5 s . He advocated the more widespread use of transportation instead. He particularly opposed public executions since he argued that the spectacles were conducted in an unseemly party atmosphere in which the condemned criminals attracted sympathy and were presented in an almost heroic light.
    In August 1753 Fielding was summoned to see the Duke of Newcastle, soon to be Prime Minster, who asked him ‘to demolish the reigning gangs’ who were terrorising the Covent Garden area. Fielding proposed the recruitment of a special force of ex-constables to pursue criminals. He secured an advance of £200 from the Privy Council. Seven of the culprits were captured after a ferocious battle which involved breaking into their den and in December 1753 the Public Advertiser reported that ‘since the apprehending of the Great Gang of Cut-Throats, not a dangerous blow, shot or wound has been given either in roads or streets’. In Fielding’s words ‘this hellish society were almost utterly extirpated’. 34
    By this time Fielding was exhausted, suffering from, dropsy, gout, asthma, years of overwork and possibly tuberculosis. For two years he had walked with the aid of crutches. In June 1754 he left England for Lisbon, having been advised by his doctor that the milder climate would be good for his health. He chronicled his last days in his Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon , 35 which also contains reflections on his life and work. He died on 8 October and is buried in that city.
    BLIND JOHN FIELDING
     
    In 1750 his half-brother, John Fielding, had moved into Henry’s house in Bow Street and had been appointed to join him on the Westminster and Middlesex benches. John had been blind since 1740 as a result of an accident sustained while serving in the Royal Navy. In February 1749 he and Henry had founded a business, the Universal Register Office, on the corner of Castle Street and the Strand. It was an employment agency, but it also sold a quack medicine, known as Glastonbury Water, which claimed to be a cure for asthma and tuberculosis, though it did nothing to relieve Henry’s sufferings from those conditions. John’s zeal as a magistrate, if anything,