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had previously done twenty others; it being his frequent boast that he had first introduced bruising and bloodshed amidst rural scenes and transformed a quiet slumbering town into a den of Jews and metropolitan thieves.’
    Thurtell by now had a thorough knowledge of metropolitan thieves and Jews. (All moneylenders were regarded as Jewish, whether they were or not.) He had failed as a cloth merchant in Norwich, after defrauding his creditors by claiming to have been robbed of the money he owed them. Few believed in these convenient thieves, and Thurtell was declared bankrupt in February 1821. Shifting his base of operations to London, where his reputation might not have preceded him, he set up as the landlord of the Black Boy, in Long Acre, but the pub became a byword for illegal gambling, and soon lost its licence. Thurtell moved from job to job, from money-making scheme to money-making scheme. At the Army and Navy pub he met Joseph Hunt, briefly its manager, a gambler who had already been to prison once; he met William Weare and his friends at yet another pub. Weare claimed to be a solicitor, and lived at Lyon’s Inn, formerly an Inn of Chancery and now lodgings frequented by legal professionals. In fact he had been a waiter, then a billiard-marker, and had finally joined a gang ‘who lived by blind hooky [a card game], hazard [dice], billiards, and the promotion of crooked fights’. He was a legendary figure in the gambling underworld, and it was reported that he always carried his entire savings, said to be £2,000, with him.
    Thurtell’s brother Thomas was the landlord of the Cock Tavern, in the Haymarket, and there they became acquainted with Probert, a spirit merchant who helped them to raise money on dubious lines of credit. Thurtell was operating once more as a cloth merchant, but just as his credit ran out, by an amazing coincidence his warehouse, insured to the hilt, was destroyed by fire. The insurance company refused to pay, and in 1823 Thurtell sued. Despite witnesses testifying that he had earlier discussed arson with them; despite information that he had bought fabric on credit and resold it for less than he had paid; despite evidence that he had blocked up the single window that would have permitted the nightwatchman to see the flames as they started – despite all this, the jury found for Thurtell, with £1,900 damages. * The insurers appealed, withholding the insurance money, while the money from the damages went to Thurtell’s creditors. The Thurtell brothers’ financial situation continued parlous.They were by now reduced to selling off the drink from the pub they managed in order to eat, while they couldn’t leave the building in case the insurance company had them arrested for conspiracy to defraud; they would have been unable to post bail.
    Weare, meanwhile, was doing splendidly, alternating between trips to the races and days spent in billiard saloons. Then one day he said he was off to Hertfordshire for the weekend to go shooting with Thurtell. There would be shooting, it is true, but it was not Weare who held the gun.
    On 24 October, two men who very strongly resembled Thurtell and Hunt bought a pair of pistols from a pawnbroker in Marylebone. The same day, Hunt hired a gig and horse, and asked at the stable where he could buy a rope and sack; at a public house in Conduit Street, he was overheard to ask Probert if he wanted to be ‘in it’. In the late afternoon, Thurtell drove Weare down to Probert’s cottage at Gill’s Hill in the gig, leaving Probert to follow on with Hunt. Their horse was a grey with unusual markings: a white face and white socks. Probert dropped Hunt at an inn near Gill’s Hill, to wait for Thurtell as arranged, and drove on to his cottage on his own. As he neared home, he found Thurtell in the lane. Thurtell asked him where Hunt was, and grumbled – or boasted – that he had ‘done the business without his help’. Probert returned to the inn to collect Hunt,