Fields (Newcastle House). Being lame, and greatly over-taxed, Fielding excused himself. But the Duke sent Mr. Carrington again next day, and Fielding with great difficulty obeyed the summons. After waiting some three hours in the antechamber (no unusual feature, as Lord Chesterfield informs us, of the Newcastle audiences), a gentleman was deputed to consult him as to the devising of a plan for putting an immediate end to the murders and robberies which had become so common. This, although the visit cost him “a severe cold,” Fielding at once undertook. A proposal was speedily drawn out and submitted to the Privy Council. Its essential features were the employment of a known informer, and the provision of funds for that purpose.
By the time this scheme was finally approved, Fielding’s disorder had “turned to a deep jaundice,” in which case the Bath waters were generally regarded as “almost infallible.” But his eager desire to break up “this gang of villains and cut-throats” delayed him in London; and a day or two after he had received a portion of the stipulated grant, (which portion, it seems, took several weeks in arriving), the whole body were entirely dispersed,—“seven of them were in actual custody, and the rest driven, some out of town, and others out of the kingdom.” In examining them, however, and in taking depositions, which often occupied whole days and sometimes nights, although he had the satisfaction of knowing that during the dark months of November and December the metropolis enjoyed complete immunity from murder and robbery, his own health was “reduced to the last extremity.”
“Mine (he says) was now no longer what is called a
