In the winter of 1771, a set of wild young men made their appearance, who, from the profligacy of their manners and their outages conduct in the theatres, taverns and coffee houses in the vicinity of Covent Garden, created general indignation and alarm, actually driving away many sedate persons from their customary amusement in the evening.
This 'set of wild young men' became known as the Mohawks or Mohacks and attracted something of a reputation as evildoers. It was alleged that their objective was "to do the most possible hurt to their fellow creatures" and that they once nailed the ear of a Portuguese gentleman to a wall and then stabbed him to death when he broke free. Their fame was such that even a century a more after their heyday Webster 1913 felt obliged to include them in his dictionary definition and the 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue also refers to their practice of 'sweating' that is, of repeatedly pricking a passer by in his posterior with their swords "till they thought him sufficiently sweated".
Oddly enough for a gang whose fame had reached as far as the dictionary
very little detail appears anywhere regarding their identities or activities, but fortunately we can look to the Memoirs of William Hickey for an honest account of the Mohawks, as he was personally acquainted with the gang. He spent many an evening in their company during which he sought to dissuade them from harassing other people, so much so that he became known as, (or at least claimed to be known as) the 'Anti-Mohawk'.
According to William Hickey "they consisted of only four in number". The leader of the gang being one Archibald Hamilton Rowan, although known to Hickey under the name of 'Rhoan Hamilton', "a man of fortune", the second was a Mr Hayter, the son of "an opulent merchant and bank director"; the third a Mr Osborne "a young American who had come to England to study law"; whilst the fourth and final member was Mr Frederick "a handsome lad without a guinea", who claimed to be a descendant of one Theodore von Neuhoff, a Westphalian adventurer who in 1736 had somehow managed to get himself briefly recognised as King of Corsica.
These four were certainly responsible for creating "general indignation and alarm" and achieved a great deal of notoriety being "severely attacked by the public newspapers" and "were in a constant state of inebriety, daily committing the most wanton outrages upon unoffending individuals who unfortunately fell in their way". However it appears that these 'wanton outrages' did not extend much beyond minor assaults and certainly did not extend as far as murder or even nailing ears to walls. Indeed the only specific incident which Hickey quotes relating to the activities of the Mohawks is when Rowan accosted a Mr Hare in a private room at an inn, tore up his correspondence and challenged him to fight, which he then proceeded to lose.
Picking fights and 'sweating' the odd passerby appears to be the extent of the Mohawks reign of terror; the rest appears to be down to the exaggeration of the contemporary press and the eagerness of subsequent commentators to place the responsibility for an crime in the capital at the door of Rowan and his companions. The truth is that Archibald Hamilton Rowan was a wealthy Irish landowner and that "his dissolute companions kept him in a constant state of intoxication, whereby they found they could manage him as they pleased, besides supplying themselves from his purse with cash". When sober and away from the influence of his followers Rowan appears to have been as genial and well-intentioned a gentleman as you could desire.
The Mohawks continued their activities until they were eventually arrested in 1774. Subsequently Rowan jumped bail and fled to the safety of Paris and from there onwards to America where he lived for a number of years until he obtained a pardon and returned to Britain. Deprived of their leader and source of funds the other gang members rapidly faded into obscurity.
SOURCES
Sourced from the Memoirs of William Hickey, specifically the Folio edition of 1995 published under the title Memoirs of a Georgian Rake from which naturally all the above quotations are taken.