Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences
History
Lives of the Most Remarkable Criminals Who have been Condemned and Executed for Murder, the Highway, Housebreaking, Street Robberies, Coining or other offences
Crime -- Great Britain; Criminals -- Great Britain -- Biography
It cannot seem strange that in consequence of so extraordinary an act of
legislature, many of these presumptious and silly people should be
apprehended, and a considerable number of them having upon their
apprehension been committed to Winchester gaol, seven of them were by
_Habeas Corpus_, removed for the greater solemnity of their trial to
Newgate, and for their offence brought up and arraigned at the King's
Bench Bar, Westminster. There being convicted on full evidence, all of
them of felony, and three of murder, I shall inform ye, one by one, of
what has come to my hand in relation to their crimes, and the manner and
circumstances with which they were committed.
Richard Parvin was master of a public-house at Portsmouth, a man of dull
and dogmatic disposition, who continually denied his having been in any
manner concerned with these people, though the evidence against him at
his trial was as full and as direct as possibly could have been
expected, and he himself evidently proved to have been on the spot where
the violences committed by the other prisoners were transacted. In
answer to this, he said that he was not with them, though indeed he was
upon the forest, for which he gave this reason. He had, he said, a very
handsome young wench who lived with him, and for that reason being
admired by many of his customers, she took it in her head one day to run
away. He hearing that she had fled across the forest, pursued her, and
in that pursuit calling at the house of Mr. Parford, who keeps an
alehouse in the forest, this man being an evidence against the other
Blacks, took him it seems into the number, though as he said, he could
fully have cleared himself if he had had any money to have sent for some
witnesses out of Berkshire. But the mayor of Portsmouth seizing, as soon
as he was apprehended, all his goods, put his family into great distress
and whether he could have found them or not, hindered his being able to
produce any witnesses at his trial.
He persevered in these professions of his innocency to the very last,
still hoping for a reprieve, and not only feeding himself with such
expectations while in prison, but also gazed earnestly when at the tree,
in hopes that pardon would be brought him, until the cart drew away and
extinguished life and the desire of life together.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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