James Cammel was born of parents in very low circumstances, and the misfortunes arising therefrom were much increased by his father dying while he was an infant, and leaving him to the care of a widow in the lowest circumstances of life. The consequence was what might be easily foreseen, for he forgot what little he had learned in his youngest days, loitering away his time about Islington, Hoxton, Moorfield, and such places, being continually drinking there, and playing at cudgels, skittles, and such like. He never applied himself to labour or honest working for his bread, but either got it from his mother or a few other friends, or by methods of a more scandalous nature--I mean pilfering and stealing from others, for which after he had long practised it, he came at last to an untimely death. He was a fellow of a froward disposition, hasty and yet revengeful, and made up of almost all the vices that go to forming a debauchee in low life. He had had a long acquaintance with the person that suffered with him for their offences, but what made him appear in the worst light was that he had endeavoured to commit acts of cruelty at the time he did the robbery. Notwithstanding he insisted not only that he was innocent of the latter part of the offence but that he never committed the robbery at all, though Marshal his associate did not deny it. They had been together in these exploits for some time, and once particularly coming from Sadlers Wells, they took from a gentlewoman a basket full of bed-child linen to a very great value, which offering to sell to a woman in Monmouth Street, she privately sent for a constable to apprehend them. One of their companions who went with them observing this, he tipped them the wink to be gone, which the old woman of the house perceiving, caught hold of Marshal by the coat; and while they struggled, the third man whipped off a gold watch, a silver collar and bells, and a silver plate for holding snuffers, and pretending to interpose in the quarrel slipped through them, and out at the door, as Cammel and Marshal did immediately after him.