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
All this put Blueskin at last into such a passion that though this
discourse happened upon the leads at the Old Bailey; in the presence of
the Court then sitting, Blake could not forbear taking a revenge for
what he took to be an insult on him. And therefore, without ado, he
clapped one hand under Jonathan's chin, and with the other, taking a
sharp knife out of his pocket, cut him a large gash across the throat,
which everybody at the time it was done judged mortal. Jonathan was
carried off, all covered with blood, and though at that time he
professed the greatest resentment for such usage, affirming that he had
done all that lay in his power for the man who had so cruelly designed
against his life; yet when he afterwards came to be under sentence of
death, he regretted prodigiously the escape he had made then from death,
often wishing that the knife of Blake had put an end to his life, rather
than left him to linger out his days till so ignominious a fate befell
him.
But it was not only Blake who had entertained notions of putting him to
death. He had disobliged almost the whole group of villains with whom he
had concern, and there were numbers of them who had taken it into their
heads to deprive him of life. His escapes in the apprehending such
persons were sometimes very narrow; he received wounds in almost every
part of his body, his skull was twice fractured, and his whole
constitution so broken by these accidents and the great fatigue he went
through, that when he fell under the misfortunes which brought him to
his death, he was scarce able to stand upright, and was never in a
condition to go to chapel.
But we have broke a little into the thread of our history, and must
therefore go back in order to trace the causes which brought on
Jonathan's last adventures, and finally his violent death. This we shall
now relate in the clearest and concisest manner that the thing will
allow; being well furnished for that purpose, having to personal
experience added the best intelligence that could be procured, and
that, too, from persons the most deserving of credit.
The practices of this criminal in the manner we have before mentioned
continued long after the Act of Parliament; and in so notorious a
manner, at last, that the magistrates in London and Middlesex thought
themselves obliged by the duty of their office to take notice of him.
This occasioned a warrant to be granted against him by a worshipful
alderman of the City, upon which Mr. Wild being apprehended somewhere
near Wood Street, he was carried into the Rose Sponging-house. There I
myself saw him sitting in the kitchen at the fire, waiting the leisure
of the magistrate who was to examine him.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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