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
But Carrick little regarded this good advice, or the kind overtures made
him by his brother. No sooner had he procured his liberty but he
returned to his old profession, and committed a multitude of robberies
on Finchley Common, Hounslow and Bagshot Heaths, spending all the money
he got on women of the town, at the gaming table, and in fine clothes,
which last was the thing in which he seemed most to delight. But money
not coming in very quick by these methods, he with Molony, Carrol and
some others of his countrymen, began to rob in the streets, and by that
means got great sums of money. They continued this practice for a long
space of time with safety, but being one night out in Little Queen
Street, by Lincoln's Inn Fields, between one and two in the morning they
stopped a chair in which was the Hon. William Young, Esq., from whom
they took a gold watch, valued at £50, a sword, and forty guineas in
money. Carrick thrust his pistol into the chair, Carrol watched at a
distance, while Molony, perceiving the gentleman hesitate a little in
delivering, said with a stern voice, _Your money, sir! Do you trifle?_
It was a very short time after the commission of this robbery that both
he and his companion Molony were taken, Carrol making a timely escape to
his native kingdom. While James Carrick remained in Newgate, his
behaviour was equally singular and indecent, for he affected to pass his
time with the same gaiety in his last moments as he had spent it in the
former part of his days.
Throngs of people, as it is but too much the custom, came to see him in
Newgate, to whom, as if he had intended that they should not lose their
curiosity, he told all the adventures of his life, with the same air and
gaiety as if he had been relating them at some gaming ordinaries. This
being told about town, drew still greater heaps of company upon him,
which he received with the same pleasantness; by which means he daily
increased them, and by that means the gain of the keepers at Newgate,
who took money to show him. Upon this he said to them merrily one day:
_You pay, good folks, for seeing me now, but if you had suspended your
curiosity 'till I went to Tyburn, you might have seen me for nothing._
This was the manner in which he talked and lived even to the last,
conversing until the time of his death with certain loose women who had
been his former favourites, and whom no persuasions could engage him to
banish from his presence while he yet had eyes, and could behold them in
his sight.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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