Butler, also for forging a bond of £20,000, payable by the executors of Sir Robert Clayton six years after his death.” Later on (1708) I find an entry in Luttrell that Justice Dyot, who was a commissioner of the Stamp-office, was committed to Newgate for counterfeiting stamps, which others whom he informed against distributed. Of the same character as the foregoing was the offence of Mr. Lemon, a clerk in the Pell office of the Exchequer, who received £300 in the name of a gentlewoman deceased, and kept it, for which he was turned out of his place. Other unfaithful public servants were to be found in other departments. Robert Lowther, Esq., was taken into custody on the 25th October, 1721, by order of the Privy Council, for his tyrannical and corrupt administration when Governor of the Island of Barbadoes. Twenty years later the House of Commons fly at still higher game, and commit the Solicitor of the Treasury to Newgate for refusing to answer questions put to him by the Secret Committee which sat to inquire into Sir Robert Walpole’s administration. This official had been often charged with the Prime Minister’s secret disbursements, and he was accused of being recklessly profuse. Returning to meaner and more commonplace offenders, I find in the records full details of all manner of crimes. Murders the most atrocious and bloodthirsty, robberies executed with great ingenuity and boldness by both sexes, remarkable instances of swindling and successful frauds, early cases of forgery, coining carried out with extensive ramifications, piracies upon the high seas, long practised with strange immunity from reprisals. Perhaps the most revolting murder ever perpetrated, not excepting those of later date, was that in which Catherine Hayes assisted. The victim was her husband, an unoffending, industrious man, whose life she made miserable, boasting once indeed that she would think it no more sin to murder him than to kill a dog. After a violent quarrel between them she persuaded a man who lodged with them, named Billings, and who was either her lover or her illegitimate son, to join her in an attempt upon Hayes. A new lodger, Wood, arriving, it was necessary to make him a party to the plot, but he long resisted Mrs. Hayes’ specious arguments, till she clenched them by declaring that Hayes was an atheist and a murderer, whom it could be no crime to kill, moreover that at his death she would become possessed of £1500, which she would hand over to Wood. Wood at last yielded, and after some discussion it was decided to do the dreadful deed while Hayes was in his cups. After a long drinking bout, in which Hayes drank wine, probably drugged, and the rest beer, the victim dragged himself to bed and fell on it in a stupor. Billings now went in, and with a hatchet struck Hayes a violent blow on the head and fractured his skull; then Wood gave the poor wretch, as he was not quite dead, two other more blows and finished him.