There was wild blood in the Marisco veins. Sir William, a younger son of this original William, succeeded; his elder brother, Sir Geoffrey, having been slain in a descent upon Ireland in 1234. Sir William himself was outlawed in the following year, for murdering an Irish messenger, in London. Then followed what appears to have been a trumped-up charge against him of having conspired to assassinate Henry the Third. Threatened with the most serious consequences, William the younger then fled to Lundy, described as “impregnable from the nature of the place.” The account of his doings then proceeds to tell how he “attached to himself many outlaws and malefactors, subsisted by piracies, taking more especially wine and provisions, and making frequent sudden descents on the adjacent lands, spoiling and injuring the realm by land and sea, and native as well as foreign merchants.” During four years the piracies of this desperate man continued. It does not, however, appear that he could do otherwise than rob upon the high seas, and really perhaps he deserves a little sympathy. Falsely accused of plotting to assassinate the king, he had of necessity to abscond, if he desired to save his life: and once upon Lundy, where no sufficient sustenance grew, he was further obliged to help himself from passing vessels. And having thus, from the mere instinct of self-preservation, become a fugitive and a pirate, he continued (impelled by the Moorish blood thought to run in the veins of his race) to follow the trade of buccaneer from sheer delight in it, and from merely helping himself to necessaries, descended to the enormity of seizing whatever he could. It all sounds like the downward career of a good young man, as read in religious tracts. First we see him, son of a turbulent father, with a heritage of bad blood. Then the mere peccadillo of killing a stray Irishman--an incident not worthy a moment’s consideration--clouds his fair horizon. No one in those times would, in the ordinary course of things, have thought much of that; but his father’s wild career was doubtless remembered against him, and he was, as we have already seen, outlawed. The rest of his descent was easy; and at last, in 1242, he was captured--how, we are not told--“thrown into chains, and with sixteen accomplices condemned and sentenced to die. He was executed on Tower Hill, with especial ignominy,” his body gibbeted and divided up into small portions, in a manner which it scarce beseems these pages to narrate.