[268:1] "What do you bring this fellow here for?" Oneby had cried to the keeper of Newgate when he appeared with Hooper. "Whenever I look at him I shall think of being hanged." Hooper had a forbidding countenance, but he was an inimitable mimic, and he soon made himself an agreeable companion to the condemned man.
[273:1] The husband of the Lady Macclesfield who was mother to Richard Savage.
CHAPTER IX
LATER RECORDS
Crimes more commonplace, but more atrocious—Murder committed by Catherine Hayes and her accomplices—She is burned alive for petty treason—Sarah Malcolm, the Temple murderess—Other prominent and typical murders—Wife murderers—Theodore Gardelle, the murderer of Mrs. King—Two female murderers—Mrs. Meteyard—Her cruelty to a parish apprentice—Elizabeth Brownrigg beats Mary Clifford to death—Governor Wall—His severe and unaccommodating temper—Trial of Sergeant Armstrong—Punished by drumhead court martial and flogged to death—Wall's arrest and escape to the Continent—Persons of note charged with murder—Quin, the actor, kills Williams in self-defence—Charles Macklin kills Hallam, a fellow actor at Drury Lane—Joseph Baretti, author of the "Italian Dictionary," mobbed in the Haymarket, defends himself with a pocket-knife, and stabs one of his assailants.
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's 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 £1,500, 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 more blows and finished him. The next job was to dispose of the murdered man's remains.
To evade identification Catherine Hayes