"He then, observing that more was to be made in one Night's good-fortune under the Stars than in a week of snatching the Bung or cly-filing in the streets, and with less danger, in it, became a Collector of Tolls upon the High-Way."
That was your true penny style for the streets. It was sympathetic and understood, which the "Flowers of Innocency" business was not.
Paul Lorrain and his brethren never failed with the moral lesson, however little they themselves believed in it; and always, you will find, who read their nauseating pages, that those who had the misfortune to sit to them for their biographies were "truly penitent," "moved to contrition," or "heartily renounced their Wicked and profligate course of life," and the like.
And yet nothing is more certain than that the larger number of them went to death impenitent and hardened. The better sort were merely sulky; the worse cursed and flung indecent quips to the crowd, all the way to the gallows. Nor need there be much wonder at it. To die for taking a purse from a traveller must have seemed even to an eighteenth-century highwayman, born into this state of things and bound to suffer by it, an extravagant penalty. Temperament, sanguine or otherwise, did the rest, and conditioned his attitude on the Tyburn journey.
The Reverend Thomas Pureney had a way of his own with sinners. He could not make them truly penitent, but he could, and did, frighten them almost into convulsions by a way he had in preaching. He was a nasty person, among a succession of forbidding persons. He stumbled as he walked: his nose and cheeks flamed with intemperance in drink: he took the flavour of the pot-house with him whithersoever he went. Nay, he even, as a youth, before ever he was educated for the Church, had thoughts of himself going upon the highway, and indeed actually began the business of taking things without leave of the owners of them. His first and only essay in this sort was the handling of a silver flagon and two volumes of sermons, which he was conveying from the rectory of his native place in Cambridgeshire, when the excellent clergyman discovered him with this singular booty and lectured him, not unamiably. He would certainly end his days in Newgate, prosed the good man, if he did not instantly see the error of his youthful ways, and reform. Why, that very reform, so far as it went, served, strange to say, to land him, years later, at Newgate; and there he ended, after all; but very differently from the fashion the old clergyman had foreseen.
His respectable parent soon after this youthful escapade entered him at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge, and there he assimilated as much learning as sufficed to place him in holy orders. But he had not been, in any sense of the word, a moral man while at the University, and although he found a curacy at Newmarket, it was with a reputation which rather fitted him for the society of the racecourse than for the pulpit that he went there.
The eighteenth century demanded little of a clergyman, but even that little our Pureney could not render, and he was flung out with ignominy, even from Newmarket. Drink and flagrant immorality were the undoing of him there, and the rumours of his evil ways long followed him about, and prevented him securing another post, until at last that of Ordinary at Newgate was tossed contemptuously to him. The suggestion of that office—insult though it would have been to a decent man—found in him a ready and grateful acceptance. No standard of conduct was required, and, joy of joys! he became pastor among the very kind of heroes who had fired the imagination of his perusing youth.
He lorded it over those caged gaol-birds with imperious ways for thirty years, and in that time had the fortune to hob and nob with many a famous rogue. Jack Sheppard and many a lesser light sat under him in the prison chapel and listened to his outrageous sermons, promising damnation and everlasting torment; and he had the singular fortune to call the infamous Jonathan Wild a crony for some years, and in the end, when that appalling scoundrel had been found out and cast for the shameful death to which he had brought so many others, to preach the worm that dieth not to him also. It is true that, owing to his intimate acquaintance with Pureney, Wild did not greatly value his discourse, and sought and obtained the counsel and guidance of an outsider, the Reverend Mr. Nicholson, to wit, who, he says, "very Christian-like gave me his assistance"; but the Ordinary came into his own again on the Sunday, when the condemned, Wild among them, were herded into their gruesome pew in that most awful of chapels, and had to listen to his ravings.
Pureney's account of the life, crimes, conviction and confession of Jonathan Wild and of other malefactors condemned at the same time is a folio broadsheet, distinguished among a badly produced class of literature as surely the very worst-printed, on paper of the commonest. A rude woodcut at the beginning discloses the Ordinary in a black Geneva gown, preaching to his charges (an extraordinarily large Ordinary, and remarkably small convicts), with conventional representations of Heaven and Hell, to left and right. A Hand, bearing a celestial crown a good many sizes too large for any of the convicts here pictured, is seen amid clouds; the Ordinary, not at all astonished by the phenomenon, pointing to it and continuing his discourse.