Which now thy Legs bedeck,
To fly: in Fetters softer far
We'll chain thee by the Neck."
But in the short space of six weeks from his acquittal at Salisbury and his triumphal exit in a post-chaise for London, he was again arrested on a charge of highway robbery, this time for robbing a Mr. Gammon at Nettlebed, on the road to Oxford. Committed to trial at Newgate, he was transferred to Oxford gaol, and tried there on March 6th. He had up to now been phenomenally fortunate, but things at this crisis looked a great deal more serious. He acknowledged "he had experienced many narrow scrapes, but never such a d—d one as this," and he was presently found guilty and condemned to death, this time without any extenuating circumstances being found.
Isaac Darkin was what in our times would be called a "superior person." Slang he disdained to use, bad language was anathema to him; and if he did, indeed, condescend to describe a person of mean understanding as "a cake," or "a flat," that was the most he permitted himself. His delicacy was so great that he never mentioned a "robbery," a "robber," or a "highwayman," but spoke instead of persons who had been "injured," or of "the injured parties." And as he was so nice in his language, so he was particular in his dress and deportment. As an eulogist of him said, not without a little criticism: "He was possessed of too great a share of pride for his circumstances in life, and retained more of it to the last than was becoming in a person in his unhappy situation. He had a taste for elegance in every respect; was remarkably fond of silk stockings, and neat in his linen; had his hair dressed in the most fashionable manner every morning; his polished fetters were supported round his waist by a sword-belt, and tied up at his knees with ribbon."
Although but the son of a cork-cutter, he had lived, in the estimation of his contemporaries, like a gentleman. Like a gentleman he spent his last days, and if he did indeed seem to boast a little when, a few days before his execution, he declared he had been nine times in gaol, and seven times tried on a capital charge, that was merely a pardonable professional exaggeration. His claim to have gleaned over six hundred guineas from the road has, on the other hand, the look of an under-estimate. The rumbustious fellows of a hundred years earlier would have thought that very bad business; they often took much more in a single haul. But times were changing, and not for the better, from the highwaymen's point of view.
Isaac Darkin died like a gentleman, without apparent fear, and without bravado, at Oxford, on March 23rd, 1761, and was at that time, as himself remarked, without apparent pathos or truckling to weak sentiment, "not twenty-one."