The Newgate Calendar, recounting all these things, says: "Such was the baseness and unfeeling profligacy of this wretch that when his almost heart-broken father visited him for the last time in Newgate, and put twelve guineas into his hand to repay his expenses, he slipped one of the pieces of gold into the cuff of his sleeve by a dexterous sleight, and then, opening his hand, showed the venerable and reverend old man that there were but eleven; upon which his father took another from his pocket, and gave it him to make the number intended. Having then taken a last farewell of his parents, Lewis turned to his fellow-prisoners, and exultingly exclaimed: "I have flung the old fellow out of another guinea!"
Lewis said he would die like a man of honour; no hangman should put a halter round his neck. He would rather take his own life. But this he had not, after all, sufficient courage to do. A knife he had secreted in his pillow fell out one day, either by accident or design, and was taken away from him. He was executed at Tyburn on May 4th, 1763, aged twenty-three.
THE WESTONS
The careers of George and Joseph Weston read like the imaginings of a romantic novelist, and, indeed, Thackeray adopted some of the stirring incidents of their lives in his unfinished novel, Denis Duval.
George Weston was born in 1753, and his brother Joseph in 1759; sons of George Weston, a farmer, of Stoke, in Staffordshire. Early in 1772, George was sent to London, where a place in a merchant's office had been secured for him, and there he was fortunate enough to be promoted to the first position, over the heads of all the others, upon the death of the chief clerk, eighteen months later. He was then in receipt of £200 a year, and on that amount contrived to take part pretty freely in the gaieties and dissipations of Vauxhall and similar resorts. At this period he introduced his brother Joseph to town, and also began a series of peculations in the office, in order to support the extravagances into which a passion for gambling and "seeing life" had led him. When he could no longer conceal his defalcations, he fled to Holland, and Joseph, suspected of complicity, was obliged to leave London.
Within three months George had returned to England in disguise. He made his way to Durham and there entered the service of a devout elderly lady of the Methodist persuasion. Pretending to have adopted the religious convictions of George Whitefield's followers, he affected the religious life, with the object of marrying the lady and securing her ample fortune. But he was recognised on the very eve of the wedding, and exposed. He then fled southward, with as much of the old lady's money and valuables as he could manage to secure at the moment.
But he speedily lost nearly all his plunder in backing outsiders at York and Doncaster races, and entered Nottingham with only one guinea. There he fell in with a company of strolling players, managed by one James Whiteley, who offered him the post of leading gentleman. He accepted it, and under the name of Wilford, remained with them a little while.