JONATHAN WILD ON THE WAY TO EXECUTION.
NICHOLAS HORNER
Nicholas Horner was a younger son of the vicar of Honiton, in Devonshire, and was born in 1687. He was wild and unmanageable almost from infancy, and showed little promise of remaining in the humble post of attorney's clerk, in which his father placed him, in London, when he was seventeen or eighteen years of age. He remained, however, with the attorney for three years, learning more in the way of drinking and dicing at the "Devil" and the "Apollo" taverns in the Strand, than of law in Clement's Inn. He then ran away, and remarked when he exchanged his quill-pen, his parchments, and his stool in the lawyer's office, for the pistols, the crape mask, and the mettlesome horse of the highwayman, that he was only exchanging one branch of the profession to which he had been articled for another and a higher—becoming a "highway lawyer," a "conveyancer" and a "collector." Unfortunately for him, he began to practise in this new branch before he had properly made himself acquainted with the rudiments of its procedure, and was in consequence taken in an interview with his first client, and lodged in Winchester gaol, where he remained for three months before his trial came on. In the meanwhile, the friends of his family, seeing how scandalous a thing it would be if a clergyman's son were convicted of highway robbery, and sentenced to die by the rope of the hangman, strongly endeavoured to persuade the gentleman whom he had robbed to fail in identifying him. But their efforts were fruitless, for he was determined to prosecute, and the trial in due course was held, and the prisoner found guilty and formally sentenced to death.
His friends were more successful in the petitions they forwarded to the Queen, herself an excellent Churchwoman, and disposed to stretch a point that its ministers might be saved from unmerited reproach. Horner was pardoned on condition that his friends undertook that he should be sent out of the kingdom within three months, and that they should undertake to keep him in exile for seven years. It was an excellent offer, and they accepted, shipping him to India, where he remained for the stipulated time, passing through many adventures which, although detailed by Smith, are not concerned with the highway portion of his career, and are not even remotely credible.
Returning to his native shores, he found both his father and mother dead, and received from the executors of his father's will the amount of £500, all his father had to leave him. That sum did not last him long. What are described as "the pleasures of town" soon brought him again to his last guinea; and he, of course, once more took to the road.
"Well overtaken, friend," he said to a farmer he came up with on the road. "Methinks you look melancholy; pray what ails you, sir? If you are under any afflictions and crosses in the world, perhaps I may help to relieve them."